The discovery made by the commercial record companies that money might be made from the music of mountain and other rural musicians inspired field trips into the southern hills, not totally unlike the expeditions made a few years earlier by Cecil Sharp. The most historic of these ventures came in late July 1927, when producer Ralph Peer took a Victor recording crew to Bristol, a city astride the boundary of Tennessee and Virginia. Peer already knew that one mountain musician, Ernest Stoneman, had made money from his recording of “The Sinking of the Titanic” and other traditional tunes. Peer contracted to record Stoneman again and, announcing his visit in local newspapers, lured other musicians to the makeshift studio on the Tennessee side of State Street. The resulting Bristol Sessions11 did not mark “the birth of country music,” as some observers like to argue, but they did preserve the music of nineteen different acts on seventy-six recordings, and they introduced to the world the music of country music’s two most enduring seminal acts: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. An ex-railroad worker from Meridian, Mississippi, Rodgers had temporarily relocated in Asheville in an attempt to find relief from tuberculosis, the disease that took his life only six years later. With his fusion of blues, pop tunes, and traditional material, bolstered by his unique style of yodeling, Rodgers enjoyed a brief but influential career that eventually won for him the title of the Father of Country Music. The trio of musicians now remembered as the Carter Family (A.P., his wife, Sara, and their sister-in-law Maybelle) came down from Maces Spring, Virginia, where they had gained a local reputation singing at house parties and church socials. They eventually recorded about three hundred sides for various companies and introduced both a vocal sound and an instrumental pattern (distinguished by Maybelle’s guitar playing) that captivated hosts of rural musicians in the decades that followed. They bequeathed to the world a body of songs now known as “Carter Family Songs.” A.P. had picked up most of these songs from a variety of sources, often from friends and other informants in the mountains, but, like their two most famous songs—“Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side”—the Carter Family songs emerged generally from a large reservoir of musical material known to rural southerners everywhere. Drawing on nineteenth-century pop tunes, gospel resources, African American items, and some British folk fragments, the Carter Family recorded a body of music that breathed with the essence of the rural South.12
A substantial body of material from the British Isles and Ireland, such as the Carter Family’s “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” Tom Ashley’s “House Carpenter,” Buell Kazee’s “Lady Gay,” and Bradley Kincaid’s “Barbara Allen,” did appear on early country broadcasts and recordings. But such songs were heavily outnumbered by material that derived, ultimately, from the popular culture resources of urban America or from the presses aligned with religious revivalism in the nation.
Mountain musicians, like rural entertainers everywhere, were fascinated with the blues, and elements of the form showed up on the earliest recordings. Henry Whitter recorded “Lonesome Road Blues,” also known as “Going down the Road Feeling Bad,” as his initial effort in 1923. The word blues itself turns up repeatedly in the title of tunes, even on fiddle pieces that evoked no melancholy at all, and in songs whose themes or moods seemed far removed from the classic African American pattern. But some mountain musicians exhibited a familiarity with the country blues and faithfully recreated what they had heard. As early as 1926 Frank Hutchison covered tunes, such as “Worried Blues,” that he had learned directly from black musicians back home in Logan County, West Virginia. His recordings featured some of the earliest examples in country music of slide or bottleneck guitar accompaniment. Hutchison’s fellow West Virginian, Dick Justice, made a famous recording of a British ballad, “Little Henry Lee,” but at the same session he also recorded a creditable performance of “Cocaine” (probably learned from Luke Jordan’s earlier recording), complete with a finger-picking style of guitar that is also traceable to African American sources.13 Tom Ashley and Dock Boggs were similarly eclectic in their song tastes, and their performances of blues tunes with five-string banjo accompaniment provided capsule examples of the ways in which the British and African American traditions meshed in mountain music. The Carter Family had a large storehouse of Victorian parlor songs, but with songs such as “Worried Man Blues” and “Bear Creek Blues,” they also demonstrated a fondness for the blues and other African American tunes. A black musician named Lesley Riddles sometimes accompanied A. P. Carter on his song-hunting expeditions in the Southern hills. These performances, and others like them, point to a significant African American influence in mountain culture, either through the physical presence of black people as workers or as itinerant musicians or through the music found on phonograph records that were sold in the region’s towns and cities.14
By the end of the 1920s Americans had been presented with two contending visions of Appalachian music: that fashioned by the commercial hillbillies on radio broadcasts, phonograph recordings, and stage shows and that conveyed by the apostles of Cecil Sharp in books, concerts, and recitals and, in the 1930s, at folk festivals. Although songs and styles from the two traditions often overlapped, the musicians basically played to two different audiences.
