“Hey,” he told them in tones that were at once genial and sternly disapproving, “if you’re not gon’ listen, I’m not gon’ pick. I mean that thing.”
The fans were genuinely bewildered, for throughout the evening, until Watson’s appearance, they had simply responded like typical bluegrass fanatics—stomping in time with the showy fiddle and banjo runs that are intended to produce precisely that kind of frantic response. But the older-vintage musicians like Watson, Asa Martin, and Buell Kazee see a big difference between their craft and modern-day bluegrass. They may like bluegrass, may admire its pioneers such as Bill Monroe, but they are aware of a crucial and subtle distinction between it and the tradition out of which it grew.
Bluegrass has become pure entertainment, evolving during the last several decades through the consummate skills of people like Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Lester Flatt. It sounds, in many respects, very similar to its mountain-music predecessor. Both rely chiefly on a blend of banjos, fiddles, and guitars; and in addition, the old-time music had its share of fast-paced reels and hoedown numbers—aimed, like bluegrass, at producing the same sort of rollicking retreat from reality. But bluegrass has a different spirit, a much greater emphasis on individual showmanship, that is at odds, somehow, with the natural modesty that runs through the mountain character.
And there is also a difference in the type of emotion expressed by each musical form, and therefore in its ultimate, overriding purpose. With some notable exceptions (the music of Ricky Skaggs comes to mind), today’s bluegrass is seldom sad, while yesterday’s mountain music often was. When Asa Martin, for example, looked back on the evenings at the rugged old church, the things that stood out in his mind were the slow and ballady songs like “Railroad Boy,” a New World rewrite of an old English standard, which told the story of a mournful young girl committing suicide in the cause of unrequited love. There were also, Martin remembered, the purely localized compositions—songs like “The Death of Edward Hawkins,” the autobiography of a young Kentucky man who was hanged for murder at the age of twenty-three and who, according to legend, sang his confessions from the scaffold moments before the rope snapped taut.
“There were a lot of songs about sadness and tragedy,” Martin explained with a somber nod of his head. “Don’t know quite why that was, really, ’cept it just seems natural when things go wrong, when tragedies hit, that you would make up a song about it.”
And that, above all else, has been the distinguishing feature of mountain music throughout the years. Its primary purpose lies less in escape and entertainment than in a head-on coping with whatever the world can throw at you.
Given that fact, it was not surprising that the music of Appalachia would soon become intertwined with the social and political issues that had begun to prevail. In the very early days of the Grand Ole Opry, Uncle Dave Macon raised a few eyebrows with a hard-hitting song called “Buddy, Won’t You Roll Down the Line”—protesting, among other things, the coal company bosses’ using convict labor to drive down the wages of working people. There were a fair number of songs like it, for there was a lot to protest in the mountains of the South.
Many people who had never been there once thought of Appalachia as a remote and backward place, devoid of good roads and modern methods of communication—the kind of place where the folk songs of England could endure for centuries with very little change. And for centuries that view was pretty much correct. But in the past several decades the pace of change has been astounding, particularly so to the people who have lived through it. Roads and television have made the mountains accessible to outside influences, and the accessibility has proved a mixed blessing at best.
The coal companies, for example, claim to have created jobs, and no doubt they have. But they have also transformed much of Appalachia from a subsistence-farming area into one of the most industrialized parts of the country, outside the big cities of the north.
Such industrial revolutions, of course, have never been very pretty, and when the companies arrived in the mountains, the by-products of their coming were depressingly similar to conditions in Europe a century or so earlier. Nimrod Workman, a skinny and toothless ex-miner and blues singer from West Virginia, remembered the days during Woodrow Wilson’s administration when he would enter the mines so early, and emerge so late, that he seldom saw the sun. For that, he said, he and his comrades were paid $2.80 a day—generally in scrip that was redeemable only at company-owned stores. In the evening they would wander home to the tiny cabins that they rented for six dollars a month, coming in so exhausted that “there wasn’t much to do but sing a little bit and go to bed.”
Coal camp songs thus became a desperately popular tradition in the mountains, a last-ditch bastion of sanity and perspective that helped sustain the people who were forced to create them. Among the most famous of the mining songs, particularly in the outside world, were “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” both of them written by Merle Travis, a guitar-picking native of western Kentucky who escaped the mines through the skill in his fingers.
“Dark As a Dungeon,” recorded by everybody from Chad Mitchell to Grandpa Jones, is the better song of the two, and it was written, oddly enough, when Travis was three thousand miles away from the mines. “I was driving home after a date with a beautiful girl in Redondo Beach, California,” he explained to writer Dorothy Horstman. “I had a recording session to do the next morning and needed some material. I parked my car under a street light and wrote the verses. Sometimes the saddest songs are written when a person is happy.”
Not always, however. There were dozens of mountain writers who were never able to escape, and whose songs were as sad as any you’ll find. They may not have had Travis’s great skill with words, but they did have their own style of rough-edged eloquence that comes when you really have to live it. One of the best of these writers was a handsome, strong-faced woman balladeer by the name of Hazel Dickens. She had seen her share of Appalachian tragedy, and this, in part, was how she responded to it in her songs: He’s a poor man ’cause mining’s all he’s known and miners don’t get rich loading coal.
