Fixing to Shout & Sing

Still: The Journal Contest Issue

2011-10-21T16:20:00.001-04:00

Still: The Journal was established in October, 2009, as an online literary journal with my fellow editors Silas House and Jason Howard. In this issue we're proud to present our second annual contest winners, work by four other poets, an oral history of an eastern Kentucky midwife, and a musical performance.

Our judges for the 2011 contests were Connie May Fowler (fiction), Marilyn Kallet (poetry), and Karen Salyer McElmurray (nonfiction).

Read and Share!

Contest Winners in Fiction:
Rachel Hale Drew
Phillip Meeks
Natalie Sypolt

Contest Winners in Poetry:
Connie Jordan Green
Erin Miller Reid
S. Cook Stanforth

Contest Winners in Nonfiction:
Brittany Rogers
Frankie Finley
Kim Trevathan

New work from poets
Adam Day
Coleman Larkin
Chris Mattingly
Amy Tudor

An Oral History with midwife Hazel Durbin conducted by Vickie Cimprich

Multimedia performance by Nikki Lane

Still: The Journal 2nd Annual Literary Contests

2011-06-28T09:42:00.001-04:00

Still: The Journal 2011:

The second annual Still Writing Contests in Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction

Contest entries should be in keeping with our submission philosophy which states: “Our emphasis is on the literature of the Southern Appalachian region, and we are committed to publishing excellent writing that does not rely on clichés and stereotypes. We want to feature writing that exemplifies the Mountain South or that is written by an author with an established connection to the region.”

Rules:

Submitted entries must be unpublished.

Simultaneous entries are accepted as long as you let us know if your submissions will be published elsewhere before the contest ends.

The contest reading fee is $8 PER ENTRY, payable to Still’s PayPal account, which can be accessed from our website:

An entry is defined as:

one short story,

or one nonfiction piece,

or one poem.

You may submit multiple submissions in multiple genres, as long as you pay a separate entry fee for each submission. Contest entry fees cannot be refunded under any circumstances.

Manuscripts should be typed in a standard 12-point font (Times New Roman is preferred) and should have numbered pages. Prose must be double spaced. Poetry can be single spaced. Prose entries must not exceed 6,500 words. Poetry entries should not exceed 60 lines.

Make sure that your name or any other identifying information does not appear anywhere on the manuscript(s). All contest entries are processed and read on a “blind” basis.

Deadline for email postmark is 11:59 p.m., August 31, 2011. Any entry that is not sent on or before that date/time will not be processed and entry fees will not be returned.

Winners will be notified by September 30, 2011. Winning entries will be announced publicly in Issue 7: Fall 2011 Still: The Journal.

Prizes:

$150 each for winners of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and publication in Still: The Journal, 7: Fall 2011. All other contest entries will be considered for possible publication.

Judges:

Fiction: Connie May Fowler

Poetry: Marilyn Kallet

Nonfiction: Karen Salyer McElmurray

Submissions:

We prefer electronic submissions and fee payment.

Submissions should be saved as a word document, rich text file or plain text file only (doc, docx, rtf, or txt ONLY) and attached to an email. Multiple submissions must be sent separately; in other words, if you are submitting a short story, an essay, and three poems, for instance, you would have five different electronic submissions and five different entry fees. The subject line for each entry should include “Still Contest” and the category; for example: Still Contest Fiction, Still Contest Poetry, or Still Contest Nonfiction. Include with each entry a title page which contains this information:

o Title of entry

o Category listed in parentheses next to title

o Name

o Mailing address

o Telephone number

o Email address

All entries must be sent to contest@stilljournal.net. Entries will not be processed until the $8 entry fee is also paid.

Mail submissions can be accepted, although electronic submissions are preferred. Follow the above guidelines for manuscript and title page preparations, include an $8 fee per entry and mail checks payable to Still to: Still, P. O. Box 1121, Berea, KY 40403.

Mailed entries must be postmarked by August 31, 2011.

Failure to follow any of the above guidelines will result in disqualification. No entry fees can be returned.

Inquiries or questions should be directed to contest@stilljournal.net

About our Judges:

Fiction: Connie May Fowler is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and screenwriter. Her most recent novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, was published in 2010 to wide acclaim. Her other novels include Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue and Before Women Had Wings, which she adapted into an Emmy-winning film starring Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Barkin. She serves on the faculty of The Afghan Women’s Writing and is currently a visiting faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine creative writing MFA program. She is a Florida native.

Poetry: Marilyn Kallet is the author of fifteen books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems and Circe After Hours, and translations of Paul Eluard's Last Love Poems and of Benjamin Péret's The Big Game (2011). Dr. Kallet directs the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee, where she is Professor of English. She also teaches poetry workshops for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at their site in Auvillar, France. Kallet was named Woman of Achievement in the Arts by the Knoxville YWCA, and was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in poetry in 2005.

Nonfiction: Karen Salyer McElmurray grew up in a family with roots in Eastern Kentucky that date back to the 1700s. She now teaches in the MFA program at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. She is the author of a memoir, Surrendered Child, which received the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, and two novels, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven and Motel of the Stars.

Still: The Journal

Still: The Journal, Issue 6

2011-06-05T21:03:00.002-04:00

Still: The Journal was established with two of my writing colleagues (Silas House and Jason Howard) as an online literary journal in October 2009. We are proud to say we’ve just published our sixth issue which includes short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, an interview, and a multimedia performance.

In every issue we’ve tried to stay true to our original vision: to feature award-winning, established, and emerging writers in the Appalachian region. We’ve chased after excellent contemporary writing either created by writers from or devoted to the Appalachian South, and we’re as proud of our sixth issue as we were of our first.

Read and Share!

Issue #6 includes:

Short fiction by

Judy Cooper

            Elizabeth Howard
            Laura Long
            Denton Loving

Creative nonfiction by

Amy Clark

Sean Corbin

Poetry by

donnarkevic

            Karen George
            RichardHague
            Clyde Kessler
            Mark W. Kidd
            The Poezia Writing Group (Jay McCoy, Staci R. Schoenfeld,
                                                           and KaterinaStoykova-Klemer)
            Tracy L. Seffers

Interview with

David Dick (1930-2010)

Multimedia with

Darrell Scott

Still: The Journal, Issues 1-5 are archived here

MOTIF 2 Debut

2010-07-06T21:34:00.020-04:00

The second annual volume in the Motif Anthology Series just arrived from the printer, and I’m so proud of the writing contained in Motif 2: Come What May, An Anthology of Writings about Chance.

We all are marked by some chance encounter, some happenstance in our lives, some bit of good luck or misfortune, a missed opportunity or a fleeting glimpse, some salvation through the kind-hearted actions of others. We might even argue that a good portion of our literary inspiration probably comes from witnessing some unplanned moment with an unusual outcome. Volume 2 of the Motif Anthology Series represents many of those random occasions. Motif 2: Come What May, An Anthology of Writings about Chance is brimming with the best short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and song lyrics that speak to the theme of chance. 136 writers provide their literary notions on this motif, a theme tied together with the elusive twines of accident, coincidence, fluke, prospect, and mystery.

Motif 2: Come What May is published by MotesBooks (Louisville, Ky) and is the second anthology in the annual series. Motif 1: Writing by Ear, An Anthology of Writings about Music was published in 2009. Both anthologies are available directly from the publisher.

