On Appalachian Music, With A Playlist

Around the globe, culture is being homogenised by dominant styles of popular music, spread far and wide by delivery platforms like Tik Tok and Youtube. Even so, regional musics continue to be surprisingly resilient. I’m not just talking about variations like KPop, or like the Ghanaian drill music that has been on the verge of becoming a global success (Yaw Tog! Jay Band!) for the past 18 months. Nor do I have in mind the global popularity of reggaeton, son, cumbia, bachata and other forms of Latin music. There’s a good reason why the Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny has topped Billboard’s Pop Star Power Rankings all year.

Instead, I’m talking about the resilience of the genuinely off-the-grid regional music – both old and new – featured on this week’s Werewolf music playlist, which I’ve loosely called Mountain Music. The mountains in question being the Appalachians, which run from Georgia in the south to Pennsylvania and New York (and beyond) in the north. What I’m calling “mountain music” has largely been a product of the central and southern Appalachians, including areas in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

The resilience of this music has been a by-product of talent, geography and intense poverty. The Appalachians happen to run diagonally across the east/west lines of much of the region’s highways and railroads. People got left behind – economically and culturally – along the ridgelines and down in the hollows. It is not an accident that two of the leading musicians from the region – Jean Ritchie and Roscoe Holcomb – were members of the Old Regular Baptist Church.

This music isn’t a museum piece, though. Young artists like the banjo prodigy Nora Brown have been introducing new audiences to older forms of banjo playing ( e.g. the clawhammer style vs the dominant three finger style of bluegrass banjo playing pioneered by Earl Scruggs). New audiences are also gravitating to the nasal “high lonesome” style of singing Holcomb learned in church, and which has become associated with the ballads brought across the Atlantic by the pioneers from England, Ireland and Scotland.

More to the point, Brown and those who came before her have diligently searched out and learned the regional variations on old folk standards like ‘ Shady Grove” “Cumberland Gap” “Trouble in Mind” etc etc. In many cases, these variants have been learned - either directly or from recordings – from musicians like Lee Sexton (1928-2021), Addie Graham (1890-1978) Virgil Anderson (1902-1997)and Fred Cockerham (1905-1980).

As Brown said in a recent interview, this seeking out of the many different versions of the older tunes is one of the constant rewards:

….That’s one of the awesome things about the music; you find a really great song and you’re like, “Oh my God… this is the best thing I could have ever learned… I love the song so much.” You [then] discover something else and you just get that feeling again. It’s very cool to not only see how much recorded music there is, but different versions of songs that maybe you know one version of. For example, “Shady Grove,” that’s a pretty common well-known tune, but there are a lot of cool, unique versions of the song that are just played differently… it could be in a different tuning, or could be a slightly different melody. There’s always that curiosity of finding out other things and listening to more stuff.

You bet.

The playlist tracks

This Werewolf playlist isn’t in any way definitive, and I don’t lay claim to any deep knowledge of the music, or its cultural wellsprings. Nora Brown has been an inspiration to go deeper. Five years into her career, Brown has only recently turned 17. The version of “Wild Goose Chase” that kicks off the playlist came by way of Virgil Anderson, and is featured on her just released live album Long Time To Be Gone. Her 2020 recording of “ The Very Day I’m Gone” is based on Addie Graham’s wonderful variation of the old folk music chestnut “500 Miles.”

The revenge drama “Frankie and Albert” (also known as “Frankie and Johnny”) was inspired by a murder committed in 1899, in St Louis, Missouri. At 22, Frankie Baker shot dead her 17 year old lover Albert Britt after he two-timed her with Nelly Bly, with whom he had just won a slow dancing contest at a local tavern. It is one of the very few murder ballads where the woman kills the man. Here’s a link to a lively 1921 version with Frank Crumit on vocals.

