(liner notes) In All Honesty - The Stonemans

Fresh-off-the-farm, this cotton pickin’, finger clickin’ goodness derives from a crew of honestly good & real-life Beverly Hillbillies. In his own springtime of youth, elder of this musical clan, Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, hailed from the Blue Ridge mountain margin of the Appalachians Range. An itinerant labourer and amateur musician of formidable dexterity and invention (too poor to afford a store-bought autoharp, he fashioned one instead from the ruins of a broken piano), in the middle years of the roaring twenties he cut out for the bright lit big city of New York after figuring to better upon an early Henry Whitter record that he’d chanced to hear. In the next several years, the sides he etched to shellac for the Okeh and Victor labels would provide a defining moment for the “regional music” sound: Country Music, by contemporary reckonings, but back then no such thing was known to exist! By 1927, he’d prompted his producer, Ralph Peer, to follow him back out for the return journey; in the process Peer came to make the earliest commercial recordings of the original Carter Family, and Mississippi yodeller Jimmie Rodgers, at the Bristol Recording Sessions. Even if they were shortly to be eclipsed by these stellar careers that launched in their wake, it was Pop & his wife Hattie (with her own considerable chops on banjo and fiddle) theyselves who inaugurated this “Big Bang of Country Music” that first surveyed the field for our listening delectations...

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

The Stonemans on YouTube:

from The Road To Nashville (1967) - imdb entry