When Singing Comes in, Fighting Goes Out
Mountain folk, especially those who have had the misfortune of being mixed in troubles (feuds to the outside world) believe earnestly that “when singing comes in, fighting goes out.” “Look at the Hatfields and McCoys,” they say. “They make music together now at the home of one side and now at the home of them on t’other side. They sit side-by-side on the bench at the Singing Gathering down on the Mayo Trail come the second Sunday in June every year. Off yonder nigh the mouth of Big Sandy,across the mountains which once were stained with the blood of both families. What’s more, Little Melissy Hatfield and Little Bud McCoy even sing together a ballad that tells of the love of Rosanna McCoy for Devil Anse’s son Jonse. And their elders sing hymn tunes long cherished in the mountain church, whilst tens of thousands gathered on the hills all around about listen with silent rejoicing over the peace that has come to the once sorry enemies.”
To be sure, there is the singing of folk songs handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. When the mountain people are asked the origin of their music, the usual reply is “My grandsir larnt me this fiddle tune,” or “My Granny larnt me this song-ballet.”
Since mountain people have brought their music out of the coves and hollows for the world to hear through their Singing Gathering and Festivals, the nation is fast becoming aware of the importance of folk music in the life of Americans today. Great singers have taken up the simple songs of our fathers. “Wipe out foes of morale with music,” says Lucy Monroe, New York’s “Star Spangled Banner Soprano,” director of patriotic music for RCA-Victor, when she sang on September 11, 1941, before the National Federation of Music Clubs in New York. “Let’s make certain that when the present crisis is passed, music will have done its full job of defense,” she said enthusiastically. The singer urged federation members to become soldiers of music. “Let us enlist together to form a great army of music!” she urged. Miss Monroe was commissioned by Mayor LaGuardia to devote her efforts to the cause of music for the Office of Civilian Defense. Whereupon she outlined a four-point program: 1. To visit large plants and industrial centers connected with defense workto give musical programs and to suggest that the plants begin each day’s activities with playing the Star-spangled Banner—to tell the men what they are working for. 2. To conduct community sings in large cities. 3. To collect phonograph records for the boys in army camps, establishing central depots in every locality in the country. 4. To give talks, with song illustrations, on the history of the United States of America in colleges, high schools, women’s clubs, and music clubs.
Though some may see folk song, the basis of all music, endangered by motion pictures, Kurt Schindler, authority on ancient European customs and collector of folk music in other lands, believes the danger lies in another direction. “The young students, the modernists, in their great desire to keep up with the times wish to kill the old things.”
All the forces working in America to preserve folk song should share Kurt Schindler’s fears. The press is cognizant of the farflung effort throughout the land. TheAtlanta Journal(September 19, 1928) says, “The collection and preservation of mountain folk music is a singularly gracious work and one of rare value to history. Collected in its natural environment, it is perforce authentic both in tune and idiom, and sincere collectors are not content with this alone—they complete the record by tracing the songs to their origins. Such is a most gracious work and one which lovers of beauty, whether music or in legend or in local history, throughout the South, would do well to imitate.”
Far removed from the metropolitan area where great singers interpret the simple songs of our forbears and urge the necessity of their preservation, an untrained mountain minstrel is lending his every effort to aid not only in conservingbut in correlating as well the folk lore of the Blue Ridge Country. He is a kinsman of Devil Anse Hatfield and lives just around the mountain from where the old warrior lies buried. “Sid Hatfield never was mixed up in the troubles in no shape nor fashion,” anyone can tell you. “He’d not foir a gun if you laid one in his hand. But just give him a fiddle! Why, Sid Hatfield is the music-makinest fellow that ever laid bow to strings. What’s more he puts a harp in his mouth and plays it at the same time he’s sawin’ the bow. I’ve seen him and hear-ed him, many’s the time.”
And so have thousands of others. For Sid Hatfield spends his spare time, when he’s not working for the Appalachian Power Company in Logan County, West Virginia, making music first at one gathering, then another. Sid’s repertoire is almost limitless. He plays any fiddle tune from Big Sandy to Bonaparte’s Retreat. And when it comes to the mouth harp, Sid just naturally can’t be beat. “I love the old tunes,” he says, “and they must not die. You and I can help them to live. Let old rancors die, but not our native song.”
