Curious about what might be there, last night I searched YouTube for the Carter Family and other early country acts. There’s some incredible footage there. The first several clips that turn up on a search for the Carter Family are from 1970 or 1971, just after Maybelle Carter was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and they include Johnny Cash introducing her and June’s sisters. They’re interesting, but they’re performances for television, so everyone’s both gussied up and dull. Scroll down a bit, however, and there’s Maybelle on guitar and Sara Carter on autoharp playing “Cannonball Blues” in a clip filmed at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival:

Postrock “Cannonball Blues,” however, is nothing compared to this 1929 recording of Jimmie Rodgers singing “Waiting for a Train,” “Daddy and Home,” and “Blue Yodel No. 1”:

Then, in two parts, footage from 1965 of the Fincastle Bluegrass Festival near Roanoke, VA. The first clip features someone I don’t know playing a fiery “Orange Blossom Special” on fiddle; in both, the mandolin-playing tenor whose face is often in shadow is Bill Monroe:

Finally, the Stanley Brothers playing “Single Girl, Married Girl,” a brutal song about a woman’s limitations in marriage: