The Legend Of Charlie Poole, Vol. 3: Original Recordings 1926-1930

This North Carolina banjo picker and singer was a bona fide recording star in the late 1920s, selling hundreds of thousands of old-time records in his day. Charlie Poole was able to create buoyant, polished string-band music while still preserving the organic nature of the style. The man himself became known for his appetite for life and for drink--he bought his first banjo with moonshiner's profits and died at age 39 in the wake of a two-week bender that celebrated an opportunity to record the music for a Western movie in California. The 16 songs here are as likely to come from Tin Pan Alley as from the mountains and mines of the South, and they all boast a compact banjo-fiddle-guitar instrumentation. Many of the cuts have a swinging, jazzlike quality, and Poole's three-finger banjo style was a precursor to the Scruggs style that revolutionized bluegrass 20 years later. Simply put, Poole gave old-timey a modern style and a primitive grace. --Marc Greilsamer