To that end he has become a prime mover in a folksong and folklore conservation movement called American Folkways Association. “There are a lot of McCoys,” he says, “who can pick a banjo and sing as fine a ditty as you ever heard. There’s Bud McCoy over on Levisa Fork. Never saw his betters when it comes to picking the banjo. We’ve played together a whole day at a stretch and never played the same tune twice. We just stop long enough to eat dinner and then we go at it again. Bud’s teaching his grandson, Little Bud, and he’s not yet five year old. Little Bud can step a hornpipe too. Peert as a cricket!” A slow breaking smile lights Sid’s open countenance.“Reckon you’ve heard of our Association,” and, not giving anyone time to answer, Sid is off on the subject nearest and dearest to his heart. “We’ve got the finest Association in the country. Got a nephew of Fiddling Bob Taylor in our Association and by next summer we aim to hold a Singing Gathering down in his country—the Watauga country in Tennessee. Folsom Taylor, that’s his name and he’s living now in the far end of the Blue Ridge in Maryland. He helped us with the Singing Gathering we held in the Cumberlands in Maryland this past summer. We’ve got another helper down in Tennessee. His name is Grady Snead. He was in the World War and about lost his singing voice but he’s not lost any of his spirit for mountain music and old-time ways. Why, every summer ever since Grady got back from the war he’s gathered his people around him in Snead’s Grove—he owns quite a few acres down in Tennessee—and they have an old-time picnic and they have hymn singing and ballad singing and fiddle music. This past summer our Association joined in with them at the Snead picnic and you never saw the like that day in Snead’s Grove. People thick as bees and pleased as could be. We started off a-singing a good old-fashioned hymn all together and that put everybody in good heart. Never saw such a picnic in all my born days. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned all-day picnic to make friends among people and then mix in a lot of good old-time music. That’s what Americans were brought up on and that’s what they’re going to live on more and more through these troubled hours and as time goes on.”
That day at Snead’s Grove, Sid Hatfield told them about the Association and how already different organizations had united with it. He told of a preacher over in Maryland who had joined in whole-heartedly. “He’sadopted the great out-of-doors for his temple in which to worship with song and prayer. Robinson is his name. Reverend Felix Robinson, as fine a singer and as fine a preacher as you’d ever want to sit under.”
Then Sid put down his fiddle and his mouth harp and drawing from his coat pocket a crumpled paper, he began again. “My friends, I want to read you this piece in theChicago Daily News. This is the place to read it. We ought to be warned about what can happen in this country to our music, by what has happened to some of our people. Though maybe sometime it’s been for the best. This piece was writ by a mighty knowing man. His name is Robert J. Casey and he flew from Chicago for his paper theChicago Daily Newsto hear with his own ears the music of the mountains from the lips of mountain singers at Traipsin’ Woman cabin on the Mayo Trail the second Sunday in June, 1938.”
There was a moment’s breathless silence over the great gathering there in Snead’s Grove. The look of fear and apprehension gave way to that of eagerness and hope as Devil Anse Hatfield’s kinsman read with quiet dignity:
“‘One breathes a sigh for the Hatfields and McCoys who maintain the Democratic majority in cemeteries along the West Virginia line. One voices a word of commendation for the Hatfields and the McCoys who drive taxi-cabs in Ashland or run quiet, respectable and legal beer parlors in Huntington. And looking from one group to the other, one realizes that something has happened to the hill country.
“‘A person of imagination standing on the tree-shaded porch of the Traipsin’ Woman cabin up in Lonesome Hollow probably still can hear echoes of “the singing gathering” which only a few hours ago demonstrated the essentialdurability of the hill folks.... Where a day or two ago there was only a neutral interest in such proceedings, now people are talking of Elizabethan culture preserved completely for a matter of centuries by people who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, just a few rods from the fence of the rolling mills.
“‘There is a tendency in some quarters to look upon the sing-festival as a permanent and predictable community asset. But that is because the sophisticated and urban population is ignoring the present status of the McCoys and the Hatfields, as for many years it has ignored the crack-voiced “ballet” singers and the left-handed virtuosi in its own backyard.’”
Sid Hatfield paused in his reading to say a few words on his own. “There is one, not calling any names, who discovered a forgotten England in the Kentucky uplands.” He turned again to read from the paper. “‘One who set down the words of the amazing ballads and studied music in order to capture the changeless arrangements for psaltery, dulcimer and sakbut, who has no such illusions. The music of the hills today is a thin echo of tunes that were sung on the village greens in Shakespeare’s time. Tomorrow it will be gone!’” Sid Hatfield’s voice lifted in warning. “‘And with it will vanish the early English idiom of the hill folks—their costumes, their customs, their dances, the singing ritual of their weddings. Pretty soon there aren’t going to be any more hill folk—if indeed, there are any now.
