Try analyzing this phenomenon by using the following pieces of evidence:
[The opening screen of the Hillbilly Days home page]
Welkum Ya’ll.. . . Come on in, crack open a Pepsi, and sit a spell rite cher in good ole Pikeville, Kentucky! We would like to thank everywun for visitin us durin the 2001 Hillbilly Days. We would also like to thank all of our sponsors for their generosity and support. Over the next few weeks we’us will be postin some piturs taken at the festival. Make sure ya vist the archive piturs taken by the web cams. See ya next year!38
[Devon Scalf, retired teacher]
Hillbilly? Everybody gets stereotyped in life, but everybody’s heritage just gets more valuable with time.39
[George C. Wells, ninety-one-year-old local car dealer and Shriner]
Well, there was complaining from some at first about using hillbilly. But it soon became a real fun thing, and look at all the children we brought out of the backwoods who needed hospital care.40
[Sandy Runyon, executive director of the Area Development District of the Big Sandy River region]
We walk a fine line between being very proud of our heritage and trying to dispel the typical idea the rest of the world has. It remains a sensitive point. A lot of people would rather not remember the past, but it gave us a heritage to be proud of.41
[Paul Patton, governor of Kentucky]
It’s a little paradoxical, but when you can laugh at yourself, that’s a healthy sign that you can acknowledge a part of your heritage and be comfortable with it. The old days of Lyndon Johnson’s foray into eastern Kentucky to highlight domestic poverty are gone. What we offer now is intellectual service to people around the world.42
[Bob Dart, reporter for Cox Newspapers]
Sykes, an international computer troubleshooting firm, has communications centers in Pikeville and nearby Hazard. It employs more than 1000 highly trained residents of Appalachia to deal with computer problems of people around the world.. . . Pikeville Methodist Hospital and the medical school are linked to a new telecommunications network that will help provide medical care to federal prison inmates across the country.43
[Melissa Cornett, staff writer for Appalachian Focus Civil News]
Coca-Cola Enterprises of Pikeville announced Monday [March 5, 2001] it will offer a specially-decorated eight-ounce bottle and carrier to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the annual Hillbilly Days Festival. . . . A total of 96,000 bottles featuring a Hillbilly Days logo and the date for the three-day festival were produced. . . . [According to Gov. Paul Patton,] “These bottles will be taken back by our guests to all parts of the country and displayed as proud mementos by people who have adopted this very special cause of celebrating the heritage [of] Appalachia and helping the children of the region through the Shriners’ efforts.”44
Now consider the meanings and implications of Appalachian stereotypes in modern America. Why would tens of thousands of people who live outside the mountain region want to come to the Hillbilly Days Festival? Why would the residents of Pikeville support an event that, at one level, fosters a stereotypical image of themselves? Perhaps it’s all about money, but there is more to it than that.45
What does the future hold for Appalachian stereotypes? Anthony Harkins has described the stereotype’s durability and flexibility over the past century, and there’s no reason to suspect it will not endure for another hundred years. The images continually surround us; for example, over the weekend of July 28–29, 2001, the cable television station TV Land broadcast episodes of the old Beverly Hillbillies show for 48 consecutive hours. Although it may not be in our power to control the dissemination of such images, we do have the power to interpret these stereotypes critically and in ways that take into consideration the people of Appalachia past and present.
NOTES
1. Anne Shelby, “The ‘R’ Word: What’s So Funny (and Not So Funny) about Redneck Jokes,” in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 155.
2. New York Times Magazine, Dec. 26, 1999, p. 58.
3. Transcript of “Another America,” CBS News’s Forty-eight Hours, Dec. 14, 1989, p. 2.
4. For earlier movies, especially the classic Deliverance (1972), see J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
5. For an analysis of television shows, especially The Beverly Hillbillies, see Anthony A. R. Harkins, “The Hillbilly in Twentieth-Century American Culture: The Evolution of a Contested National Icon” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1999), chap. 6.
6. Kathleen M. Blee and Dwight B. Billings, “Where ‘Bloodshed Is a Pastime’: Mountain Feuds and Appalachian Stereotyping,” in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, ed. Billings et al., 120.
7. Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), xiii, 4 (quote).
8. Ibid., 8, 15.
9. David C. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 176.
10. Mary Noailles Murfree, In the Tennessee Mountains (reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970), 80.
11. Ibid., 289, 90.
12. Ibid., 196–97.
13. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, 179.
14. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 56.
15. Ibid., x.
16. Ibid., 119.
17. Ibid., chap. 5. Frost’s most famous article is “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (Mar. 1899): 311–19.
18. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, 179; Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, chap. 2.
19. For a full explanation, see Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, esp. chaps. 2–5.
20. Rail Road Journal (Jonesborough, Tenn.), Sept. 21, 1850.
21. Rail Road Journal and Family Visitor (Jonesborough, Tenn.), Aug. 30, 1851.
22. Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 177–78.
