Black Musicians in Appalachia: An Introduction to Affrilachian Music
by Fred J. Hay
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 2003), pp. 1-19
[Footnotes moved to the end of the article. R. Matteson 2011]
BLACK MUSICIANS IN APPALACHIA: AN INTRODUCTION TO AFFRILACHIAN MUSIC
FRED J. HAY
[FRED J. HAY, Professor of Appalachian Studies and Librarian of the W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University, has published articles and books on African- American and Caribbean culture, Appalachian Studies, and librarianship. His most recent book is "Goin' Back to Sweet Memphis": Conversations with the Blues (University of Georgia
Press, 2001).]
This special issue of Black Music Research Journal, devoted to the African-American music of Appalachia, focuses on a long-neglected but important region of the African diaspora. Because the music of blacks in the Appalachian region has been poorly documented and rarely presented, this special issue is mostly descriptive in content. It contains survey articles addressing major genres of African-American music as well as essays on the African-American influence on white Appalachian music, the poetry and performance of "classic blues" singer Ida Cox, and the Appalachian genesis of the James Brown sound.
In 1985, William Turner and Ed Cabbell published their pioneering compilation Blacks in Appalachia. It came as a revelation to many that there had always been a significant African-American presence in the southern Appalachians. In the wake of the publication of their monograph, regional serial publications Now and Then (1986), Mountain Life and Work (1988), and Appalachian Heritage (1991) published special African- American issues. More recently, scholarship on diverse aspects of the African-American experience in Appalachia has been published. This special issue of BMRJ makes an important contribution to this new Affrilachian scholarship.[1] Since it is the first attempt at producing an overview of black Appalachian music, added documentation in the form of a directory of black Appalachian musicians (living and dead) and a preliminary bibliography on black Appalachian music are included in a separate issue (BMRJ 24, no. 1).
Appalachia, Appalachians, and Their Music
Well, I believe I'll take a train, all the way to Berea,
Well, I believe I'll take a train, all the way to Berea,
Well, that little Kentucky town, where baby waits for me.
-"Way Up in the Mountains of Kentucky,"
Otis "Smokey" Smothers[2]
Appalachia, conceived of as the contiguous mountainous area of the southeastern United States, was first designated as a distinct and unique cultural region by James Taylor in 1862. Referring to this region as "Alleghenia," Taylor (1862) proposed that it was of strategic importance to the Union; because of its nonplantation economy, its residents were closer in sentiment to those residing in nonslave states than they were to the white people of the lowland South.
It was not Taylor's decision to incorporate the southern mountain region into the Union but, instead, the rise of Jim Crow legislation that served to call wider attention to the region as a place different from the rest of the South. Following passage of Kentucky's infamous Day Law in 1904, Berea College ended its experiment in interracial education. The threat that Kentucky would mandate segregation in its private educational institutions, however, had loomed over the college for at least a decade. Facing this threat to the college's mission, college president William Goodell Frost in 1899 articulated a new purpose for Berea. Frost's vision was based on his description of a distinct geographical and cultural region that he labeled "Appalachian America" (Shapiro 1978; Frost 1997).
This region, according to Frost (1997, 6), was "the mountainous back yards of nine states ... one of God's grand divisions." Appalachian America was relatively unknown, inhabited by a "racially-pure" people that Frost referred to as our "contemporary ancestors" whose culture was very similar to that of Elizabethan England. In Frost's description, as Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams (2002, 201) observed, "Mountain people were not just white, but the right kind of whites: bearers of 'Anglo-Saxon blood."[3]
In the same decade that Frost busied himself defining Appalachia as a lily-white remnant of pure Anglo-Saxon descent, African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner completed his often-reproduced painting The Banjo Lesson, which portrays an elderly black man showing a young boy how to play the banjo. The scene was based on the artist's sketches of life in the mountain village of Highlands, North Carolina (Linn 1994, 73). (According to banjo scholar Karen Linn, the first mention of the banjo in Appalachia was the black banjo player in Maurice Thompson's 1885 short story "Hodson's Hide-Out" [125].)
A few miles from Highlands in Oconee County, South Carolina, the remarkable black banjo player J. C. Staggers was born in 1899. The same decade in which the region was defined as white also witnessed the Appalachian births of, among others, Bessie Smith (1894) in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Ida Cox (1896) in Toccoa, Georgia; Maceo Pickard (probably 1897) in Bluefield, West Virginia; Cow Cow Davenport (1894) in Anniston, Alabama; and both Clara Smith and Roland Martin (about 1894) in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
To adequately understand black Appalachian music, as well as its general neglect, we need an awareness of the popular conception of nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century Appalachia and its music. Appalachia was discovered, during this time, by outsiders looking for the surviving remnants of European song from what was perceived to be America's sole surviving remnant population of pure Anglo-American stock.
