Norman Blake and Red Rector (County 755, 1976) pairs Blake’s guitar with Red Rector’s mandolin. It was recorded in the summer of 1976 and produced by David Freeman, with Charlie Collins on second guitar and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass.
Rector, born in 1929 in Marshall, North Carolina, had been playing in bands since the age of twelve. In 1944 he was working with J. E. and Wade Mainer on the radio, and over the following years he played with Carl Story, Charlie Monroe and Hylo Brown. In the 1970s he toured with Bill Clifton and Don Stover as the First Generation. Blake, born in Chattanooga in 1938 and raised in Sulphur Springs, Alabama, had spent ten years touring and recording with Johnny Cash and had made his first solo album, Home in Sulphur Springs, in 1972.
The twelve pieces run from traditional numbers such as “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Mississippi Sawyer” and “Cricket on the Hearth” to Kenny Baker’s “Denver Belle” and Blake’s arrangement of “Lorena,” written by Henry D. Webster and Joseph P. Webster. Kerry Mills’s “Red Wing,” Billy Hill’s “The Old Spinning Wheel” and “Limehouse Blues” sit beside Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster’s “The Green Leaves of Summer.” The rest are Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” “Darling Nellie Across the Sea” and Arthur Smith’s “Darlin’ Honey.”
Tracklist
- 1 Girl I Left Behind Me Source Recording 2:43
- 2 Denver Belle alt version 3:57
- 3 Lorena alt version 2:55
- 4 The Old Spinning Wheel alt version 4:04
- 5 Mississippi Sawyer Source Recording 2:04
- 6 Red Wing Source Recording 2:33
- 7 Cricket on the Hearth alt version 2:49
- 8 Limehouse Blues alt version 1:20
- 9 The Green Leaves Of Summer 2:01
- 10 Freight Train alt version 5:20
- 11 Darling Nellie Across the Sea alt version 2:43
- 12 Darlin' Honey 2:32
