A Dark Road Is A Hard Road To Travel - G. B. Grayson & Henry Whitter (1928)

G. B. Grayson & Henry Whitter

Victor V-40063

July 31, 1928

The blind fiddler Grayson is a country music legend. He was tragically killed on August 16, 1930, while riding on the running boards of a vehicle outside of Damascus, Virginia.

Henry Whitter was born on April 6, 1892.

He was a pioneer in what would eventually be called "hillbilly" and much later "country" music. The June 1924 issue of Talking Machine World actually calls it "Hill Country Music."

Edison literature of early 1926 used the term "Mountaineer and Rural Ballads."

Whitter had sessions within a year of Arkansas-born fiddler A. C. ("Eck") Robertson, who had cut in mid-1922 for the Victor Talking Machine Company such instrumental numbers as "Arkansaw Traveler," "Sallie Gooden," and "Done Gone" (on two early selections Robertson is joined by fiddler Henry C. Gilliland).

Sales of Okeh records featuring Fiddlin' John Carson (the first singer in this genre), Whitter (the second singer), Ernest Thompson, and a few others made clear to the industry that a market existed for traditional music cut by rural musicians.

Whitter was born in Virginia's Grayson County near the town of Fries (he worked in a cotton mill there) and lived in Cliffview during his years as a performer and later in Warrensville, North Carolina.

He traveled in March 1923 to New York to visit the recording headquarters of the General Phonograph Corporation, maker of Okeh records. Tests made of Whitter in that year were shelved.

Later in 1923 Fiddlin' John Carson enjoyed success with Okeh recordings (in Talking Machine World's September 1923 Advance Record Bulletins, Carson's Okeh 4890 was listed under "Novelty" records, the two other categories being "Dance" and "Vocal"--the term "hillbilly" was not yet used), and Whitter was invited to return to the New York studio to record again.

His first Okeh disc featured "The Wreck on the Southern Old 97," recorded on December 12, 1923, and issued in early 1924 on Okeh 40015, with "Lonesome Road Blues" on its reverse side. Lyrics are about a Southern Railroad mail express train that derailed on September 27, 1903, on the outskirts of Danville, Virginia, killing several people.

Whitter took credit for the lyrics and may have been inspired by a poem written by a young Charles W. Noell, who lived in 1903 near the site where the train wrecked, or by a set of lyrics written by Fred J. Lewey.

On April 26, blind musician Ernest Thompson of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, followed in Whitter's footsteps by cutting "The Wreck of the Southern Old '97" (the preposition "on" was changed to "of," and an apostrophe was added before "97"), and his version on Columbia 130-D was advertised on page 17 of the June 1924 issue of the trade journal Talking Machine World.