Although for some in rural southern Appalachia basketmaking supplemented subsistence living, it was also an art form. Individual basketmakers, as well as basketmaking families, demonstrate aesthetic preferences for particular forms and widths of splits, and basketmakers often have an uncanny ability to recognize the work of a specific person. Among the Cherokee, where dyes have been used more often in baskets, color preferences also reflect individual artistic choice. Basketmaking can also be a part of cultural identity. As Cherokee basketmaker Louise Goings said, “In my own self, when I make baskets, I get this feeling, you know, this being Indian. And it gives me a good feeling about myself that I can, you know, show a part of culture that’s been for years.”1
The transformation of Appalachian crafts, such as basketry, into tourist commodities was aided by both the growth of tourism that followed the coming of the railroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the work of various charitable and educational organizations. Berea College and various settlement schools began “fireside industry” programs that marketed Appalachian crafts, and these efforts were aided by the establishment of organizations such as the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild in 1928 and the Cherokee Indian Crafts Co-op in 1946. These institutions both preserved (in some cases revived) and changed local craft traditions.2
Weaving is one tradition that was significantly altered by the crafts revival. In the nineteenth century, weaving, especially of coverlets, was a fairly specialized craft in the rural community. By the early twentieth century, the railroad made commercially produced fabric inexpensive and readily available, and hand weaving declined dramatically. By the time of the “fireside industries,” schools were often teaching local people to weave who had no experience with it at home. In 1911, Berea College in eastern Kentucky hired Swedish weaver Anna Ernberg to direct their weaving program, and she introduced lightweight looms and new fabrics. Swedish designs quickly became a part of the “traditional” Appalachian weaving promoted by Berea and some of the settlement schools.
Folk art is the art of everyday life; although it is connected to tradition, it is also always changing. Most folk art combines practical and creative needs. A quilt serves the purposes of keeping people warm and of artistic pleasure. Like many forms of folk art, quilting is commonly a product of “aesthetic recycling” in which the reuse of otherwise discarded materials serves both creative and financial needs. Many older quilters remember the days when flour and feed sacks were used to piece quilts, and old socks and other worn-out clothing were unraveled for batting to make the quilts thicker. Ruby Haynes Caudill of Carcassonne, Kentucky, remembers from her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, “We bought feed, some what we didn’t raise for the stock, and it came in bags made of fabric and [Mom] used those to make quilts out of. I have one of them yet that she made from feed sacks that she quilted in fans. When clothing would wear out, if there were good pieces in the back or shirt tails, or whatever, she would save that and tear it into squares and set it into quilt tops and make quilts out of them.”3
Of course, those who could afford it also made quilts from new materials. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, quilters distinguish between “plain” and “fancy” quilting.4 The plain quilts often were a product of necessity and more often used recycled materials. Although quilts often seem timeless, preferences for colors and designs change from decade to decade, and fancy quilting in Appalachia, as elsewhere, has been influenced by periodic national revivals. For example, in the 1920s a huge nationwide revival of interest in quilting popularized pastel colors and patterns such as Grandmother’s Flower Garden, Dresden Plate, and the Double Wedding Ring. Although many Appalachian quilters still learned from tradition, quilt patterns became available from mail-order catalogs and magazines.
Highly individualistic artistic expressions are often displayed as Appalachian folk art. In some cases, these are variations of traditional crafts, such as carving, but in others they are art forms, such as representational painting, which is not traditional. For some art collectors, the more bizarre the art, the more likely it is to be labeled as “folk” even though it does not necessarily express the shared traditions of the community. Sometimes the line between “folk” and “outsider” art is hard to define. One artist, Chester Cornett (1913–81) of Perry County, Kentucky, took the traditional craft of chairmaking into a highly creative and eccentric direction. Cornett learned the art in a traditional manner but resisted the urge followed by other chairmakers in eastern Kentucky to mechanize the process and make chairs quickly and cheaply. Instead he lavished care on the traditional process but broke from tradition in creating chairs with extra legs, exaggerated proportions, and other odd characteristics. Today, the chairs made by this troubled and often reclusive man are considered museum pieces.5
An artist who managed to make highly individualistic art into a community tradition is Minnie Adkins of Elliot County, Kentucky. Although it is typically thought of as a male diversion, Adkins took up whittling as a child. As an adult, to supplement her family’s income she began to sell her whimsical painted carvings of chickens, possums, and other animals. Discovered by collectors, Minnie Adkins eventually became promoted to an internationally renowned folk artist. Rather than seeing herself as a uniquely talented individual, however, Adkins convinced family members and neighbors that they too could produce marketable folk art, and Adkins’s home in Pleasant Valley has become the center of a grassroots tradition of carving and painting.
