Mark Connelly

Side A contents:

Side B contents:

Comments:

A barbecue on a hot summer afternoon is a great way to party and unwind after a long week at work. Besides good friends, tasty food, and cold beer, you need the right music. Since the southern states practically invented "BBQ", music from there works best. That's true whether you're talking about Dixie rock, blues, country, bluegrass, Cajun, or even gospel.

In the 1980's and early '90s, I took many business trips to Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee. On one occasion I even stopped in at country music's "Mother Church", the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. On that adventure, there was also a stop at Opryland and a WSM radio & TV tour. These trips helped to "juice up" interests I already had in all kinds of southern tunes.

As far back as 1961, when the country charts were topped by Faron Young's "Hello Walls", I listened to C&W music on fadey AM signals from WWVA - 1170 in Wheeling, WV and WCKY - 1530 in Cincinnati, OH. Top 40 pop surveys, even here in metro-Boston, had a lot of country crossover tunes on them at the time. WCOP - 1150, owned by Georgia-based Plough, Inc., had the greatest concentration of these. Eventually WCOP became a full-fledged country station.

In August of 1961, one of my uncles who was a priest had a community barbecue at his backwoods church in North Carver, MA. The area was rural, especially back then. It consisted mostly of poultry farms and cranberry bogs. The people, some of Portuguese descent, didn't have much money but were very friendly. Though the event was taking place just an hour's ride south of Boston, you could easily think you were in Alabama instead. Country music and Elvis-style rockabilly (and even some Cajun) reigned supreme on the big speakers set up for the occasion. Part of the time there was a DJ, some of the time a country station in Providence was piped in. I distinctly remember "I Fall to Pieces" by Patsy Cline echoing out through the piney woods as people "chowed" on ribs, chicken, burgers, corn, beans, and coleslaw. Other great tunes like "Sleepy Eyed John" by Johnny Horton are indelibly etched in my memory from that massive outdoor bash in the hot sun. At that point, a 12 year old city boy got a lesson in country music and country people.

About 14 years later, when I was old enough to rent a house in a woodsy area near Willis Pond in Sudbury, MA, I was a frequent barbecue host. Southern rock was coming on in a big way at the time with the Allman Bros., the Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and that new "little band from Texas" ZZ Top all having a commanding presence on the airwaves of WCOZ - 94.5 and other local rock stations. The mid '70s also had a mainstream country revival that took a ride on the Citizens Band radio / trucking craze. It didn't take a genius to figure that southern tunes, from rock to country to blues, worked a lot better at the outdoor summer parties than the sombre classical / Gothic style British "art rock" albums that sounded so cool in autumn and winter. Music has to be "tweaked" to fit the activity, the place, and the time of year: it's precious few songs that go well with everything.

This tape goes into full-tilt southern blues-boogie for Side A and glides towards country on Side B when the party has wound down a bit from early athletics (football, frisbee tossing, dancing or whatever) to hanging out in the shade as the day's heat, and bellies full of food and brew, exact a toll on the energy level of the guests.

Some of the transitioning involves what I term "mountain music": songs originating in the Virginia / Tennessee Appalachians, Vermont, Northern California, the Rockies, and similar places. I'm talking about contemporary music that draws from many American roots, most notably bluegrass, blues, jazz, gospel, country, and straight-down-the-middle rock 'n' roll. Eclecticism is the order of the day in the works of Dave Matthews, Phish, and the Grateful Dead (also Bruce Hornsby, Dixie Dregs, etc.). The fact that I heard a lot of these groups at parties in the hills of central Vermont and in eastern Tennessee probably has more to do with my "mountain music" genre association rather than anything particularly factual or objective. Anyway, it's great barbecue music, just like blues-rock and straight country. Cajun would be excellent too ... maybe I can put some Beausoleil on the volume 2 tape. That tape will also get some goodies from the Time-Life Bluegrass CD I just picked up.