Jilson Setters (James W. Day) articles
[James William "Jim" Day (1861-1942) of Rowan County was a Kentucky fiddler. He was discovered by traditional folk music entrepreneur Jean Thomas, who changed his name to Jilson Setters, the Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow. Below after a bio on Jean Thomas, is a series of articles by Thomas and others about Jilson Setters. I have an autographed copy of her book, 'Singing Gathering" from my grandfather's collection. There's an additional article by Thomas titled "60 Years in Darkness," referring to Day's blindness and the operation that 'cured' him, which I haven't transcribed yet. Matteson- 2011]
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Jean Thomas Biography
From Wikipedia: Jean Bell Thomas (November 14, 1881 – December 7, 1982) was an American folk festival promoter, author and photographer who specialized in the music, crafts, and language patterns of the Appalachian region of the United States.
Early life
She was born Jeanette Mary Francis de Assisi Aloysius Narcissus Garfield Bell in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1881. She earned the nickname "Traipsin' Woman" when, as a teenager in the 1890s, she defied convention to attend business school, learn stenography, and become a court reporter, traveling by jolt wagon to courts in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Her exposure to the musical traditions, dialect, folkways, and costumes of the mountain people she encountered, combined with her later work in "show business," led to her avocation as a popularizer of mountain music and as proprietress of the American Folk Song Festival, staged in and near Ashland, Kentucky, from 1930 through 1972.
Career
Using money saved from her court reporter wages, Thomas moved to New York, where she took writing classes and continued to work as a stenographer. She married accountant Albert Thomas in 1913 and moved to Logan, West Virginia, but was divorced within a year. She then held a variety of jobs, including work as a script girl for Cecil B. de Mille's film The Ten Commandments, as secretary to the owner of the Columbus Senators baseball team, and as press agent for Ruby "Texas" Guinan, the notorious entertainer and owner of prohibition-era speakeasies.
During her years working in eastern Kentucky, and on subsequent visits, Thomas often carried her camera and photographed the musicians and other mountain people with whom she came in contact. She used her portable typewriter to document lyrics and tunes to ballads. In 1926, Jean Thomas met James William Day, a blind fiddler from Rowan County. Using the skills she had acquired as a press agent, she changed his name to Jilson Setters, secured recording contracts, and booked him (as the "Singin' Fiddler from Lost Hope Hollow") in theaters. As Jilson Setters, Day eventually played in London's Royal Albert Hall at the Festival of the English Folk Song and Dance Society, for Thomas subscribed to the belief, also held by many of her contemporaries, that in Appalachia, "the speech, song, and traditions of old England still survived" (Thomas 1940, p. 88). Day/Setters was the subject of Thomas' first book, Devil's Ditties, published in 1931; subsequent books included the semi-autobiographical The Traipsin' Woman (1933) and The Sun Shines Bright (1940).
Beginning of the American Folk Song Festival
Inspired by a traditional mountain "Singin' Gatherin'" (wherein musicians got together to perform old songs) she had witnessed, Jean Thomas staged a small folk festival for a group of invited guests at her home in September 1930. Featured performers included Setters and Dorothy Gordon, a singer from New York. Thomas incorporated the American Folk Song Society the following year to plan for an annual festival near her hometown of Ashland, Kentucky. The second American Folk Song Festival was held in 1932 on Four Mile Fork of Garner, just off the Mayo Trail, and featured eighteen acts, all of whom had learned by oral tradition, per Thomas' stipulation. The stage included a rented log cabin, because "It was my purpose to recreate as accurately as possible the original scene of the Singin' Gatherin'. That had been presented in front of a windowless cabin. But this rented cabin did have a glass window in front; so I covered it with an American flag" (Thomas 1940, p. 198).
With the exception of the years 1943-1947, the American Folk Song Festival was held annually until failing health forced Thomas to retire in 1972. From 1934-1949, thanks to a benefactor's gift of land and a windowless log cabin, the festival took place at a site eighteen miles south of Ashland. Beginning in 1950, the festival was held in Thomas' yard in Ashland, moving to a state park in Prestonsburg in 1964, and to the Carter Caves State Park in 1966.
The festival followed an unwavering script for many years, intended to show "authentic sequences in America's musical history" (Thomas 1940, p. 262). Volna Fraley or, later, his nephew, would signal the start of the performances by blowing a fox horn that had belonged to "Devil Anse" Hatfield (patriarch of the legendary feuding family of the Kentucky-West Virginia border). Next, a man, woman, and two children would arrive at the stage by covered wagon to be greeted by a woman dressed as a Cherokee Indian, as a representation of the Anglo-American settlement of the Appalachian Mountains. Traditions carried over from the British Isles would then be demonstrated by a dozen children performing an old English country dance accompanied by a piper. A woman in the role of "Narrator" (often played by Thomas herself), attended by "Ladies-in-Waiting" dressed in long black Elizabethan gowns, would read a historical prologue connecting Appalachian customs and music to Elizabethan England. The prologue would conclude with a description of the wedding of a young pioneer couple named Ephraim and Drusilla; the ensuing musical performances were set in the narrative context of their wedding reception, or "Infare."
Musicians would play traditional stringed instruments such as dulcimer, fiddle, guitar, banjo, and accordion, plus recorder and mouth harp. Homemade varieties, such as fiddles constructed out of corn stalks, and banjos made from gourds, appeared alongside later models.
Nostalgic for the 19th century, Thomas costumed festival performers in homespun garments evoking that era: girls wore bonnets and calico dresses; women dressed in linsey-woolsey and wrapped shawls around their shoulders; and men and boys often wore overalls. Characters bore names of people she had met long before ("Emmaline," "Little Chad," and "Little Babe"), or were invented to sound folksy. Props such as hickory chairs and egg baskets, brooms, and drinking gourds were used in photographing performers.
