“When I first set foot in Nellie Storey’s home on the outskirts of Carrollton, Georgia, to interview her for a university oral history project in the fall of 2000, little did I anticipate where our initial meeting would lead. Eighty-four-year-old Nellie’s vivid and detailed recollections of life in Carroll County during the 1930s and 40s took hold of my imagination, transporting me back in time to a world of hillbilly music, barn dances, and live radio programs. But more than anything, it was the aging reel-to-reel tapes and fragile 70-rpm acetate discs she entrusted to my care that opened a window into the past.
As a reflection of that by-gone era, this unique collection of banjo and fiddle tunes, cotton patch boogies and ballads, sanctified singing, and down-home radio chatter pays tribute to the pickers, singers, preachers, and radio personalities who helped shape, preserve, and promote rural music traditions in West Georgia. Selected from hours of historic, previously unreleased recordings, it evokes the ambience of live music programs by local entertainers on a small-town radio station in the South during the years following World War II.”
