Frank Hutchison (1897 - 1945)
The Pride of West Virginia
Those are not my words, but the promotional tagline used by Okeh Records.
“Between 1926 and 1929, Hutchison recorded 41 sides for Okeh, of which 9 were unissued.”
“He is thought to be the first non-African American musician to record in the country blues idiom. Hutchison was best known as a slide guitar player, where he held the guitar in his lap and used a pen knife as a slide.”
“He worked as a coal miner at various coal mines in Logan County, West Virginia, both before and after his career as a recording artist. His exposure to Appalachian music came at an early age because his grandfather played fiddle and banjo in Logan before he died in 1903 in a mining accident. In 1904, the railroad first came into Logan County and exposed Hutchison to African-American blues and pre-blues.”
Hutchison is considered to be one of the finest performers of the "white country blues" genre of early folk music. One of his more famous recordings is "The Train That Carried My Girl From Town." His recording of "Stackalee" was included in Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, and influenced a number of musicians during the 1950s and 1960s folk revival. Hutchison's songs have been covered by or have influenced Doc Watson, John Fahey, Bob Dylan, Mike Seeger and many more. He was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of fame in 2018.
I decided to transcribe the intro to his recording of “The Train That Carries My Girl From Town”. You can check out the 1927 recording below.
As the little intro text said, many players after him played his tunes too, such as this incredible version byDoc Watson (I’ll be transcribing this one as well when we get to Doc Watson).
He talks quite a bit in the beginning (and re-tunes his guitar), but he start playing at 1’40”:
And the modern day phenomenon that is Billy Strings (his album Home won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2021):
Some caveats about a couple of things:
Both the Doc Watson and Frank Hutchison version are tuned to open Eb tuning (Eb Ab Eb G Bb eb).
You could also go for open D tuning and put a capo on the 1st fret.
Good ol’ Frank wasn’t to concerned about bars and meters, so I went with where the chord changed and worked my way backwards from there to determine what beat 1 is.
I could be wrong and he could’ve slipped in a bar of 2/4 somewhere and everything would be shifted over 2 beats, but just so you know.
A lot of the guitar players from this era (born around the 1900’s) were blues and country players. The jazz guitarists were still mostly accompanists in swing bands (and also banjoists), but we’ll be getting to some more jazz players with our next post about Fred Guy.
See you then!
