STILL: Literature of the Mountain South

The inaugural issue of STILL: Literature of the Mountain South debuted this week. The online journal features writing devoted to the southern Appalachian region.

Poets featured in the first volume are Steve Holt, poet and teacher from northeastern Kentucky, Ron Houchin, award-winning poet from Huntington, West Virginia, Irene Latham, poet, novelist, and editor from Birmingham, Alabama, Lisa Parker, poet and musician from Virginia, and Josh Robbins, poet and teacher who lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Fiction writers featured are Mark Powell, novelist and teacher from South Carolina, Kathi Whitley, short fiction writer and music manager from eastern Kentucky, and Tiffany Williams, short fiction writer and teacher from Pikeville, Kentucky.

Nonfiction writers are Donna McClanahan, essayist, fiction writer, and poet from Irvine, Kentucky, Karen Salyer McElmurray, award-winning memorist and novelist from eastern Kentucky, and Beth Newberry, editor and essayist from Louisville, Kentucky.

Still features an interview with Appalachian scholar, musician, activist, and writer Jack Wright, and a video song clip from Sue Massek, long-time member of The Reel World String Band.

The editors will publish new issues three times a year and will sponsor a contest later in 2010.

Read it, enjoy it, leave us your comments on the "Feedback" page.

Epistemology or 10 Ways of Knowing:

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

1. Watching a daughter in sleep.

2. Determining which birds are pacifists and which are competitors at the feeders. Squirrels will let the finches feed with them, but not the jays. Jays will let finches and turtle doves feed with them, but no crows allowed. Crows are hoggish, but fascinating.

3. Smelling the air after rain on a humid day.

4. Rubbing a dog’s fat belly.

5. Eating a ripe peach.

6. Reading the right poem at the just-right time.

7. Singing with Lester Flatt.

8. Finding an old photograph of your parents.

9. Receiving a letter.

10. Striking the right chord.

Morning Quiet

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

I’ve been up writing since before daybreak. The house is quiet but humming peacefully. The refrigerator motor provides a pedal-point accompaniment to the rhythm of my dogs snoring through their early morning nap and to the percussive chip-chip-chip of the redbird family at the feeder right outside my library window. The weather has cooled down. Mornings are foggy and slow. These couple of hours before I have to go to school have given me just what I need: time to contemplate without anxiety or the burden of interruption. It’s a gift. I wish I could give it to you.

The Great Blue Heron: Sightings, Sculptures and Stanzas

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

My mother’s nursing home sits near the banks of the Holston River in southeast Knoxville. She often reports that from her window she can see great blue heron flying across the sky. She saw one recently, its matchstick legs long-dangling as the blue-black feathers blurred past her view of the outside world.

The great blue heron is inspiration to many artists; perhaps because it’s a stunning experience just to see one. Native Americans believed the heron wise and considered it a good omen to see one before a hunt. Tennessee artist William Brock’s sculptures of the great blue heron are so life-like that real herons have been known to set down in his field where several of his sculptures live. My friend and former teacher Danny Marion has spotted many a heron from his river house on the Holston River. Here’s his poem, “The Great Blue Heron,” originally published in his chapbook about birds, Miracles of Air (1987), and available in Marion’s collected works, Ebbing & Flowing Springs:

Framed in my window
your swash of slate grey
stillness is a winter study
of stones cobbling shore.

Twilight & the river unravels
its secrets in shallow threads
rippling gold around your spindle-
legs.

Downriver sycamore & willow
echo the grace
of your neck arched
to angle over pools.

Soon darkness drapes a distance
between us & fog rises
in a dance of wings.

Medicine Hat or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jay Farrar

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

On my drive back home from Tennessee on Sunday afternoon I played my newly-purchased Son Volt CD American Central Dust.

I-75 North from Knoxville into Kentucky is an awful place on Sunday afternoons, jammed with crazy truckers hogging the left lane, rage-filled men who’ve had to spend the day with their wives’ relatives, reckless kids racing back to school, and mamaws who should have given up their cars last year.

I didn’t care. I just let Jay Farrar’s way-out voice and asymmetrical lyrics wash all over me.