She donated manuscript materials and her photographs to the University of Louisville in 1968. The remainder of her papers came to UofL's Dwight Anderson Music Library in 1990, and are described in an online finding aid.
Jean Thomas died in 1982 at the age of 101.
References
Davis, Stephen F. "Jilson Setters: The man of many names." The Devil's Box (Journal of the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Association) 12, no. 1 (March 1978): 42-45.
Moore, Anne. "Gift of mountain lore is presented to UofL." Courier-Journal, May 28, 1969.
"Music of the Southern Appalachians lives on in Kentucky's American Folk Song Festival." Thirty-ninth Annual American Folk Song Festival program. Carter Caves State Park, Olive Hill, Carter County, Kentucky (June 7-8, 1969).
Nixon, Bruce. "Down from the Mountains." Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) 13, no. 23 (April 9, 2003): 14-16.
Portnoy, Marshall A. Jean Thomas' American Folk Song Festival: British Balladry in Eastern Kentucky. Louisville, KY: University of Louisville M.A., 1978.
"Singin' Gatherin'." Time (June 20, 1938).
"Singin' Gatherin'." Time (June 22, 1942).
Thomas, Jean. The Sun Shines Bright. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940.
Thomas, Jean. The Traipsin' Woman. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1933.
"Traipsin' Woman." Time (June 18, 1934).
University of Louisville Dwight Anderson Music Library. "Finding Aid to the Jean Thomas Collection."
The West-Virginia Hillbilly (August 8, 1965).
Wolfe, Charles K. Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
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Music: Traipsin' Woman
Time Magazine: Monday, June 18, 1934
Bugles hushed 5,000 persons assembled in the hills near Ashland, Ky. last Sunday afternoon. Kentucky's Governor Ruby Laffoon bade them all a deep, drawling welcome. His wife uncovered a bronze tablet. And a rude little log cabin was officially christened "Traipsin" Woman."
The name was for the cabin's owner. Jean Thomas, a small, sprightly blonde who was there dressed in a billowy Elizabethan costume. Mountaineers called her ''the traipsin' woman" because as a court reporter she followed the Law from one hilly settlement to another. Eventually her chief interest became folksongs and ballads, particularly those which could be traced back directly to the folk music of England. Last week for the fourth time mountaineers came to her cabin to play and sing in an American Folk Song Festival.
The mountaineers, many of them in shirtsleeves, played accordions, dulcimers, banjos, guitars. They sang, as they had heard their parents and grandparents sing, about Sourwood Mountain, turnip greens. old coon dogs, Napoleon Bonaparte. Because many an expert believes that these are the rarest of U. S. folksongs, cameramen were present to film the proceedings for the Library of Congress. Feature of the afternoon was supposed to be an Elizabethan wedding celebration in which Marion Kerby, Chicago ballad expert, soloed. But outsiders were more interested in Jilson Setters, the 75-year-old fiddler whom Miss Thomas took to Lon don a year ago to perform in Albert Hall. Jilson Setters has earned wide publicity for Miss Thomas' folksong society. When he arrived in Manhattan to sail his bag gage consisted of one extra shirt, a quilt his grandmother had made, a gourd for a drinking cup, a corncob pipe and his fiddle wrapped in an oilcloth poke. He came, he said, from Lost Hope Hollow and he was going to see the King. Ashlanders have since said that there is no such place as Lost Hope Hollow, that Jilson Setters' real name is William Day. never much of a mountaineer, but an oldtime beggar.
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The Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow, a persona
Posted by Dave Tabler | May 20, 2009
Jean Thomas called him the “first primitive, unlettered Kentucky mountain minstrel to cross the sea to fiddle and sing his own and Elizabethan ballads in the Royal Albert Hall in London.” She presented to the American public a man she said spent his life in the mountains, never to come into contact with the modern world, still retaining vestiges of his English ancestry.
James W. Day (1861-1942), from Rowan County and Ashland KY, went by many names in his life… known in childhood as Willie, then later as “Blind Bill Day” because he was blind. He often went by J.W. Day as an early adult, but after he was ‘discovered’ by Jean Thomas, who became his agent, he became best known by his stage name of Jilson Setters, the Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow.
The left-handed Setters played his fiddle for many years in the American Folk Song Festival held in Ashland, composed tunes such as ‘The Rowan County Troubles,’ a popular local ballad, and recorded on the RCA Victor label in the late 1920s. He also recorded in the 1930s for folklorist John A. Lomax, whose collection is now in the Library of Congress.
In February 1930 Jean Thomas, who said she was a circuit court stenographer, wrote “Blind Jilson: The Singing Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow” for American Magazine. The article describes how Thomas arranged for an operation that gave him sight, and how he appeared on a radio broadcast from New York City. It ends: “Jilson Setters, whose Elizabethan ballads broadcast over a hook-up from coast to coast and relayed half way around the world, delighted millions last night…Jilson Setters is a modern survival of the ancient minstrel. Who knows but that his primitive turnes have paved the way for American grand opera.”
In 1931 Thomas took Setters to London, where he performed in the Albert Hall at a folk song festival. On his return, Harvard professor George Lyman Kittering pronounced Setters’ composition “London Town” ‘a classic of American folk song.’ By 1934 Thomas was affecting Elizabethan garb, and Setters had become the featured performer at the National Song Festival organized by Thomas under the umbrella of her American Folk Song Society, which included on its board Carl Sandberg and Ida M. Tarbell.
Thomas had first asked another Kentucky fiddler, Ed Haley, to take on the persona of a character she was creating, Jilson Setters. When Haley refused, Thomas turned to J.W. Day. He wasn’t blind from birth as she’d said, but his sight had failed while he was young, and Thomas had arranged to have the cataracts removed from his eyes.
