Hi all,
The recent posts in the Lomax Nuggets thread made me dig out the two E.C. Ball albums put out by Rounder in the early '70s and give them a listen for the first time in a long while. They are titled "E.C. Ball" and "E.C and Orna Ball--Fathers Have a Home Sweet Home". They are excellent Old-Time albums, featuring E.C.'s very strong finger-picked guitar and banjo (on "Pretty Polly" only), and Orna's accordion and pump organ. On the second album, Blair Reedy joins them on mandolin and second guitar, as does his sister, Elsie Reedy, on vocals (they were Orna's brother and sister). There are some stirring gospel quartets on a lot of good songs I've not heard done elsewhere, which is always nice. E. C. also does several instrumentals and some sentimental numbers and a couple of blues.
E.C. was really a nice guitar player. In the course of the two albums, he plays songs out of C, D, A, G and E in standard tuning, and he's quite comfortable playing up and down the neck out of a variety of shapes. In his solo on "When I Kneel And Pray", which he plays out of D, he starts out playing it out of the C shape, 5-5-4-X-3-5, later plays a D6 out of the A shape, X-5-7-7-7-7, and finishes up the solo playing a conventional D chord at the base of the neck. One of his instrumentals, "Raggin' The Wires" employs a VI-II-V-I progression in A, a key you almost never hear that progression played in, and he handles the various F#7 chords he's required to play with aplomb. For the instrumental "Chow Time", played in G, he hits a variety of harmonics that fit beautifully. He had a big rich sound on the Martin dreadnought he played. He and Orna (whom I mistakenly called Orna Mae in the Lomax thread) were both strong singers, as were the Reedys.
I'd recommend these records very highly to any of you who enjoy strong mountain fingerstyle guitar, and if you enjoy hymn-singing so much the better. There's a lot of great material on these discs.
All best,
Johnm