I used to worry that I didn’t always understand Farrar’s sideways, abstract songs, but I’ve learned to just take them as the gifts they are: loosely-related words situated next to each other orchestrated by thrashing guitars, clunky piano playing and, occasionally, fiddles, mandolines, organs or accordions. His songs make the most lovely and provocative tone poems. Sometimes reminiscent of Neil Young, The Byrds, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, The Carter Family, or Hank Williams, his compositions are familiar yet completely original.

I’m not one of those geeky fans who knows the intimate details and evolution of Farrar’s various musical incarnations, but I do know that when everything is going wrong for me, Jay Farrar can fix it. His songs will wail me home safe and sound.

Jay Farrar’s "Medicine Hat"(from Wide Swing Tremelo)

THERE WILL BE DROUGHTS AND DAYS INUNDATED UNVEILINGS FREE FROM SATURATION DEPARTURES RAISED WITH NO MASQUERADING THERE WILL BE TEACHERS THAT DIE BY THEIR OWN HAND PUNDITS THAT PUSH HEADLONG FOR ATONEMENT FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS DEVOTED TO LIVING THERE WILL BE WATCHERS THAT PLY FOR NEW CONFINES AND THOSE COMMITTED TO SOCIETY'S CIRCLES UNWARY COGS WITH NO CADENCE OF VIRTUE THERE WILL BE RIGHT THERE WILL BE WRONG DROP OF A HAT AND IT'S ALREADY STARTED JUST LIKE THAT AND THE DEED IS DONE WHAT I'D GIVE NOW FOR THAT HAT TO BE MEDICINE THE TIME IS NOW TO BE ON THE RUN THERE WILL BE MACHINATIONS UNFORESEEN SLEEPWALKING SENSE FROM A BAD DREAM NO PROMENADE WALK IN THE PARKWAY THERE WILL BE CATCHWORDS FILLED WITH INFECTION CIRCULARS TO PROP UP OCCASION NO GOLDEN MEAN TO GUIDE THE FOOTSTEPS THERE WILL BE LEVELS ON HIGH HILLS THAT APPRAISE THERE WILL BE UNCHANGING CERTAINTIES BAROMETERS THAT FOLLOW THE STAMPEDE THERE WILL BE RIGHT THERE WILL BE WRONG DROP OF A HAT AND IT'S ALREADY STARTED JUST LIKE THAT AND THE DEED IS DONE WHAT I'D GIVE FOR THAT HAT TO BE MEDICINE THE TIME IS NOW TO BE ON THE RUN THERE WILL BE SIGNPOSTS OF INDICATION SEMAPHORE GO SIGNS AND WARNINGS HAILSTONE HALOS AND COUNTRY BLUES WAILINGS THERE WILL BE STRAINS THAT BREAK OUT OF STRAIGHT TIME THAT PAVE WITH GRACE DIFFERENT ROADS TO THE SAME PLACE NO CONSEQUENCE TO REPAY WHAT HAS BEEN GIVEN THERE WILL BE LAYERS OF MEANS TO AN END DRAWN OUT DAYS BEFORE RESOLUTION DREGS WILL RAIN DOWN FROM ALL DIRECTIONS THERE WILL BE RIGHT THERE WILL BE WRONG DROP OF A HAT AND IT'S ALREADY STARTED JUST LIKE THAT AND THE DEED IS DONE WHAT I'D GIVE FOR THAT HAT TO BE MEDICINE THE TIME IS NOW TO BE ON THE RUN

Lead in My Heart

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

I got those back to school blues.

I’ve either been in school or teaching school since 1981, and every opening day is always the same: fitful sleep the night before with dreams of betrayal, slight dizziness and nausea, and a sense of dread for the long semester ahead. No matter that I enjoy the subject matter I’m teaching (that reward comes later in the semester, and I’ll be glad for it). No matter that I enjoy knowing my students (and that’s another reward that comes later in the semester). No matter that I love the challenge of teaching. Right now, on the first day: it’s fear and loathing.

I’ll be better tomorrow. I always am.

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A Poem for Sunday morning by Robin Behn

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge


Yellow Morning

She awoke deep into the morning,
forgiving words,

Forgiving how they want to make
the whole world one color.