There’s no such place in Kentucky as Lost Hope Hollow. Day was an itinerant town beggar who made money not by performing ancient ballads, but by playing a mix of topical songs of his own composition. And Thomas was not a circuit court stenographer, but a Hollywood scenario writer—albeit an amateur folklorist.
Accompanied by songwriter/guitarist Carson Robison, Day recorded ten traditional songs for RCA Victor in NYC in February 1928 using the Setters name. But there is no record of him ever appearing on live country music shows, or performing with other authentic Kentucky musicians on the radio. Jean Thomas had him under contract and wanted him to be represented as an Elizabethan relic, so too much exposure might have threatened the careful image she had crafted.
Maybe folk music fans didn’t buy the image and therefore the records? Certainly Kentucky newspapers weren’t paying him much notice.
“When he arrived in Manhattan to sail his baggage consisted of one extra shirt, a quilt his grandmother had made, a gourd for a drinking cup, a corncob pipe and his fiddle wrapped in an oilcloth poke,” said TIME magazine. “He came, he said, from Lost Hope Hollow and he was going to see the King. Ashlanders have since said that there is no such place as Lost Hope Hollow, that Jilson Setters’ real name is William Day, and that he was never much of a mountaineer, but an oldtime beggar.”
So anxious were various forces in American society to find something that represented their vision of what was really American that Setters was heralded as the genuine article. Thus, William Wolff, in a 1939 article entitled “Songs that express the soul of a people” in the left-wing The People’s World, noted of Jilson Setters: “He has probably never heard of Marx or Lenin, but there can be no doubts about where his roots lay, as he sings.”
One of the things that seems to have really set people off in Kentucky about Jilson Setters, says genealogist Steve Green in a thread at Ancestry.com, was when Jean Thomas got carried away with her remarks in the early 1930s about how Jilson Setters (who was traveling with her at the time) was disappointed he wouldn’t be able to be back in his cabin in the Kentucky mountains to celebrate Old Christmas on January 6. Many people did not like her portrayal of eastern Kentucky as a backward place– for some reason, they felt that the references to Old Christmas were ludicrous and were harmful to the image of the region.
In a slew of letters to newspaper editors around the state, they fervently declared that people in Kentucky celebrated Christmas just as it was everywhere else, on December 25. What’s interesting is that most of the people who wrote in protest were unaware that there was in fact an “Old Christmas” that was indeed celebrated by some grassroots people. Nevertheless, the whole thing caused a brief public controversy, and along with Miss Thomas’ continual claims about the supposed Elizabethan ancestry of mountaineers, it generated quite a few skeptics.
Sources: Constructing Country: Fakery and “Strictly American” Music, by Kevin Yuill, Reconstruction 8.4, 2008
Old-time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, By Jeff Todd Titon
Creating Country Music, By Richard A. Peterson
Big Sandy, By Jean Thomas
Time magazine, Traipsin’ Woman, Monday, Jun. 18, 1934
Steve Green on Jilson Setters thread at Ancestry.com—
http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.northam.usa.states.kentucky.counties.wolfe/
1122.1120.1124.1125.1127/mb.ashx
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Photograph of James William "Jim" Day of Rowan County
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(From the photographic collection of Jean Thomas, University of Louisville)
The real name of the balladeer and fiddler known as "Jilson Setters" was James William "Jim" Day. A Rowan County native, he died in Ashland, Kentucky on May 6, 1942 at the age 67. In 1926, Day had changed his name to Jilson Setters at the urging of his manager, Jean Thomas. Folk festival organizer and entrepreneur Jean "The Traipsin' Woman" Thomas, who ran the American Folk Song Festival, presented Day (Setters) to the public as an old mountain fiddler who had lived in total isolation for many years and was still in possesion of the traditions of his English ancestry, including a repertoire of ancient British ballads.
Later, after regaining his eyesight, he recorded successfully in New York with studio musician and pop songwriter, Carson J. Robison, while being promoted as the "modern survival of the ancient minstrel." Day recorded several sides for RCA Victor and the Library of Congress, and appeared around the world including New York society functions and in front of England's King George V.
WAY UP ON CLINCH MOUNTAIN
by James William Day
(Recorded on February 27, 1928 in New York City. This tune is a fiddle tune that is also known as "Drunken Hiccups" and has been traced to even older variations in the British Isles.)
I tune up my fiddle, I rosin my bow
I make myself welcome wherever I go
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
I eat when I’m hungry, I’ll drink when I’m dry
If hard times don’t kill me, I’ll live ‘til I die
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
I’ll buy my own whiskey, I’ll make my own gin
If I get drunk, madam, it’s nothing to you
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Oh whiskey, oh brandy, you’re an old friend of mine
You killed my old father and you trouble my mind
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Way up on Clinch Mountain, I wandered alone
I’m drunk as the devil and a long ways from home
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how lazy I feel
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The Last Minstrel
By Jean Thomas
The English Journal, Vol. 17, No. 10 (Dec., 1928), pp. 810-820
THE LAST MINSTREL
by JEAN THOMAS
In a windowless cabin, hidden away in a high cranny of the Kentucky mountains, lived Jilson Setters, who, for all his sixty-five years, had never seen a railroad. Neither had he heard a phonograph nor a radio. His home-made fiddle and his "ballets" were good enough for Jilson Setters and mountain folk. Good enough, too, for the passing stranger who heard the inimitable tunes. The stranger knew something of their origin, sensed their possibilities, and acted accordingly.
