High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  Musicians were among the migrants who moved to Cincinnati, Detroit, and other industrial areas, and once “hillbilly enclaves” emerged in these cities, professional country musicians began to make them part of their touring schedules. Singers or bands did not have to be from Appalachia to find acceptance, because such musicians as the Texan Ernest Tubb or the Alabamian Hank Williams spoke in cadences and styles that were appealing to Southern working-class people everywhere.

  Although writers and historians have found Southern migrations to the West Coast or the industrial Midwest dramatically appealing, the population dispersions within the South, from rural hinterlands to the towns and cities, have been more dynamic forces in the creation, evolution, and dissemination of various forms of music. In the 1930s and 1940s many rural southerners, from mountains and flatlands alike, gravitated toward the Piedmont South to work in the cotton mills, furniture plants, tobacco factories, and other industrial settings. Not only did they constitute an audience for country music, they also contributed musicians to the field, such as J. E. and Wade Mainer, Roy Hall, and Dewitt “Snuffy” Jenkins, who found radio homes in Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Columbia, Spartanburg, and other cities. In these Piedmont towns they found mill audiences eager to hear their music and radio stations that could circulate their names and songs to broad swaths of territory throughout the South.26 Once they made their reputations through radio broadcasts, musicians could then enlarge their audiences through public appearances in country schoolhouses and movie theaters. Mountain musicians joined with rural entertainers from the Piedmont and other parts of the South to craft a body of music that fused traditional and modern elements. Charlie and Bill Monroe, for example, relocated from Western Kentucky to the Carolinas in the mid-1930s and became popular sensations throughout the Piedmont region.27 The Piedmont was crucial in the development of country music in the 1940s, where the Old South confronted the New, and where rural and industrial values met and mixed. It was, in short, the birthplace of bluegrass music.

  Bluegrass is neither Appalachian nor very old. Bluegrass received its name from the music made by Bill Monroe’s string band, the Blue Grass Boys, between 1944 and 1948.28 No one in that seminal band came from Appalachia. Earl Scruggs, who perfected the sensational three-finger style of five-string banjo playing, grew up in the Piedmont town of Flint Hill, North Carolina. The band’s bluesy fiddler, Chubby Wise, came from Florida. Bill Monroe, the dynamic mandolin player and bandleader, hailed from western Kentucky, and his high tenor singing, the basis for bluegrass music’s vaunted “high lonesome sound,” came not from the mountains but from Monroe’s fascination with the blues and the music of Jimmie Rodgers.

  However, bluegrass found a receptive audience among mountain people, especially those who had relocated to the working-class sectors of Detroit, Cincinnati and other southern Ohio industrial towns, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The pioneer hillbilly performer Ernest Stoneman had moved with his family from Galax, Virginia, to Washington as early as 1932.29 His talented children easily made the transition to bluegrass in the early 1950s. The bluegrass phenomenon remained largely unknown, or confined to Southern working-class people, until “outsiders” heard it on the big radio stations such as Nashville’s WSM or Wheeling, West Virginia’s WWVA, which sometimes boomed into New England. Touring bluegrass bands took the music beyond the Upper South, and some musicians, such as the Osborne Brothers and the Lilly Brothers, spent long periods playing in Northern cities. The music clearly had been winning new adherents throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, but the Folk Revival after 1958 did most to introduce the style to new audiences and to assert the genre’s Appalachian identity.

  The Folk Revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s was only one of many flirtations that Americans have had with roots music.30 The Revival was linked almost seamlessly to the Great Depression experimentation with old-time music and to the left-wing or populist heritage bequeathed by such Appalachian performers as Aunt Molly Jackson, Sara Ogan, and Jim Garland.

  Folk music moved to a new dimension of popular acceptance in 1958, when the Kingston Trio recorded an old Appalachian murder ballad, “Tom Dooley.” The recording’s spectacular success triggered a national craze for folk and folklike music. The Trio had learned the song from a version collected by Frank Warner from the North Carolina ballad singer Frank Proffitt. Proffitt’s version probably came from the 1930 recording of Grayson and Whitter. The Kingston Trio and their youthful cohorts turned a lot of people on to folk music and acoustic instruments.

