Biography
Guitarist Tommie Bradley teamed with colleague James Cole, whose own skills extended to fiddle as well as guitar, for sessions at the Gennett recording studios in Richmond, IN that spanned 1929-1932. Cole had already appeared there the previous year in a date that apparently featured white players, an occurrence that stood out sharply within the racially divided record business of the era. Questions of racial identity have shaped how these two African American musicians are remembered, largely because their mixture of Southern rural blues, black vaudeville, hillbilly, country fiddling, and Tin Pan Alley/jazz material has resisted easy classification by writers and scholars. Although no confirmed biographical details have surfaced to establish their birthplaces, informed speculation points toward central or western Kentucky as a likely origin. Their surviving recordings invite comparison with a range of other artists from the same period, among them the Memphis Jug Band, the Mississippi Sheiks, the Alabama Sheiks, the Beale Street Sheiks, the Mississippi Mud Steppers, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, the Dallas String Band, Whistler & His Jug Band, Ishman Bracey and Charley Taylor, Eddie Anthony and Peg Leg Howell, Georgia Tom Dorsey and Tampa Red, Al Miller, and Charlie and Joe McCoy. A still wider circle of parallels would encompass the additional jug bands then operating in Louisville and Memphis along with eastern blues performers such as Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, and Mississippi John Hurt. In 1993 Document assembled and issued a wide-ranging survey of the Bradley and Cole catalog.