Biography
Few locales as unremarkable as Gastonia, North Carolina, have inspired a musical salute as buoyant as David McCarn’s “Gastonia Gallup,” first recorded by the local harmonica virtuoso during the 1930s. Because the instrument travels so easily, it found its way into nearly every corner of American music, with players always ready to produce one and begin playing. McCarn belonged to the earliest cohort of American harmonica masters whose work was showcased on the Yazoo collection Harmonica Masters. For many listeners that anthology supplies virtually their only exposure to him and to several of the other performers included. Even specialists who track the careers of such distinctive figures as Daddy Stovepipe, Six Cylinder Smith, and Rhythm Willie know little about McCarn’s later movements, although his forays into country music have drawn notice from scholars of radical politics. One of his sides stands among the rare country-and-western protest recordings to address the hardships of textile-mill laborers. That industry dominated the North Carolina Piedmont, where working conditions were severe. More songs in the spirit of his “Cotton Mill Colic,” a widely circulated protest number throughout the 1930s, might therefore have been expected. Apart from additional McCarn material, the only comparable country treatment of the subject is Jim & Jesse’s “Cotton Mill Man.” Protest songs on the textile industry have otherwise come chiefly from Appalachian folk performers such as Wade Manier and Dorsey Dixon. Yet Melton McLaurin’s essay “Class Consciousness in Country Music” emphasizes that McCarn operated primarily as a commercial country artist of his day. He cut both that number and the striking “Everyday Dirt” for Victor while the label was seeking to exploit the emerging country market. He continued to direct pointed commentary at mill owners; his sequel “Cotton Mill Colic No. 2,” also known as “Poor Man, Rich Man,” was later preserved by the American Folk Life Center on an anthology of American folk songs.