It was a lifetime ago when Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers entered a studio in New York City to cut some music for Columbia Records; it will be 80 years ago this July.

It was such a different world with no television, central heat and air, personal computers, or wireless phones. Records were still being cut to wax cylinders or 78s and radio had never heard of the creeping evil called demographics. Charlie Poole was a record nut. He'd get a favorite and play it over and over, especially if there was a banjo in it. He'd been playing banjo since the age of 8 and had developed his own unique three-fingered style after severely injuring a hand playing baseball. This appreciation for records and his own confidence that him and his band, the North Carolina Ramblers, could do better is what led to the group to leave their Piedmont region homes in North Carolina and travel to New York City in the hopes they would be able to make a record of their own.

It sounds incredible today, but Poole got his trio (Posey Rorer on fiddle, Norman Woodlieff guitar) an audition for Columbia A&R man-producer Frank Walker who gave them $75 to cut a record. This session from 1925 led to "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues" selling over 102,000 copies which was an extraordinary amount at a time when 20,000 sold was considered a smash hit. The same session also yielded "White House Blues", later a staple of both Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers, and recently revived by John Mellencamp. Poole's high treble voice and banjo style is just as appealing now as it obviously was then. Those 1925 sessions predated Ralph Peer's Bristol sessions giving ample ammunition for historians and music lovers to credit Poole for the birth of country music. He's considered by many to be the "patron saint" of country music.

Poole was also a hard-drinking hell raiser which wasn't all that uncommon for a man who worked in the mills and moonshine industries when he wasn't entertaining people with his music and stage antics.

As the liner notes from You Ain't Talkin' To Me by Henry "Hank" Sapoznik point out: " ... a Charlie Poole show was something to see. Punctuating sly twists on familiar songs with his rat-a-tat picking style, Poole would leap over chairs, turn cartwheels, clog dance on his hands, and shake up audiences with repertoire that just as surprising. Typical sets would careen from prim, cautionary heart songs to a ditty usually reserved for bawdy house anterooms to fiddle tunes to over-the-top dramatization, [and] versions of popular songs, before drawing to a close with a contemplative hymn.".