Contributors to Motif 2: Come What May are:

Alice Hale Adams

Christopher Allen

Janice Willis Barnett

Jennifer Barton

Joseph Bathanti

David Baxter

Laura Treacy Bentley

Peter Bergquist

Chad Berry

Tara Betts

Carole A. Borges

Cathy Smith Bowers

Peg Bresnahan

Bill Brown

Bobbi Buchanan

Michael Scott Cain

Ben E. Campbell

Emily Cavan

Ann Cefola

Sherry Chandler

Amy Clark

Sandy Coomer

Judy Cooper

Chella Courington

LeAnna Crawford

Wayne Cresser

Barbara Crooker

Ann Curran

Ed Davis

Marie Davis

Cheryl Denise

Peggy Duffy

Joyce Dyer

Suzie Work Edwards

Michael Filimowicz

Erin Fitzgerald

Melissa Frederick

Katy Giebenhain

Harry Gieg

Andrew Glaze

Chris Green

Connie Jordan Green

Judy Lee Green

Ruth F.Grubbs

Ellen Hagan

Richard Hague

Paul W. Hankins

Maryanne Hannan

Pauletta Hansel

Melanie Henderson

Michael Henson

Jane Hicks

Thomas Alan Holmes

Stephen M. Holt

Michael Homolka

Randall Horton

Ron Houchin

Silas House

Elizabeth Howard

Jason Howard

M.J. Huang

Dory L. Hudspeth

Charlie G. Hughes

Laura Hunter

Lori-Lyn Hurley

Frank Jamison

Jessie Janeshek

Marilyn Kallet

Mike Karman

Erin Keane

Sandi Keaton-Wilson

Kit Kennedy

Alan King

Alison Kolodinsky

Lolette Kuby

Kate Larken

Irene Latham

Anthony A. Lee

Christina Lovin

Denton Loving

Sylvia D. Lynch

George Ella Lyon

John C. Mannone

Linda Parsons Marion

Sue Massek

Donna McClanahan

Karen Salyer McElmurray

Michael McFee

Alan McMonagle

Michael Medley

Phil Meeks

Kali Meister

Jim Minick

Felicia Mitchell

Susan J. Mitchell

Elizabeth Morelli

Irene Mosvold

Lisa Parker

E. D. Pendarvis

George Petty

Larry Pike

Lee Ann Pingel

Melva Sue Priddy

Mary Anne Reese

Joshua Robbins

Richard Roe

Jackie White Rogers

Sakabaka

Jane Sasser

Mike Schneider

Roberta Schultz

Judy Sizemore

Jimmy Dean Smith

Kathryn B. Smith

Larry Smith

Noel Smith

Anna Egan Smucker

Lex Sonne

Georgia Green Stamper

Mari Stanley

Art Stewart

Charles A. Swanson

Natalie Sypolt

John J. Trause

Larry Thacker

Frank X Walker

Amy Watkins

Julene Tripp Weaver

Robert West

Laurelyn Whitt

Dana Wildsmith

Cyndi Williams

Tiffany M. Williams

Sylvia Woods

William Kelley Woolfitt

Jeff Worley

Praise for Motif 2: Come What May:

With a passion and focus most editors only dream of, Marianne Worthington spins a bold thread through the essays, poems, stories, and songs of the second volume in the Motif series, Come What May: An Anthology of Writings About Chance. Here are brief encounters that sprout generations; split seconds of ruin; sudden migrations, lust, and strife. These pieces remind us to cling to life’s lessons with grace and humor. Worthington steers what could be an unwieldy theme through a touching and illuminating series of pirouettes. Following her deft lead, there’s a good chance this anthology will delight those lucky enough to read it.

—Neela Vaswani, author of You Have Given Me A Country

Take a chance on Come What May. You won't regret it. With remarkable insight and intelligence, 136 talented writers across a broad spectrum of geography, generations, and genres, delve deeply into the meaning and nature of synchronicity, coincidence, luck, fate, bashert, and kismet -- and the very enigma of human existence. Come What May is an important book for anyone interested in understanding humankind today, individually and collectively -- and why we act, think, and feel as we do.

—Janice Eidus, author of The War of the Rosens

MotesBooks

Louisville, Ky.

http://www.motesbooks.com/

Literary Contest sponsored by STILL: The Journal

2010-06-27T17:55:00.006-04:00

Still: The Journal:
The first annual Still Writing Contests in Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction

Contest entries should follow our normal submission guidelines, which state that “we want to feature writing that exemplifies the Mountain South or that is written by an author with an established connection to the region.”

Rules:
Submitted entries must be unpublished.
Simultaneous entries are accepted as long as you let us know if your submissions will be published elsewhere before the contest ends.
The contest reading fee is $8 PER ENTRY, payable to Still’s PayPal account, which can be accessed from our website: www.stilljournal.net/contest.php
An entry is defined as one short story, or one nonfiction piece, or one poem. You may submit multiple submissions in multiple genres, as long as you pay a separate entry fee for each submission. Contest entry fees cannot be refunded under any circumstances.
Manuscripts should be typed in a standard 12-point font (Times New Roman is preferred) and should have numbered pages. Prose must be double spaced. Poetry must be single spaced. Prose entries must not exceed 6,500 words. Poetry entries should not exceed 100 lines.
Make sure that your name or any other identifying information does not appear anywhere on the manuscript(s).
Deadline for email postmark is 12:00 a.m., August 15, 2010. Any entry that is not sent on or before that date will not be processed and entry fees will not be returned.
Winners will be notified by September 15, 2010. Winning entries will be announced publicly in the 4: Fall 2010 issue of Still: The Journal.

Prizes:
$100 for winners of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and publication in Still: The Journal, 4: Fall 2010. All other contest entries will be considered for possible publication.

Judges:
Fiction: Ann Panake
Poetry: Maurice Manning
Nonfiction: Janisse Ray

Submissions:
We prefer electronic submissions and fee payment. Submissions should be saved as a word document, rich text file or plain text file only (doc, docx, rtf, or txt ONLY) and attached to an email. Multiple submissions must be sent separately (in other words, if you are submitting a short story, an essay, and three poems, for instance, you would have five different electronic submissions and five different entry fees). The subject line for each entry should include “Still Contest” and the category; for example: Still Contest Fiction, Still Contest Poetry, or Still Contest Nonfiction. Include with each entry a title page which contains this information:
o Title of entry
o Category listed in parentheses next to title
o Name
o Mailing address
o Telephone number
o Email address
Do NOT include your name or any other identifying information on the manuscript(s). Please number all pages.
All entries must be sent to contest@stilljournal.net. Entries will not be processed until the $8 entry fee is also paid.
Mail submissions can be accepted, although electronic submissions are preferred. Follow the above guidelines for manuscript and title page preparations, include an $8 fee per entry and mail checks payable to Still to:

Still
P.O. Box 1121
Berea, KY 40403

Mailed entries must be postmarked by August 15, 2010.
Failure to follow any of the above guidelines will result in disqualification. Inquiries or questions should be directed to contest@stilljournal.net

Golden Apples of the Sun

2009-12-28T19:36:00.006-05:00

I hope by now you've heard Caroline Herring's latest CD project, "Golden Apples of the Sun" (Signature Sounds 2009). If you haven't, you must.

Really. Hurry.

Honestly, it's one of my favorite CDs of the year, maybe of the decade. Bobbi Buchanan's online magazine, New Southerner, featured my review of "Golden Apples" in the Winter 09-10 issue. You can read the review here, but it would be better if you just bought the CD and shared the love. You won't be disappointed.