Beginning in 1882, Harvard professor Francis James Child ([1882-1898] 1965) published his five large volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. This collection contained 1,200 versions of 305 distinct ballads compiled from manuscript sources. Child included thirty versions of eighteen surviving English and Scottish ballads from North American sources and suggested that a wealth of traditional Anglo folksong might still be found in the United States. Child had studied in Germany and was familiar with the work of the Brothers Grimm in saving the surviving bits of pre-Christian folklore remembered by the peasant population. It was this idea of cultural survivals, definitively articulated by the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in his influential 1871 treatise Primitive Culture, that inspired the research of Child, as well as of those who followed in his footsteps in North America. Due to the influence of the Grimms, Tylor, and other scholars, the study of cultural survivals became the focus of much independent research among peasantries in Europe and in former and current European colonies throughout the world. In Latin America at about this same time, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, Nina Rodrigues in Brazil, and others were collecting instances of African cultural survivals from former slaves. The emphasis in this early research was preserving rapidly disappearing folkways.
After Child's death, his Harvard successor, George Lyman Kittredge, encouraged his students to collect the trans-Atlantic survivals of European folksong from North American singers. Kittredge copublished some of the first orally obtained ballads from North America-those collected in eastern Kentucky by Josiah Combs (Wilgus 1967, ix). Among Kittredge's many students was John Harrington Cox, who in 1925 published a large collection of West Virginia folksong, collected by his students from West Virginia University, as Folk-Songs of the South.
Also active in these early years was Professor C. Alphonso Smith, first of the University of North Carolina and later at the University of Virginia; he encouraged both his students and the state's public school teachers to collect traditional ballads before they disappeared. He maintained that these folksongs were an important part of American literature. Smith's efforts eventually led to the publication of Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Davis 1929) and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Davis 1960) both edited after Smith's death by University of Virginia English professor Arthur Kyle Davis.
Before the publication of the Virginia and West Virginia collections, an Englishman, Cecil Sharp, who had long been a student of folksong and dance in the United Kingdom, came to the United States at the invitation of Olive Dame Campbell. Campbell was the wife of John C. Campbell, author of the influential survey of Appalachia, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921). In 1916, Sharp traveled through Appalachia, especially parts of western North Carolina, east Tennessee, and around Charlottesville in Virginia. He and Olive Dame Campbell published English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachianisn 1917. Their collection included 122 songs and ballads and 323 tunes (Campbell and Sharp 1917).
Sharp's work inspired a number of other collectors, including the important 1930 song-collecting trip by Columbia University professor Dorothy Scarborough in the vicinity of Charlottesville and in Buchanan County in Virginia, and in the mountains near Asheville in North Carolina. Scarborough's influential book was published posthumously as A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains (1937).
On his visit to southern Appalachia in 1916, Sharp found that The region is from its inaccessibility a very secluded one. There are but few roads. ... [It is] completely isolated and cut off from all traffic with the rest of the world. Their speech is English, not American, and, from the number of expressions they use which have long been obsolete elsewhere, and the old-fashioned way in which they pronounce many of their words, it is clear that they are talking the language of a past day. . . . Economically they are independent.... The mountaineer is freer in his manner, more alert, and less inarticulate than his British prototype, and bears no trace of the obsequiousness of manner which, since the Enclosure Acts robbed him of his economic independence and made of him a hired labourer, has unhappily characterized the English villager. ... Their language, wisdom, manners, and the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial attributes which have been gradually acquired and accumulated in past centuries and handed down generation by generation, each generation adding its quotum to that which it received. (Campbell and Sharp 1917, iv-vii)
Although subsequent scholarship has exposed Sharp's description of life in early twentieth-century Appalachia as inaccurate, many both inside and outside the region (and inside and outside of academe) still take it as truth. The romantic themes of cultural, moral, and racial purity, of the survival of an isolated people and culture dating from a previous, simpler, and more happy era, and the urgent need to preserve these survivals so that they may enrich posterity are repeated over and over in the folk-music literature of Appalachia. Another collector of mountain ballads and songs, Appalachian native Cratis Williams (1937, 1-2) described his research among his Lawrence County, Kentucky, neighbors:
The lore and ways of the folk are fast disappearing and it is the desire of the author to save the folk-heritage of Lawrence County for its future generations who may be stimulated with a pride in their earthy, corn-liquor drinking, ballad-singing ancestors who were content to till the soil but whose restless yearning and wildness of spirit within were often reflected in the severe plaint and tumultuous tone of their song. . . . It is said that certain Asiatics who become possessed with transports of religious fervor employ a mad and soul-plumbing music compatible with the unrest within. So, with the mountain people, the character of their song is soothing to the soul and releases the emotion generated by an unconquerable fate at the hands of a hard and irreproachable God. This wildly sweet almost barbaric song should be a source of stimulative joy to the descendants of Lawrence County's ninety-nine per cent native-born population, and of matchless interest to a new race of musicians who are looking for the groundwork of an American opera.