It was not a miracle, but strategem, that whisked Jilson Setters away from mountain fastnesses to the Great White Way, to record and to broadcast for a modern world the ballads of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors-they had them from the minstrels of Shakespeare's time, but Jilson Setters does not know that. He does not know that except for him an authentic interpretation of the unwritten music of the southern highlands would have been lost to the world. He does not know that his primitive tunes have blazed the trail for American grand opera.
How could he know? All his endurin' life Jilson had lived there in the selfsame place, in the selfsame way, like his ma and his pa before him. He had watched his grandmother there beside the log fire make tallow candles just as Shakespeare's mother must have made them. From her lips he heard the same songs Elizabethan mothers sang, for in the veins of these Kentucky mountain pioneers flowed the same strain of Anglo-Saxon blood. Jilson's grandsire had sawed the house pattern out of beech with his own hands. "What's good enough for me, is good enough for mine," the older Setters said. And Jilson shared the old man's views, for he brought Rhuhamie, his bride, home to the windowless cabin. It was home to Rhuhamie! Home to the ten offspring which blessed her wedlock with Jilson.
Setters men-folks were no laggards! Powerful clever. "See this hure fiddle," says Jilson to the stranger, "I heir-ed hit from my grandsir. He rived hit with his own hands outten a pine log. Arter thet he never strummed nary tune on the dulcimer no more. Putt hit up on the foir-board and nary other Setters ever taken hit down. Can't fault 'em for it. The dulcimer is the sorriest music they is. All the Setters men-folks follered fiddlin' and singin' ballets. Learnt 'em by word of mouth from tother generashun." No wonder Jilson was the "fiddlinist and singinist man on the creek."
To be sure the preacher, whose only joy on earth was "funeralizin' a corpse," favored the dulcimer. To his saintly mind a fiddle was hand in hand with worldly pleasure, a frolic, a play party. Right out in meeting he besought his flock to take warning of the devil and his ways, "a feller with a fiddle." Whereupon meek eyes peered from under slat bonnets in the direction of Jilson and his mate. And old Granny Croswite poked her bony elbow into Rhuhamie's ribs, and whispered into Rhuhamie's ear, with conscientious wistfulness, "D'ye reckon thar's any harm in a fiddle?"
Then and there Rhuhamie rose up in meeting and spoke her mind, and Jilson trying his best to pull her down in the bench by her apron strings. "If the good Lord hisself gifted a man with fiddlin' and singin' ballets," declared Rhuhamie, "and hit pleasures folks to hear, and if a body's puney and his land ain't yieldy, and he has to make out twixt crappin' a leetle, and fiddlin' round over the countryside at a weddin', a infare or a play party, to yearn a honest livin' for his woman and little uns, peers to me the good Lord won't fault him for hit! " The echo of her voice startled Jilson. The re-echo came back to him a half-century later.
Truth to tell, folks didn't take warning of the devil and his ways. Year in and year out, Jilson Setters, with his fiddle in an oil cloth poke, trudged to and fro, into quiet hollows, along lonely creeks, wherever there was a cabin, to play for a gathering. News of his coming passed by word of mouth, newspapers were unheard of in that community. Anyway, what good would they have been to folks who couldn't read them-folks who knew only toil and hardship? No wonder Jilson and his fiddle brought pleasure into their existence. His coming lent festive cheer. The neighbors gathered in; chairs were moved back against the wall; and Jilson fiddled gayly for a frolic. Uncle Jason cut a caper or two; little Bije and Big Bije matched skill in the steps of Humphrey's Jig; and Jilson raised his hearers to heights of glee with "Green Horn Bill and Sue," a flyting ballad. The scolding was none the less real, even though Jilson did answer back in the same voice for both Bill and Sue. Then he sang "There Lived an Old Lord by the Northern Sea," and old and young joined in the refrain till their voices resounded from puncheon floor to darkened rafters:
Bowee down!
Bow and balance to me!
Who could resist the charm of the ballad? That personal charm with unity of interest, a common foe, a common friend, a common adventure. To Jilson's hearers it was their own story, whether he sang of "Lord Thomas and Fair Elender," or "Sweet Betsy from Pike." To them it was reality. And Jilson Setters, like his forbears, could make up a ballad right out of his head, whether inspired by tragedy or love, it was all the same. His talent stood him well in hand. Sometimes he had to supply a word, a line, or even a verse, if it had been lost or forgotten. And again, in his own ballads, he would suit the words to the community. Like "My Red Top Boots Got Mud to the Strop on Laurel," it was "on Triplett," "on Thomas Branch," "in Brushy," wherever Jilson chanced to be. He extolled in rhyme the good deeds of his friends, or "dispraised" the misdeeds of his foe.
Unknowingly he imitated the Elizabethan ballad. In his younger days, when he first started "talkin" to Rhuhamie, he composed a descriptive ballad of his lady fair, singing it gladly everywhere-except to the adored one. It is the way of mountain lovers, and in that Setters men-folks were like the rest. They showed their independence in another way! The way they held a fiddle, for instance. Now there was Jilson's grandsire. He held his fiddle upright on his knee; Jilson's father rested it upon his chin; but Jilson to this day puts his fiddle upon his chest and plays, amazingly, with his left hand! No wonder folks "norrated how
clever" he was.
His fame spread, and finally, on court day, to the county seat straightway went Jilson Setters. He gathered a flock about him in the public square of the courthouse. For it had come to be the market place of the farmer, the agora of women-folks, the playground of the children. At his feet lay Jilson's upturned hat. Folks "drapped in whatever they seen fitten to give" in return for a goodly measure of song. When the day was done, back to his cabin and his little flock he trudged, weary but happy with his honest earnings. Content with tomorrow to be as today. Unmindful of the world that lay beyond his mountain walls.