All through her music, there’s a rough and angry quality to the sadness, and it’s appropriate for a line of work as dangerous as hammering for coal a mile inside a mountain. But it’s a peculiar kind of anger—very fatalistic. In the polished million-sellers of Merle Travis, as well as in the down-home coal camp blues of Hazel Dickens or Nimrod Workman, the affirmation of humanity lies not in overcoming, but in staring the son-of-a-bitch right in the face and taking whatever it has to offer.
For many years, that point of view was prevalent in the mountains, but as every generation learns and relearns, the fatalism of the father eventually gives way to the anger of the son; and by the early sixties, Appalachian writers such as Billy Edd Wheeler were turning out anthems of straight-forward protest: I’ve never been one to walk in lines, picket with placards, or carry signs. But maybe I’m behind the times.
Those lines are the bridge in “They Can’t Put It Back,” a song Wheeler wrote when he was returning for a visit with his grandfather in the West Virginia mountains of his boyhood. Things had changed a lot since his departure for Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, then Berea, then Yale, and finally the beginnings of a songwriting career in New York City. He was aghast at what he saw on the trip back home.
“I was driving along Big Coal River, on one of those little old mountain roads,” he remembers, “and I came to a spot where they had been strip-mining. The machines had literally taken off the top of a mountain, and the debris was scattered down the hillsides. I had a very emotional reaction to that—I had also flown over the area and seen what they were doing in a lot of West Virginia and Kentucky. So I sat down and wrote something a little bit different—straight, hard protest.”
Wheeler has been best known over the years for a different type of song—the novelty numbers like his own country hit, “
Ode To The Little Brown Shack Out Back,” or the Kingston Trio’s “Reverend Mr. Black,” or the torrid love song “Jackson,” made popular by Johnny and June Carter Cash (and later by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood). But after his move to New York City, and some initial coaching by pop writers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Wheeler fell in very compatibly with some of the protest singers of Greenwich Village.
Judy Collins, among others, would periodically wander over to his dumpy apartment in Brooklyn and listen by the hour to tapes of his songs, for she had always been known as one of the most meticulous of the folkies in her search for material. Eventually she recorded four Wheeler originals, and they chronicle in a poignant way the agonies and particularities of life in the mountains.
Perhaps the most haunting of them is “The Coming of the Roads,” which, like most of Wheeler’s compositions, is couched in human rather than ideological terms. But its message is, if anything, more obvious and wrenching than much of the straightforward protest that began to proliferate in the sixties. The song tells the story of a love affair gone sour, but it weaves the sadness through all the issues confronting Appalachia—the new highways that made it accessible to outsiders, the rape of the land by the strip-mining machines, the weakening of values by the hunger for wealth. The woman in the song has been seduced by the new alien ways, and her lover can only offer his lament, blaming her leaving on the coming of the roads.
There was an explosion of such songs in the late sixties and early seventies, and there was a great deal of talk about an emerging genre of mountain protest. This thinking was true as far as it went, but most of it contained at least one major flaw. It assumed that the modern explosion was something brand-new, and it wasn’t. There was one brief period in the 1930s when Depression-era radicalism combined with indigenous mountain conservatism to produce an extremely significant development in music. It was an instant, frozen in time, whose impassioned music was a progenitor not only of recent vintage country music, but of the Pete Seeger-Bob Dylan brand of protest music as well.
Some of the key figures during the period included Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, and Sara Ogan Gunning, who were actually all members of the same family. Their father was Oliver Perry Garland, a young minister and coalminer who had been raised as a frontier farmer and then turned to the mines as Appalachian life began to change. He cast his lot with the unions at their very beginning, but change did not come overnight, and the family moved from one dingy coal camp to another in search of a more adequate living.
Like most miners in southeastern Kentucky, they never really found it, and throughout the area the sense of desperation began to grow. About the time the Great Depression descended on the country as a whole, conditions in the mines were reaching rock-bottom. The United Mine Workers union had fizzled in the face of stiff opposition, and in the area around Harlan County, Kentucky, the miners were ready when the tougher and more committed radicals of the Communist-backed National Miners Union arrived on the scene.
Even in retrospect, it was a peculiar mix: the determined New York radicals mingling with the intensely conservative coal camp people—the one group tracing its values and ideology to Karl Marx, the other to Daniel Boone and Jesus. The compatibility lay in the remnants of a frontier spirit, a sort of don’t-tread-on-me independence that had long been a staple of Appalachian values—and also in the introduction by the union of an entirely new concept: hope. The idea of perfectibility, of radical alterations of the earthly condition, had never been a part of the mountaineers’ experience. Times had generally been hard, and the quest, therefore, was for endurance and dignity in the face of the world’s limited offerings.