The number of Child ballads collected in the southern mountains led Arthur Kyle Davis (1928, 290) to declare the region a "ballad territory": ballads, "like coal deposits, are to be found chiefly in the mountain area of each state, and the Southern Appalachian mountain region running through a part of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama is a district far more homogeneous and far more significant in balladry that any state division."
Appalachian Music and the Denial of Blackness
Way, way up in the mountain, I could hear my baby call,
Way, way up in the mountain, I could hear my baby call,
Well, you know, she called so loud, 'till it, rocks began to fall.
-"Way Up in the Mountains of Kentucky,"
Otis "Smokey" Smothers
Sharp wrote of the racially and culturally pure mountaineers who inhabited this homogeneous ballad territory, and Scarborough (1937, 12-13) wrote of the absence of the African American in the mountains, the mountaineers' distaste for them, and the "Nordic" racial traits of the Appalachians. In Country Music U.S.A., historian Bill C. Malone (1968, 6) described this earlier conception of Appalachia: "The Appalachians were pictured as a remote sanctuary inhabited by a pure strain of Anglo- Americans who, untouched by communication with the outside world, preserved the speech and customs of Elizabethan England."
Anthropologist Patricia D. Beaver (2001) observed that the region's history has been "white-washed and homogenized." Research over the past several decades has demonstrated that many more African Americans lived in these mountains than was previously thought and that the European ancestry of recent, as well as earlier, inhabitants of the region included many non-Anglos (see, for example, Turner 1985; Dunaway 2003).[4]
In her review of the general poverty and exploitation suffered by most Appalachian people regardless of race, Fayetta A. Allen (1974, 42) observed that the "difference between white and black Appalachians ... lies in visibility vs. invisibility." The music should and does reflect the region's diversity-even as this diversity remains invisible to many observers. The ballad collectors ignored most of Anglo-Appalachia's music because it fell outside the Child ballad canon. With few exceptions (Smith 1916; Scarborough 1925), they also ignored African-American song in the mountains even when the black mountaineers were singing Child ballads.
African-American musical influence in Appalachia has been occasionally acknowledged but popularly disregarded for years. Record collectors have known for decades that the mountains were one of the best places to look for old blues 78 rpm records. The mountaineers were listening to great black guitarists like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, blues divas like Bessie and Clara Smith, and the jazzy string band music of groups like the Mississippi Sheiks (whose recording of "Sitting on Top of the World" has become a bluegrass standard). It is known that in parts of the South, the guitar was introduced by black musicians and that, even today, outstanding finger-picking is still occasionally referred to by the offensive term "nigger-picking." We know, too, that the banjo was of African origin and that many of the twentieth-century mountain songs were called "blues" and were adapted from that African-American song genre.
Recent research has begun to bring this evidence together and examine it more critically. Folklorist William E. Lightfoot (1990) has documented the life and music of African-American Arnold Shultz, who greatly influenced bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe (Rooney 1971; Kocher 2004). Robert Cantwell, in his 1984 tour de force Bluegrass Breakdown, demonstrated beyond any doubt the significance of black blues and jazz on the development of bluegrass music. Likewise, Winans (1976), Conway (1995), and others have documented that just as Appalachia got the banjo from Africa, the Anglo-Appalachians learned to play it from African Americans, whether genuine or spurious (black-face minstrels).
These developments come as no surprise to those familiar with the histories of both Appalachian and African-American folk traditions. If not for his narrow focus on British/Scottish survivals and his lack of interest in African-American folk culture (and his apparent racism), Sharp would have undoubtedly recognized that the unique character of Appalachian ballad singing-that supposedly most romantically Elizabethan and pure Anglo idiom-which he identified as an independent invention of the good mountain folk was, in fact, learned through their contact with African Americans. Sharp described this innovation as follows:
"They have one vocal peculiarity, however, which I have never noticed amongst English folk-singers, namely, the habit of dwelling arbitrarily upon certain notes of the melody, generally the weakest accents. This practice, which is almost universal, by disguising the rhythm and breaking up the monotonous regularity of the phrases produces an effect of improvisation and freedom from rule which is very pleasing" (Campbell and Sharp 1917, x).