Forgiving how that color is loneliness incarnate.
Forgiving how they persist,

building themselves an altar
peopled with people, thinged with things,

and touched, sun or no sun, with sun:
she awoke so deep into the morning

time had gone pungent and dim
like the smell of an old locked trunk

stirred by a slow ray of light,
within.

This is the dream of the woman,
and this is the dream about the woman

another woman, her/no-her,
woke in the middle of, and wept.

Outside, a fledgling
—filthy lump upon a wet, black bough—

punctured daylight with its high cry,
the sound of it shredding time

—a nest, a nest, a nest—
until an adult the color of blood

appeared and put his blunt beak down
into the tiny throat.

But then it woke again,
not trusting the dream of trust,

and cried, and cried-and-cried
—for-SA-ken, for-SA-ken—

so that an adult the color of blood rolled in the earth
appeared and put her whole blunt beak

down into the throat and held it there
the length of time it takes

in love, for the grail to be passed,
and then, and then, it could sleep.

Who fed the birds?
It happened outside of words.

Black Oil Sunflower Seed?
Whatever. A need.

Robin Behn, from Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality, Gerry LaFemina and Chad Prevost, eds. Bottom Dog Press, 2006.

How Can I Keep from Singing?

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

Last night I participated in a reading from Jason Howard’s new anthology of writings about Mountaintop Removal Mining called We All Live Downstream. Before the reading, I met Bobbi Buchanan, the editor of New Southerner, an online journal that offers excellent writing related to environmental stewardship, supporting sustainable communities, and self-sufficiency. Before last night, Bobbi and I had only met online, so it was great fun to see her and to talk in person for a few minutes. On the way back home, one of my friends said to me: “I can’t believe that you meet Bobbi and two minutes later, you all were singing!” And we were. Bobbi mentioned a hymn and I tried to sing it. I was mixing up one hymn with another hymn, and we ended up laughing after Bobbi told me I was just singing the same hymn over and over.

By great coincidence, I found today that there is a tradition among Inuit women called Katajjaq or throat-singing (not to be confused with the complex dual-toned overtones of the Tibetan throat singers in central Asia). According to one source, in the Inuit culture two women face each other, and one singer leads by setting a short rhythmic pattern and the other singer offers another rhythmic pattern. Usually the exchange lasts up to three minutes or until one of the singers starts to laugh or is left breathless.

Maybe later I’ll write more about all the cultural ramifications of singing, but for now here’s a question: How much happier would we be if we always greeted each other with singing and laughing?

Be Still!

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

I can’t find it, of course, but I used to have a quote from a writer that said something like this: a perfect day is being curled up somewhere looking up words in the dictionary all day.

Today I’m contemplating the word “still.” Variations on the word “still” include:

adjective:
remaining in place or at rest; motionless, stationary
free from sound or noise; silent
subdued or low in sound; hushed
free from turbulence or commotion; peaceful; tranquil; calm
without waves or perceptible current; not flowing, as water
not effervescent or sparkling, as wine

noun:
stillness or silence
a single photographic print, as one of the frames of a motion-picture film

conjunction:
an yet; but yet; nevertheless

verb:
to calm, appease, or allay
to quiet, subdue, or cause to subside (waves, winds, tumult, passion, pain)

And my favorite of all . . . the directive I regularly received from my grandmother: “Be Still!”

To sleep, perchance to dream—

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

Every evening my dogs take a hard, dog-sleep nap. Usually this occurs from about 6:30 until about 8:00 p.m., and almost nothing can interrupt them. At my house we call this “The 7 o’clock flop” so named after one of our late dogs who used to flop down with a thud and a sigh as she got ready for her 7 o’clock siesta. My two current dogs snore, twitch, yelp, and run in their dog-sleep dreams during evening naptime. Sometimes they cry like it’s the end of the world.