Although many mountain-born musicians performed in the first two decades of the country music business, they could not have presented an “Appalachian” image, even if they had wanted to do so. Mountain and rural scenes, or representations of them, easily meshed in the public mind. It was hard to play mountain roles without resorting to caricature or stereotype, the result being a depiction drawn from vaudeville or popular culture of the feuding, moonshining, jug-toting hillbilly. On the other hand, if musicians chose to depict a wholesome picture of mountain life, that of down-to-earth simplicity and virtue, they wound up portraying placid and thoroughly romantic scenes that conformed to the Currier and Ives vision of rural America. When attempting to don appropriate costumes that portrayed mountain life, entertainers had to face the troubling question of what mountaineers wore that might set them apart from other rural people. People in Appalachia donned overalls, work pants, brogans, bonnets, and gingham dresses, but no more so than in other regions of the rural South. Stage entertainers faced equally difficult choices when pondering what kind of speech to use and what kind of values to embody. Are mountaineers simpler and more old-fashioned than other rural people?15
As a matter of fact, the early entertainers exhibited a remarkable diversity in style and song. Most of them chose to go on stage or pose for publicity pictures wearing their best Sunday go-to-meeting clothes or, after the Hollywood film industry popularized the image in the 1930s, in the garb of a cowboy. Few of the entertainers explicitly chose to wrap themselves in rural or mountain symbolism.
On the other hand, they were aware of the allure of Appalachian imagery, whether positive or negative. They knew that Americans hungered for old songs. And they knew that the words “Appalachian” and “mountain” carried romantic, almost mystical connotations for most people. Consequently, bands gave themselves regional or local mountain names, as in the case of Ernest Stoneman’s Dixie Mountaineers, Mainer’s Mountaineers, Smoky Mountain Boys, Blue Ridge Entertainers, Cumberland Mountain Folk, and Clinch Mountain Clan, or an individual singer such as Bradley Kincaid marketed himself as the Kentucky Mountain Boy.16 They sang songs that referred to mountain life, nostalgically, humorously, or stereotypically. Although occasional songs such as A. P. Carter’s “Foggy Mountain Top” and “Clinch Mountain Home” came from the pens of local entertainers, more often than not such famous “mountain songs” as “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues,” “Zeb Turney’s Gal,” “The Martins and the Coys,” “I Like Mountain Music,” and “Carry Me Back to the Mountains” were written by outsiders, by the tunesmiths of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, or by people such as the Kansas-born Carson Robison, who in the mid-1920s “converted” to hillbilly music.