This "peculiarity" is actually almost universal in the blues, jazz, and gospel of African Americans, and it is also well documented in the music of West Africa. If Sharp had realized this fact, he may not have found this "peculiarity" so "pleasing," or he may have opened his mind to the magnificent richness and complexity of the region's musical culture.
Despite the recent scholarship documenting the African-American influence on Anglo-Appalachian music, many are still reluctant to accept the music of African Appalachians as Appalachian music. Some will reluctantly admit banjo player J. C. Staggers (1899-1984) to the Appalachian canon. He played traditional banjo and was considered the best banjo picker, black or white, in northeast Georgia and the adjacent part of South Carolina. He often played for white mountain dances and parties and influenced white banjo players in that part of Appalachia. Staggers' repertoire shared many songs with demonstrably Appalachian (i.e., white) banjo players such as North Carolina's Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the "Minstrel of the Appalachians" (Rosenbaum 1983).
Some will also grudgingly accept Leslie Riddle, originally of Burnsville, North Carolina, as Appalachian. After all, he was a direct influence on Maybelle Carter's guitar style and taught A. P. Carter many songs. They are reluctant, however, to admit his friend, Knoxville, Tennessee, native Walter "Brownie" McGhee, the famous bluesman, to the Appalachian canon. Brownie admitted, like the Carters, to having learned from Riddle when they were both regulars of the then-flourishing Kingsport, Tennessee, blues scene (Lornell 1973a, 1973b).
Even less acceptable to would-be Appalachian purists is Brownie's younger brother Granville "Stick(s)" McGhee. Known by that name because of the sticks he carried as a child to guide Brownie's cart- Brownie having been crippled by polio-through the streets of Knoxville, Sticks McGhee played in a more modern sounding, jump-blues, and rhythm and blues style than Brownie and had an early crossover hit with "Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." This 1949 recording was Atlantic Records' first big seller and is considered by some to be the original "Beach Music" song (Ertegun 2001).
And what of the many African-American musicians of the Greenville- Spartanburg area, including blues guitar greats Willie Walker and the Reverend Gary Davis, or the blues, gospel, and jazz traditions of Birmingham and northern Alabama? And what of the "classic" or "vaudeville" blues singers from Appalachia, including some of the very greatest-Ida Cox, Lucille Bogan, Clara Smith, and the incomparable Bessie Smith?
More recent music made by black Appalachians, such as western North Carolina's Roberta Flack and Nina Simone, North Georgia's Bobby Byrd, or Appalachian Alabama's Percy Sledge, is even less likely to be considered authentic Appalachian. Versatile Appalachian scholar David Whisnant (1977, 108) observed that black Appalachian music had "as yet hardly been touched by serious documentation and analysis." A quarter of a century later, this special issue of BMRJ is an attempt to bring together, in one place, most of what we know about black Appalachian music and to take a few tentative steps toward "serious" analysis.
Affrilachian Music: "A Musical Kaleidoscope"
Look out that mountain, white rocks too,
I got to find my baby, while the grass is blue.
-"Way Up in the Mountains of Kentucky,"
Otis "Smokey" Smothers
Demography influences culture. It is reasonable to expect that the higher the percentage of blacks in an area's population, the more likely that area would be the locus for the development of distinct African- American musical styles. Hence, defining characteristics common to the Delta or the Piedmont blues can be described and a stylistic complex articulated. For Appalachia, a region in which blacks represent a smaller proportion of the total population and one in which they are widely scattered, descriptions of coherent, regionwide, black musical styles are not possible.
In addition, the environment has influenced the region's music. The southern Appalachian Mountains have a more diverse landscape, varied ecology, and abundant flora and fauna than any other geographic region in North America. This diversity, variation, and abundance have influenced the ways humans have exploited its resources and provided for themselves and their families (and, too often, for large absentee corporate owners). Despite a popular perception to the contrary, Appalachia is as extraordinarily heterogenous economically, socially, and culturally as it is ecologically. As Barry Lee Pearson writes in this issue: "Since it ranges from urban centers, such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, to the small towns and farmsteads of Virginia to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia, Appalachia embraces a musical kaleidoscope
rather than a single common thread."