I wonder if their dreams recur like mine do, like the dream I woke up with this morning. The details of the dream are gone now, but the setting is vivid and always the same: I’m inside an old house that is an amalgamation of all my past bedrooms, my grandmother’s boarding house, and my great aunt’s attic room. But unlike my real past habitations, this house is full of run-down, nasty bedrooms: dirt floors, damp limestone walls, velour-covered bedsteads (avocado, moth-eaten, shabby) or just soiled mattresses on the floor surrounded by heaps of bedclothes and trash. Some of the bedrooms have no windows. Those that do have windows are draped in yards of heavy, dusty brocade or velvet. All the rooms are dark as a cave, yet I can see the filth all around me. Some of the bedrooms have outside doors that lead to balconies with no stairs or fire escapes. In the dream I experience vertigo and claustrophobia, but whenever I flee—panicked—from one bedroom, I just run into another, worse bedroom. There’s no escape.

Surely and obviously this recurring dream has some entrenched meaning buried deep among my fears or guilt or insecurities. . . “ay, there’s the rub.” This morning I instinctively began the day with organizing, planning, cleaning, writing—probably an antidote to the messes in my dreams.

I also felt an intense urge to twitch, yelp, run and cry like it’s the end of the world.

Wash Day

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

My Aunt Mary Margaret would have been proud of me this morning. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and started the laundry. By 6:30 I had pressed three shirts and mended the hems in two pairs of pants. As much as I hate doing laundry, especially anything that has to do with ironing, I think I know why my aunt always did her laundry before daylight. No one is up yet, the rhythm of the washing machine is good company, the house takes on the smell of clean, and there is something mildly satisfying about folding a stack of towels or steaming down the creases in a crinkled blouse.

I always claimed that there was some kind of ironing gene in my family. My aunt and mother ironed everything that wasn’t pinned down when I was a kid. They even made ironing dates. They collected their clean, damp laundry in zippered plastic laundry bags, packed up their irons and ironing boards, and hauled everything to each other’s houses. All morning they ironed while watching TV and drinking Coca-Colas. (Clean Coke bottles were used for sprinkling/re-wetting laundry for ironing.) After he retired, my father took on the role of family ironer. My sister and cousins iron much more frequently than I do. I always say the ironing gene skipped me, and generally, I try to avoid dragging out the iron and ironing board. But this morning it felt right.

Tomato Sauce: A Lesson and A Recipe

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

I cooked up a mess of tomatoes this morning from my brother-in-law’s garden (see photo above). The tomato sauce is a recipe from my sister and a lesson in how far away from my heritage I’ve moved. My mother and grandmother spent nearly every day of gardening season cooking something at the stove. They canned green beans, peaches, cabbage, and corn. They pickled okra, cucumbers, and peppers. They ran cooked tomatoes through a cone-shaped sieve with a cone-shaped wooden pestle the size of a rolling pin. (Who knows what happened to that antiquated equipment? I’ll bet that pestle weighed four or five pounds.) As a kid, I was interested in eating all that good bounty but not so much in learning the crafts of gardening, canning, or even cooking. I’m a fair cook now, but I’ve never raised a garden, and until this morning, I’ve never cooked tomato sauce. After I tasted the finished product this afternoon, I immediately regretted that I didn’t have more tomatoes for another batch. The sauce is that good, and I’ll be sorry when it’s gone. All my people were farmers, and here I am in mid-life, just now catching on.

Here’s our recipe; it’s time-consuming, but not difficult. I used about 2 dozen tomatoes, various types, sizes, and colors.

Wash tomatoes and remove stems. Make a cross-cut on the bottom of each tomato and place in boiling water until the skins split (about a minute or two). Remove tomatoes and cool slightly, peel off skins, then de-seed by mashing through a sieve. Squeeze out every bit of juice and throw in remaining pulp. I got nearly a dutch oven full of juice and pulp. Prepare for cooking the tomato sauce by first sautéing one or two shredded carrots, several cloves of diced garlic, and one small diced yellow onion (or 2-3 shallots) in olive oil. Sautee slowly until carrots, garlic and onion are soft. Flavor with salt, pepper, dried basil, oregano, thyme, parsley, and a few red pepper flakes. Add tomato goop and bring to a boil. Cover and turn down to a simmer for 2-3 hours. Mixture will thicken if pot lid is tilted during cooking.

