Listening to Prestige 450: Pink Anderson

Samuel Charters brought another field recording to Prestige Bluesville, journeying to South Carolina to record veteran bluesman Pink Anderson. Charters is listed as engineer on the this project, and Kenneth S. Goldstein as producer.

Kenny Goldstein was overall producer for the whole Bluesville series. having been brought on board when Bob Weinstock decided to start the subsidiary label. Goldstein, a folklorist, had been producing a range of

recordings for Riverside and Folkways. His interests in folklore were wide-ranging; he received the first Ph.D. in folklore offered by the University of Pennsylvania, and began teaching there in the early 1960s. He was co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. He was a special assistant to the Smithsonian and an adviser on folk arts to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pink Anderson got his start as a young teenager in that strange American institution, the medicine show--playing music to attract a crowd so that his bosses could sell patent medicine (concoctions that weren't actually patented, were available without prescription, and were generally worthless). The patent medicine hucksters gradually went out of business as government started to enforce stricter regulations on what you could or could not claim that a medicine would do, but it was a great training ground for entertainers in the first part of the 20th century, and it's said that Anderson stayed with the medicine show circuit into mid-century.

He was first recorded by folk singer/folklorist Paul Clayton in 1950, but the recording wasn't actually released until 1956, when it became half of a Riverside album called American Street Songs. The other side of the album was given over to songs by the Reverend Gary Davis. The Davis curs were produced by Goldstein, which would have been Goldstein's first exposure to Anderson. The album was accurately titled--Davis was a street preacher, and his repertoire, mostly his own compositions, was from that world. Anderson's side was called "Carolina Street Ballads" and that's what it was. Not much blues. Mostly the familiar ballads -- "John Henry," "Wreck of the Old '97" -- that would strike a chord with passing listeners and get a few coins tossed his way. He even included a Jimmie Rodgers song, "In the Jailhouse Now."

Like Willie Nelson's Texas fans, who were so country that they didn't know they were country, the audiences--street audience or medicine show audience--for Pink Anderson were similar. They didn't care so much about whether it was the blues, or a song a song about a railroad disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, or whatever. And yet Anderson was a real bluesman, and everything he sang came out as blues.

On his Bluesville debut album, he is much more focused on the blues. With the exception of Big Joe Williams's "Baby, Please Don't Go," all the other songs listed as "uncredited traditional blues," which is a little strange. since many folk singers--certainly many white folk singers--had no problem putting their own names on, and getting the publishing right for, traditional folk songs.  Some of the blues on the album are familiar, like "Mama, Where Did You Stay Last Night?" but with Anderson's own variations. Others string together the sort of "traveling lyrics" that were common to many blues in many combinations. There wasn't a strong proprietary sense about lyrics in Anderson's day. Guitar styles were much more personal and more closely guarded. It's said that Charley Patton used to do a lot of the showy tricks for which Jimi Hendrix later became famous--playing the guitar behind his back, tossing it in the air, plucking the strings with his teeth--so that other guitar players wouldn't be able to figure out exactly what he was doing.

Anderson has a powerful guitar style,  a lot of single-string picking and a strong, full-toned, percussive approach. It's not hard to imagine what he would have sounded like had he joined the Great Migration to Chicago and gotten into the electric blues scene.

Anderson's first name was appropriated by the British rock group Pink Floyd, and his whole name lives on in the person of his son, the contemporary bluesman Little Pink Anderson. The Bluesville LP is titled Pink Anderson--Carolina Bluesman, Vol. 1. "Try Some of That" did not make it onto this album, but was later included in a Bluesville compilation called Bawdy Blues, as the serious blues collectors started to discover they could make a few extra bucks marketing to the party records crowd.