Fiddlin’ John Carson
Fiddlin’ John Carson was a Georgia fiddler and singer whose June 1923 OKeh record of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” sold out its first pressing within days. It is often described as the first commercially successful country music record, and Carson went on to record some 165 songs for OKeh and Bluebird. He was also one of the first country musicians on the radio, on Atlanta’s WSB from its first weeks in 1922.
The facts of his birth are disputed. Carson named Fannin County in north Georgia as his birthplace, and the date most often given is 23 March 1868, but his younger siblings placed his birth on a Cobb County farm, a third account says Gilmer County, and the dates run as late as 1874. He grew up in Marietta, where his father worked on building the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and he earned his living as a farmer, railroad worker, horse jockey and moonshiner before music became his trade.
From 1913 to 1935 the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Conventions in Atlanta crowned a state fiddling champion each year, and Carson was a major figure at them, taking the title in 1914, 1923 and 1927. He played up his north Georgia origins, told audiences about making moonshine and spending time in jail, and sometimes carried his fiddle to the contest in a flour sack. When the young Lowe Stokes beat him at the 1924 convention, the story ran in the Literary Digest.
WSB, the South’s first radio station, went on the air in Atlanta on 16 March 1922. About a week later Carson walked into its studios with his fiddle and played until, as a station official put it, exhaustion set in. Calls, telegrams and letters poured in, and he was a regular on WSB into the early 1930s and appeared on it from time to time into the 1940s.
Polk C. Brockman, an Atlanta furniture dealer who sold OKeh records, persuaded the label’s Ralph Peer to record him. In mid-June 1923, at a makeshift studio on Nassau Street in downtown Atlanta, Carson cut two sides alone with his fiddle, issued together as OKeh 4890. Peer called the result “pluperfect awful,” but the first 500 copies were gone within days and OKeh rushed out more. That November Carson recorded a dozen more sides in OKeh’s New York studio, among them “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Casey Jones” and “Fare Thee Well Old Joe Clark.”
Through the rest of the 1920s he recorded for OKeh in Atlanta and New York, and once in New Orleans in December 1929, often with his string band, the Virginia Reelers, whose players at different times included Land Norris on banjo and the fiddler Earl Johnson. His daughter Rosa Lee Carson played guitar and sang with him and, as Moonshine Kate, made records of her own from 1925, which made her one of the first women to establish herself as an independent country performer. Their records ran from fiddle tunes such as “Soldier’s Joy” and “Fire in the Mountain” to topical songs like “The Death of Floyd Collins” and comic sketches such as the “John Makes Good Licker” series. In October 1929 he took part in OKeh’s Medicine Show recordings in New York with Carson Robison and Emmett Miller. His last sessions, on 27 and 28 February 1934 at Victor’s studio in Camden, New Jersey, with Moonshine Kate, were issued on Bluebird.
In 1915 Carson wrote “Little Mary Phagan,” about the murder of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory worker, and sang it on the steps of the state capitol. The ballad declared the guilt of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager convicted of the killing, who is now widely considered an innocent victim of antisemitism. Rosa Lee recorded the song in 1925, and Carson recorded “The Grave of Little Mary Phagan” at the end of that year.
Carson spent his last years as an elevator operator in the Georgia State Capitol, a job that rewarded years of playing at campaign rallies for Governors Eugene and Herman Talmadge. He died in Atlanta on 11 December 1949. In 2019 the Nassau Street building where he made his first record was demolished.