The efforts made by radio barn dance entrepreneurs to evoke a mount
ain feeling were similarly shrouded in ambiguity. John Lair began cultivating the image of going home to the warmth and security of the mountains when he was working in the mid-1930s as an announcer for WLS on Chicago’s National Barn Dance.17 Inspired by his memories of the old home place in southeastern Kentucky, he wrote a popular song called “Take Me Back to Renfro Valley” that was performed often by the Barn Dance’s entertainers. Though designed as a tribute to mountain pastoralism, the song instead presented mixed messages and images with its references to both “the old plantation” and “springtime in the mountains.” In Chicago and later in Kentucky, where he created the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, Lair organized and cultivated musicians who were encouraged to portray mountain characters. He gave them names that conjured up mountain origins, such as the Cumberland Mountain Folk and Coon Creek Girls, supplied them with old-fashioned songs, and required them to dress in homespun costumes. One of these entertainers, the North Carolina-born Myrtle Eleanor Cooper, performing under the name of Lulu Belle, became one of the most popular radio personalities of the 1930s. Lulu Belle played the role of an innocent but sometimes saucy mountain girl who often upstaged the male entertainers with whom she was paired. With her husband, Scott Wiseman (as the team of Lulu Belle and Scotty), she contributed vitally to the cultivation of the Mother and Home mystique that has always been central to country music’s self-proclaimed image. Scott Wiseman’s “Homecoming Time in Happy Valley” beckoned listeners to return, at least symbolically, to a land of rural innocence and family security.18
Though immensely influential, the tradition inaugurated by Sharp and other collectors of British material long remained the province of a small elite. Enshrined in books and scholarly articles, taught in English literature and music appreciation courses, or performed in concerts and recitals, this essentially art music approach to the ballads was narrowly focused and largely disembodied because it stressed the music rather than the people and culture that had produced it. Pianist Howard Brockway and singer Loraine Wyman had been presenting their versions of Kentucky mountain ballads to sophisticated audiences for at least a couple of years before Cecil Sharp entered the field. They and other musicians such as Grace Wood Jess, Edna Thomas, and John Jacob Niles tended to be classically trained graduates of Juilliard and other music schools. They romanticized, and even venerated, the culture from which the music came, but they treated it as a static phenomenon. On the other hand, they were not averse to changing the songs to fit their personal artistic preferences: For example, Niles changed the melody of “Black Is the Color” because his father did not like the original. Niles’s melody is the one that most people remember. This first generation of “urban folk singers” valued the oldest representations of British folk music and was contemptuous if not hostile to hillbilly and other commercial manifestations. From Brockway and Wyman to Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” the concert performers and arrangers of Appalachian music strived to create a body of music that would appeal to an elite audience of educated and articulate listeners. Did listeners ever wonder, though, about how real mountain musicians sounded?
The folk festivals became the chief vehicles for preserving the oldest musical material of the mountains and venues where mountain people themselves could be featured. Somewhat analogous to fiddle contests, held in the South since 1737, the festivals served as both preservators of tradition and promoters of economic growth. They were sometimes adjuncts of Chambers of Commerce. The first festival convened in 1928 when Bascom Lamar Lunsford organized a series of musical events as part of the Rhododendron Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. Lunsford’s musical venture has thrived ever since as the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. A lawyer and businessman, musician (five-string banjo and fiddle), and amateur folklorist, Lunsford straddled the worlds of commercial country and folk music. He had recorded a few songs for the Brunswick label in 1928 and hundreds of items by 1949 for the Library of Congress and other collectors. He valued, and tried to preserve, the oldest ballads, instrumental pieces, and dances. Group clogging may have been the most enduring legacy of Lunsford’s festivals and, as a composite of folk, stage, minstrel, and native American dancing, the most vibrant evidence of mountain music’s diverse sources.19
The festivals that came after Lunsford’s forays were openly hostile to commercial adaptations of folk music. Not only did they strive to preserve old musical traditions, but they also combated hillbilly and pop styles. Annabel Morris Buchanan, cofounder in 1931 with John Powell of the White Top Mountain Folk Festival in southwestern Virginia, announced that the “products of the streets, penitentiaries, and the gutter,” or songs from the paperback gospel hymnals, would never gain admittance to the festival.20 Jean Thomas, the self-styled Traipsing Woman and founder of the American Folk Festival in Ashland, Kentucky, sought Elizabethan survivals in mountain culture and, like the mountain settlement schools and some of the other festival entrepreneurs, sometimes introduced archaic forms such as Morris dancing into the festival setting. Powell and Buchanan rigorously restricted participation at the White Top Festival and sought to censor the kinds of songs that were performed, striving to preserve the “Anglo Saxon” cast of the music that was presented and prohibiting the performance of African American entertainers.21
