High Mountains Rising (25 page)

Tin Pan Alley songs, ragtime pieces, or any other example of modern musical innovation did not interest Sharp. Much influenced by Francis James
Child, the Harvard professor who had collected 305 English and Scottish ballads and their variants (all from manuscripts),
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Sharp labored to find living examples of these songs among the peasantry of the Southern hills. Accompanied by Campbell, Sharp spent about twelve months winning the confidence of the people and noting the tunes of the songs that they contributed. That justly celebrated expedition has endured as a benchmark in the discovery of indigenous American culture and has since shaped the vision of what Appalachian music is.
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Sharp knew what he was looking for, he found it, and we are all the richer for his discoveries. He knew that other forms of music were available in the mountains, and he sometimes referred to them and in a few cases noted down their tunes.
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We cannot fault him for his preferences but can only conclude that in ignoring the products of the pocket songsters, sheet music, paperback gospel hymnals, minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and phonograph records, all of which were present in the mountains, Sharp was not simply ignoring much music that was beloved by local people but was also rejecting the economic and social processes that had been transforming mountain life since at least the Civil War. The riverboats that followed the tributaries of the Ohio River far back into the Appalachians, the railroads that ended mountain isolation, and the coalmines, textile mills, and lumber camps that fostered economic growth also lured new people with new songs, instruments, and styles. Consequent town growth made available department stores, movie and vaudeville houses, sheet music, instruments, piano rolls, and phonograph records.

Only five years after Sharp left the mountains, a textile worker from Fries, Virginia, armed with a guitar and French harp attached to a rack around his neck, journeyed to New York and recorded two songs for the Okeh label, “Lonesome Road Blues” and “Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (Okeh 40015). Henry Whitter was only the first of many mountain-born musicians who made commercial recordings in the years after 1923 or who appeared on the radio stations emerging in Asheville, Wheeling, Knoxville, and other mountain cities. Samantha Bumgarner, Eva Davis, Ernest Stoneman, Kelly Harrell, Buell Kazee, G. B. Grayson, Al Hopkins, Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Alfred Karnes, B. F. Shelton, Frank Hutchison, and the Carter Family were only a few of the Appalachian musicians who emerged in those early years.
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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 Sessions
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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.
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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
it
self 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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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 mountain 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.
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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.
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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?