"Appalachian Journey", Alan Lomax (1991)

[Music] in these southern Appalachian Mountains a culture has been long growing for 200 more years it's becoming more and more important to all of us here in America and indeed to people all over the world most of it know it through the music of Nashville the country music but it it has deeper roots that go far back into American times people came bearing strains of the Norse adventurer a Celtic fantasy and of the Protestant revolution that helped to free mankind from the old tyrannies of kings and emperors and in this grand setting all were influenced by the civilized Cherokee town dwellers who taught them how to go to backhoe and corn and squash and how to play the mouse bone but the Indians found that there was no end to the pale faces and no end to their greed for land and gold and so a long and tragic war broke out to drove the Indians west on the Trail of Tears they marched most the turkey Dakota and Oklahoma and killed lots and women and children on marches are you proud of your Indian blood yes sir [Music] which music I thank you gift God and I'm proud to be a mountain man I'm proud to be a banjo picker I don't care what you said back wait their child is one of the stars of the modern Appalachian folk music revival his costume and his Tunes take us back to the time when these mountains with the south western frontier of the United States a land of promise for Daniel Boone and his people who came pouring in from the impoverished lands of Northwest Europe the only way in was up the mountain creeks and they drove their oxen right over the big boulders with I popped my whip I bring the blood I make my leaders take the mug these people didn't have symphonies or choruses but they were highly artistic there were great hands it's a fiddle it's solo tunes and they brought with them as they're invisible baggage the great ballads of the past whereon he stands so fare thee well my own true love our time is passed by but I wish you well still I hope the day will come when you and I shall be as one they had the the great English ballots that are quite the equal of best lyric points of those are best days black is the color of my true love's hair her cheeks are like the rosy fair the prettiest eyes and the daintiest hands i love the ground whereon she stands this seventy thousand square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this british tradition time to reshape itself and when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain it was finding a new home here reforming itself taking on a new new life on the frontier of life out of the cornfields and out of the whiskey stills and out of the feuds and out of the loneliness of of living and the difficulties of living in a new land most people don't understand America because they don't know how frightening it has been to leave home completely and pull up your roots and and face the wilderness [Music] sometimes really hard then but you can make pretty plenty to eat on the phone we always had work there you see me way up in the Smokies we're about 400 4,000 feet near Boone North Carolina and I'm looking up to go and see Stanley Hicks who's a member of a family that came from Northern Ireland and has just endless amount of stories and ballads and dance traditions tradition isn't static it's growing and Stanley turns out to tell me a story that he just made up a couple of days before just an anticipation of my coming I guess we'll just say it told you about my catfish dinner one time oh you didn't then well they've heard about that and I'll tell you about it when I went to school back in the old days you know one went and dad didn't want to go fishing much by slip dog went to the river your proper coffee coming on and a cup catching these fish throwing him out in the bank and the coat of catfish about that well laid him up on the bank you go cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo lay now you know so I got him and took him on home that part in water hall and then I I waited long stained water you know and a puppy little stranger I'd snack and he'd go along behind me to school you know good lead it's true talking cats yeah and hit would they broke a boulder out in the bridge you know hard the road let her cross old stairs instead and I went across this bridge going through and the string got blue you know and I went back she walked out into my catfish and you know what happened fell right down through that hole where the boulder got broke off and got drowned well the hips generation and Hicks is at scots-irish name it was all musical talent upon you my watch and I upon you much and I'll upon you my gold i McCrae ray X is seven feet just close to it you can count the days I'm gone you can see the train at I'll Eva you can hear the whistle they used to love to invite ray to barn racing didn't have to have a last alrea is the greatest of all American folk tale towers and he not only tells the stories of The Adventures of Jack Jack and the Beanstalk but there are many more stories of that in the tradition but he he embellishes them and they grow under his talent was fifty dogs around fifty ducks was a swimming night ribbit he said but Dad ray I've got to have a I said how you need there you go again where we got our shoe strings out built in a pockets who we'd been around hats and the other string in their pocket he tied them together and tied his Bridget legs and said I'll swim under there and tied our legs together and they won't know and he got under that water and swim down the back and got him tied together and when he come up monks that bunch of ducks I'd be any quacking and hollering and wound up they had all whole 50 other I'm tired of just wham together and he need bread cheese when you stand there talk me fix what doing man let him out and had 35 pound of fish he'd seen in here while he was on the light and he had that golden barrel down between them been in three crook seen I walked down where he set up a bending a crook for each one okay he said the bullet goes eaten game good game get all three cook and so he's shot and it blowed the turkey off and hit the squirrel and then the duck and the goat the gunner the barrel with a and Jack was knocked down there pretty tore up and unconstitu me when he got over who got