  The quest for roots music gave exposure to many Appalachian performers. Jean Ritchie, from Viper, Kentucky, deep in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, had already built an avid following in New York, singing old ballads and love songs learned back home in Perry County. She impressed her friends and students with her sweet soprano singing and velvet touch on the dulcimer, an instrument that had been quite common in her part of the Appalachians.31 Alan Lomax arranged for a recording contract with the Prestige label. At first she sang very rare versions of traditional ballads learned mostly from her family, but during the folk revival she began to add other kinds of material to her repertoire. Admitting that she had once made fun of hillbilly songs, she nevertheless recorded a fine album of such material, performed with Doc Watson, and discovered that she could also write her own material. Such Ritchie songs as “Dear Companion,” “The L and N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” and “Black Waters” (a lyrical but angry complaint against the ravages wrought by strip-mining) have since entered the repertoires of many country and folk singers.32

  Just as Ritchie was popularizing her versions of Appalachian ballads and love songs, a generation of urban folk fans were learning about early commercial hillbilly musicians through the Folkways record collection, the Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled from the private collection of Harry Smith.33 Issued in 1952, these six records contained eighty-four recordings of blues, hillbilly, cowboy, Cajun, and gospel music taken from 78-rpm records made between 1927 and 1934. The “folk” designation lent to the music both respectability and a sense of exoticism that “hillbilly” or other early labels could not have given. The collection contained a host of important Appalachian performers, including the Carter Family, Grayson and Whitter, Ernest Stoneman, Buell Kazee, Tom Ashley, Frank Hutchison, Dick Justice, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Kelly Harrell, and Dock Boggs. During the revival Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were only a few of the young urban musicians who sang songs learned from the collection.34

  Inspired in part by the Harry Smith collection and by the music heard on other 78-rpm records, a trio of young New Yorkers (Mike Seeger, Tom Paley, John Cohen) formed a band called the New Lost City Ramblers and set out to recreate the sound of the early hillbilly string bands. Through a series of Folkways albums35 and innumerable concerts at festivals and college campuses, the Ramblers won an enthusiastic audience for their music, introduced hosts of people to early hillbilly styles, and inspired a passion for the performance of old-time string band music that still endures. The songs performed by the Ramblers reflected the broad spectrum of rural Southern music, but in the introduction to their influential songbook Mike Seeger declared that “most of the songs that we sing and play were originally recorded by commercial companies and the Library of Congress in the southeastern mountains between 1925 and 1935.”36

  Seeger, Cohen, and other Northern folk music enthusiasts began searching to see whether any of the people heard on the Harry Smith collection were still alive and whether any other living musicians reflected the old-time traditions or were making valuable departures from them. One can imagine their delight in finding that not only were such people as Maybelle Carter, Tom Ashley, Dock Boggs, and Buell Kazee still living, but that they could sing and play as well as ever. Maybelle Carter was easy to find. She performed with her daughters almost every Saturday night on the Grand Ole Opry.37 These hillbilly pioneers must have felt immense gratification at the resumption of their careers, after long years of be
ing unknown or forgotten. But they were often bemused if not troubled by the radical politics and lifestyles of the folkies with whom they came in contact, particularly when the Vietnam conflict threatened to polarize the nation.

  The most important byproduct of the search for pioneer hillbilly musicians was the “discovery” of Arthel “Doc” Watson. Watson was making his living playing electric guitar in a country swing band at his home in Deep Gap, North Carolina. Watson went to New York with Ashley and soon swept away fans and critics with his immense repertoire, smooth and supple voice, and virtuoso style of guitar flat picking (marked by the use of a flat pick rather than finger picks). He could present to audiences the entire range of music available in the mountains: everything from a cappella performances of ballads and gospel songs to dazzling renditions of hillbilly, country and western, blues, jazz, and rock tunes. He designed MerleFest, held each April in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, as a memorial to his deceased son, but it stands now as a showcase and tribute to the acoustic music phenomenon that flowed largely from Watson’s singular achievements as a guitarist.38