Everyday creative expression is found in many other activities that may not be labeled as “art” or “craft.” Rural people often find artistic outlet in gardening, canning, or other forms of food preparation. Food traditions, similar to other forms of folklife, are constantly changing, but the Appalachian diet (and Southern food preferences in general) is noted for its conservatism. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, pork and corn were central to the Southern diet. These two items are emblematic of the marriage of European and Native food traditions that took place in the early days of European American settlement.
In the nineteenth century in the Southern mountains, the traditional cornand pork-based diet was supplemented by wild game and the gathering of wild plants such as ramps, sochan, poke, creases, and wild berries. Some wild greens offered a much-needed change in the spring from the monotony of the winter diet. However, as necessity and the availability of lands on which to gather have declined, so has the consumption of wild plants, although some still hold an allure. Of these perhaps the most notable, or notorious, are ramps, a form of wild leek. Although they are increasingly difficult to obtain, some towns still hold festivals that celebrate the consumption of ramps (and attract tourists). Nevertheless, much of the local lore about the plants consists of how unappealing a person will be to the opposite sex after consuming the plant because of its strong onion-garlic smell.
The gathering of wild plants reflects a strong influence of Cherokee cultural knowledge on non-Cherokees in southern Appalachia. For the past century and a half, Cherokee and non-Indian diets in the region have been quite similar. However, there are certain items that still signal Cherokee identity. Perhaps the most important is traditional bread made from a mixture of cornmeal and hot water that is wrapped in green corn blades and then boiled or baked. Often cooked beans, or less often chestnuts or pumpkin, are mixed with the cornmeal. Fry bread has also become popular, particularly as a form of Cherokee fair food. Not originally native to the Cherokee, fry bread was invented by Native American groups as a response to the provision of government rations of white flour and lard. Today it is popular among many Native American groups and is a shared symbol of native identity.
Cherokee traditional knowledge of indigenous plants also shaped the rich store of herbal lore in the region. Appalachians used wild plants and a number of nonherbal substances such as onions, kerosene, tobacco juice, and whiskey to treat illnesses. These practices also have diminished over time, although the gathering of som
e wild plants, such as ginseng, still survives. Even in the nineteenth century, the hunting of ginseng was carried out as much for economic as medicinal reasons. By the late nineteenth century, much of the ginseng dug in Appalachia ended up in Asian markets, and the plant has since become increasingly scarce. Although many Appalachians are familiar with its tonic effect, the high price ginseng brings is a strong inducement to sell for those who still have the traditional knowledge to locate ginseng in the mountains. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee lead the country in the export of wild ginseng, and some have speculated that per pound, ginseng is the most valuable renewable resource in central Appalachia. However, the loss of land used as a “commons” for hunting, gathering, and pasturing has sharply limited the areas where “sang” can be hunted. In some parts of the Southern mountains, such as the Smokies, where the government owns much of the wild land, such activity is illegal, whereas in West Virginia, mountaintop removal has destroyed ginseng’s habitat.6
As with foodways, Cherokee and non-Cherokee have shared many of the same folk medicinal beliefs. A notable difference is that Cherokee folk healing practices tend to be grounded in a traditional belief system. Although many Cherokees converted to Christianity in the early nineteenth century, traditional healers found ways to reconcile Christianity and traditional beliefs. Today, many older people are still familiar with the specific healing properties of certain plants, but it is difficult to know how widespread the use of traditional healing rituals continues to be. Both because they often were condemned by Christian missionaries and because of their inherently private nature, traditional healing practices generally are not made public.7