Although much was excluded, the festivals showcased the performances of such fine mountain musicians as Horton Barker, Maud Long (daughter of Jane Gentry, Cecil Sharp’s most important informant), Hobart Smith, and Texas Gladden. Profiting from the renewed appreciation of America’s folk roots inspired by the Great Depression, some of these singers were invited to perform in venues outside the South and were asked to record for the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress.22 Eleanor Roosevelt attended the White Top Festival in 1933, suggesting White House endorsement for the venerable arts of the Appalachians. In 1939 an array of mountain musicians that included Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Coon Creek Girls, and the Soco Gap clogging team performed for the king and queen of England at a White House soirée, and added still more luster to the performance of Appalachian songs and dances.23
The Great Depression years did not simply inspire a search for roots. They also provoked an outcry for social justice and an awakening of Southern labor. Labor’s rise in turn was accompanied by an outpouring of protest music and a new suggestion of what Appalachian music might be. Americans began to be aware of working-class unrest in the rural South after 1929 when a wave of strikes, at first spontaneous, spread through the textile mill towns of the Piedmont. A similar fusion of radical ideology and local populist anger occurred in 1932 in the coalmining counties of Bell and Harlan, Kentucky, when the National Miners Union (NMU) moved in to take advantage of a vacuum left by the immobility of the conservative American Federation of Labor. In each labor context, the ancient art of traditional ballad making was put to the service of the struggling workers. Folklorist Archie Green declared that “from this setting came a group of topical songs using old melodies to set off intensely stark and militant texts.”24 The most famous textile strike of that era, in Gastonia, North Carolina, found its balladeer in the music of Ella May Wiggins, a native of Sevierville, Tennessee, who had followed her husband into itinerant cotton mill work. Her death in 1929, from shots fired by scabs, gave labor radicalism its first Southern martyr. Her name, and at least one song, “A Mill Mother’s Lament,” became widely known among radicals throughout the North. The most famous song to emerge from the Kentucky coalfields was Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?,” written in angry response to the deputy sheriffs and company “gun thugs” who had ransacked her house looking for union material. Northern radicals and labor organizers took many of the songs back home and introduced them to local singers. Radical activists also encouraged Aunt Molly, Jim Garland, and Sarah Ogan to relocate in the North, where, along with Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), they became the center of an emerging urban folk music scene that has carried a pro-labor and left-wing edge.25
Th
e protest songs popularized by Aunt Molly and her brethren were only a small slice of the “mountain music” that reached out to Americans in the 1930s. Folk festivals had strived to keep the oldest music alive. The Carter Family and Mainer’s Mountaineers found exposure for their music through the powerful broadcasts of the radio stations on the Mexican border. The Smoky Mountain Boy, Roy Acuff, won a new title as the “King of Country Music” during the war with his broadcasts over WSM, the 50,000-watt clear channel station in Nashville, Tennessee. By no means was his popularity confined to the southeastern United States. He took his road shows all over the United States and played to an enormous crowd in Venice Pier, California, that had promoters fearing that the pier might sink under the weight. Transplanted southerners certainly contributed to the popularity of “mountain music” in cities throughout the industrial North, in places such as Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Dayton, Akron, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.
Southern migrants adjusted to city and industrial life in a variety of ways. Some people welcomed the new way of life they had found and never looked back with nostalgic yearning at the old home place. However, many working people sought refuge in storefront churches, neighborhood social clubs, hillbilly bars, and “Dixie cafes” or searched their radio dials looking for familiar voices and stories. Hillbilly and gospel songs proliferated on music machines in Detroit, Chicago, and other industrial cities. Mountaineers communed easily with Southern rural flatlanders, all of whom often bore the stigma of “hillbillies” when judged by their “yankee” neighbors. Local differences vanished in the quest for something familiar and comfortable.
High Mountains Rising Page 18