  Watson has been only one of many mentors for the musicians who have set out to learn what they perceive as Appalachian styles of musical performance. Much could be learned from concerts or repeated playings of a record until a desired sound was recreated, but the best form of apprenticeship was to stand or sit alongside a fiddler, banjo player, balladeer, or other musician and painstakingly observe the way a note was played or voiced. Trips to the mountains and immersion in the family and community life that surrounded the music became almost mandatory rituals for young musicians who had been converted to Appalachian music. Like John Cohen, who filmed important documentaries of mountain musicians, some fans sat at the feet of Roscoe Holcomb in eastern Kentucky39 or journeyed to one of America’s citadels of traditional music, Madison County, North Carolina, to learn from banjoist Obray Ramsey or balladeers Berzilla Wallin, Dellie Norton, Doug Wallin, or Dillard Chandler. Still others traveled to Surry County, North Carolina, to revel in the stories and tunes of Tommy Jarrell, the gifted fiddler who could demonstrate fiddle licks and tunings that he had learned from musicians who lived in Civil War days. The future director of the Archive of American Folk Song, Alan Jabbour, began his apprenticeship in American folk music by immersing himself in the fiddle music of Burl Hammons and Henry Reed, from West Virginia and Virginia, respectively. Nashville music personality John Hartford, best remembered for his composition of the hit song “Gentle On My Mind,” was a passionate student of American fiddle styles, and his most significant research involved the music and life of one of Appalachia’s most influential musicians, the West Virginian Ed Haley.40

  The reawakening of interest in traditional Appalachian music that was inspired by the folk revival occurred also in the context of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and still another national discovery of Appalachia. Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) personnel and music collectors alike recognized that music was a vehicle for popular and regional pride and a medium of protest. Institutions that stressed Appalachian identity and culture, such as Berea College’s Appalachian Center and Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, invariably promoted both regional betterment and musical enrichment. Such Northern musicians and social activists as Si Kahn and John McCutcheon relocated in or near the mountains. The memory and legacy of people such as Florence Reece, Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Sara Ogan Gunning, and Don West were resurrected, and newer balladeers and social activists such as Nimrod Workman and Hazel Dickens were encouraged.

  Dickens, from Montcalm in Mercer County, West Virginia, has been comfortable performing in most of the styles of country music. While living in Baltimore in the late 1950s, working in a factory and trying to come to terms with the loneliness and alienation of life as an exile in a big city, she began singing and playing bass in local bluegrass bands. Eventually she met Alice Gerrard, a graduate of Antioch College who had fallen in love with traditional music, and their searing, soulful harmonies inspired other women to perform in what had been perceived as a good old boys’ genre of music. Although she loved and could perform all styles of traditional country music, from the Carter Family to George Jones, Dickens may be more widely known as a singer of protest and socially conscious music. She sang often at union rallies, and her voice filled the soundtrack of the movie documentary Harlan County, USA, the gripping story of a protracted coal strike in eastern Kentucky. Although her stark, passion-filled style of singing is widely admired, her songs, such as “Black Lung,” “They’ll Never Keep Us Down,” “Working Girl Blues,” “Will Jesus Wash the Blood Stains from Their Hands,” “West Virginia, My Home,” and “Mama’s Hand,” will ultimately be her most enduring contributions to American music and the struggle for social justice.41

  Once the folk revivalists discovered hillbilly music, it was almost inevitable that an upsurge of interest in bluegrass would follow. This Southeastern-based style, it seemed, was the logical modern extension of old-time string band music. In an influential article in Esquire magazine in 1959,42 folklorist Alan Lomax described bluegrass as “folk music with overdrive.” Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler, young folk enthusiasts who were making the transition from Library of Congress discs to commercial recordings, heard and taped the music of people such as Ola Belle Reed at country music parks. Seeger in 1959 produced a recording of rural musicians in Baltimore for the Folkways label called Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, the first explicit linking of the two terms.43

