Richard Martin

Anytime there's a first, a real first, it takes a long time to figure out what you're dealing with. Vaznier was born free, but his father was not. He was a house painter. As he gets into his mid-20s, you start seeing him appear on stage. At some point, he did graduate to the vaudeville stage.

His voice and the piano is very faint because it's a very early, almost He's got this mule that he loved, and the mule is always getting into trouble. He's kicking and he's eating rocks, and the farmer gets kicked in the mouth. There is no such thing as country until like the 1940s.

Some of the historians say we can talk about stuff that's sort of proto-country, but they have always managed to pencil out any black contribution. Mimicking the mule, if that's an important part of the canon of country music, we've got the guy doing it in 91. This is clearly part of the country tradition.