But things cannot go on the same, always, not even in quiet corners of the earth. Things happen, and something quite unexpected happened in the tranquil life of Jilson Setters. And, truth to tell, when you get right down to it, it was Rhuhamie's doings, "unthoughtedly," of course, but her doings none the less. After all, almost everything that has ever happened in the world, from the beginning of time, can be laid to the door of women-folks.
It was the night before the first day of court, Rhuhamie herself tells it, and Jilson sat mending his fiddle. He never had missed fiddling at a term of court, and he didn't calculate to stop now. Even though the last one of the Setters' offspring, "plum down to Lindie is growed up and married off." How time flies!
"Thar now," drawled Jilson, tying the broken string of his fiddle, "hit ort to hold out a leetle spell longer." He raised the fiddle to his chin and tilted back in his straight hickory chair against the puncheon wall. One boot heel, caught in the rung of the chair, braced his spare-built frame, the other tapped the bare floor with rhythmic beat to a lonesome tune. The flame from the log fire cast a flickering shadow of Rhuhamie as she tottered quietly from cupboard to table on which stood a great willow basket. Rhuhamie was filling it with eggs, ginseng, wild honey, and sassafras for Jilson to carry to town tomorrow to trade for their simple needs.
"Bakin' powders, bluin', some factory for Lindie's baby a dress, and a needle-I've broke my needle and I'm bound to sew a
seam for Lindie's baby"; Rhuhamie was thinking aloud. She tied a piece of "bleach" over the basket to hold fast its bulging contents. All the while Jilson's fiddle moaned, and Jilson crooned in plaintive voice:
I wish I had knowd before I courted
That love had b een sucha killing crime
I'd have locked my heart with a key of golden
And tied it down with a silver line
Young man, never cast your eye on beauty,
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
Soon will wither and fade away.
Jilson's mate rubbed her palms on her thin hips. There was a wistfulness in her voice, "Peers like I can't bide them lonesome
tunes no more, Jilson, bein' as all the youngins is gone. Putts me to studyin. D'ye reckon-you-could fiddle a frolic? Like you used to-" There was a silence, only the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the log fire. Rhuhamie tottered to the mantel shelf, took down a feathered turkey wing, and brushed up the hearth. A puzzled line marked Jilson's brow as he fumbled the strings of the fiddle. The look of perplexity gave way to a smile. He swept the bow across the strings with masterly ease; his heel tapped merrily.
"That's 'Damon's Winder,'" cried Rhuhamie, with unbelievable joy in her voice, "I calculated you'd plum forgot hit long agol
Sounds pint blank as clair as hit did-the night-you played hit at Aremathie Holbrook's infare." There was a far-off look in the
faded eyes. "I wuz Aremathie's waiter," she went on dreamily, "and you-do you recollect, Jilson?"
As if Jilson Setters could ever forget the great wedding feast at Holbrooks' when he and Rhuhamie, "the likeliest-favored gal in
Brushy Hollow," started courtin'. The old fiddle caught the spirit of romance and swept away the years. Jilson's heel tapped in joyful abandon. "That's 'Shelvin Rock'; that's 'Leather Breeches'; 'King's Head?"' Rhuhamie called them all by name, as fast as
the fiddle talked a different tune. "That's 'Cumberland Gap,' and that-" the fiddle sang a gayer tune-"that's 'Wild Wagoner.' "
The melody changed. Jilson watched his wife's perplexed face. "Don't you memorize 'Marthie Campbell'? They ain't no livlier
piece than 'Marthie Campbell.' " And Rhuhamie smiled and nodded assent.
Fiddles have their contrary spells, just like folks, and they can lead folks too, if they take a notion. Surely his grandsire's fiddle
was leading Jilson, making his fingers prank now in a rollicking tune, now "quilin" him down to a sorrowful strain, and now swaying him into a crooning song:
As William crossed the briny ocean
And landed safe on the other side
Says if Mary's alive and I can find her,
I'll make her my lawful bride.
He knew his mate loved the story of "The Brisk Young Farmer," the old, old story of the lover-lost and found. He sang it
through to the happy end:
She wrung her lilly white hands saying
Lord have mercy, what shall I do
O how to prove my story to you,
Here is the ring that I gave you.
Rhuhamie sat there in her straight hickory chair, hands meekly folded in her lap. Softly now, the crooning rhythm of the fiddle
and Jilson's voice hushed with veneration:
I saw a ship a -sailing on the sea
And O, it was a-laden with pretty things for thee;
There were comfits in the cabin, and apples in the hold,
The spreading sails were made of silk, the masts were made of gold.
Next day coins fell thick and fast into the upturned hat of Jilson Setters standing in his same old place in front of the courthouse. Proof enough that folks liked the "Kissing Song." He always started out with a lively piece, for Jilson Setters understood crowd psychology, even if he didn't know it by that name. A stalwart youth tossed a shining half-dollar into the hat and called for "Callahan"-strange how the young generation harks back to tales of daring of a scalawag. Then an old man, not to be outdone mountain folk are that way-dropped in a silver dollar and named "The Forked Deer." Jilson obliged by playing all five parts with lots of extra flourishes between. The lad caught his lass by the arm and together they went through the intricate steps of the dance. The old folks tapped a heel and smiled approval, and the youngsters skipped in glee.
Then Jilson sang in wistful long meter of the lofty young squire who from Portsmouth came and courted a nobleman's daughter so fair; but the lady loved a farmer, who had been chosen to give her away. She disguised herself in hat, coat, and trousers, and went a-huntin' with her dog and her gun. She met the farmer and asked why he had not been to the wedding. "I could not give her up, I love her too well, cried the farmer." Then the lady handed him a glove flowered in gold, "saying I have found it." Then she went home and "put forth the news that she had lost a glove," and offered her heart and hand to the man who would find it.