23. For details see Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, chap. 6.
24. Harkins, “Hillbilly,” 2–3 (emphasis added).
25. Ibid., 158, 164.
26. Blee and Billings, “Where ‘Bloodshed Is a Pastime,’” 134.
27. Chris Burritt, “Trying to Make Hay from a Sad History,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution (home ed.), June 10, 2000, p. 3A. Also available online at LEXIS-NEXIS/Academic Universe (July 25, 2001).
28. Darlene Wilson, “A Judicious Combination of Incident and Psychology: John Fox Jr. and the Southern Mountaineer Motif,” in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, ed. Blee and Billings, 100.
29. Ibid.
30. Williamson, Hillbillyland, 20.
31. Ibid., 41.
32. Ibid., 264.
33. Ibid., 15.
34. Ibid., 16–17.
35. Stephen King, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” in The Blair Reader, 2d ed., ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), 288–89.
36. Williamson., Hillbillyland, 17.
37. “Hillbilly Days,” n.d. Available online at
38. “Hillbilly Days.”
39. Francis X. Clines, “Backwoods Image Gone, Kentucky Town Revels in Hillbilly Roots,” New York Times (late ed.-final), Apr. 1, 2001, sec. 1, p. 14. Also available online at LEXIS-NEXIS/Academic Un
iverse (July 25, 2001).
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Dart, “Revitalized.”
44. Melissa Cornett, “Coca-Cola Offers Commemorative Bottle for Twenty-fifth Hillbilly Days,” Appalachian Focus Civil News, Mar. 7, 2001, p. B1. Also available online at
45. To help you get started and to reward those who actually look at endnotes, I’ll quote J. W. Williamson: “The special thrill the Shriners get from playing the country fool in public comes not just from the big money they raise in the process for their crippled and burned children philanthropies. Their behavior is a rebellion, too. They are giving vent to a common human urge to kick over authority— what Willeford calls the urge to eat sausages in the cathedral” (Hillbillyland, 14).
9
Music
Bill C. Malone
“Carry me back to the mountains, back to my home sweet home.” Roy Acuff, “the Smoky Mountain Boy,” sang those lines often as his theme song on the Grand Ole Opry. Like many of the songs about the Southern mountains, this one was written by a northerner, Carson Robison, one of the pioneers of commercial hillbilly music. Acuff used the song as an affectionate recollection of his home in the Tennessee hills near Knoxville. For Robison and the rest of us, “Carry Me Back to the Mountains” conjures up an almost mythical place and a special kind of music.
No concept in American life has had a more magic appeal than Appalachian music. For almost one hundred years Americans have exhibited a romantic fascination with a body of music that seems to evoke a cluster of values and a way of life that stand in stark relief to the dominant culture of our urban-industrial nation. The values evoked may be negative (feuding, moonshining, violence), or they may be positive (family solidarity, a simple life lived close to the soil), but they are appealing because they stand in short supply today or because they provide dramatic relief from the boredom that many find in our society and in the homogenized sounds of popular music. Appalachian music simultaneously suggests the roots from which our culture evolved and stands as an alternative to other presumably soulless musical styles that have become dominant in our popular culture.
The discovery of English and Scottish ballads in the southern hills, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, was both cause and product of a larger preoccupation with the Southern mountains and the belief that the Appalachians were an unchanging repository of traditional British lore. In our own time, we mercifully have abandoned many of the stereotypical assumptions of that era, but we still respond enthusiastically to the idea, if not the reality, of Appalachian music. The recent success of the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the phenomenal sales of its soundtrack were accompanied by declarations that Americans were turning once again to “mountain music.”1 A musical tour that featured songs and singers from the soundtrack was billed as the Down from the Mountain concert. The resulting vogue for bluegrass music was widely interpreted as a reaction against the suburbanized sound of Top 40 country music and as an effort to take the music back to its true roots in the mountains. The assertion of mountain identity was indeed strange, however, because the movie’s plot was set in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta, and the music heard there, with one singular exception—the award-winning “Man of Constant Sorrow”—was generically southern rural and not mountain at all. Of all the singers on the soundtrack, only Ralph Stanley, from Dickenson County, Virginia, was genuinely Appalachian. His lonesome tenor voice seemed to summon up the strains of Old Regular Baptist singing and to evoke visions of isolated glens and village churchyards. However, none of the songs he sang, including “Conversation with Death,” were uniquely indigenous to the mountains. The O Brother phenomenon is best understood as an example of the lingering romantic appeal of Appalachia and of the lazy inclination to describe anything that seems old, rural, acoustic, and out-of-the-mainstream as “Appalachian.”
There is no such thing as “Appalachian music.” There are instead a wide variety of instrumental and vocal styles made by Appalachian musicians, many of which have exerted great influence in the larger realm of American music and all of which have exhibited the eclectic and steadily evolving nature of life in the mountains. The music is diverse because the culture in which it evolved is diverse. It exhibits the influence of many ethnic and racial groups and, above all, the interaction of city and rural forms and the changing economic patterns of the Southern mountains.