Omer Forster’s beautiful instrumental “Flowery Girls” is one of the highlights of this list :

All his life Omer has played in an archaic two-finger style (thumb and index finger) which he can’t remember learning from anyone; “it’s always been natural with me.” Nor has he during his life been aware that his style was all that unusual; apparently his friends and neighbours in rural Humphries County [Tennessee] accepted the style without much comment. But distinctive it is: soft, graceful, complex, different both from the classic three-finger vaudeville styles of the other middle Tennessee artists like Uncle Dave Macon, and different from the claw-hammer style of the eastern mountains.

Ira and Charlie Louvin were a classic example of the region’s close harmony sibling groups. (The Everly Brothers were the style’s most successful pop practitioners.) “Kentucky” is from the Louvins’ great Tragic Songs of Life album from 1956 – a time when, apparently, a lyric like “ I miss the darkies singing in the silvery moonlight” could still pass muster. Everyone loved Charlie Louvin. But Ira Louvin, who played the mandolin beautifully and sang in a high quavering tenor, was reportedly “as mean as a rattlesnake” in private life. Somehow, Ira survived being shot four times in the chest by his third wife Faye after he allegedly tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. He eventually died in a car crash in 1965, along with his fourth wife, Anne Young.

Other tracks: “Matty Groves” dates back to 17th century Britain, and is another murder ballad. Basically, the lord of the manor discovers his wife in bed with a young man, and kills them both, but not without regrets. Like many other English, Scottish and Irish ballads, “Matty Groves” was brought to the American colonies, and it eventually found a lasting home in the Appalachians. The much recorded “Shady Grove” is an offshoot of the same song. The other track by Doc Watson (1923-2012) on this list is “Your Long Journey” – which was written by his wife Rosa Lee, and is best known from a syrupy version by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. There is lingering controversy over the title. Arguably, it may be “Lone Journey Home”( which makes more sense) and the title could possibly have been misheard as “Long” by the Smithsonian collectors, thanks to Watson’s strong Tennessee accent. Or so the story goes.

Any number of tracks could have been included by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973) a tireless folk music collector and practitioner of America’s music and dance styles for over 60 years. He also had a keen interest in the traditional music of Cherokee Native Americans. Lunsford can be briefly glimpsed in this extraordinary footage of old style mountain clog dancing. It seems very odd to think that this event was happening at the same time in the mid 1960s as demonstrations were taking place against the Vietnam War, and as hippies of the same age as these teenagers were heading for Haight Ashbury. The old, weird America indeed.

Despite the immense value of his collecting work to American culture, Lunsford was a polarising figure. In his autobiography, the folk musician Dave Van Ronk (no shrinking violet himself) described Lunsford as " a racist anti-Semitic white supremacist who in later years would steadfastly refuse to come to the Newport Folk Festivals because of [Pete] Seeger's involvement. " (Seeger quit the Communist Party in 1950. In 1995, he was still describing himself as a communist but by then, the term had lost much of its cultural sting.)

Definitive versions of Lunsford classics like “Goodbye Old Stepstone” and “Old Mountain Dew” can be found on his Music from Turkey Creek album. “Lost John Dean” his 1928 recording of a 19th century song about a runaway black slave from Bowling Green, Kentucky with superhero powers, is also worth checking out.

Finally then, it's back to Nora Brown. Her version of “Jay Gould’s Daughter” strips the song back to its foundations, as tragedy befalls the child of the 19th century railway robber baron.(Moral: wealth is no guarantee that harm will not befall one’s nearest and dearest). As with much of the music Brown has learned from her elders – like say, her own take on “Little Satchel'' by Fred Cockerham – the tunes evolve, and eventually become her own over the course of her repeated performances of them. So it goes.

She‘s keeping her options open. “I’m not sure if I want to continue a career in music for my entire adult life,” she said a year ago in an interview. “But I do know that I always want to play music. I don’t really know exactly what I’m going to do, but I do know I want to continue passing on musical traditions.” Here’s a beautiful example of that process, from back when she was only 13.

Here’s the playlist:

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