Big Apple Label Remasters The Red Fox Chasers' Historic Recordings into New CD Anthology

Thanks to the New York-based Tompkins Square label, the quartet, whose members recorded during the high-water mark of the Golden Era of American vernacular music, has a brand-new anthology release to its credit titled I'm Going Down To North Carolina: The Complete Recordings of The Red Fox Chasers (1928-31)

Per label exec Josh Rosenthal, the rural-music recordings represent a unique and exciting blend of Appalachian fiddle tunes and ballads, popular tin-pan alley songs and Victorian sentimental compositions. Moreover, he notes, the lineup was especially popular in the Virginias and Carolinas, with the players' "Galax fiddle-sound" and intricate three-finger banjo style that simultaneously evokes Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters and Charlie Poole.

The Red Fox Chasers hailed from North Carolina and represent "an idiosyncratic slice of early American Applalachian music as it was captured commercially in the 1920s and 1930s," Rosenthal says.

Grammy-winner Christopher King remastered the tracks on the two-CD set, which will be available for purchase beginning Aug. 18 via the label's Web site.

Tompkins Square has made a name for itself by preserving historically relevant, early recordings that otherwise likely wouldn't have see the light of day, so to speak, including, Spencer Moore, as well as artists such as Charlie Louvin, whose 2008 CD, People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938, secured a Grammy nod for Best Historical Album, as did the label's Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette (2009).