Tell It To Me

Released in August 2019 in conjunction with the 90th Anniversary celebration of the Johnson City sessions, 'Tell It To Me: Revisiting the Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929' is intended to demonstrate what music historian Ed Ward meant when he tweeted 'Johnson City Sessions: Lots more fun than the Bristol Sessions. Fewer stars, more insight into a vanished world.' Intended to distill onto a single CD the groundbreaking research found on Bear Family Records' award-winning 4-CD boxed set, The Johnson City Sessions: Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?' (BCD 16083), released in 2013, 'Tell It To Me' offers 25 essential highlights from Columbia Records' historically significant location recording sessions in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1928 and 1929 recording sessions in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1928 and 1929.. Featuring 25 recordings by 25 different musical acts that were active in the late 1920s, 'Tell It To Me' presents a diverse and dynamic overview of Appalachia's vernacular music at the cusp of the Great Depression. While representing a range of genres and styles and showcasing both secular and sacred material, this album is thematically unified by the fact that all of the tracks hail from commercial location recording sessions held by Columbia Records in Johnson City, Tennessee, during successive Octobers in 1928 and 1929. With precisely 25% of the released sides from those two Johnson City recording forays, 'Tell It To Me' documents timeless performances from the 1928-1929 sessions and bolsters recent assertions by discerning aficionados of 78 RPM records that those sessions generated a particularly memorable canon of historical recordings.