But in the coal fields the times hit bottom, dignity came hard if it came at all, and in those circumstances, a strong radicalism began to take hold of people such as Aunt Molly Jackson. Aunt Molly was a balladeer and a midwife. She had helped deliver more than a hundred miners’ babies, only to watch helplessly as all too many of them died of malnutrition and childhood disease.
Two of those who died belonged to her half-sister, Sara Ogan, whose husband also died of TB when the coal dust of the mines got the better of his lungs. In the early and mid-thirties, the two women—along with their brother, Jim Garland—began writing songs that chronicled the struggles of the union. Garland, for example, wrote “The Ballad of Harry Simms,” a teenaged organizer who was gunned down in eastern Kentucky as he walked along a railroad track. (Garland’s account does not mention the fact that a few weeks later, the coal company gun-thugs suspected of the killing were found slaughtered in exactly the same spot.)
Of all the writings of the day, however, none were any more revealing than those of Sara Ogan (who later remarried, to become Sarah Gunning). Sara, whose voice and compositions were recently recorded for preservation on Folk-Legacy Records, continued to sing all the old hymns and traditional numbers. But she also took the tunes to some of her favorites, including “Precious Memories,” and transformed the lyrics into an amalgam of deeply personal lamentation and highly polemical exhortation in the cause of unionism.
She called the new song “Dreadful Memories,” and she sang it all in a mournful voice, rich and clear in its hillbilly twang. What’s the crime that we’ve committed? Nothing, only that we’re poor.
In the short run, such songs played an important role in the organizing process, but neither they nor the National Miners Union became a permanent force in the history of the mountains. The bitter thrust of coal-field radicalism was blunted by several factors—the reform and renewal of the more moderate United Mine Workers union, the New Deal with its aura of concern for the working man’s plight, and finally, World War II.
The war, even more than Roosevelt’s anti-Depression strategies, pumped life into the American economy, and certainly into American patriotism. The growing sense of fear and anger in the face of hard times became submerged beneath the national will to survive. And when radicalism re-emerged in the fifties and sixties, the music of protest was channeled in new directions—into the struggle against the out-front racism of the Deep South, the more subtly ingrained varieties farther north, and then against the new and peculiar war in Southeast Asia.
But the anthems of Sarah Ogan and Aunt Molly Jackson were more than a forgotten aberration. There was a direct and personal link between them and the music that was soon to come—a link that was forged between 1935 and the early forties, when the two sisters traveled to New York, singing their songs and seeking to drum up support for the battles in the coal camps. While they were there, they met and became friends with the godfathers of modern protest, a young and highly educated banjo player named Pete Seeger, and the hard-living poet of the Oklahoma dust bowl country, Woody Guthrie.
Both men were captivated by the utter simplicity of the women’s commitment, and Seeger, especially, became a student of the folk music tradition of the southern mountains. His interest was more than political. He traveled south to study the picking style of Aunt Samantha Bumgarner, a versatile banjo and fiddle player from western North Carolina, and also of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a legendary old banjo man from outside of Asheville whose right-wingish politics were enough to curl Seeger’s hair.
Among all but the most hard-hit Southerners (as well as the industrial workers of the North), there was a tendency toward such politics in the years that followed the Great Depression. There had long been a natural conservatism in the region, a discomfort in the face of rapid change, and there were some uglier and murkier characteristics that would rear their heads from time to time—a sullen defensiveness dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a deeply imbedded theology of racism that went back even further.
Even without all that, it was hard for white workers who had struggled their way through the viciousness of the thirties to comprehend the argument when blacks began to maintain that the game was rigged. After all, the white folks countered, they themselves had known hard times, but
had worked and scrimped and persevered, and in the end it had all paid off. They had begun to sniff prosperity, and it was hard to acknowledge that something other than their own sweat and blood had made it all possible.
But, of course, something else had. The Depression went away when the war came along to prime the pump. But the depression surrounding black people did not go away, for it was a fixture of the system, carefully enforced, and condemning all but a few remarkable blacks to a second-class life and livelihood.
The idealism of the struggle against that system caught the imagination of Pete Seeger and the younger musicians that followed him—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, and all the rest. But among the traditional fans of hillbilly music—the people who would retreat to their radios with the Grand Ole Opry, or besiege the Ryman on drizzly weekend evenings—the threat of new upheavals was the last thing they wanted to contemplate. The Protestant Ethic was reaping some rewards in the here-and-now, and there was an intolerance that soon bordered on outright hatred for those who would tear at the fabric that seemed to make those rewards possible.
The split between the fans of Pete Seeger and of, say, Roy Acuff was soon very striking, and the idea that the two forms of music had evolved directly—and over a remarkably short span of time—from the same point of origin began to seem wildly implausible.
But it didn’t seem that way to everybody. There were people like Bobby Bare, a transplanted Ohioan who would apply his rich and rustic baritone to offerings from both sides of the musical chasm. In the early sixties, soon after his arrival in Nashville, Bare recorded a song called “Detroit City,” the story of a man who hops a north-bound freight looking for work and maybe a little bit of excitement, winds up with nothing but an assembly-line job and a drinking problem, and begins to yearn for the home and the girl he left down South.
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