Roy TC over Music department would take me down,
to his studio in the creepy basement an we would play together,
There we came up with Pine Breeze Blues....
But I'm not on any of These Tracks............>
Jubilee Community Arts announces the release of double CD
The Pine Breeze Recordings
Between 1975 and 1981, the students of Pine Breeze Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, released eight LPs of field recordings of local
traditional musicians. This was a time when oral history projects and student projects documenting local traditions were a popular
educational activity. Pine Breeze was not a regular high school: Pine Breeze Center was a State residential facility serving 23
East Tennessee counties' most severe emotionally disturbed adolescents.
Evening teacher and counselor Ron Williams had attended a workshop presented by a young English professor, Charles Wolfe, from Middle
Tennessee State University, now a widely known expert on country music history. The topic was using traditional music as a starting
point in creative writing lessons for high school students. Williams obtained permission from his boss to drive his students around
the county looking for old folks to document their musical traditions,
naively assuming that they would easily find local traditional musicians, who had been waiting anxiously over the years for a group
of emotionally disturbed adolescents and their longhaired teacher to pull up in a State van in their front yard to record their
performances of fiddle tunes and ballads passed down through the centuries.
Amazingly, it turned out that this was what happened.
The first Pine Breeze LP of traditional music was funded by a $600.00 grant from The Tennessee Arts Commission. The seven LPs that
followed were all paid from the sales of the previous releases making the project essentially self-supporting.
All the tracks were recorded by 13 to 18 year old students diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and being treated in a residential
facility. All the recording equipment was consumer quality and much of it was used and old and not at all ideal for field recording.
These students set up and ran all the equipment, did the mixing and the editing. They helped write some of the liner notes, took
many of the photos, helped design album covers, and kept track of orders.
There was no reason to think that the Traditional Music Project at Pine Breeze Center would have ever documented any traditional
musicians, much less releasing a series of eight nationally recognized and acclaimed field recordings of significant historical
value. These recordings presented here are proof that there is magic in the music.
Musicians documented on these recordings include Eldia and Oscar Barbee, Homer and Calvin Chastain, Bob Douglas and Ray Brown, Russ
Vandergriff, Ella Hughes, Blaine Smith and Florrie Stewart, J.R. "Peanut" Cantrell, Lee Trentham and J.D. Perkinson, Clay Turner, and
the Bice Family. The repertoires represented encompass distinctive variants of familiar and rare fiddle tunes on fiddle, banjo, and
guitar as well as less common string instruments from mando-cello to hammered dulcimer; unaccompanied ballads, family gospel singing,
and other songs. Charles Wolfe supplies notes on the tunes and songs and Ron Williams provides biography notes on the musicians.
he Pine Breeze Recordings
Jubilee Records JCA-1003, were co-produced by Brent Cantrell and Ron Williams with funding by the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Complete notes (2.3 MB pdf)
Copies are available for $17 each plus $2.50 shipping and handling
payable to Jubilee Community Arts, 1538 Laurel Ave., Knoxville, TN, 37916 or from County Sales
For more information contact Brent Cantrell at (865) 522-5851 or info@jubileearts.org and see http://www.jubileearts.org/
