{"id":245,"date":"2014-01-19T07:51:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T07:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/?p=245"},"modified":"2014-01-19T07:57:05","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T07:57:05","slug":"wild-bill-emerson-harlan-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/?p=245","title":{"rendered":"Wild Bill Emerson, “Harlan County”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"harlan<\/a>
\nhttps:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Bill-Emerson-Harlan-County.mp3<\/a><\/audio>
\nclick here to get the file<\/a><\/p>\n

How about a murder song tonight folks? Wayne Kemp cut a terrific version of this for MCA, but here’s the original, by its author “Wild” Bill Emerson, on the Ace of Hearts label. There were at least three musical Bill Emersons: the renowned virtuoso bluegrass banjo player, the R&B guy who cut a few sides for Sun, and this fellow. Dig around on the web a little, and you will see the bluegrass Bill Emerson and Wild Bill often lumped together, confused and conflated, but they are different dudes. I remember reading a short bio of Wild Bill a while back that said he got his start in Detroit during the rockabilly explosion of the 50s; that’s where he got the “Wild” nickname, he had a reputation for crazed dancing-on-the-tables performances. But like a lot of those guys, after that initial burst of rock & roll energy dissipated he simmered down and started cutting country in the mid-60s. He made several nice sides for Nashville-based Topic Records circa 1965 (I may post one or two of those sometime), went quiet for a few years, then had a flurry of releases on Ace of Hearts beginning in 1972. He recorded steadily thereafter for about a decade, so if you like this there is more out there to dig for. But be careful: no man’s ever lived long enough to tell about runnin’ his woman around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

click here to get the file How about a murder song tonight folks? Wayne Kemp cut a terrific version of this for MCA, but here’s the original, by its author “Wild” Bill Emerson, on the Ace of Hearts label. There … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tomsrecordroom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomarmstrongmusic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}