After they were married she told him of the fun,
How she hunted up the farmer with her dog and her gun
And now I have got him so fastly in my snare
I will love him forever I vow and declare.
While Jilson sang, a stranger, carrying a 'quare contrapshun' in her hand, stood apart from the rest on the courthouse steps. She put down the portable typewriter and was listening intently. When the ballad was finished she smiled and clapped loud and long. "She's the short-writer the Judge fotched on," they told Jilson, "she sots down every word a body says in court." It pleased Jilson Setters to have a stranger take notice of his pieces and jerking his bow in her direction he announced, "I'm aimin' to play a anshunt piece fur that woman." Setters men-folks were powerful respectful of strangers.
"Hit'll be a piece called 'Damon's Winder.' I'd plum forgot hit on tell Rhuhamie got to callin' back old pieces last night. Don't reckon none of you young fellers around here can hardly memorize it." Jilson knew how to hold his crowd while he mended his fiddle. "My grandsir learnt hit to me, and he's dead and gone fifty year or more." With masterly touch he played it to the end. When the last note died away, the stranger, who had stood transfixed by his skill, hurried down the courthouse steps and edged her way through the crowd, straight to the side of Jilson Setters. Jilson didn't dream of what was going on in the stranger's mind. What did he know of the outside world, of recording, of broadcasting? But one thing the stranger knew, and that was the way of mountain people; it would take time, patience, strategem perhaps, to gain her purpose. That very night she dispatched a message from the railroad station, some twenty miles away, to an impresario in the East.
After that there were many visits to the Setters' cabin, on one pretext or another; a gift for Rhuhamie, a tucking comb, a pretty kerchief, a bit of fancy work. And Rhuhamie, like all mountain women, accepted no favor without returning one. She taught the "short-writer" to make preserves that would "keep a lifetime," how to cure spasms, how to drive away a "haynt". "Sure as you're a-livin' they's haynts," vehemently declared Rhuhamie. As time went one, both Jilson and Rhuhamie proudly admitted they had "tuck a likin to that short-writer cause she's common, eats our vittals, and washed my dishes for a span when I had a felon on this hure finger."
It was an event when at last she came carrying the typewriter, and took the day with the old couple. Jilson sang all the ballads he could call to mind, while the visitor "set 'em down." To the amazement of the old folks, she "writ 'em off on the quare contrapshun," and gave them to Jilson. Carefully he locked the precious sheaf of papers in a hide covered chest that stood by the fireplace.
"Now my ballets is safe for the next generashun!" Jilson smiled contentedly. "But what about your music- the music as you sing and play it?" It was a voice of persuasive kindness. "Your music can't be captured like words-not here. But there is a way! In a far-off city, and I'll take you there on the train." Eagerly the visitor drew from her purse a letter. "They want you to come," she pleaded earnestly. "Don't you see, it is your duty to go where these ballads and this music can be recorded, preserved for the next generation! God has given you a talent to play, to sing, a memory rich with rare ballads, which will be lost when you are gone. It is a service that you alone, Jilson Setters, can render. Besides," she looked eagerly from Jilson to Rhuhamie, "it will be a pleasure to folks to hear, and you have no right to hold back-your duty will haunt you. You owe it to mankind."
That was too much, even for the meek Rhuhamie to endure her own words coming back to her through all the years. "For all Jilson is a pore man, he's honest," the thin voice trembled. "He don't aim to hold back nothin' that ain't his'n. And as for bein' haynted, nary Setters by name ever was bewitched in no fashion and Jilson ain't one to lay hisself liable now. Fur all he ain't never sot foot on a railroad train, an' hit just twenty mile off yonder over the mountain, I'm not afeard. Go long, Jilson!" Rhuhamie's head raised high, just as it had in meeting that time, "I'm wantin' you to do whatever is your bounden duty to do. Presarve your ballets, Jilson Setters, and broadkaist 'em, if hit calls fur sweetnin or gunpowder! I'm not afeard. Go long, I'll be waitin' fur you in the holler when you come back. ... ."
From the cabin door she watched him trudge forth, fiddle in oil cloth poke, and hickory chair under arm, "cause hit's comfortabler than a store cheer," and in his hand a willow basket filled with his "wearin' clothes" and drinking gourd. A body might get thirsty on such a long journey on the train. Slowly he wended his way along the narrow path, over the mountain top, and out into the unknown world.
To Jilson Setters it was an enchanted world, with dazzling manmade towers that lifted glittering spires to heaven-high as the rugged peaks of his beloved mountains. And beneath the crowded "roads," endless white tunnels through which clattering trains rushed ceaselessly, packed with shoving, crowding humanity. That and more! He saw with his own eyes a ship a-sailing in the air! With his own ears he heard music from unseen harps filling the palace of a king in which he sat, listening, just as ten million folks on the hook-up had listened to him, they told Jilson Setters. And at last with his own ears he heard his own music, clear as a mountain echo, come right back-"off a lettle round, black plate." Oh to get back home and tell Rhuhamie of the wonders of this world.
"I'm plum tuckered out, Rhuhamie," drawled Jilson Setters. With faltering step he crossed the threshhold of his cabin. From limp arms fell Jilson's home-made fiddle, hickory chair, and willow basket, bulging strangely, now, with more than Jilson's wearin' clothes and gourd. The way-worn traveler tossed his dilapidated felt on the floor and blinked incredulously at his mate, and Rhuhamie, thin fingers gripping bony higs, peered uncertainly at her spouse. "Good Lord, you've answered my prayer," she thought, "all I axed was fur You to fotch him home safe in the flesh and the bone." For a silent moment she surveyed the forlorn Jilson.