Herring's video for "Tales of the Islander"

STILL: Open Reading Period begins December 1

2009-11-29T19:34:00.004-05:00

Beginning December 1, the editors at Still: Literature of the Mountain South will begin reading open submissions. Below are the submission guidelines:

Still: Literature of the Mountain South is an on-line literary journal featuring literature of the Southern Appalachian region. Our reading period is December 1 through December 31 only. We are committed to publishing excellent writing that does not rely on clichés and stereotypes. We want to feature writing that exemplifies the Mountain South or that is written by an author with an established connection to the region. We accept submissions of SHORT FICTION, POETRY, and CREATIVE NONFICTION.

We encourage established, unpublished, or emerging writers to submit their best work to Still.

We appreciate writing grounded in craft as well as experience. We are moved by lyrical writing that is compelling, distinctive, accessible, and finely written. As a purely editorial decision, we will not consider trite, light verse, genre fiction, critical analyses, inspirational or motivational advice, erotica or pornography, or any writing that purposefully exploits or demeans. We cannot accept unsolicited interviews or book reviews at this time.

We will consider one short story or one creative nonfiction piece up to 6,500 words or up to five poems less than 60 lines each during the reading period. Please do not submit more than once during the reading period.

We accept only electronic submissions. Send submissions with STILL SUBMISSION in the subject line. Submit only one double-spaced story, one double-spaced creative nonfiction piece, or up to five poems as a WORD document or Rich Text Format to the appropriate editor. Poetry submissions should be sent as one attachment. Attachments that are not in .doc, .docx or rtf formats will be deleted unread. At the end of your submission include a five-sentence biography and your contact information. Cover letters are unnecessary and discouraged since we will be choosing your work based on the merits of your writing and not on past achievements, publications, or awards.

We will consider simultaneous submissions as long as you let us know if your work is accepted elsewhere. We will not consider previously published materials, including any online publications.

Still acquires first rights for publication. Upon publication, rights revert to the author. Still reserves the right to reprint work at a later date if we have the opportunity to occasionally make a print anthology and want to include your work.

Still is published three times a year: October, February, and June. The submission period is December 1 through December 30 of each year. We will only read submissions received during this reading period. Any submission received other than during this time will be deleted unread.

Send submissions to appropriate editor:

Fiction submissions: fiction@stilljournal.net

Nonfiction submissions: nonfiction@stilljournal.net

Poetry submissions: poetry@stilljournal.net

STILL: Literature of the Mountain South

2009-10-22T18:25:00.005-04:00

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:

2009-09-01T18:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-31T08:25:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-30T16:33:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-27T08:21:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-26T08:46:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-23T07:06:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-08-21T15:08:00.004-04:00

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!

2009-08-20T11:46:00.000-04:00

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—

2009-08-19T11:21:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-18T07:58:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-17T15:56:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-16T20:41:00.007-04:00

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

2009-08-14T09:29:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-13T11:35:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-29T17:39:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-25T21:18:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-24T14:59:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-23T16:15:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-22T21:50:00.005-04:00

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

Appalachian Music Fellowship 15

2009-06-19T06:23:00.003-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 15, June 19, 2009

Goldie Hill: The Golden Hillbilly . . . and "Little Gal"

In a file of miscellaneous published song books this morning, I found the 1954 Scrapbook of Hillbilly & Western Stars (pictured above); obviously a money-making endeavor that featured photographs and short biographies of current country music stars. Goldie Hill was one of these performers, and here is her “biography.” Note the very intimate details about her physical features. Gee, I found no such description about the male performers in this little book, but all of the female performers had some kind of description like this:

“Goldie Hill is a little gal from Texas with as much talent as she has beauty—and partner, that’s goin’ some! Goldie is the baby of the Hill family and was born in Karnes City, Texas, in 1933. Her professional singing career came about in an unexpected way. Goldie and her mother went to Nashville, Tennessee, with one of Goldie’s brothers (a recording start in his own right). They were watching Tommy record and during a lull in the session, Goldie picked up a guitar and started singing. That one song was enough to convince Decca that they had a real ‘find’ in Goldie. The lovely lass is five feet, four inches tall, weighs 129 pounds, has blue eyes and brown hair and is still single. Recently she signed with the Grand Ole Opry and her latest hit, ‘Yesterday’s Girl,’ is on the Decca label.”

Goldie Hill had five top hit singles from 1953 until her marriage to Carl Smith in 1957. She chose to forego the male-dominated music bid’ness after her marriage, perhaps prompted by either Roy Acuff who once told Johnnie Wright not to bill his wife Kitty Wells as a star on their tours (“Don’t ever headline a show with a woman,” Acuff warned. “It won’t never work, because people just don’t go for women.”) or these alliterative liner notes from her first album in 1957:

“Since Goldie’s marriage in 1957 to singer Carl Smith, most of her own singing has been as a homemaker indulging in household humming, while hanging up new drapes or a pair of her husband’s old jeans in the rambling ranch house.” (Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music)

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 14

2009-06-18T21:29:00.005-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 14, June 18, 2009

Here is one last note on the ballad collecting craze I’ve been writing about recently. From about 1900 through at least the next 50 years, Berea College had several faculty members who were avid ballad collectors. Berea’s third President, William Goddell Frost (1893-1920), encouraged faculty and students to find and document ballads and ballad singers. For a time, Berea was well known as a haven and repository for ballad performers, scholars, hunters, and songs.

However, today I found two typewritten notes written in 1922 by two Berea students (we think; we’re not sure; we also believe they may be course evaluations) who make known their distaste of “them old love songs and song-ballets.”

“There are some earnest people in Berea who believe we should confine our study and singing to ballads, thus making Berea unique. I believe Dr. Raine is addicted to this idea. We in the Music Dept. do not so limit ourselves, for the same reason that he does not confine his Dramatics Association to Morality plays and his classes to Chaucer. Audiences are much interested in ballads; but audiences think only of being entertained. They are not looking far enough ahead to see the musical future of a people. Berea College is not a museum, nor is it an object of curiosity.”
AND

“The teachers of the Music Dept. and the members of the Glee Club are sick of mountain ballads—as are the students who were brought up on them. Why? Because they have little literary or musical value. By the time students come to Berea, they have outgrown them. They come to Berea to learn, to hear, and to see the best there is. Shall we let them think the best in the whole musical world is made up of ballads? If the musicians of today confined themselves now to the study of this music, it would be as though our medical students should confine themselves to the study of the use of herbs among our forefathers. The mountain ballads may be interesting to an outsider for the moment and as a curiosity, but how our students hate the idea of being curious or different from other students.”

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 13

2009-06-17T23:17:00.006-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 13, June 17, 2009

The Song Catcher Competition

My colleague in the Special Collections & Archives, Penny Messinger, suggested "The Song Catcher Competition" phrase to describe the ballad-collecting craze that went on in the mountains (particularly in Kentucky) during the early decades of the 20th century. Yesterday’s post indicated some of the writers’ prejudices and all the hardships they were willing to “endure” in order to get an authentic ballad from a mountain singer. (Last weekend I heard a mountain-born actor/singer refer to these kinds of preservationists as “culture vultures.”)

Well, here’s a few more examples of how these collectors contributed to the long-term stereotypes of Appalachians; and then, I promise, I’m off this kick and onto something new tomorrow.