“‘“The Hatfields and McCoys, they were reckless mountain boys,” whose history is now as stale as that of the Capone mob. Their feud, which ... threatened to provoke a civil war between two states, gave rise to the general belief in the lasting endurance of the hill dwellers.A race must be hardy as the ragweed when it could not be exterminated even by its own patient effort. The tenantry of the flatlands might be excused for believing that a special Providence intended it to survive, despite poverty, malnutrition, bad housing and wasting disease forever and ever.
“‘And so it might have survived, for the hill people had “the habit of standing.” They had set a precedent of fertility and hardihood and the will to live for a matter of centuries.... But there had come influences over which not even the carefully nurtured stubbornness of 300 years could prevail.... The railroad and the concrete highway and the automobile and the black tunnels of the coal mine.
“‘... The day of isolated communities and isolated culture in the United States is already past.... The hill folk have been known to the flatland people chiefly for feuds and moonshine. Perhaps tempers are no less quick, but it’s less trouble to get to court and have grievances adjudicated according to law. And the music is going—and the traditional dances. It is one of the defects of all educational systems that they make it easier for a person to forget by removing the necessity for his remembering.’”
Sid Hatfield again voiced his own observations. “Time was when old folks could recall every word of hundreds of ballads.” He turned once more to read from the newspaper in his hand. “‘... and every note of a music whose disregard for melodic rule made it exceedingly difficult to remember. Now, when such things can be written down, no “grandsir” will bother to repeat them to the youngins and the youngins will get their music from theradio. By that time there will be no doubt that Queen Elizabeth is dead.’”
Devil Anse’s kinsman surveyed his listeners. “My friends, we’ve got a-bound, me and you and you,” he singled out a lad here a man, a woman there, “to put our shoulders to the wheel and save our old ways and our old music.”
Then he told about the American Folkways Association and its purpose. “We aim to unify efforts to conserve and cultivate the traditions and customs of the Blue Ridge Country where conditions are ideal for a renewed emphasis on living a simple and natural life ... to preserve the past and present expressions of isolated peoples in the Southern Appalachians which are untainted by any form of insincerity or make-believe. There is growing interest among city-bred people in the folk-ways, and through research and actual experiences, they are learning to appreciate the simple folk-life that is still intact.”
Sid, like Devil Anse, understands crowd psychology, though neither calls it by that name. Sid had the attention of his hearers and he told them more. “We’re getting our eyes open more every day to the boundless treasures in America. People all through the Blue Ridge don’t aim to stand by and see things disappear because new ways have come in. They’ve started all sorts of gatherings and festivals to keep alive the things that mean America!”
With quick gesture he enumerated upon his fingers as he named some of them: “There’s the Forest Festival held in October at Elkins, West Virginia, with a pretty mountain maid for its Queen; the Tobacco Festival in Shelbyville, Kentucky, that pays homage to the leading product of the Blue Grass country, next to the race horse, of course; there’s the Mountain Laurel Festival at Pineville,Kentucky, in May, glorifying the beauty and profusion of the mountain flower; the Virginia Apple Blossom Festival in April in the Shenandoah Valley at Winchester, Virginia—a wilderness of blossoms that has made beautiful a once lonely valley; the Rhododendron Festival in Webster Springs, West Virginia, in July, that vies in charm with a like event in Kentucky; the Sweet Potato Festival in Paris, Tennessee, that pays tribute to the yam; the American Folk Song Festival in the foothills of Kentucky. Then there’s the Snead Picnic that our good friend Grady Snead has been carrying on every summer ever since he got back from the war across the waters; there’s the Mountain Choir Festival over in Oakland, Maryland, in the month of August, when hundreds of mountain boys and girls gather together to sing hymns and old ballads too; there’s the Arcadian Folk Festival and the Poet’s Fair and the Arcadian Guild all bunched together at Hot Springs National Park and McFadden Three Sisters Springs where down in the Ozark Country folks welcome the advent of ‘the Moon of Painted Leaves’ and pattern new dreams in the valley of pastoral fancy, listen to the Pipes of Pan, meet old friends, and make new ones in a sylvan environment, where poetry slides down every moonbeam. Every sort of gathering right where it belongs, where it was cradled through all these long generations.”