  Mountain-born musicians made vital contributions to the popularization of bluegrass in the North and to the popular identification of the style with mountain culture.44 In Boston, the Lilly Brothers dispensed their appealing blend of old-time brother duet singing and bluegrass music seven nights a week at a seedy and dangerous bar called Hillbilly Ranch in the Combat Zone, where prostitutes were more frequently seen than banjos were heard. The mixed metaphors conveyed by the club’s name were echoed by the name used for the Lilly Brothers’ band, the Confederate Mountaineers. The Osborne Brothers (Bobby and Sonny) from Hyden, Kentucky, had also moved north early, playing in the mid-1950s to transplanted southerners and curious Yankees in the honky tonks of Detroit and Dayton, Ohio. In March 1960 the Osbornes gave the first bluegrass concert at a college, at Antioch in Ohio. Two of the most popular bluegrass acts in the folk revival, Jim and Jesse McReynolds and Ralph and Carter Stanley, grew up within a few miles of each other in southwestern Virginia. They had strongly contrasting styles and repertoires, however. Jim and Jesse (as they were usually called) sang with smooth, clear, high harmonies and were famous for Jesse’s syncopated style of mandolin crosspicking. The Stanley Brothers, on the other hand, conveyed a more strident, backwoods sound that carried the flavor of such earlier hillbilly groups as Mainer’s Mountaineers. More than any other band, including that led by bluegrass’s founding father, Bill Monroe, Carter and Ralph Stanley and their Clinch Mountain Boys fit the public perception of how a mountain band should sound. Noted for their high, lonesome harmonies, hard-driving rhythms, and storehouse of old-time songs, the Stanley Brothers conjured up visions and sounds of deep rolling hills, isolated mountain glens, lonesome rivers, little country churchyards, broken family circles, and the undying love of Mama and Daddy. In the decades since Carter’s death in December 1966, Ralph Stanley has remained a pillar of tradition, singing in his high, clench-throated style with vocal mannerisms learned in Primitive Baptist church services. Relying increasingly on old-time songs and harmonies, Stanley has impressed growing numbers of listeners—most of whom heard his voice for the first time in the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?—with his rugged integrity and uncompromising commitment to tradition. For many people, Ralph Stanley is the embodiment of mountain music.45

  Appalachian Music today bears the major characteristics that it possessed in the days of Cecil Sharp. It is a vigorous composite of songs and styles that defy precise definition. Mountain-born musicians still make music in great
profusion at home, in church, at community gatherings, and in professional venues. Exhibiting great diversity, their music illustrates the continuing relationship of their region with the rest of the world. The old ballads and love songs that so enthralled Cecil Sharp are now rare, but they live in the performances of such singers as Jean Ritchie, Betty Smith, and Sheila Adams (the grandniece of the Madison County balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton). Other musicians consciously preserve the banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, and other string band styles of earlier mountain stylists. Old Regular Baptists still sing their hymns in congregational style—unadorned, unaccompanied, and unharmonized—led by a songleader who lines out the songs in chanting fashion. No style of music is more traditional or more rooted in mountain culture. Students of Appalachian music, and other folk expressions, can learn elements of Old Regular Baptist singing and other vocal and instrumental styles at annual workshops, such as those held each year in West Virginia at the Augusta Heritage Center on the campus of Davis and Elkins College, or from people such as Wayne Erbsen, who instructs students on Appalachian instrumental styles from his base in Asheville, North Carolina.46

  The Appalachian-born musicians who inhabit contemporary country and bluegrass music perform in a broad range of styles. Ralph Stanley and Hazel Dickens convey a rough-hewn and unaffected rural sound, whereas Dwight Yoakam and Kenny Chesney sing with rock-inflected mannerisms and butt-wiggling theatrics. Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Ricky Skaggs, and Patty Loveless sing with the high, pristine clarity that is often associated with mountain music. But Skaggs’s one-time singing partner, the late Keith Whitley, who also grew up in eastern Kentucky, sang plaintively in a low vocal register, and Doc Watson, the quintessential Appalachian musician, sings in a warm, expressive baritone. In their choice of musical material, these singers have roamed all over the map, singing and playing everything from traditional murder ballads to pop, jazz, and rock.