From a 1917 edition of New Jersey Education, Mellenger E. Henry writes:
“It should be kept in mind that these mountaineers of the South have not learned their songs from books, for often they cannot read nor write; nor have they books from which they might be learned. . . . They are naturally diffident and at first, sometimes suspicious. One must live with them, talk with them of their life, become a part of their family interest, and tactfully suggest, by the recitation of some tale or story, their own folk-songs. Once interested in romance and started in their songs of oral transmission, they are like to pour forth a well of literature unguessed of from people so simple.”

From a 1915 article in Harper’s Monthly called “Song-Ballets and Devils Ditties,” William Aspenwall Bradley writes:
“With such ignorance of what lies beyond the limits of their own little world, it is indeed remarkable that these simple-minded mountain folk should retain in their balladry the memory of so much that has long since passed out of their practical knowledge and experience.
In a primitive country, where pioneer conditions, indefinitely prolonged, have produced a well-nigh perfect democracy, they still sing of kings and queens, lords and ladies. Poverty is general there, yet they dream of wealth which they reckon in silver shillings and golden guineas. Cheap cotton prints have begun to take the place of good homespun linsey-woolsey, but such changes of fashion do not affect the secular tastes and habits of the damsel who still ‘dresses herself in silk so fine’ when she fares forth to seek her lover. The largest towns are scarcely more than villages, but the mind continues to dwell with complacency upon the glory of courts and cities. And where nothing less potent than sound ‘corn licker’ ever passes the lips of man, woman, or child who requires a stimulant, the wine-cup still, as of yore, goes round the festal board.”

Finally, this from a 1917 article in Current Opinion which details the toils of collectors
Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway, who hunted for “the Lonesome Tune in the Wilds of Kentucky”:
“Mr. Brockway, together with Miss Loraine Wyman, both well-known figures in the musical life of New York, . . . tramped some 300 miles through the Kentucky wilds, ‘climbing mountains, fording streams, enduring superlative discomforts and . . . rebuffs from the suspicious inhabitants, but emerging at the end with something like eighty entrancing melodic specimens in their note-books, representing both the lonesome tunes and fast music, as they are called.’”

A photograph of Wyman and Brockway singing to an outdoor audience accompanies this article. The caption reads: “Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway invaded the mountainous regions of Kentucky, and entered the most isolated regions, in order to obtain strange folksongs for the delectation of more sophisticated audiences.”

You know how when you are working on some project and everything you read or hear seems to have something to do with your work (or you tell yourself it does, anyway)? This evening I sat down with my copy of Appalachian Heritage. The current issue is dedicated to the work of Jim Wayne Miller, one of our best and fiercest bashers of mountain stereotypes. In this issue, Mary Ellen Miller tells of her husband’s fascination with ballads. When he learned that his wife’s family had a connection to “The Ballad of Lottie Yates,” (the murder of Mrs. Miller’s great aunt), “Jim went to the Carter County [Ky.] Courthouse and came back with documents we never knew existed. One of those was the marriage license of Carlotta Yates and the man who murdered her, her husband, Oscar Porter. Dad [Mrs. Miller’s father] held the document copy in his hand, wordless for a while. Then, ‘My father was 16 at the time. He told me she cried out, ‘He’s killed me, Daddy.’”

Here is Jim Wayne Miller’s poem “Harvest.” This poem is from The Mountains Have Come Closer (which should be in your library, dear reader) and from which I quoted part of Miller’s “Brier Sermon” on Day 11. “Harvest” is both protest and homage, pastiche and invention. It’s about a near perfect poem:

HARVEST

Now his whole life seemed weathered and old-fashioned.
When others spoke, their words made pictures
with gleaming surfaces and metal trim.
He spoke drafty pole barns and garden plots.
His customs had a mustiness, a smokehouse mold
about them; his shriveled wisdom hung like peppers
and shuckybeans from a cabin rafter.
Beliefs leaned back like doors with broken hinges,
stood sunken like a rotten springhouse roof.

Still, he thought of songs landlocked two hundred
years, living in coves and hollers, far from
home, by creeks and waterfalls, and springdrain
trickles,—songs that still remembered the salt salt sea
and held all past time green in the month of May
and made all love and death and sorrow sweet.

So he wasn’t sad to see his life gathered
up in books, kept on a shelf like dry seeds
in an envelope, or carried far off
like Spanish needles in a fox’s fur.
His people brought the salt sea in their songs;
now they moved mountains to the cities
and made all love and death and sorrow sweet there.

Heaviness was always left behind
to perish, to topple like a stone chimney.

But what was lightest lasted, lived in song.

--Jim Wayne Miller, The Mountains Have Come Closer
(“Harvest is also featured in the current issue of Appalachian Heritage.)

--from the Berea College Special Collections & Archives, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 12

2009-06-16T19:47:00.003-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 12, June 16, 2009

Stereotype: “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group: The cowboy and Indian are American stereotypes.” –Random House Dictionary.

Yes, and so is the southern Appalachian, as I’ve been aptly reminded today while studying newspaper, magazine, and journal articles circa 1900-1920 related to ballad-collecting in the mountains. So Child’s work with ballads in America (See Day 11) sparked a whole contest of folk-song collectors trying to get into the mountains to record the ancient songs that many mountain people sang as easily then as we sing Beatles songs today. Even the gov’munt got in on the race.

In November, 1913, the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, issued an appeal to public school teachers and others on “An Opportunity to Help in an Important Work,” With the help of Edgar Allan Poe, professor of English in the University of Virginia, the Bureau intended to collect the American survivals of the ballads classified by Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

While many collectors/folklorists did important preservation work in the mountains, they also felt compelled to pepper their song texts with quaint (or hateful) descriptions of the singers and their communities.

An article in The Nation, Feb. 5, 1914, makes light of the Department of the Interior’s call for ballads. “Ballad singing,” the editorial states, “was a lost art almost as long ago as ballad-making. . . . And it is doubtful if ballad recitation or oral preservation, in old country or new, is more than vestigial. . . . Survivals will inevitably be most sought in the still medieval-minded Appalachians, so akin in speech, custom, and superstition to the folk among whom balladry was common three centuries ago.”

And there’s much, much more, including three articles from Harper’s Monthly, written by one William Aspenwall Bradley, whose flowery, ornamental style of feature writing barely disguises his disdain for the mountain people in Kentucky. (One article is called “Hobnobbing with Hillbillies.”)

There were more sympathetic collectors. Olive Dame Campbell references the imperative of the Bureau of Education and wrote of her work collecting the words and music of ballads in a 1915 article, “Songs and Ballads of the Southern Mountains,” in The Survey. First, she mentions the great geographical hardships endured in collecting ballads (unlike Child who only collected ballad manuscripts and did no field work—heard little to no singing!):
“For one traveling now over portions of the Wilderness Road and sections yet more remote, it is not hard to understand why so many of these pioneers lingered in the fastnesses of the mountains, while others pushed on across the ranges to settle the Great Valley and to open up the new country of the West. Even now, the main roads, in places, are bitterly hard to travel, while many less-frequented roads are, in the winter season, almost impassable. After several days of journey, one comes to appreciate the old funeral hymns,
Been a long time traveling here below
To lay this body down!”

Professor Hubert G. Shearin of Transylvania University, writing in the July 1911 issue of Sewanee Review predicted that the days of authentic ballad collecting would soon be over in the “sequestered valleys of eastern Kentucky” because of the industries moving into the mountains: “In another generation or two these songs will be but a memory in the Kentucky highlands; the clank of the colliery, the rattle of the locomotive, the roar of the blast-furnace, the shriek of the factory-whistle, and, alas, even the music of the school-bell, are already overwhelming the thin tones of the dulcimore and the quavering voice of the Last Minstrel of the Cumberlands.”