Undoubtedly, the lack of identifiable regionwide styles has contributed to black Appalachian music's "invisibility." The commercial record companies, apparently blind to nonwhite Appalachian music, did not make records of black Appalachian musicians, at least not of those who stayed in the region (the Armstrongs and Martin collaborations discussed in Pearson's article being the best-known exception); thus, the record companies helped perpetuate the invisibility problem. Despite the lack of an identifiable Appalachian style in black music, significant black music of nearly every genre was created in the mountains and had an impact on the country's and the world's music.
There is little agreement on the boundaries of Appalachia. Taylor's (1862) "Alleghenia" was composed of 161 upland counties south of the Mason-Dixon Line; Frost's (1997) "Appalachian America" included 194 counties. John C. Campbell (1921) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1935) based their boundaries on topography and altitude, and the Ford Survey (Ford 1962) modified previous definitions, in part, for the convenience of statistical analysis. Recently, sociologist Wilma Dunaway (1996, 2003) and historian John Alexander Williams (2002) have proposed their own definitions of the region. Politicians got involved in defining Appalachia in the 1960s, resulting in a political definition-one that has been as constant as a politician's whim. The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) moved the boundaries north of the Mason- Dixon Line into Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York and west into Mississippi.
There is no consensus on Appalachia's boundaries within the Appalachian studies community, and no definition of Appalachia was imposed on the authors in this collection: Pearson crafted his own region, Freed made use of Campbell's definition, Zolten and Wright and Higby worked with the ARC definition, and Eagle used both the most current list of ARC counties (some being added as recently as 2003) and those Virginia counties that were once included by ARC but are now "excluded" from Appalachia.[5]
Pearson, Wright and Higby, and Zolten summarize what is known concerning three major genres of black music in Appalachia.[6] Pearson's contribution examines Appalachian blues: where and when it originated and where, how, and for what purpose it was performed. He identifies and describes four Appalachian blues styles: "vaudeville blues, piano blues and boogie-woogie, string-band dance blues, and guitar-and-harmonica- based down-home blues," noting their regional and-especially in the case of Appalachian vaudeville blues singing and Birmingham-based piano blues-national impacts. "The diversity and richness of Appalachian blues" impresses Pearson, as does its greater interracial character compared with other regional blues. Pearson describes an Appalachian "blues tradition distinct from that of Mississippi or Texas and, in its own way, just as rich."
Wright and Higby ask: "Is there an American jazz that can be identified with musicians in Appalachia? If the question were asked about string music, finding some kind of answer would not be too difficult. Jazz is a different matter." They conclude that there is not an Appalachian jazz but several Appalachian jazz styles found in urban "pockets": Pittsburgh and the Upper Ohio River watershed (including Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia), Chattanooga/Knoxville/Birmingham, and third, "the corridor of cities along 1-85 and 1-40 in the Carolinas: Winston-Salem and Asheville in North Carolina, Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina."
Jerry Zolten identifies the main precursors of rhythm and blues. Among these important influences were several that were well established in Appalachia: "Piedmont"-style blues and ragtime guitar picking, the "classic" blues tradition of singers like Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, and especially gospel quartet singing as it had developed in western South Carolina (particularly the popular Dixie Hummingbirds) and northern Alabama. Zolten examines the careers of North Carolina's Nina Simone and Roberta Flack, north Georgia's Bobby Byrd and James Brown, West Virginia's Johnny Johnson and Bill Withers, the rhythm and blues scene of Pittsburgh, and the recent collaboration of bluegrass and hip-hop artists sponsored by radio station WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Zolten concludes:
"The whole history of rhythm and blues, it seems, has been laced with important influences from Appalachia's African- American community, and indeed, music is at its best when it cultivates unity and cross-cultural understanding. In contemporary Appalachia, it would seem that these possibilities are still literally in the air."
Hay and davenport, both natives of the area ("People in Gainesville not all that different from Cleveland, Bean Creek, Cornelia, Clarkesville, or Toccoa" [davenport 1995, 14]), direct their attention to the hills of northeast Georgia. Affrilachian performance poet doris davenport describes how she gained an appreciation for the poetry and performance of Toccoa (Stephens County) native Ida Cox. The article's purpose, Davenport writes, is to "celebrate, acknowledge, honor, and, I hope, illuminate the artistry of Ida P. Cox." She describes Cox's performance style and vocal delivery and examines the humor, sexuality, and "gloom" in her lyrics and claims a pan-Appalachian character for some of Cox's blues, comparing them to traditional mountain ballads and labeling them "Appalachian ballad-blues." "Cox's stylistic humor," according to davenport, is "sophisticated, subtle, and cerebral and has contemporary applicability and appeal."
