High Mountains Rising (27 page)

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.
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These hillbilly pioneers must have felt immense gratification at the resumption of their careers, after long years of being 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.
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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 Kentucky
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

The diversity displayed by Appalachian-born musicians is impressive, but in many people's minds it is overshadowed by the romance that clings to the concept of mountain music. Appalachian music conjures up simpler and time-honored notions of purity and ancient moorings, appealing to those who envision a culture unspoiled by urban conceits and machine technology. Among musicians and fans in the highly commercial and urban-based genres known as country and bluegrass, one finds frequent assertions that their music was born in Appalachia (an idea that is often coupled with the thesis of Celtic identity).
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Rather than acknowledging that these styles of music were born in many places, including Appalachia, it is more tempting to claim exclusively the seemingly pristine origins identified with mountain life (even though the music made by Appalachian people themselves occurred as often in bars, honky tonks, radio stations, and recording studios as in churches and homes). If such presumptions encourage an appreciation for old-time musical styles and songs and a desire to preserve them, we can forgive the narrow understanding that they convey of Appalachian history and music. However, it is less easy to tolerate those who glibly describe as “Appalachian” any expression of music that seems old or based on traditional rural sounds, whether it be the homespun pop songs written by the California convert to old-time music Gillian Welch or the classical adaptations of old-time material performed by Mark O'Connor, Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck, and Yo-Yo Ma. O'Connor and his colleagues commented in one of their three CDs dealing with presumed Appalachian material that they proposed to celebrate American “roots,” “folk,” and “traditional” songs (thereby suggesting that such descriptions were synonymous with the word
Appalachian).
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Welch, O'Connor, and Yo-Yo Ma may be simply using a shorthand and appealing way of labeling their music, knowing full well that hosts of fans and critics are more than ready to accept any acoustic “rural” sound as Appalachian. More likely, these sophisticated musicians themselves may have succumbed to the romance of Appalachia. After all, it has happened many times in the past and will continue to do so in the future. As America continues its irreversible journey down the road toward industrial and technological hegemony, many of us will cling to the visions of another time and another place. The reality of our lives may not change significantly, but at least for the duration of a song or concert, our immersion in Appala
chian music—either real or imagined—will link us once again to a land of presumed simplicity, moral rectitude, and honest emotion.

NOTES

1.
Richard Harrington assessed the effects of the movie and soundtrack in the
Washington Post
, Aug. 12, 2001.