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 11

2009-06-15T20:38:00.007-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship
Day 11, June 15, 2009

“The house our foreparents left had a song, had a story.
We didn’t care.
We said:
them old love songs
them old ballets
them old stories and like foolishness.”

from Jim Wayne Miller, “Brier Sermon—You Must Be Born Again,” in The Mountains Have Come Closer, 1980.

I'm reading about “them old love songs, them old ballets” again this week. The Special Collections & Archives at Berea have ballad lyrics by the hundreds, collected by various folk from the folk in Kentucky and beyond. Of course, the grand-daddy of folk ballad collecting and classifying was Francis James Child, 1825-1896, who published The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in ten parts, forming five large volumes, from 1882 to 1989. It contains 305 distinct ballads; many of those old ballets were collected in the southern Appalachian mountains beginning in the late 19th century.

Here’s a little bit from Child’s introduction of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which describes what a ballad is (and sounds a whole lot like a Cormac McCarthy novel as well):

“A ballad is a song that tells a story, or—to take the other point of view—a story told in song. More formally, it may be defined as a short narrative poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical structure, divided into stanzas, and characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is concerned. . . . A ballad has no author. . . . Not only is the author of a ballad invisible, and so far as the effect which the poem produces on the hearer is concerned, practically non-existent, but the teller of the tale has no role in it. Unlike other songs, it does not purport to give utterance to the feelings or the mood of the singer. . . . [The singer] does not dissect or psychologize. He does not take sides for or against any of the dramatis personae. He merely tells what happened and what people said, and he confines the dialogue to its simplest and most inevitable elements. The story exists for its own sake. If it were possible to conceive a tale as telling itself, without the instrumentality of a conscious speaker, the ballad would be such a tale.”

And here’s what Cecil Sharp said of the Child collection when he published English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians with Olive Dame Campbell in 1917:

“It is greatly to be deplored that the literature of the ballad has, in the past, attracted so much more attention than the music. Properly speaking, the two elements should never be dissociated; the music and the text are one and indivisible, and to sever one from the other is to remove the gem from its setting. Early poetry, to which category the traditional ballad belongs, was always sung or chanted; it was addressed to the ear, not the eye.”

Sharp was one of the first to note that mountaineers referred to ballads as “love songs” and to printed lyrics (rare, and usually handwritten) as “ballets.”

More ballad updates tomorrow . . .

Over the weekend I got to hear Chad Berry, director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea, talk about his research on the National Barn Dance. At the LMU Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, Chad talked about his grandparents’ migration out of Tennessee into the northern cities and how important the WLS Barn Dance broadcasts were to his grandfather. Chad noted that when migrants from the mountains (like his grandfather) heard the people on barn dance radio, they were really hearing "home." For great reading, check out The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, edited by Chad, and look for the documentary film on the National Barn Dance in the near future.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 10

2009-06-12T00:10:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 10, June 12, 2009

This is the end of week two in my four-week-long Appalachian Music Fellowship in the Special Collections and Archives at Berea College.

Today, just a short entry on an interesting letter I found in the John Lair papers, written by Patsy Montana in 1967. Lair worked with Patsy Montana at the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago in the 1930s. In 1967 Montana lived in West Covina, California, and John Lair was still running things at the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. The letter is typewritten, probably on an IBM Selectric using the “cursive script” golf ball.

Here’s the part of the letter I find interesting:

“I am still in the recording racket, it’s not fun like it use to be, too commercial but I do have out an album and a single. My single hit # one on several stations.
I especially enjoyed your editorial in the [Renfro Valley] Bugle. Personally, I am growing tired of the ‘Nashville sound’ and am trying in my own small way to help bring back some of the good old tunes. The results of your program must prove that the people are wanting this type of music. We are living in such a hectic world, it is so nice to remember the times that were less hectic therefore the need for this type of music.
Several weeks ago, I worked a show that for our audience we had all young fellows on the way to Viet Nam. The band before me played all of the current Nashville songs. There was nothing left for me but ‘Cowboy’s Sweet heart.’ Ha! So I thought I’d try something new. I sang ‘I’ll remember you love in my prayers’ and ‘Wild and Reckless Cowboy.’ I was the only one that stopped the show and this was from the younger generation!!!!!”

Country Music was always built on the “Myth of the Eternal Return,” the idea that the good ole days were “less hectic,” more pure, simple, traditional, respectful, moral, down-home, whatever. The religious historian Mircea Eliade theorized that we continually desire to return to this mythical time because we long to escape the linear march of time and change. This philosophy was certainly what John Lair hoped to achieve in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky when he finally established the physical Renfro Valley Barn Dance in 1939. Billed as the place “Where Time Stands Still” Renfro Valley audiences were treated to pretty girl singers wearing calico dresses and hair bows who sang decent “home and hearth” songs, men who sang close family-style harmony in checkered work shirts and dungarees, and funny old characters who dressed up like grandparents from the 19th century and told corny jokes—you know, just like they did way back when on the farm.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 9

2009-06-11T15:04:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 9, June 11, 2009

Today I’m still working through some of the John Lair Papers, and mostly I’m confirming what many historians and country music entertainers have already said: Lair had a reputation for being tight-fisted and controlling. I’m amazed, and offended I guess, at how he could make a living by re-inventing people and exploiting their musical talents. I know I’m using 21st century sensibilities to judge his work from the 1930s-1940s; still, I can’t help but be opposed to how he used women (especially) performers and how they mostly put up with it and went along. I’m unclear if these early women radio stars acquiesced just because they were grateful to be performing or because they bought into these radio personas without question. The two major female personas on Lair’s Barn Dance radio shows were “the pure, good, country girl” who dressed in calico and sang proper (read: sentimental) songs and “the crotchety, coarse old granny” who told jokes and sang novelty songs. For Lair, there really wasn’t any other kind of woman performer.

Here, for instance, is a clause from the contracts that Lair made all his performers sign (the performer is the “first party” and Lair is the “second party”): “Second party shall write, produce, assemble or otherwise procure and furnish all songs, music, routines, spoken lines or sketches which in the opinion of said second party shall be necessary to the success of first party. . .” In other words, everything was scripted, including the color of ric-rac sewn onto the women’s dresses (which, by the way, were usually sewn up by the women performers themselves).

Today I read about how Lair turned Jeanne Munich, a blues singer from Hammond, Indiana into “Linda Parker, The Little Sunbonnet Girl from The Hills of Kentucky” for the WLS National Barn Dance Radio. Parker sang with The Cumberland Ridge Runners and as a soloist, but her repertoire was mostly Carter Family songs like “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” From a 1933 WLS Publicity Album, we get this description of Jeanne Munich a.k.a. Linda Parker (who just four years earlier had debuted on a rival Chicago radio station as the blues-singing “Red-Headed Rascal”—yes, still an invented persona, but at least it’s a feisty one with some sense of independence):

“When Linda Parker was a little girl around the old home at Covington, Kentucky, she learned many of the old ballads of the hills . . . You have doubtless detected in her singing that occasional plaintive note, so typical of mountain music. She sings just as her mother and grandmother sang, artlessly, but from the heart.”

Artlessly? Really?