Outlining the history of black musical culture in Stephens County, Hay establishes a context in which to examine the Appalachian roots of James Brown's soul and funk music. When Brown arrived in Toccoa, he joined Bobby Byrd's gospel and pop groups. At first, the Flames' (Byrd's band) sound was primarily synthesized from gospel, frolic and old-time blues and dance music, and the country and western music heard over the local airways. Following the introduction of a jukebox and of black radio programming out of Nashville (WLAC), Brown and the Flames became more aware of the currently popular rhythm and blues. Bobby Byrd, a renowned recording artist himself, was an early and continuing influence on the development of the James Brown sound; the Godfather of Soul "has been sustained by regular infusions of Appalachia."
In the process of doing research for his book Blacks, Whites, and Blues, British scholar Tony Russell (1970, 10) came to this conclusion:
Racial antipathy, of course, hampered the free exchange of musical ideas.... [T]hat interaction was more fertile in areas where blacks were scattered and thus less fearful. Nevertheless, in all but the most tightly enclosed communities, there was some degree of interaction, and, as the twentieth century grew older, and group isolation rarer, the threads of the two traditions were more and more often entangled.
John Szwed (1980), Kip Lornell (1990), and others have advanced similar arguments. Blues scholar Paul Oliver (1985, 29) suggested that those areas most peripheral to innovation (and black population concentrations) would be affected latest and least: "If the New Orleans-Memphis-Chicago axis is perceived as the innovatory source of much black music, including blues, the oldest, least affected traditions are likely to be found at the furthest limit." This periphery includes "Virginia, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, the Carolinas, [and] Georgia." Obviously, the periphery would also include those other parts of Appalachia not specifically identified by Oliver. Thus, we should expect Affrilachian music to be both more traditional and more multicultural than the black music of the Mississippi Delta.
A logical extension of Oliver's argument is that we should expect to find the more innovative Affrilachian music on the peripheries of Appalachia, closer to areas of greater black population (e.g., western South Carolina, northeast Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, etc.), and, conversely, the more traditional and conservative black music in the region's interior, in the Appalachian Summit. Based on the articles included here, this does seem to be the case.
Sterling Stuckey (1987, 233) has argued that African-American culture "came exclusively from the slave population"; free blacks tended to be more acculturated to Euro-American culture and less cognizant of African tradition. Bob Eagle, in the Mance Index, the Appalachian subset of which is included in BMRJ (24, no. 1), has even developed a way to measure places for this potential for cultural exchange and conservatism, and conversely, also for the independent development of, and innovation in, distinct black culture.
If Russell's and like-minded scholars' theories are correct, we should expect Appalachia to be a remarkable laboratory for the study of Afro- European cultural interpenetration-to use French anthropologist Roger Bastide's (1978) term.[7] Several of the articles already discussed touch on this phenomenon, and the articles by Paul Wells, Cecelia Conway, and William E. Lightfoot address it directly.[8] Bastide warned that:
"There are never . . . cultures in contact but rather individuals, carriers of different cultures. However, these individuals are not independent creatures but are interrelated by complex webs of communication, of domination-subordination, or of egalitarian exchange" (quoted in Price 1978, x).
It is within this framework that cultural interpenetration is examined here. The combination of banjo, fiddle, and other instruments on antebellum plantations and in nineteenth-century minstrel shows was "perfectly suited to the realization of the heterogeneous sound ideal. The combination of these sounds create[d] a contrasting, not a blending, conglomerate, resulting in a sound that is ideally suited to the rhythmic, polyphonic, and tonal stratifications of African and African-American music" (Floyd 1995, 56). The ideal sound played a major role in the development of all African-American musical genres. The heterogeneous sound ideal also influenced the development of "white" Appalachian string-band and bluegrass music. In fact, this music played by white Appalachians is not so much white but, as Julio Finn (1986) or Henry Louis Gates (1988) would likely say, "mulatto."
"The earliest meeting ground between white and black musicians was dance music played primarily on the fiddle." Paul Wells examines what is known concerning black fiddling, "an old, long-lasting, and deeply influential locus of musical and cultural interchange," its impact on white musical traditions and vice versa (both directly and through the intermediary of minstrelsy), and the syncretization of African and European musical traditions in antebellum America. Of particular importance in this transculturative process was the Africans' combination of European fiddle and African banjo and this pairing's subsequent adoption by white mountain musicians. The southern mountain string band and its progeny bluegrass owed much of their rhythmic development to the influence of black fiddling and to their adoption of the banjo. Long before, and prerequisite to, the many celebrated "mergings of white and black musical traditions that have given our popular music the shape it has today, white and black fiddlers were swapping tunes with each other and providing a foundation for much of what came later."
