High Mountains Rising (30 page)

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.

Although Appalachians seek to characterize others who moved into or visit the region, many of those who have left the region continue to find ways to maintain their Appalachian identity. Throughout much of the twentieth century, people have left the mountains seeking work in the textile mills of the Piedmont, the industrial North, and the timbering areas of the Northwest. Even over decades many have maintained connection with the communities and families left behind and, particularly in the cities of Ohio and Michigan that experienced much in-migration from Appalachia, “Appalachian” is now seen as a form of ethnic identity. Connections to home have been maintained especially through frequent visits and the traditional acts of homecoming found throughout the region. Narratives also help sustain identity. Urban Appalachians often tell nostalgic stories of home and personal-experience crime stories that starkly contrast rural life with life in a Northern city.
¹²

Despite the early writings of folklorists and the popular attention to Appalachian clogging, banjo picking, or quilting, Appalachian folklife is not as well documented or as well understood as it could be. Increasingly, attention has focused on the mixing of Cherokee, English, Celtic, German, and African heritages, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped the creation of a regional culture. Scholars have paid less attention to the folk traditions of those who have settled in the region in the past century, such as African Americans from the deep South and the eastern and southern Europeans who came to the coalmining regions of Appalachia. The influx of new people constantly reinvents how we define Appalachian folklife.

Perhaps all the stereotypes of Appalachian folklife ought to be discarded. The culture of Appalachia is neither unique nor monolithic. Much of what is described as southern Appalachian folklife is also true of the broader region of the Upper South. On the other hand, within Appalachia, wide variety exists. Eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina, for example, have not had the same historical or cultural experience. Nor is Appalachian culture specifically English or Celtic, as others have long believed. Finally, Appalachian folklife is not all ancient and unchanging. Songs are sung and stories told that are centuries old, but Appalachian culture will continue to change and redefine itself.

NOTES

1.
Louise Goings, tape-recorded interview with Michael Ann Williams, Aug. 8, 1993.

2.
For histories of these efforts, see Henry Shapiro,
Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), chap. 9; David Whisnant,
All That Is Native and Fine
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Jane S. Becker,
Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

3.
Ruby Haynes Caudill, tape-recorded interview with Beverly Caudill, Sept. 30, 1998, Carcassonne, Kentucky.

4.
Geraldine N. Johnson,“‘Plain and Fancy': The Socioeconomics of Blue Ridge Quilts,”
Appalachian Journal
10 (1982): 12–35.

5.
For studies of chairmaking in eastern Kentucky, see Michael Owen Jones,
Craftsman of the Cumberland: Tradition and Creativity
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989); Charles E. Martin, “‘Make ‘em Fast and Shed ‘em Quick': The Appalachian Craftsman Revisited,”
Appalachian Journal
10 (1982): 42–52.

6.
Mary Hufford, “American Ginseng and the Idea of the Commons,” in
Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia
, Library of Congress American Memory Project <
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cmnshtml/essay1
>.

7.
For an examination of Cherokee healing in relation to religious beliefs, see Catherine L. Albanese, “Exploring Regional Religion: A Case Study of the Eastern Cherokee,”
History of Religion
23 (1984): 344–71; Sharlotte Neely,
Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 63–64.

8.
For information on Will West Long, see Leonard Broom's foreword in Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom,
Cherokee Dance and Drama
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). For a more recent view of Cherokee traditional dance, see Jane Harris Woodside, “The Cherokee: Hungry for the Dance,”
Now and Then
6:3 (Fall 1989): 22–25.

9.
Some scholars have argued that minstrels introduced banjo playing to the Southern mountains, but Cecelia Conway makes a compelling argument for introduction through the direct contact of black and white musicians in certain key areas of southern Appalachia in
African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 120–59.

10.
See L. Allen Smith,
A Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983).

11.
Doug Wallin, tape-recorded interview with Michael Ann Williams, Mar. 11, 1993.

12.
John R. Williams, “‘Up Here, We Never See the Sun': Homeplace and Crime in Urban Appalachian Narratives,” in
Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America
, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 215–31.

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