Biography
Jimmie Tarlton gained his primary recognition through a musical alliance with Tom Darby that spanned the late 1920s into the middle of the following decade. Mutual fondness between the two men remained limited at best, so even though each resurfaced briefly during the 1960s folk-blues revival and Tarlton completed a new album, nothing encouraged them to resume working together.
His approach to playing grew directly out of the rural South Carolina countryside where he spent his childhood and youth. A father who combined occasional farming with sawmill labor strummed a fretless banjo while his mother performed vocal pieces; by the age of six the boy was already handling both banjo and French harp, later adding guitar and mastering bottleneck technique with glass and knife. During the 1920s he further absorbed the Hawaiian guitar manner. In his teenage years he performed across the Northeast as well as the Texas-Louisiana-Oklahoma territory, eventually reaching California where he appeared in bars, cafes, and medicine shows.
Because of poor eyesight he avoided service in World War I and instead supported himself at South Carolina cotton mills before taking a job as a telegraph operator. Recording sessions with Tom Darby commenced in 1927, yet throughout his career Tarlton also shared stages or studios with Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Skillet Lickers, among many others. Although the duo scored a substantial hit via “Cumberland Stockade Blues” and “Birmingham Jail,” their agreement provided only a flat seventy-five-dollar payment per release, and subsequent efforts never matched that success. By the middle 1940s Tarlton had withdrawn from the music industry altogether.
Rediscovery came in 1963 when he was located in Phenix City, Alabama—a place notorious as the county’s sin capital and a hub of crime and corruption whose story inspired two separate feature films during the 1950s. He emerged as a respected presence on the folk and folk-blues circuit, performing at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and cutting a record, yet advanced age prevented him from capitalizing on the fresh openings. Alongside a small number of peers such as country fiddler Eck Robertson, Tarlton safeguarded a regional music-making tradition that might otherwise have vanished, then reshaped it into a personal idiom. The solo sides he taped at home during the early 1960s already reflected Hawaiian guitar and ragtime elements, yet the underlying foundation remained the indigenous South Carolina folk manner that predated the era of recorded sound.
His approach to playing grew directly out of the rural South Carolina countryside where he spent his childhood and youth. A father who combined occasional farming with sawmill labor strummed a fretless banjo while his mother performed vocal pieces; by the age of six the boy was already handling both banjo and French harp, later adding guitar and mastering bottleneck technique with glass and knife. During the 1920s he further absorbed the Hawaiian guitar manner. In his teenage years he performed across the Northeast as well as the Texas-Louisiana-Oklahoma territory, eventually reaching California where he appeared in bars, cafes, and medicine shows.
Because of poor eyesight he avoided service in World War I and instead supported himself at South Carolina cotton mills before taking a job as a telegraph operator. Recording sessions with Tom Darby commenced in 1927, yet throughout his career Tarlton also shared stages or studios with Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Skillet Lickers, among many others. Although the duo scored a substantial hit via “Cumberland Stockade Blues” and “Birmingham Jail,” their agreement provided only a flat seventy-five-dollar payment per release, and subsequent efforts never matched that success. By the middle 1940s Tarlton had withdrawn from the music industry altogether.
Rediscovery came in 1963 when he was located in Phenix City, Alabama—a place notorious as the county’s sin capital and a hub of crime and corruption whose story inspired two separate feature films during the 1950s. He emerged as a respected presence on the folk and folk-blues circuit, performing at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and cutting a record, yet advanced age prevented him from capitalizing on the fresh openings. Alongside a small number of peers such as country fiddler Eck Robertson, Tarlton safeguarded a regional music-making tradition that might otherwise have vanished, then reshaped it into a personal idiom. The solo sides he taped at home during the early 1960s already reflected Hawaiian guitar and ragtime elements, yet the underlying foundation remained the indigenous South Carolina folk manner that predated the era of recorded sound.
Albums