Oh yes, the okra in the picture above . . . it's in my freezer awaiting the cornmeal, egg, and Crisco tomorrow.

A Grand Machine

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

Today I played a beautiful organ in Corbin, Ky. It’s not a pipe organ, and many organ purists would discount the instrument on that fact alone. But it’s a pretty fancy electronic organ that sounds nearly as good as the real thing, and in some ways it is much more versatile than a pipe organ. While playing today, I began to think about what I love about playing the organ:

the vibrations and rumbles that occur in the sanctuary, like the angels are on their way

the windy flush of flutes, which, when registered just right, sounds like birds in deep woods

the rush I feel when my feet and fingers and muscles coordinate and cooperate (this rarely happens, but this morning it did, and I was grateful for all my past music lessons and music teachers)

the gorgeous and exotic names of the keyboards and the stops: swell, positiv, great, celeste, diapason, aeolina, bombarde, nazard, principal, dulciana, tierce, cornopean

the complex and secret knowledge organists have about a mysterious and grand machine; surely this is akin to what magicians must share?

For the Wordle version of this post, go here. (It's so cool.)

Jaybirds and Grandmothers

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

Today’s discovery took some digging. The challenge comes from Denton Loving by way of his experiences at a recent fiction workshop where he was asked to write a “manifesto”—which in this case meant to identify and list the recurring elements, emblems, beliefs, intentions, motives, and/or opinions in your own creative work. For example, Denton identified in his own fiction the repetition of cows, dirt, lawnmowers, birds, and some kind of technology or modern gadget.

This challenge invited me to revisit some of my poems, and I did discover some recurring themes: redbirds, crows, dogs, wood, trees, hymns, kitchens, paralysis, soap, song lyrics, jaybirds and grandmothers. Some of these emblems are easy for me to explain, some are mysterious, and some are both. For instance, in my very first college creative writing class, my teacher (poet Jeff Daniel Marion) asked us on the first day of class to write a short piece in which we remembered our grandparents. Both of my grandfathers died before my parents were married, but my grandmothers were a daily part of my growing up. It was easy to explain my relationships with them, yet 25 years after that first writing class, I am still not finished with my grandmothers. They visit in my dreams, talking constantly, directing my beliefs and actions; they remain a mysterious force in my life. Even now in my current writing projects, as I try to leave them behind and out of this work, they sneak in and boss me around.

Here is one of my early poems that illustrates my mystery of grandmothers:

Tree Rings

When they meet me in my dreams, I do
what they say. We are encircled now, all

living together, my grandmothers and me.
Down dim paneled hallways I follow obediently

behind them. I answer their telephones in knotty
pine nooks. Those black eyes know

me. I hear their boarders walking over
our heads and I’m sent up the mahogany stair

case to collect the rent. I stand at the oak
door and knock. We are willow and birch,

enchanted and renewed; apple and blackthorn,
blossoms with sharp spines. We are the bristle cone pine

in the desert, older than Methuselah. We are
the crone living in the elderberry shrub, straggly

and unruly in old age. We can grow anywhere
working strong earth magic, avenging, punishing.

We are the yew, adored above all others, screening
the doorway between this life and the next.

What is your writing manifesto? Be sure to check Denton’s post for his suggestions about using your emblems in a couple of writing exercises.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Discover Something New Every Day: The Challenge

My friend Silas House posted this challenge yesterday (August 12, 2009), and I'm going to take it up. Here is his original post:

I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to challenge myself to not only discover something new everyday--which a writer should ALWAYS be doing, every single day--but to also WRITE a little piece on it everyday for my blog. So I've just done the first one. I hope you'll follow my progress. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it every single day for a month, but I'm sure going to try (I'll always DO it, the problem will be getting it posted). Anyway, I hope you will follow my progress and tell other people about it and send me good vibes, prayers, energy, whatever-you-got to help me out. You can follow my discoveries (and post your own if you want) at www.silashouseblog.blogspot.com.

This morning my discovery is about stuff. I have too much of it. I share a life and a home with a man that has more stuff than should be allowed by law, and often, we cannot even get into our daughter's room when she is at home from college.

We're overrun with stuff.