Linda Parker died at the age of 23 in 1935. While on tour with The Cumberland Ridge Runners in Indiana, she fell ill but kept performing for two days before she was diagnosed with peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. John Lair noted in the obituary/tribute that he wrote for her that she was buried under a beautiful weeping willow. That detail was picked up by the news media and widely circulated as part of her mythology. But, guess what? It’s an invention. There is no weeping willow tree shading the grave of Jeanne Munich.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 8

2009-06-10T16:03:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 8, June 10, 2009

Today I read some of the letters and contract agreements John Lair made with performers who worked (or wanted to work) on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. In 1941, Cousin Emmy was working on WNOX-Knoxville’s Mid-Day Merry Go Round Show but she could not get along with Lowell Blanchard, the announcer/producer. In a letter she wrote to John Lair in February 1941 (handwritten, in pencil, on blue stationery), asking Lair for a job, she says: “I can tell he [Blanchard] had ruther not have me here. But he cant very well fire me with out some reson. He wanted two much of a cut.” Lair wouldn’t help her either, probably because she had a pretty fiery reputation as an independent, business-minded woman.

In another letter dated August 1937, Evelyn Lange (soon to be Daisy of the Coon Creek Girls) wrote this to Lair: “I’m writing to you once again to say I’m still craving a job at your station.” She goes on to describe how she has been practicing all summer and feels “now that I am just as good a guitar player as I am a fiddler.” She closes by promising to see the WLS Barn Dance players who are coming to Ohio for a county fair appearance and asks: “May I hear from you and the prospects of a job at W.L.S.?” Lair didn't hire Lange until 1939.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 7

2009-06-09T22:38:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 7, June 9, 2009

How many ways can you murder your sweetheart?

That’s the question I kept coming back to today while reading the verses to hundreds of “Murdered Sweetheart” Ballads (honest, that’s the genre name scholars give to these murder songs). In the countless variations of the murder ballad “Knoxville Girl,” for instance, the murderer uses a beech wood stick, beech wood club, hickory stick, hard oak stick (you choose) to beat his beloved “till the ground around her stood in a bloody gore.” Then the murderer (now remember, this is the man who wanted to marry the Knoxville Girl) drags her around by her hair and throws her in the river. Drowning is one of the preferred methods of slaughter in these “Murdered Sweetheart” ballads, but poisoning, stabbing, decapitating and shooting are just as effective as blunt force trauma. Evidently, strangling was not often used, or maybe just not poetic enough to qualify for song lyrics. Whew, I’m exhausted today from vicariously witnessing so many murders.

One more bit of interesting information I found today regarding the ballad called “Rose Connoley” or “Down in the Willow Garden.” Although this is an Irish ballad, it has rarely been collected in Ireland in the same way that it appears, almost everywhere, in the southern Appalachian mountains. Folklore scholar D.K. Wilgus writes: “It is as if an Irish local song, never popularized on broadsides, was spread by a single Irish peddler on his travels through Appalachia.”

The Wilburn Brothers had a big hit with “Knoxville Girl” after the Louvin Brothers. Here’s Teddy and Doyle (with flattops) singing their version

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 6

2009-06-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 6, June 8, 2009

Today I started looking at one of the many collections of murder ballads housed in the Special Collections library at Berea. I found this asymmetrical, pared down, eastern Kentucky version of “Barbara Allen” collected from Rendy York, age 78, Bell County, Ky., in 1957. Don’t you love this?

One pleasant May morning
When the June buds they were swelling
He courted her seven long years
Her name was Barbara Allen

She said she would not marry him
Purty William he went home and taken sick
He sent for Barbara Allen

She walked in by his bedside she said
“Young man you are dying”
He turned his pale face to the wall
and busted out to crying

As she walked down them long stair steps
She heard some death bells ringing
Ever bell seem to say
Hard-hearted Barbara Allen

As she walked down that shady grove
She heard some birds singing
Ever bird seem to say
Hard-hearted Barbara Allen

She saw his corpse a-coming
“Lay him down I want to look upon him.
I could’ve saved his life but I wouldn’t”
She busted out to crying

Mother, go dig my grave
Both wide and deep
Purty William died for me today
I will die for him tomorrow

From Purty William’s grave there sprung a rose
From Barbara Allen’s a brier
They grew so high they tied in a true love-knot
And the rose wropped around the brier.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 5

2009-06-09T22:29:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 5, June 5, 2009

The Coon Creek Girls used the old parlor song “Flower Blooming in the Wildwood” as one of their theme songs on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. Today I heard a 1941 radio broadcast of The Coon Creek Girls performing this song, a slow, nearly maudlin ballad, much in contrast to the noisy, fast, kicking music they usually played on the Barn Dance radio shows. Here’s the words, including the oft-quoted phrase: “drown-ded in the deep blue sea” --

On an evening long ago when the sun was sinking low
My true lover went to sail upon the sea
It was in the month of June when the roses were in bloom
That he took me in his arms and said to me

You’re a flower that is blooming in the wildwood
Flower that is blooming there for me
Sweeter than the morning dew and I’ll soon return to you
You’re a flower that is blooming there for me

Then a letter came to me from the captain of the sea
And it told me my lover was dead
Oh the shock of that surprise made the teardrops in my eyes
And I thought about the last words that he said . . . chorus

Now he’s drowned in the deep blue sea and he can’t come back to me
He has passed over life’s weary way
And when it’s in the month of June and the roses are in bloom
It seems that I can hear my sweetheart say . . . chorus

You can listen here, and this version is a little livelier because all The Coon Creek Girls sing on the chorus.

Or you can watch a flat-out-race-to-the-finish version of Lily May and Sis (Rosie) Ledford at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival playing “Cacklin’ Hen”

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 4

2009-06-09T22:26:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 4, June 4, 2009

The very public narrative that Lily May Ledford told about herself hardly ever changed. She consistently told the same story about her life and career to interviewers. I’ve read it plenty since working in the archives. But the personal narrative that her friends and family tell is, as they say, a whole ‘nother story. Today I read interviews with Lily May’s daughter, granddaughter, an ex-husband, a brother-in-law, two musician friends, Mike Seeger, and Pete Seeger.

Pete Seeger tells of Lily May telling him that after the Coon Creek Girls’ White House appearance in 1939, Lily May passed around her banjo for guests and dignitaries to sign. She was insulted to get it back full of coins, like she was a street musician begging for money, I suppose.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 3

2009-06-09T22:21:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 3, June 3, 2009

Today I’ve read interviews with Lily May Ledford, the other Coon Creek Girls, and other friends, and family members of Lily May. Ledford’s daughter, Barbara, gave an interview in 1996 and spoke candidly about the control that Ledford’s manager (John Lair) and husbands exerted over her. According to the daughter, Ledford hated this control and manipulation but would not confront them or stand up for herself.

Ledford’s daughter says: “He (John Lair) probably wanted them (The Coon Creek Girls) to be perceived as unique, you know, the first women string band, but yet, he did not want them to be perceived as feminists, or someone who would upset the apple cart in their community. . . . he did not want, like on a religious level or a social level, for them to be perceived as people who would go over the line. . . . He wanted them to be spunky on stage, but he didn’t want them to be feminists on stage. And so he controlled that very closely. The kinds of things they said on stage—he didn’t want them to say much. He just wanted them to play. And the things that they said on stage were usually led by men. You know, men were the emcees.”

