True Story Of Abner Jay

Abner Jay billed himself as the last of the great traveling one-man-band minstrels, a self-taught songster from rural Georgia who accompanied his own banjo, harmonica and foot-pedaled bass drum and cymbals in a single performance. He toured the South and beyond for decades, playing schools, supper clubs, churches and street corners, cutting his songs himself on small private-press singles and LPs he sold from the trunk of his car. This compilation gathers highlights of that self-released catalog, mixing his own compositions - blunt, plainspoken protest and hard-times songs like "Cocaine," "Vietnam" and "The Reason Young People Use Drugs" - with his stripped-down readings of older standards such as "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "Ol' Man River." Jay's music reaches back past postwar blues toward nineteenth-century minstrel and songster traditions, filtered through his own idiosyncratic, deeply personal voice. He remained a marginal, largely unrecorded figure in his lifetime, better known to those who caught him live than to record buyers, which makes this gathering of his scattered singles and album sides a rare window onto an outsider artist rediscovered decades after the fact. Critics and collectors have since embraced him as a singular American voice, prized precisely for the raw, unclassifiable character that kept him outside the era's blues and folk revivals.