"You look plum peekid out of your eyes, an' pale as a bed sheet. Jes' drag your cheer alongside the table, and quile down," her voice was like soft music of the mountain brook. "Git a passel a hot vittals in your stummick," she coaxed, "and you'll peerk up." Rhuhamie stood behind the chair of her mate and plied him with copious helpings. "Hure's more of the snaps, an' sorgum an' hammeat an' buttermilk."
When the meal was over and the supper dishes had been cleared away, Jilson dragged their chairs before the fireplace. Rhuhamie sat with hands meekly folded, eyes shining with quiet animation, while Jilson unpacked the basket. First he took out a mysterious bundle of newspapers, which he unfolded and laid one by one in her lap. There were New York dailies and glaring tabloids from which the likeness of Jilson Setters confronted the amazed Rhuhamie.
"Hit's the spitten image of you, Jilson. Your likeness, pint blank," she gasped. "Thar you are a-settin' in your cheer, a-holdin' your fiddle; thar's your basket." A trembling finger moved from one to the other, "you a-smokin' your pipe and that man a-handin' you the gourd." There was a silence. She looked up questioningly.
"Yas, I broadkaist 'em," Jilson sensed her question, "but I don't credit nothin' I can't see with my own eyes or hear with my own ears. Now, presarvin', hit's different." With fine unconcern, he took from the basket a portable phonograph, quickly adjusted a record, and held it on his knees. "This hure is the short-writer's doins. She sent you this pretty. First hit reads like the papers thar, and arter that you kin hear for yourself." With a hovering stare, Rhuhamie gazed searchingly at the revolving record, listening breathlessly:
Jilson Setters, whose Elizabethan ballads broadcast over a hook-up from coast to coast delighted millions last night. He is a descendant of those early pioneers who climbed into the hills hundreds of years ago and locked their offspring, through generation after generation right down to the present, in mountain fastnesses which barred the world. Jilson Setters is a modem survival of the ancient minstrel. A singer of mountain ballads, old, old tales, woven to old, old melodies. Jilson Setters has rendered to this and to generations to come a priceless service, by preserving intact the unwritten music of his Anglo-Saxon forbears, for he is now a recording artist, whose ballads will live long after his passing. Who knows but that his primitive tunes have blazed the trail for American grand opera.
Jilson touched a tiny lever and stopped the record. He was watching Rhuhamie. With head held high she sat, gripping the sides of her chair. He saw her fingers grow white at the joints. Then, raising a trembling hand, she rested it ever so lightly on the shoulder of her spouse. There was a look of proud possession in her eyes, "You're somethin' I never knowed you wuz, Jilson, an' me married to you nigh on to fifty year."
A moonbeam filtered through a chink-hole in the puncheon wall, lighting up the cabin. In the waiting silence, Jilson again released the tiny lever, and clear as a mountain echo the miracle of a modern age wafted back to Jilson and his mate Jilson's voice with the rhythm of Jilson's home-made fiddle, an old, old tale woven to an old, old melody. Softly it came, softly as a benediction:
I saw a ship a-sailing on the sea
And oh it was a-laden with pretty things for thee; ....
The spreading sails were made of silk, the masts were made of gold.
------------------------------------------------
Jilson Setters: Singin' Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow
By Jean Thomas
American Speech, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Apr., 1933), pp. 28-30
JILSON SETTERS
SINGIN' FIDDLER OF LOST HOPE HOLLOW
JEAN THOMAS
Founder of American Folk Song Society
IN these days of sophistication it is refreshing to find a spot like Lost Hope Hollow back in the mountains of Kentucky. There individuals like Jilson Setters, the Singin' Fiddler,[1] [1. See-Jean Thomas, "The Last Minstrel," English Journal, Vol. XVII, pp. 810-20.-] live on in the selfsame place in the selfsame way as his Anglo-Saxon forbears who had climbed deep into the wilderness of the Appalachians hundreds of years before him. To this day his folks cook at the open fireplace and cut pumpkin in rings and dry it on a stick suspended from the foir-board (the mantel).
When you enter the windowless cabin, it is the men-folk who will first greet you: "Drag up a cheer, and sot a spell." A man will tell you, too, chewing his home-made twist contentedly, "A pipe ties a body down. Hit's all right for the wimmin to smoke a pipe, but hit's a heap more comfortabler for us menfolks to chew. We can step around where's we're a-mind to not wearyin' about a hot coal from the foir-place to keep the pipe a-goin'."
One day Jilson Setters was telling me about a young man up the holler (hollow)with his own hands; that is to say, he cut the logs and ripped off the bark. "And I razed hit my own self," he said, "and hit were pint blank level" (plumb). He had one neighbor who was contrarious (contrary) and witchy claiming power to cast haynts and to bewitch people), and another who was flighty and drinlin' (fragile and failing).
Jilson Setters's folks still make gritted bread by rubbing the corn on a large grater, and still use for sweetnin' wild honey kept in piggins. who was a "right ditty singer, and when it comes to strummin' the dulcimore, Jason don't valley no man." When I pressed him for an explanation of valley he replied blandly, "Well Jason can jest nacherlly outstrum any feller in the holler."
He tells me frankly, "I don't mind the cold weather nary wight; I'm naturalized to hit." Proudly he escorted me to the well in front of his cabin. (The well is generally located in front of mountain homes-apparently the mountain man is more thoughtful or considerate of the passing stranger than of the woman [his wife] who does the cooking. Rarely have I observed a well located near the kitchen door convenient for her use.) Speaking of his well, Jilson Setters said, "This is lasty water," meaning that it was supplied by a spring that never had been known to go dry.
