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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZTHOMPSON, Joe(b Joseph Aquilla Thompson, 9 December 1918, near Mebane NC; d 20 February 2012, Burlington NC) Fiddler. Before the music industry took over, black and white musicians played together on the front porch of the general store, learning from each other. Joe Thompson was at least the third fiddler in his line, his grandfather having been a slave, and lived long enough to teach black string music to younger people before it disappeared. Black string-band music has been described as ‘like square dance music’ but ‘more rhythmic, syncopated and African in character’, and the tunes were called ‘Negro jigs’. But the truth is we don’t know what American vernacular music might have sounded like if it hadn’t been segregated: the commercial business decided in the 1920s that black music meant the blues and that string band music was white, even though the blues singers would sing anything people wanted to hear, and white artists like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams sang the blues. Joe Thompson made strings for his first fiddle out of wire from a screen door, and was playing a real fiddle at dances when he was seven years old. With his brother Nate and a cousin named Odell Thompson on banjos, he played in a trio all over North Carolina. ‘People loved to see us come,’ he said in an interview in 2008. ‘Every year we would shuck corn and strip tobacco, then whoop it up with a big dance.’ During World War II he drove a bulldozer in Europe, and afterwards worked in a furniture factory for 38 years, while music remained a hobby. He and Odell were discovered in 1973 by Kip Lornell, a graduate student in ethnomusicology, looking for old-time string-band music, who urged them to play at folk festivals. They subsequently played all over the country and as far away as Australia. They made an album Old-Time Music from the North Carolina Piedmont ’89 for the Global Village label. Alan Lomax included all three Thompsons in his American Patchwork documentary film series, and in 1990 Joe and Odell appeared at Carnegie Hall ’90 in its Folk Masters program. Odell died in a car crash ’94. Joe made a solo album Family Tradition ’99 for Rounder. He had a stroke in 2001 which affected his fiddling, but not his voice; the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Heritage Fellowship in 2007 and he played that year at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Meanwhile, in 2005 three young musicians started coming to his house once a week for lessons: the Carolina Chocolate Drops formed a band mostly as a tribute to Joe, they said, and in 2010 their album Genuine Negro Jig won a Grammy for best traditional folk album. Their music is utterly unlike anything else in the marketplace, and they learned a lot of it from Joe Thompson. |