High Mountains Rising (26 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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The 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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 albums
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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.”
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