BAYLESS ROSE

                       

Bayless Rose was an American singer and guitarist who recorded for Gennett Records in 1930. Although the music industry was highly segregated at the time, it is uncertain whether he was White or African American.

Career

His four titles issued on the Gennett and Champion labels have been seen as stylistically similar to White blues artists such as Dick Justice and Frank Hutchison, and therefore reissued on anthologies of early White country music by County Records and Arhoolie. However, he was included in an anthology of Black Ragtime Blues Guitar and likened stylistically in the sleeve notes by Paul Oliver to Black blues musicians of the Northern Piedmont. Later reissues have been in collections which are neither exclusively Country nor exclusively Blues.

Rose is known to have accompanied 1930 Gennett recordings of the Black artists Clara Burston, Walter Coleman and (possibly) Cow Cow Davenport. For this reason he is included in the comprehensive pre-1943 Blues and Gospel discography, and excluded from the comprehensive pre-1943 Country Music discography. However, research published by Christopher King in Issue # 12 of the journal 78 Quarterly suggests otherwise. In an interview, Mildred Justice, the daughter of Dick Justice recalled that her father played with a railway worker called Bailey Rose who she described as "quite a bit older than daddy". He was "the man who sounded the most like daddy" and taught her father how to play "Old Black Dog" and "Brown Gal". She twice asserted that Rose was not Black, but did describe him as dark-skinned and Arab looking. King suggests that he may have been a Melungeon.

    

Bayless Rose was a Kentucky guitarist and singer who recorded several Ragtime-style Blues tracks for the Gennett label in 1930. His articulate, ‘Piedmont’ picking got him some session work, and his occasional use of a slide is reminiscent of the Memphis guitarist Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis, who had been recording since 1927. Not much is known about Bayless, as there are no surviving photographs and very little documentary evidence beyond his birth records in Booneville Kentucky in 1890. At a time when the Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced, it seems nobody is sure of Bayless’s ethnic origins, but the daughter of ‘white’ Blues player Dick Justice, who was a friend of ‘Bailey Rose’, reported that he had an ‘Arabic’ appearance.