On one occasion he remarked about
a neighbor, "Hezekiah flouted Eph's
woman. I can't fairly master hit either,
all the critter done was to putt on a
fair-pink calicker apron over her black
dress and wear hit to meetin'. I taken
notice she had on her same old black
bonnet, with nary a grain of starch in
hit and hit retch plum out over her
face same as ever. She's not fixy like
that young widder-woman over on
Brushy." He leaned closer with scandalized
expression on his face, "That
widder-woman wears pink sun-bonnets
starched stiff as a plank."
Again the old minstrel commented
after he had broadcast on the blue network
in New York City and I had
told him proudly, "Now millions have
heard your priceless ballads." "Well,"
he drawled in his slow mountain way,
"I don't credit nothin' I can't see with
my own eyes. That thar lettle fryin' pan
contrapshun standin' up on a stick and
me a-standin' in front of hit fiddlin'-
however could hit carry off a-body's
ballets from one ocean to tother."
Speaking of a neighbor who had
complained because Setters's cow had
gotten over in the neighbor's pasture:
"My cow-brute uses whar the grass
grows greenest. But it were unbeknownst
to me, and Obadiah had no
call to fault the woman (Setters's wife)
for what my property (the cow-brute)
done; he had no call to pelt my piedy
heifer with the battler." It seems that
Obadiah's folks still wash clothes at the
battling bench, and his wife being so
engaged when Setters's cow transgressed,
Obadiah up with the battling
stick and drove his neighbor's spotted
cow out of the pasture. "Obadiah is
techeous," Setters told me afterward.
Recently upon his return from England
the Singin' Fiddler told me, "I
everly had a favorance for the Englishers.
You see my grandsir come from
that country. And when it comes to
song ballets (ballads) and lively ditties
they're a mighty knowin' race. What's
more they're a powerful friendly turn
(hospitable). Bless me, the elder (the
Vicar) cyarved me a fleek (slice) of hammeat
the size of my pam (palm) spread
plum wide (indicating with wide
spread hand). And that young striplin'
that stood afore the foir-board and
sung that Riley ballet; eh law, he were
for a fact a doughty feller" (a well
dressed gentleman).
When Jilson Setters was still blind,
he "cyarved a house pattern out of oak"
----------------------------
Article from Old, Weird America
Set Two: Social Music; Disc One; Track Two: "The Wild Wagoner (Frolic Tune)" performed by J.W. Day (Jilson Setters). "Violin solo with guitar." Recorded in New York on February 27, 1928. Original issue Victor 21353A (42485).
The story of James William Day, a.k.a. J.W. Day, a.k.a. Blind Bill Day, a.k.a. Jilson Setters is vague and littered with half-truths. Here are the facts that we know: Born in 1861, Day was a self-taught fiddler from Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Day was blind, although whether he was born blind or was blinded is not known. During his youth, Day performed locally at dances and parties. He also occasionally supported himself by begging on the street while performing. He was known as Blind Bill Day during this period. At some point around 1906, Day had an operation that restored his sight. In 1926, Day met Jean Thomas, a folklorist and impresario who later ran the American Folk Song Festival near Ashland, Kentucky from 1931 to 1972. Thomas was impressed with Day's skill as a fiddler and with his repertoire of English folk ballads. Moreover, Thomas was convinced that the rural folk of the American southeast possessed traits that had been passed down from their Elizabethan English forebears almost unaltered. Thomas decided to manage Day. She changed his name to Jilson Setters and presented him as an old man who had lived in isolation in the mountains. She also claimed that the eye surgery that restored Day's sight had been only recently performed and that Day (now Setters) had been shocked by the modern world. Day was taken to New York to perform and record. He made ten sides for Victor, including this recording of "The Wild Wagoner," a staple of the standard fiddle repertoire. Day was also taken to England where he performed at the Royal Albert Hall for the King and Queen. He continued to perform throughout the 1930s and into the '40s at folk festivals, as well as recording for the Library of Congress. Jean Thomas wrote a heavily fictionalized biography of Day titled The Singin' Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow. He died in 1942.
Here is a quote from a 1928 article written by Thomas about Day in which she provides a heavily romanticized picture of the man:
In a windowless cabin, hidden away in a high cranny of the Kentucky mountains, lived Jilson Setters, who, for all his sixty-five years, had never seen a railroad. Neither had he heard a phonograph nor a radio. His home-made fiddle and his ‘ballets’ were good enough for Jilson Setters and mountain folk.
from: “The Last Minstrel” by Jean Thomas, The English Journal, December, 1928
"The Wild Wagoner" is the second of seven tracks in a row that feature the fiddle, either solo or in combination with various instruments. As mentioned above, it is a standard part of the fiddle repertoire, most often performed at dances or "frolics." On this recording, the fiddle plays the melody line while a guitar (played by an unknown hand) keeps the rhythm. The song is in the key of C, a less common key for old time fiddle music than A, G, or D. The title of the song often varies according to the location of the musician playing it, e.g. "The Kentucky Wagoner" or "The Missouri Wagoner."
While it is tempting - especially on a set as laden with meaning as the Anthology - to search for some sort of sub-textual import for each song, not every song has to have a meaning. The purpose of the songs on this volume, after all, was to be played at social functions for dancing. That's all. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It is important to remember that none of the songs on the Anthology were thought of as "art" by the people who performed them. All of these songs had a function. The songs on the "Ballads" set told a story. The songs on the "Social Music" set are either songs for dancing or for worship. The songs on the "Songs" set are simply designed to amuse. It is only relatively recently that popular songs were supposed to do something more than act as diversions. It is therefore somewhat ironic when people complain that - for example - Lady Gaga's music is "just" music for dancing. While Uncle Bunt Stephens and J.W. Day would probably not responded to her music, I can't imagine that they would object to the message when Lady Gaga sings "It'll be okay...just dance."