Cecelia Conway traces the history of the banjo from its African antecedents through the various developments and innovations introduced in North America. She documents early African-American banjo playing and whites' adoption of this African instrument and aesthetic, and she summarizes what is known concerning black banjo players of twentieth-century Appalachia. Conway concludes that "black banjo playing remained nowhere more lively or persistent than in Appalachia."
William E. Lightfoot examines "white blues" in Appalachia as it has been recorded by three of its most-respected practitioners: Dock Boggs, Doc Carter (and the Carter Family), and Doc Watson. In his article in this issue, Pearson adopts an emic (as the participants within a culture view things) conception of the blues by including within the genre everything that "blues" musicians have called blues. Lightfoot, on the other hand, applies an etic (an objective outsider's view of things) approach to the blues with his precise, "ideal-type" definition of blues. Lightfoot uses his definition of "core" or "primary" blues as a standard to measure how well and how completely these white Appalachian musicians absorbed the blues aesthetic. He describes the white Appalachian musicians' "deep appreciation of the blues" and their "attempts at replicating the form that use certain key elements, the omission of equally important elements, and an amorphous notion as to the fundamental nature of blues music." Lightfoot contrasts white Appalachian blues with the blues performed by white musicians in western Kentucky and speculates why this latter group of white musicians internalized a better and more complete understanding of black music than did their mountain contemporaries.
To make this special issue of as much practical value as possible, the next issue (24, no. 1) includes two reference tools: "Directory of African-American Musicians in Appalachia," and "Preliminary Bibliography of African-American Music in Appalachia." The directory is the Appalachian subset of Australian researcher Bob Eagle's forthcoming Encyclopedia of Blues and Gospel Music, which itself is the culmination of many decades of diligent documentation of African-American musical culture. It includes references to every known African-American musician, living or dead, who was from or active in Appalachia. Also included is information about black population trends, recording companies, song titles that refer to Appalachian places, the names and locations of African-American churches, and the Mance Index.
Mark Freed's "Preliminary Bibliography" is preliminary in the sense that no subject bibliography is ever truly complete and because bibliographic research on this topic has just begun. Freed's efforts have produced a comprehensive bibliography that brings together for the first time many obscure references culled from disparate sources. It will, no doubt, serve as the standard bibliography for Affrilachian music for years to come.
"You Got Soul, If You Didn't, You Wouldn't Be in Here":[9]
The Context of Affrilachian Music
"Our understanding of the Afro-American musical diaspora," wrote John Storm Roberts (1990, 5), "seems to me like a landscape dotted with artesian wells, each representing some deep but narrow research area: gastro-sexual symbolism in the blues of the lower Mississippi Delta, say. But we tend to ignore the irrigation canals linking these wells which, shallow as they are, will make the entire landscape fruitful." Roberts also noted that "many areas lack even wells." Our understanding of Affrilachian music is a very shallow well-this issue of BMRJ digs the well a little deeper and traces the course of some of the irrigation canals connecting Appalachia with other wells of black music.[10]
As the cartography of African-American music is being mapped, the place of Affrilachian music in this geography is becoming more evident. Sterling Stuckey (1987, 83) wrote, in his masterful historical analysis Slave Culture, that the "evidence of the oneness of black culture in the twentieth century abounds. For example, the spread of Southern black music to the North with the creation of each new form, together with the migration of black musicians and blacks generally, placed Southern values within reach of all strata of Northern black communities." Although it has been less well documented, the same can be said for the Affrilachian people and their music-their impact on the "entire landscape" of African diaspora music is considerable.
African Americans of Appalachia were (like their white neighbors in the southern uplands and their black kinfolk in the lower South) mobile. They migrated-sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently to urban centers within the region; to Appalachian timber-harvesting, coal-mining, and manufacturing areas; and outside the region to seek employment in northeastern and midwestern cities, as well as those of the southeast. Their music went with them, and it was listened to by other African Americans-from the widespread influence of the "classic blues" vocal styling of Ida Cox and Bessie Smith;[11] to the impact of the Birmingham pianists (and Kingsport's "Cripple" Clarence Lofton) on the development nationally of piano blues and boogie-woogie; to the undeniable influence of western South Carolina and northern Alabama on the wider world of African-American gospel music; and to the repercussions of the Toccoa Band's sound, heard globally through James Brown's influence, in the development and evolution of soul and funk music.