Another aspect of traditional Cherokee ceremony that was often condemned by the early missionaries (particularly the Baptists) was dance. Still, Cherokee dance has remained remarkably resilient and has undergone periodic revivals in the twentieth century. The person most responsible for the continuation of the dance tradition was Will West Long, the son of a Cherokee minister. In the 1930s and 1940s, West Long provided leadership for the continuation of the tradition and worked with anthropologists to study and document Cherokee dance. More recently, his nephew Walker Calhoun has emerged as an important Cherokee dance leader, and in 1992 the National Endowment for the Arts designated Calhoun a National Heritage Fellow.8
The singing of chants and the use of a few percussive instruments, such as the gourd rattle, a wooden water drum, and turtle shell leg rattles, accompany traditional Cherokee dance. Generally it is a low-key form of dancing consisting of a low shuffling gait, although the Booger dancer in particular was noted for its use of lewd humor and clownlike behavior. In more recent decades, some Cherokee dancers have been attracted by the flashier “fancy dance” styles of the Plains Indians. Although the adoption of fancy dance has been motivated in part by its audience appeal, it is also a reflection of the growing importance of pan-Indian pow-wows and dance festivals.
The Cherokee also played a role in the creation of what is often seen as the quintessential Appalachian dance form: team clogging. Team clogging, which took its current form in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, married two older dance traditions. Southern square dancing has many antecedents in European dance tradition, although the older forms generally did not include the chanted instructions of a caller. Flatfoot and buck dancing were solo dance styles. Although it has many similarities to Irish and Scottish traditions, it was also strongly influenced by African American dance. Some of this influence came via the minstrel show, but noted African American callers and dancers such as Bob Love in western North Carolina also shaped the tradition. Love directly influenced the dancing of Sam Queen, one of the major promoters of team clogging, who with his group, the Soco Gap Square Dancers, performed for the king and queen of England at the White House in 1939.
The styles of flatfoot and buck dancing were married to the formations of square dancing, and team clogging was born. A number of early competitive teams of cloggers included dancers of Cherokee descent, and in the 1930s the all-Cherokee Great Smoky Mountains Square Dance Team under the direction of Arnold Cooper won prizes at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. Some scholars have speculated that traditional Cherokee dance, especially the toe-heel movement, also helped shape Appalachian clogging. Team clogging has continued to change, becoming more choreographed and synchronized, resulting in the birth of “precision” clogging in the 1960s.
The music that often accompanies clogging, bluegrass, is also of recent origin, emerging in the 1940s. Bluegrass is not distinctly Appalachian, although it does draw on the string band traditions of the Upper South. In the nineteenth century, the most common instrument used to accompany dances in the mountains was the fiddle. African Americans from the piedmont regions of Virginia and North Carolina probably brought the banjo, an instrument of African origin, into the mountains in the mid-to late nineteenth century.9 The pairing of the fiddle and banjo become increasingly common; in fact, the first commercial recording of string band music was the pairing of Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis on fiddle and banjo, recorded by Columbia in 1924. In the early twentieth century other stringed instruments, such as guitars and mandolins, often bought through mail-order catalogs, joined the string band ensemble. Bluegrass music eventually gave special prominence to the banjo, which many now think of as the Appalachian instrument.
Of all the string instruments associated with Appalachia, the one whose origin and distribution is most mysterious is the Appalachian dulcimer. It is probably a relative of the straight-sided Pennsylvania-German zither or “sheitholt,” and nineteenth-century examples have been found in eastern Kentucky, western West Virginia, and southwestern Virginia.10 However, in other parts of the Southern mountains the dulcimer seems to have been unknown until fairly recently. The settlement schools and ballad collector John Jacob Niles, along with the later folk revival, did much to popularize the instrument.