That diversity existed in the mountains long before its music was introduced to the outside world.2 Although one finds scattered evidence of musical performance in travel accounts, local color stories, diaries and memoirs, newspapers, and county histories, hard evidence for the years before the 1920s is hard to come by. But it is clear that the music made by Appalachian musicians bore the marks of an intensely rural society and of the technological forces that were transforming life in the region: the railroads, textile industry, coalmining, lumbering, and urban growth. Ancient ballads, gospel songs, ragtime pieces, and Tin Pan Alley ditties coexisted in the repertoires of mountain musicians, with no apparent sense of contradiction. Jean Ritchie became famous singing the British songs bequeathed to her by her family in the remote Cumberland Mountains of eastern Kentucky, but she has also testified that her father brought a Sears-Roebuck “talking machine,” along with such ragtime records as “Whistling Rufus,” into their home as early as 1905.3 Ballad singing was common among young and old, but women seem to have been the premier conservators of tradition. The writer Emma Bell Miles knew only her small section of Appalachia in southeastern Tennessee, but her comments about ballad singing probably have resonance for the region as a whole: “It is over the loom and the knitting that old ballads are dreamily, endlessly crooned.”4
Except for the performance of old ballads encouraged by the settlement schoolteachers among their students, ballad singing was largely a private act, intended for personal or family consumption. Dancing, in contrast, was a community enterprise. Described often as “frolics,” dances accompanied all kinds of community events, both work and social: house raisings, corn shuckings, bean stringings, quilting parties, syrup making, fish fries, weddings, Christmas, or for no reason at all. People cleared a room of furniture, invited the neighbors in for a Saturday night dance, and stepped to the music of a fiddler or banjo player. Music enlivened church meetings of all kinds, brush arbor revivals, camp meetings, singing conventions, and shape-note singing schools. Some religious groups, such as the Old Regular Baptists and Primitive Baptists, resisted as unscriptural any instrumental accompaniment, but the newer Pentecostal or “Holiness” sects enthusiastically accepted every kind of instrument. Fiercely conservative and otherworldly in doctrine, the Pentecostal people nevertheless were modern in their acceptance of new tunes and instruments or of anything, in short, that would enliven their worship. Their accepting spirit tells us much about the receptivity to modern forms of music in the mountains and of their presence alongside the venerable ballads and love songs.
We need only recall that Cecil Sharp, the English collector who came to the mountains in 1916, went about his ventures, as did other academic folklorists, with a sense of urgency precisely because he knew that the old ballads were being engulfed by more modern forms of music. Sharp noted sadly but wisely that the traditional ballads he sought tended to be rare in the region’s railroad towns.5
To many people, of course, the defining core of Appalachian music will always be the ballads and folksongs collected by Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell from 1916 to 1918. Their great contribution was to show that not only did this material exist in greater profusion than it did in England, but that it was cherished and sung in the mountains by young and old alike. Ballad singing in the Appalachians was not the static possession of a few elderly people, as it was back in England. Sharp remarked, “I discovered that I could get what I wanted from pretty nearly every one I met, young and old,” a
nd he commented further about the mountaineer habit of mating modern lyrics to traditional modal tunes.6
Tin Pan Alley songs, ragtime pieces, or any other example of modern musical innovation did not interest Sharp. Much influenced by Francis James Child, the Harvard professor who had collected 305 English and Scottish ballads and their variants (all from manuscripts),7 Sharp labored to find living examples of these songs among the peasantry of the Southern hills. Accompanied by Campbell, Sharp spent about twelve months winning the confidence of the people and noting the tunes of the songs that they contributed. That justly celebrated expedition has endured as a benchmark in the discovery of indigenous American culture and has since shaped the vision of what Appalachian music is.8
Sharp knew what he was looking for, he found it, and we are all the richer for his discoveries. He knew that other forms of music were available in the mountains, and he sometimes referred to them and in a few cases noted down their tunes.9
We cannot fault him for his preferences but can only conclude that in ignoring the products of the pocket songsters, sheet music, paperback gospel hymnals, minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and phonograph records, all of which were present in the mountains, Sharp was not simply ignoring much music that was beloved by local people but was also rejecting the economic and social processes that had been transforming mountain life since at least the Civil War. The riverboats that followed the tributaries of the Ohio River far back into the Appalachians, the railroads that ended mountain isolation, and the coalmines, textile mills, and lumber camps that fostered economic growth also lured new people with new songs, instruments, and styles. Consequent town growth made available department stores, movie and vaudeville houses, sheet music, instruments, piano rolls, and phonograph records.
Only five years after Sharp left the mountains, a textile worker from Fries, Virginia, armed with a guitar and French harp attached to a rack around his neck, journeyed to New York and recorded two songs for the Okeh label, “Lonesome Road Blues” and “Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (Okeh 40015). Henry Whitter was only the first of many mountain-born musicians who made commercial recordings in the years after 1923 or who appeared on the radio stations emerging in Asheville, Wheeling, Knoxville, and other mountain cities. Samantha Bumgarner, Eva Davis, Ernest Stoneman, Kelly Harrell, Buell Kazee, G. B. Grayson, Al Hopkins, Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Alfred Karnes, B. F. Shelton, Frank Hutchison, and the Carter Family were only a few of the Appalachian musicians who emerged in those early years.10
High Mountains Rising Page 17