I "discover" this every day, but this morning it was reinforced when I flipped on the TV during breakfast and saw a feature on "Extreme Superstores" on the Travel Channel (just one example of the "stuff" on TV these days). "Extreme Superstores," I've discovered, is just one program in the Travel Channel's "Extreme" series: Extreme Bathrooms, Pig-Outs, Hotels, Truckstops, Bars, Pools, Resorts, etc. In fairness, there is one episode called "Extreme Ways to Go Green."

"Extreme Superstores" featured retailers who have massive structures jammed with all manner of stuff: Jungle Jim's International Market, Archie McPhee, Bonanza Gifts, Daffin's Candy, the San Jose Flea Market, and two outdoor/adventure megastores, REI and Cabela's. I was appalled; then immediately guilt-stricken. Although my house is not large, I could easily set up a store inside. The walls are crowded with bookcases holding books, record albums, CDs, DVDs, vintage toys, knick-knacks, and dishes. My closet is stuffed with clothes I never wear, pocketbooks I've had since 1975 and never carry, fabric for quilts I'll never sew. My cabinets and closets sag with the weight of crap I've gathered and kept over the years. And I am too embarrassed to even discuss my garage, laundry room, and the space under my bed. I'm surrounded in an Extreme Home of my own making. No wonder I often feel like I will suffocate if I don't get outside onto my porch.

When my father died in 2007, I was amazed at how little stuff he had. Apart from a shed full of tools and washing machine parts (which my brother-in-law gladly took to his own shed full of stuff), my father had only a half-dozen shirts, a couple of suits (one of which we buried him in) and jackets, and three or four pairs of shoes. He had a wedding ring and a gold necklace, a pair of glasses, a magnifying glass, a few maps, and only a very few toiletries. It only took us a few hours to clean up and distribute his earthly belongings. My father was always stuff-free, and he raised me to be that way too. So what happened?

Some blame our consumer-driven culture and the proliferation of Wal-Marts in our communities who encourage the consumption of stuff we don't need; others blame our lack of spiritual or religious devotion; still others say it's part of our competitive natures ("the one with the most toys wins") or the notion that we pay too much attention to celebrities who have everything that we want too. Just pick up any issue of any popular magazine to confirm this argument. There is even a recovery program for pack-rats called "Clutterers Anonymous" based on the 12-step programs of AA and NA.

I don't think I need a recovery program, and I don't know exactly what, if anything, I will do about all my stuff, but I worry about the poor people who may be charged with cleaning up all my crap if something happens to me. I also fret that my stuff-filled life is in direct contradiction to my commitment to be a better citizen, to be greener, to be less dependent on coal and oil, to be free of purchasing anything from the Wal-Mart store, to not be so lazy and lackadaisical about others who need food, clothing, shelter, or even some of the stuff I've hoarded away for years.

Wordsworth warned us 200 years ago: We need less stuff and more connection to nature and to others.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Appalachian Music Fellowship 20

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day Last, June 29, 2009

Today I am finishing up my month-long residency as an Appalachian Music Fellow in the Special Collections & Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College. I am homesick, but I don’t want to leave Berea either. I could tell I was homesick (and tired) when I watched an old television show this afternoon that featured Lily May Ledford. The show was called Fire on the Mountain, and it used to be a weekly 30-minute show on The Nashville Network (back when cable was just expanding a little and no one had ever heard of reality TV. Does anyone remember this show? I loved it, and so did my father, who would say, “Hit’s time for Far on the Mountain!”). Fire on the Mountain was hosted by David Holt, a traditional musician, storyteller, and historian who has devoted his talents to uncovering and celebrating the roots of Southern Appalachian music.

In 1984, Holt featured women old-time musicians on his show: The Reel World String Band, Cathy Fink, and a short excerpt with Lily May Ledford (decked out in her red calico dress) and Cathy Fink at the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. But this video tape also contained the out-takes of Fink and Ledford’s conversation that never aired on Fire on the Mountain.