One notable aspect of the Appalachian musical tradition is the degree to which the instrumental and vocal traditions developed separately. Much traditional singing in the Southern mountains was originally unaccompanied, a practice reinforced by the disapproval of instruments among a number of the religious groups in the region. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traveling singing masters taught singing schools from songbooks that used shaped notation, a system devised around 1800 to help people learn to read music. Although the days of the singing schools are generally gone, there are still people who gather to sing from the old books such as the seven-shape Christian Harmony (1866), used in western North Carolina, and the New Harp of Columbia (1867), still used in east Tennessee. In north Georgia people still gather to sing from one of the oldest songbooks, the four-shape Sacred Harp. Today, these singings still reflect the open hospitality that was once the norm in the mountains. Strangers are invited to share food and, if they can, lead a “lesson,” as the songs are still called.
Although songs with religious themes were often sung unaccompanied, as they still are at the shape-note singings and in some congregations, so too were “love songs,” as ballads were once called in the mountains. In the early twentieth century, ballad scholars discovered that the English ballad tradition was alive and well and living in southern Appalachia. Whereas the singing tradition barely survived in the British Isles, in the Southern mountains people were still singing these narrative songs in versions that were remarkably similar to some of the manuscript and printed versions collected by Harvard professor Francis James Child. However, the love songs sung in the Southern mountains were not limited to the so-called Child ballads. Local events also spawned the writing of new ballads. One of the best known is the murder ballad “Tom Dula,” which in a much pepped-up version became a nationwide hit when recorded, as “Tom Dooley,” by the Kingston Trio in 1958. (In Appalachia, proper names that end in “a” often are pronounced as “ey.”)
English ballad collector Cecil Sharp, who was
perhaps inclined to romanticize, wrote that in the Laurel country of western North Carolina in the early twentieth century, singing was “as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking.” Despite the exaggeration, the Laurel section of Madison County continued to be one of the repositories of the ballad tradition through the twentieth century. Doug Wallin, a winner of the National Heritage Award for his role in preserving this tradition, passed away in 2000. Several years earlier, however, he stated that he didn’t think that the tradition would die out: “It’s not like this modern stuff they’re putting out. They sung some of them out. Lose their popularity. These old ones, they just keep going back and getting them.”11
Ballad singing tended to be preserved by strong family tradition. The same is true of the telling of Jack tales. In fact, almost all the Jack tale tellers recorded by collectors in the early twentieth century were descendants of the same man, David Hicks. Jack tales are a form of complex fictional stories of European origin (which most Americans would label “fairytales”) concerning a boy, or man, Jack, and sometimes his brothers, Will and Tom. Two of the best-known tellers of the second half of the twentieth century were first cousins, Ray and Stanley Hicks of the Beech Mountain area of northwest North Carolina. Their style was much like that of traditional ballad singers, deadpan and nonemotional. The growth of professional storytelling has begun to change the style, with more theatrical performances used to catch and hold the attention spans of contemporary audiences.
Most Appalachian storytelling, though indeed a performance, does not take place on a stage. Nor are the performers telling Jack tales. Storytellers are found among friends and family, and the most common stories are embellishments of personal experience or stories with humorous or supernatural content. Storytelling is intertwined with the humor traditions of Appalachia, and both tend to emphasize common themes. Jack tales emphasize the necessity of using one’s wits. Other stories and jokes tell of the importance of home. One common story is that of a man who dies and goes to heaven only to find a group of people chained. Those, he is told by St. Peter, are mountain people who want to go home on the weekend. Although this can be a derogatory story about migrant Appalachians, local people also tell it on themselves. Self-deprecating humor is typical, as is that which takes others down a notch. This should be no surprise in a region where the description “common” is a complement. In the parts of the Southern mountains that are overrun by tourists and summer residents, stories of “Floridiots” and “tourons” (a combination of tourist and moron) are often told.
High Mountains Rising Page 21
