Mcbee, Hamper / Good Old-fashioned Way

Drag City

The late HAMPER MCBEE was a moonshiner, carnival barker, and ballad singer of legendary proportions. First “discovered” and recorded by folklorist and performer Guy Carawan in 1964, Hamper’s prodigious talent and personality won him admirers not only in his native Smoky Mountains but throughout the folk music world, where his wholly unique approach to old-time ballads and lyric songs struck like revelations. He drew from both the oral tradition and from records—he especially loved Bradley Kincaid, Vernon Dalhart, and, surprisingly, Burl Ives—to create a repertoire entirely his own, and that he sung in a warm, powerful voice seasoned by prodigious quantities of cigarettes, booze, and joie de vivre. Recorded by renowned country music scholar CHARLES K. WOLFE and filmmaker SOL KORINE at Hamper’s home in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1977, The Good Old-Fashioned Way compiles the best of McBee’s traditional ballads, affecting original compositions, and outlandish, side-splitting stories of life on the carnival circuit, at the moonshine still, in the back of Sheriff Bill Malone’s patrol car, and as Hamper McBee. You’ve never met anyone like him before. You’ll be glad you did. (STREET DATE - 6/29/2010)

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