Lily May told how her brothers made a banjo once, and she gave detailed instructions on how to dry a ground-hog hide for the banjo head. But what got me all choked up was when she told the story about being called to the stage at the WLS National Barn Dance one night after a young boy had hitchhiked from Indiana to Chicago to play the fiddle on the Barn Dance. They let him play and then they called Lily May out to comment on the young man. She said he was “poor like I was,” in a coat that was too big for him, and she began to see herself in him and got so homesick that it overwhelmed her. She said she cried right there on the stage (and over the air), and that the “tears splashed down on my clothes.”

I felt like that today too. My official work in the archives is over, and I feel like I’m going to cry.

Appalachian Music Fellowship 19

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 19, June 25, 2009

Girl Singers

Today I gave my Music Fellowship research presentation at the Hutchins Library. Posted below is the beginning, a little autobiographical statement. . .

When I was a little girl, I used to wake up every work-day morning to the smell of bacon, fried eggs, biscuits and black coffee—the breakfast my mother daily cooked for my father. Sometimes I could hear my parents talking in the kitchen, but mostly I heard the kitchen radio, tuned to WIVK, Knoxville, from which the glorious twang of country music poured forth. My Daddy loved Merle Haggard and could sing the words to every song he recorded. My Mother was a George Jones fan.

I was fascinated with Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Kitty Wells, Skeeter Davis, Jean Shepard, Tammy Wynette, and Connie Smith. I adored them, but I did not understand as a kid, that these women were still considered “girl singers” in the country music industry. I also did not understand that a generation of women in traditional and country music had preceded these current chart-toppers who sang so frequently in our little red kitchen. Women who had been forgotten, replaced, ignored, or silenced by the ever modern sounds of contemporary country music. Women like Cynthia May Carver known as Cousin Emmy, Molly O’Day, Lily May Ledford, Moonshine Kate, Patsy Montana, Lulu Belle Wiseman, even Maybelle and Sara Carter, just to name a few.

At about the same time that I’m waking up to country music, my family is also watching it on television. In 1963, Doyle and Teddy Wilburn debuted their syndicated country music variety show on television. In addition to the joy of seeing and hearing Loretta Lynn (who was Teddy and Doyle’s “girl singer”) with her big hair, big dresses, big guitar and big voice, I was spellbound when the Wilburn Brothers sang their 1963 hit, “Knoxville Girl.”

At 8-years-old, I thought this was a true story that had happened in my hometown. I fretted about it, worried that every time we crossed the Henley Street or Gay Street Bridge I might see some dreadful man swinging some poor woman by the hair and throwing her into the Tennessee River. My grandmother, a bossy and sensible woman, told me finally to quit watching so much TV, and that “Knoxville Girl” was just a made-up story; it was, as she described it, just one of “them awful ole killing songs.”

But it was too late. I’ve been haunted by women country singers and murder ballads ever since.

Appalachian Music Fellowship 18

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 18, June 24, 2009

The Barn Dance Costume
for Linda Parker a.k.a. The Little Sunbonnet Girl and The Red-Headed Rascal

Reject the lace petticoats, the ric-rac
hems. Reject the gingham bonnet’s
stranglehold, the myth of calico
for righteousness sake. Forsake
the man whispering backstage
your fate, his eyes green
as dollar bills. Step out
your high-topped shoes and
ankle skirts, dye your petticoats
red and face them with the yellow,
wail the blue notes that howl
your heart’s longing. Hop high
and sing the song about my Lulu Gal
wearing that red dress from the railroad
man and those shoes from a driver
in the mines. Stay in the pit
with them rough and rowdy men
and leave your calico behind.

Appalachian Music Fellowship 17

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 17, June 23, 2009

“I would leave them as they are and not meddle.”

Maybe the reason I keep coming back to Cecil Sharp’s musical journeys into the Southern Appalachian mountains is because he tended to be the most open-minded ballad collector about his subjects who gave so freely of their song repertoires. This afternoon I’ve been re-reading Maud Karpeles’ 1967 biography of Sharp (a hard-bound, first edition copy lovingly preserved in the archives here).

Karpeles (1885-1976) was Sharp’s assistant, travelling companion, and fellow musicologist/scholar. She became his literary executor on his death and published what is still considered the definitive biography on Sharp, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work.