Yet, Lily May speaks of being an independent woman, on the road with other women as the Coon Creek Girls. (This is from a 1976 interview in SingOut! magazine):

“Playing shows on down in Georgia and the Carolinas and Alabama, you were insulted by the audience. They were mostly men, there were seldom any women, at the shows. They’d be drinkin’, and they’d make fun of our calico dresses and high-top shoes, and on one or two occasions we’d have to fight them. They’d come back in the alley where we’d be loading the car, and a few of these—we call ‘em hoods, now, my kid does—they’d follow us back there, and stand off and make fun and say insulting things and make cracks about us to one another and laugh.
“We’d have these high-top shoes strung around our necks—we didn’t pack ‘em, we just threw them in the car. And we attacked them! Me and my sisters, did we beat the devil out of ‘em with our shoes! And did it surprise them! They had no idea! We had a couple fights like that and they backed off and left.”

I’m starting to get a much more complete notion of Lily May’s inner life. Tomorrow I’m going to do some listening of 1930s Coon Creek Girls recordings.

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 2

2009-06-09T22:17:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 2, June 2, 2009

Lily May Ledford devoted her musical life and talents to the strict (some say parsimonious) control of producer John Lair, who kept her out of the national limelight and decked out in calico, and cut her pay when she agreed to move with him from WLS National Barn Dance Radio in Chicago to the Renfro Valley Barn Dance (first in Cincinnati, then in Mt. Vernon, Ky) in 1939). By 1977, Lily May Ledford was sick with rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes and in dire financial stress.

Today I read the sad letters she wrote to a musician friend in late 1977. One says: “We are in poor circumstances financially this month and next two or three. I’ve begged & borrowed so much, but should draw quite a sum of back money I’ve been ill so long. . . .In the mean time I am being dragged around to every place of human resources & it looks as tho I may get food stamps but so far no medical aid that’s what I need now so badly. . . . I wonder if you did your fall tour Oh Lord! how I wish I was out of this bed and right in that van with you.”

I also found the menu for the White House Dinner for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth I in 1939 (see Day 1). The Coon Creek Girls performed at the “Program of American Music” later that evening, but were not invited to supper. Would you eat this?
“The dinner set before the assemblage included clam cocktail, calf’s head soup, terrapin, corn sticks, boned capon, cranberry sauce, peas, buttered beets, sweet potato cones, frozen cheese and cress salad, maple and almond ice cream, white pound cake, and coffee.”

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

Appalachian Music Fellowship 1

2009-06-09T21:52:00.000-04:00

Berea College Appalachian Music Fellowship

Day 1, June 1, 2009

*Researching music and sound archives for historical inspiration/acumen for a poetry manuscript.

*The archivists in the Special Collections Department at Hutchins Library already had a tray of research waiting for me when I arrived this morning. It was like being served a fancy meal in a swank restaurant. The first thing I read was a timeline of the Coon Creek Girls, the first female string band to play on radio. Some highlights:

*8 June 1939: The Coon Creek Girls play before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the White House as part of a program of American music organized by Eleanor Roosevelt. (My excuse to work Mrs. Roosevelt into this poetry collection)

*Later in 1939: The Coon Creek Girls play a week-long show in Pittsburgh with the Orson Welles Show one week after his infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. From a 1994 interview with Evelyn Lange Perry (“Daisy”—all the Coon Creek Girls had to take on flower names): “between shows the fellows in the orchestra, they would tease us because Lily May and Rosie had this terrific southern accent. And they asked us if we ever went barefoot, or, do you wear shoes all the time. . . . So we decided the last show that week . . . we’d do our show barefoot . . . with our regular long dresses and our bows in our hair, and I tell you, these people were high class people, but they just about died. I’m telling you that whole theatre just roared.” One researcher suggests this was a protest by the Coon Creek Girls to subjugate stereotypes, although “Daisy” tells it like it was just a little joke on the boys.

*Cultural prescriptions and strict gender roles made women playing on stage in the 1930s a target of criticism by the public. When one Grand Ole Opry fan wrote a letter expressing his concern over Roy Acuff’s female banjo player (Rachel Veach) playing in a band of men, Acuff began passing her off as the sister of his dobro player.

*Finally, here is the broadcaster’s script for September 19, 1936, the day Lily May Ledford—The Mountain Girl debuted on the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago. She was 19 years old; she played solo fiddle, and here is the broadcaster’s introduction. I assume it is written in “fake hillbilly” so the broadcaster, John Lair, won’t fur-get how to sound all mountaineer aw-then-tikated and sich like (even though he grew up in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky):

“An now, folks, we’re ready to interduce to ye the newest member of the big WLS family. You’ve read about her, an heard about her this week, an of course you’re anxious to meet her an see what she’s like. Her name is Lily May Ledford. She comes from the Kintucky mountains, from back in one of them dark hollers five miles off the road. She’s five feet an about 9 inches tall, with brown eyes an one of the nicest smiles we’ve seen in a long time. Durin the nineteen years that have passed over her head Lily May hasn’t always had such an easy time of it. When there’s ten mouths to feed in one family everbody hasta do ther part—spechilly when the livin hasta be dug out of a little hillside farm—an many a time she’s had to go out an do a mans work in the corn field er the tobacker patch. Somehow, tho, she found time to do a lot of practicing on her granpappy’s old fiddle an the one ambition of her life has bin to git to Chicago an play on the old barn dance. . . . An now, Lily May, yore big moment has come. All up an down Indian Creek an North Fork an Red River Valley an back in Pinch-em-Tight Holler all yore old frens and kinfolk are gathered round radios waitin to hear ye, an out there on the air, all over the country, thousands of frens you aint met are waitin to hear ye, too, so step right up here with that old sushaw fiddle an show em what you got.”

--from the Berea College Special Collections, Hutchins Library

MOTIF Debut Reading

2009-03-31T19:50:00.000-04:00

Motif: Writing by Ear An Anthology of Writings about Music had a debut reading at the Appalachian Studies Association in Portsmouth, Ohio last weekend. Eleven contributors read their poems, short stories, song lyrics and essays to a receptive audience. I was very honored to hear the works of Jeanne Bryner, Diane Gilliam, Dana Wildsmith, Hilda Downer, Silas House,Denton Loving, Sylvia Lynch, Jason Howard, Eddy Pendarvis, Art Stringer, and Ron Houchin. Our next reading is in Huntington, West Virginia, April 20. Maybe you can join us?

Silas House at the debut reading of Motif: Writing by Ear

Archie Green: A friend to the working class

2009-03-23T14:13:00.000-04:00

Archie Green, age 90, died yesterday. Green was most interested in understanding and documenting the culture of working people. His own memories of his work as a shipwright are documented here. Archie Green was known for establishing “laborlore” as an academic study; he was a respected folklorist, scholar, writer, teacher, lobbyist, and champion of the ordinary, everyday worker. He had most recently received the Living Legend Award from the Library of Congress. Green was also a music scholar and aficionado, documenting relationships between music and causes and writing about certain protest singers, like the southeastern Kentucky bard Sarah Ogan Gunning. In 1965, The Journal of American Folklore published his "Hillbilly Music: Source & Symbol.” The article remains a touchstone of country music scholarship, serving as a concise primer on the early development of commercial country music. Read this seminal article in its entirety here. R.I.P.

Community Workshop in Creative Writing

2009-03-22T15:15:00.000-04:00

Spalding’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program Offers Community Workshop in Creative Writing, Louisville, Ky.

Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program is offering a “Community Workshop” to local creative writers May 23-30, during the MFA Program’s Spring Residency. Community Workshop students will participate in an instructor-led 8-day non-credit writing workshop and are invited to attend all MFA Residency events, including lectures and panel discussions normally reserved exclusively for MFA students.

Writers interested in attending the Community Workshop should submit a 5- to 7-page writing sample in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, or screenwriting. Applicants receive a $100 discount off the full price of $700 if they apply by April 8. All applications are due by April 22. The price includes lunch every day and dinner most days.

