Uncle Dave Macon arrived in commercial recording relatively late in life — he was past fifty when he made his first records — but he brought with him decades of experience as a performer on the medicine-show and vaudeville circuits of the Upper South. Born David Harrison Macon in Smart Station, Tennessee, in 1870, he had operated a freight hauling business until trucks put him out of work, at which point he committed fully to music. His energy, comic gifts, and mastery of the five-string banjo made him one of the most compelling live performers of the era.

Macon's first recordings for Vocalion in 1924 introduced a national audience to his combination of old fiddle tunes, minstrel-derived comic songs, gospel material, and original comic patter. He quickly became one of the most recorded old-time artists of the 1920s, cutting sides for Vocalion, Brunswick, Decca, and Bluebird across a career that extended well into the 1930s. He was among the first performers featured on the WSM Barn Dance in Nashville — the program that became the Grand Ole Opry — beginning in 1926, and he remained a beloved fixture of that program until his death in 1952.

"Rock About My Sara Jane," recorded in 1927 with the Fruit-Jar Drinkers — his working band name for certain sessions, featuring players including fiddler Sid Harkreader — typifies the rollicking, full-throated style Macon brought to recording dates. The song belonged to the broad stock of Southern play-party and fiddle-song tradition, and Macon's performance gave it the theatricality of a live medicine-show set. His recordings from the 1920s and 1930s remain among the most vivid documents of pre-commercial Southern entertainment culture.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.