Clarence Ashley

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, was born in 1895 as Clarence Earl McCurry in Bristol, Tennessee. He grew up with his grandfather, who ran a boarding house in the little village of Shouns in the Appalachians, and took his surname. From his mother and aunts he learned old folk songs and ballads, and from the itinerant lumberjacks and railway workers who slept at the boarding house he learned many more. From 1911 he travelled every summer with a medicine show, a travelling show in which music and comedy were meant to sell medicine.

Music and breakthrough

In 1928 he made his first recordings, with the Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers and the Carolina Tar Heels, and from 1929 also solo. He played banjo in the clawhammer style, and guitar. He sang old ballads that had come over from England and Ireland, such as The Coo Coo Bird and House Carpenter, and murder ballads such as Naomi Wise. In 1933 he recorded Rising Sun Blues with the harmonica player Gwen Foster: the oldest known recording of the song that later became known as House of the Rising Sun.

Influence

The Depression of the 1930s put an end to recording, and he worked as a miner and a truck driver. Because his records were on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, he was rediscovered around 1960. With Doc Watson he played at folk festivals such as Newport. In this way Ashley became a direct link between the old music of the Appalachians and the folk revival of the 1960s. He died in 1967.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1963Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, Volume Two
• 1972Old Time Music At Clarence Ashley's

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 1: The Origins of Pop Music^NL Reader