Affrilachian music's presence in "the oneness of black culture in the twentieth century" is significant; the collective evidence for this assertion is ably presented in the articles that follow.
Research for the compilation and editing of these Appalachian issues of BMRJ has been supported by the Appalachian State University's Board of Trustee's Travel and Research Grant. Patricia D. Beaver, William E. Lightfoot, and Val Maiewskij-Hay read earlier drafts of this article, and it has benefited from their suggestions. The editor would especially like to recognize the authors and the editorial board members for their considerable contributions to this project.
DISCOGRAPHY
Appalachian heritage, no. 2. Berea College (2002). Compact disc.
Black Appalachia: String bands, songsters, and hoedowns. Rounder 11661-1823-2 (1999). Compact disc.
Byrd, Bobby. I know you got soul. King 6378 (1971).
McGhee, Granville "Sticks." Drinking wine spo-dee-o-dee. Atlantic Records 873 (1949).
Smothers, Otis "Smokey." Way up in the mountains of Kentucky. Federal 12488 (1962).
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Footnotes:
1. Affrilachiana, term coined by poet Frank I. Walker ( 2000) i n the early 1990s, refers to African Americans of the Appalachian region.
2. This and following lyric quotes are from Mississippi/Chicago bluesman Otis "Smokey" Smothers' recording Way Up in the Mountains of Kentucky, recorded in 1962 in Cincinnati.
3. The same outsiders labeled the inhabitants of Appalachia as "Mountain Whites"-a term that not only misrepresents the region's population by its exclusion of other ethnicgroups but that white Appalachians themselves resented. As early as 1899, the Reverend Robert Campbell wrote of "the bad odor that always emanates from a class appellation that seems to imply peculiarity, if not inferiority" (Campbell 1901, 1), later noting that the term "savors of condescension" (2). Samuel Tyndale Wilson (1914, 20) observed that the term "Mountain Whites" was "objectionable" to those so labeled, that it implied "peculiarity and, inferentially, inferiority." A few years later, John C. Campbell (1921, 18) declared the term "opprobrious." Until 2002, when Appalachian State University successfully petitioned the Library of Congress to change the term to "Appalachians (People)," the term "Mountain Whites" was the authorized subject heading, used in library catalogs and databases around the country and the world to designate the people who are native to the Appalachian region.
4. For example, African-American musician Howard Armstrong of LaFollette, Tennessee, grew up with recent eastern and southern European immigrants, in addition to his wellestablished African-American and Anglo-American neighbors. Because of his multiethnic Appalachian upbringing, Armstrong was able, many years later, to work Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods, playing Italian, Polish, German, and Bohemian songs in their native languages to the recent immigrants (Pahls 1998).
5. Curiously, the two compact discs devoted to black Appalachian music (Black Appalachia: St ring Bands, Songsters and Hoedowns and Appalachian H eritage, n o. 2) include musicians from a much broader area than even that of Eagle's expanded ARC Appalachia.
6. As it was originally conceived, this special issue of BMRJ included an article on gospel music. Unfortunately, the individual contracted to write the gospel survey withdrew from the project too late to be replaced. The editor, editorial board, and the Center for Black Music Research regret this significant omission.
7. Efforts to map this transcultural process in the blending of African and European dance has also begun-see especially Szwed and Marks (1988) and Jamison (2003a, 2003b).
8. Although not considered in this special issue, the impact of black Appalachian musicians such as Brownie McGhee, Odetta, and Josh White on the folk-music revivals of the 1940s onward is another aspect of the Affrilachian diaspora that deserves serious examination.
9. From Bobby Byrd's "I Know You Got Soul," recorded in 1971, peaked at position thirty on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart (Whitburn 1996, 61). Composer credits are listed as Bobby Byrd, James Brown, and Charles Bobbit.
10. It should be acknowledged here that the John Henry Memorial Foundation, founded by Affrilachian Ed Cabbell, made some pioneering contributions in the 1970s to the study of Affrilachian music in its annual John Henry Folk Festival and in its recordings and publications, such as the short-lived periodical Black Diamonds.
11. Ida Cox is today best remembered for her song "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues," more recently adopted as the name for a theatrical review and a slogan printed on bumper stickers and T-shirts. Smith's worldwide impact is reflected in the immense scholarship devoted to her life and work, including that of Affrilachian scholar Angela Davis (1998) and the memoir of Jackie Kay (1997), an Afro-Scottish poet who wrote of Smith's influence on her own coming of age in Glasgow. For an introduction to the Bessie Smith literature, consult Katie Nash (2001).