Workshop instructor Erin Keane is the author of The Gravity Soundtrack, a full-length collection of poems, and The One-Hit Wonders, a chapbook of poems about and inspired by rock & roll. Her new novel-in-poems, Death Defying Acts, will be published by WordFarm in 2010. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines, including Nimrod, Phoebe, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sou'wester, Poems & Plays, New Southerner, Now & Then and Louisville Magazine. A recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, Keane lives in Louisville where she writes for Velocity and LEO, teaches at Bellarmine University, leads writing workshops for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts, and directs the InKY Reading Series.

For more information and registration details, visit www.spalding.edu/communityworkshop.

Motif has arrived!

2009-03-16T14:36:00.000-04:00

MOTIF: WRITING BY EAR, An Anthology of Writings about Music, is Volume 1 in the MOTIF anthology series from publisher MotesBooks.

Future editions will focus on other themes, but each submission in this first collection uses music as a motif, either prominently or in artfully subtle ways. This first MOTIF anthology includes fiction, nonfiction and poetry, as well as some song lyrics by the likes of Patty Griffin and Buddy & Julie Miller. Other contributors include Silas House, Barbara Crooker, Pamela Duncan, George Ella Lyon and Maurice Manning.

From reviewer and songwriter Sue Massek: "Motif editor Marianne Worthington has woven these stories, songs and poems with music's silken threads, creating a symphony that rocks, sways and syncopates in rhythm to the heartbeats of humankind and follows the melodies and harmonies flowing through our veins. The writers' voices reflect the rich forms and styles of their deliciously diverse home places."

From reviewer and music journalist Peter Cooper: "Within this beautiful book are thousands of words that offer poetry and laughter, peace and respite, Piano Red and Patty Loveless. There are burgundy shoes here, and feet that tattoo the earth. There is Roy, the wino who worked for Bud Whedbee doing maintenance jobs. There is bourbon and ginger, and melody and harmony in between the lines. All adorn the mystery, with no notion to unravel."

MOTIF is available at amazon.com or through the publisher: order@motesbooks.com.

MotesBooks, Louisville, Ky: http://www.motesbooks.com

Something's Rising

2009-03-10T21:07:00.000-04:00

Next month the University Press of Kentucky releases a new title, Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. The book features interviews, biographies, and oral histories of a dozen activists fighting mountaintop removal coal mining practices in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia. The book's authors, Silas House and Jason Howard, have been working for a couple of years to bring this book to completion. You can preorder here. You'll want a copy!

Come & Listen You Fellers

2009-03-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

Review of MUSIC OF COAL
Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields

Produced by Jack Wright
Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2007

I'll be under the mountain courting a dire fate,
Till my lungs are as black as a day in this place,
Till my hands callus over and my heart turns to stone,
Then you'll grind that to dust just to fill in the hole.
"Black Lung," by A. J. Roach

Scott County, Virginia, songwriter A. J. Roach was angry when he wrote "Black Lung" in 2006. His maternal grandfather, a coal miner, died from black lung disease when his mother was a child. His grandmother was left with nine children to raise yet was only compensated by the coal company with "a few hundred dollars." Roach says, "It was that anger and that feeling of loss that spurred me to write this song."

Roach's song is one of 48 musical expressions of struggle and resistance in the recently released two-CD set Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields. "The themes of these songs are sometimes tragic because so many people have lost their lives in mining over the years," says Producer Jack Wright.

Music of Coal is the project of the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth in Big Stone Gap, a delinquency prevention agency that has served families in Southwest Virginia since 1980. Conceived as a fund-raising project, the collection contains nearly a century's worth of coal mining songs. An accompanying book includes lyrics, archival photographs and Wright's extensive, Grammy-nominated liner notes.

The project relied heavily on local musicians and resources, including Maggard Recording Studio of Big Stone Gap as principal production facility.

"Our collection gives a hundred year view of life in the mines and camps of Appalachia from many of the voices who lived it," says Wright, "I want people to see the complex and bittersweet history of coal mining — to see how families have struggled to make a living."

Music of Coal begins with a 1908 recording of a music hall tune, "Down in a Coal Mine," performed by the Thomas Edison Concert Band. The collection ends with pop music eccentric Natalie Merchant covering the classic union ballad "Which Side Are You On?" In between are 46 songs—many of them performed by miners and miners' children and grandchildren—that tell the often dreadful and dichotomous story of coal mining in Appalachia.

Listeners can witness Clay County, Kentucky, native Aunt Molly Jackson's aggressive and arresting directive for miners to "strike for union conditions, boys," in her 1937 recording of "Hard Times in Coleman's Mine." Just a few songs later, listeners can sympathize with the sentiments of contemporary songwriter Susanne Mumpower as she celebrates her grandfather's memory as a miner in "Coal Dust Kisses": "Looking back, I never knew I knew hard times," Mumpower sings, "We had things money couldn't buy, like coal dust kisses all the time."

The assassinations of United Mine Workers of America executive Jock Yablonski and his family are recounted in Hazel Dickens' stark ballad "The Yablonski Murder," where Dickens nearly shouts her declarative refrain: "Well, it's cold blooded murder, friends, I'm talking about. Now, who's gonna stand up? Lord, who's gonna fight?" Amazingly, this poetic murder ballad of injustice and corruption sits comfortably next to "Coal Miner's Boogie," a hillbilly eight-to-the-bar dance song. George Davis, who spent 28 years as an underground miner, became known as "The Singing Miner" and hosted daily radio shows in Hazard, Kentucky. His "Coal Miner's Boogie" heralds the end of the miners' working day: "Put a nickel in the slot and the music rolls out. See them old coal miners just a-boogieing about."

Music of Coal includes popular musicians like Blue Highway, Tom T. Hall, Dwight Yoakum and Darrell Scott, as well as more obscure singing miners like Orville Jenks, Ed Sturgill and Gene Carpenter, and singing preachers such as Dorothy Myles, Joe Freeman, Elder James Caudill and members of the Evangelistic Choralaires, the oldest African-American Appalachian gospel group in southwest Virginia.

Songwriters and performers known for their protest efforts like Sarah Ogan Gunning, Nimrod Workman, Jean Ritchie and Billy Edd Wheeler are well represented. There is even a musical lineage: Sara and Maybelle Carter sing the beautifully executed "Coal Miner's Blues" of 1938 on volume one. Nearly 70 years later, Sara Carter's grandson Dale Jett sings Billy Edd Wheeler's "The Coal Tattoo" on volume two.

Music of Coal is a gift outright. In voices plain, clear and often haunting, we are given an entire musical history of coal mining life and work in Appalachia. Within these songs we learn of union organizing, coalfield battles, the broad form deed, environmental plunder and degradation, the contributions of women and minorities to coal mining, and the wretched consequences of disease, disability and disaster associated with coal mining.

Jack Wright notes in the anthology's introduction that the collection "is our praise and acknowledgement to the men, women and children who have labored, sometimes sacrificing their all, to produce coal for the fires of progress."

Despite the often dire fate of mining work, the lure of steady wages and honest work in the coal mines is an age-old story. Miners knew this and so did their children, as Merle Travis, a miner's son, reminds us in his 1947 cautionary song "Dark as a Dungeon":

Come and listen you fellows, so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortunes in the dark dreary mine.
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul,
Till the stream of your blood is as black as the coal.

This review first appeared in New Southernerner online.

Visit the Music of Coal website