Sid paused a moment for second wind. “When we look about we’re bound to own this is a mighty changing world. Time was when the mountain people rode to the gatherings in Brushy Hollow in jolt wagons. They kept it up a while, loading the whole family in the jolt wagon. But times have changed.... A body has to sort o’ keep up with the times, like Prof. Koch. Bless you, he loads his whole pack and passel of boys and girls in a bus andpacks them hither and yon ’crost the country to show out with their play-making. The Carolina Playmakers just naturally fetch the mountain to Mohammed.” Sid flung wide his hands, brought them slowly together. “To get all such folks to work together that’s why we formed the American Folkways Association. What’s more we’ve got us a magazine to tell about what we’ve done and aim to do—theArcadian Lifemagazine, with our good friend Otto Ernest Rayburn as editor, ’way down in the Ozarks.” Sid Hatfield smiled pleasantly. “There’s no excuse for folks not being neighborly nowadays. No matter where they live, what with good roads and the automobile—we’ve just got a-bound to be neighborly. To sing together, to make music together, to show out our crops and our posies and our handiwork together. Here in Snead’s Grove today is the third time we’ve bore witness that our Association is not just a theory. We made our first bow in the Kentucky foothills in June, the second in Maryland in August, and now in Tennessee. In October we aim to join hands and hearts and our music in Arcadia under the Autumn moon.”
That day in Snead’s Grove in Tennessee they wanted Sid Hatfield to keep right on but taking a squint at the sun sinking in the west, he said in conclusion, “I’ve got a long ways to travel back to the West Virginia mountains but I hope we’ll all be together again here in the Grove next summer, this day a year, the Lord being willing.”
Vanishing Trail
Perhaps it is merely the result of evolutionary process, economic rather than intentional, that man has wiped out many reminders of the past; that the forest primeval haspassed to make room for blue grass, tasseled corn, and tobacco; that forts and blockhouses gave way to the settler’s log house encircled by a garden patch; that the windowless cabin has gone to make room for the weather-boarded frame of many rooms and glass windows; that the village has vanished for the town—the industrial center.
The Wilderness Trail broken first by mastodon, then panther and bear and frightened deer, has been transformed into a modern highway. The Shawnee Trail along which Indians lurked and tomahawked white men has become Mayo Trail, taking its name from a country schoolteacher. He was a far-seeing man, who stumbled sometimes hopelessly along the lonely way, when he needed help to bring out of the bowels of the earth the treasure in coal he knew to be hidden there. Mayo Trail is an amazing engineering feat that connects mountains with level land. Limestone Trail in Mason County has left along its course only a vestige of vegetation to remind us it was once the path of buffalo and Indian. To motorists hurrying onward it is merely U. S. 60 that leads to another city.
The rugged, unbroken path once pursued by the lad Gabriel Arthur, a Cherokee captive, called on Hutchins Map in 1778 the “War Path to the Cuttawa Country,” uniting today with the Wilderness Trails, has become the open gateway to the West. Boone’s Trace, or Boone’s Path, leading from Virginia through Cumberland Gap, to the Ohio River, still is called Boone’s Path. Since 1909 it has been a national motorway, being a part of the Dixie Highway which runs from Michigan to Florida. It was over this same path that Governor Duncannon of Virginia built the first wagon road in 1790. During the Civil War the region of the Gap was fortified and occupied by Confederate and Union soldiers in turn. Later, in 1889, thefirst railroad entered the Gap. Today Skyline Highway—U. S. 25 and 58—leads from the saddle of the historic Gap to the top of Pinnacle Mountain, commanding a view of six states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.
And the scene has changed.
Spring has come to the Blue Ridge. The hum of industry echoes along once lonely creeks, through quiet hollows. We see no more the oxcart lumbering, creaking laboriously along, higher and higher up the rugged mountain side. The latest model motor glides swiftly over the smooth surface, winding its way upward and upward. Off yonder the TVA has harnessed the waterpower of the Holston and Tennessee, made a great valley to burst into a miracle of man’s genius. Modern industrial plants steam along the banks.
Good roads, the automobile, schoolhouses, the airplane have wiped out all barriers between mountain and plain. The Blue Ridge casts a long, long shadow across blossoming valleys. The mountaineer of yesterday with his Anglo-Saxon speech of Elizabeth’s time, his primitive plow and loom, has vanished before the juggernaut of progress. But the children of the hills are blessed with a rich, a priceless heritage in tradition, song, and love of independence that will not die as long as mountains stand and men of the mountains survive to defend and preserve it.
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