A couple of excerpts:

“During the years 1916-18 Cecil Sharp and I spent twelve months in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, forty-six weeks being given to actual collecting—nine weeks in 1916, and about twice as long in each of the following years. We travelled over a big area, spending about three and a half months in each of the states of North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, a month in Tennessee, and a few days in West Virginia. We visited altogether between seventy and eighty different small towns and settlements.”

“In other parts of the United States little was known of the mountain people, who were at that time usually referred to as ‘mountain white’ or ‘poor white trash’. We were told by our New York and Boston friends that we should find ourselves among a wild and dangerous community and we were advised to arm ourselves with revolvers. Cecil Sharp paid no heed to the warning; indeed, he said that the handling of a revolver would cause him far greater fear than encountering the wildest savage; and, as a matter of fact, it would have been hard to find any other place where a stranger—and particularly a woman—would be as safe as in the mountains.”

Of the people who sang for Sharp and Karpeles, Sharp especially enjoyed their social instincts and charm. He wrote: “They have an easy, unaffected bearing and the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred. I have received salutations upon introduction or on bidding farewell, such as a courtier might make to his sovereign. . . .”

Maud Karpeles and Cecil Sharp often relied on the mission schools in the mountains for resting places. Karpeles writes: “Cecil Sharp acknowledged the hospitality and friendliness of the missionaries towards himself, but he thought that much of their work amongst the mountain people was misguided and harmful particularly their educational methods. Here is a letter he wrote to one of the missionaries, a Mrs. Storrow, on Setpember 13, 1916. The location of the mission is not indicated:

"To Mrs. Storrow.
Some of the women [missionaries] I have met are very nice and broadminded. But I don’t think any of them realize that the people they are here to improve are in many respects far more cultivated than their would-be instructors, even if they cannot read or write. Take music, for example. Their own is pure and lovely. The hymns that these missionaries teach them are musical and literary garbage. . . . For my part, I would leave them [the mountain people] as they are and not meddle. They are happy, contented, and live simply and healthily, and I am not at all sure that any of us can introduce them to anything better than this. Something might be done in teaching them better methods of farming, so as to lighten the burden of earning a living from their holdings; and they should certainly be taught to read and write—at any rate, those who want to, ought to be able to. Beyond that I should not go."

Appalachian Music Fellowship 16

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 16, June 22, 2009

Breathing One Unlettered Atmosphere

I’ve been bugging the archivists at the Special Collections & Archives about whether any African-American mountain people were ever ballad singers and/or if their songs were ever collected by the “ballad-mongers” at the turn of the last century.

We can’t find any evidence of African American contributions to ballad singing, at least we haven’t yet. This is troublesome to me because what I’m thinking is that the ballad collectors were convinced that only the descendants of English, Scots, and Irish settlers knew ballads; therefore, they ignored (out of prejudice or ignorance) African-American communities of singers in the mountains.

Another troublesome discovery I made today concerns the ballad collector named Katherine Jackson French. French was born and raised in Laurel County, Kentucky, yet in her writings about ballads, she never associated herself with mountain people, even though she collected several ballads from Laurel Countians. She asked President Frost at Berea College to help her publish her manuscript of Kentucky ballads in 1910. The collection was never published, and she retrieved the manuscript from Dr. Frost in 1915; she then donated her papers and manuscripts to Berea in the early 1950s as a Centennial gift to the college. Like the ballad collectors and folklorists who came before and after her, French writes of the beauty of the mountains but not of the mountain singers--they are, of course, stereotyped as “breathing one unlettered atmosphere.”

“[The ballads] are peculiarly Anglo-American, most characteristic of the traditional history and spirit of their composers of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and likewise, after generations of contact made to be part of the blood, bone and sinew of the settlers in the remote land. Though told in their own homely, household speech, and illustrative of their own crude life, withal, they are poems of the highest art,--because they are not artful. . . .

In this isolated section, far removed from all activities of modern civilization, life is lived in the open amid all that is fresh and green,--glorious mountains, trees of baronial proportions, rapid creeks and narrow passes. The inhabitants are strikingly homogeneous, breathing one unlettered atmosphere, one habit of thought, one measure of defense and sympathy. . . ."


--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library