that man looking at the bottle he'd hit a rabbit setting and killed the barrel hadn't he'd certainly walk down the bank hammer was a pic of the wild hog today this early American myth captures the delight of hungry pioneers in the game rich woods they found in America putters from Davy Crockett on have lied about their adventures in the woods populating them with all sorts of preposterous creatures poisonous snakes which feel Britain's had ever seen where a favorite subject they talked about the hip snake which would roll after its victim and Tata spirit with its poisonous tail to my mind the Hicks family represent along with many many other of these fantastic Norse presbyterian people a main source of the American imagination much also was carried over from Great Britain like this jumping jack and it's digging step that's still popular in English pubs as well as in the Appalachians today memories the mountain wigglers carved funny toys like this play middle and wonderful musical instruments like this medieval Swedish dulcimer [Music] [Music] he won't come and I will follow plenty lines from the harsh early days when mountain girls were raised to fear men and sex and yet often had to marry at 13 and 14 Stanley and his sister remember how often times you have to run the girls down if the didn't step on the dress and fall you'll never catch up overtaking they know and that's about the only way you can overtake one they're just to buy spiced as the men work on the book you know I brought a man went down I've been stressed over them I mean just stress don't fish you know just like Bob Catherine's nephew [Music] Stanley tied these numerous toys that were hand-carved with a pocketknife like the hot women little right out of the available woods to the father's desire to make his children happy and to an extent to make up to them for the for the severity of discipline in these families I'd have to count sure put my bread down Tom Sheridan washing dishes not good for Saudi to bread they vacuum you I think we had a hard time er had to make shoes for the children to wear the little uniforms over but these same parents were made you all kinds of things to play with to them oh he he did bound him to get time play rest oh good Oh a lot of times we round the house you know he had a straight Fraser River straw then you waited his laser on this drop by wait a lot of times he was down dollars but everyone he had in his hands if he got mad what attitude about Troy review the discipline was Dickensian they all looked back at it with a grin but it of course buried damage deep in their psyches and it comes out in many ways in the song hang your head Tom Dooley [Music] oh it's hang your head and cry you will re foster poor boy you're bound back I met her on the mile down there I took her alive met her on the hillside and stabbed her with mine so Tang hit Tom dude this is about as close as one ever gets to the real source of things this is the Tom Dooley song by the son of the man who actually gave it to the world this is Frank Crawford jr. who is in the high mountains near live in North Carolina his father Frank prophet who sang it for my friends the Warner's when they came down into the mountains bow hunting back in 1938 I learned it from the Warner's and I sang it all over the country and on my radio shows and it got to be known that way and then sometime later on the Kingston Trio picked it up and it's now a world song reckon where I'll be and along some Valley hanging on a white oak tree this is a story from the day of Tom doulas execution may 2nd 1868 the song is a record of a true event Tom doula was a wild young buck veteran of the Civil War he was going with the two or three women at the same time and one of them it said Laura Foster gave him syphilis and he which he in Burton T passed on to another of the women named Ann Melton whom he was much closer to and she and she found that out she insisted that they murder Laura Foster in vengeance he took his dainty self and now I got a kid he didn't die the woman's right Donnie Tom do it really didn't kill her but he took this raft on himself sawed my grandpa from the grandma always told at the same time I mean here is involving different time and mountain and mountain was married already married he's already mouth yeah she was a foster I think she's Laura's first cuz there that's what we heard I don't think I had the morals of an alley cat very little morals and mania and restraint [Music] it's it's strange for the prophets to think about it Frank jr. says it changed his life and here in this book it says that about mr. prophet who's now dead the source says that before the folk music started that is the royalty started coming into the family often the family had nothing to eat but potatoes three times a day and often not enough of those gives you an idea of what life was like back in those hills at times was that a pretty low time for him it's just all the crops drying it and then it came a big spring freshet rain storm and thunder storm and washed everything away and he just didn't see no way to turn but he goes Delta more out and God little solace on it to soothe his depression I can't had that turn to I don't know watery done my grandfather Nathan Hicks came over his Cabbage Patch had been washed away he came over and him and Daddy played their misery out played their misery out that's what he do and he wrote this song and I'm going to do it try here now called poor man [Music] well I got down on my knees for rain I thought I pray won't come a great big flood washed everything away they nothing for a poor man in this world [Music] well I work through the summertime and work through the phone then I spent my Christmas and a part of over home painting for a poor man in this world lord have mercy [Music] these hills were rich with Indian corn but the market was far off over the mountains often times and so the mountain man had to turn his corn into whiskey and transport it to town in liquid form at harvest time the neighbors gathered in to help and the men shocked away like fury every time you found a red ear you got to kiss your favorite girl and somewhere down in that pile it was a fine jug of Mountain moonshine [Music] I don't lay them to play around the foot of that mountain now gone chord they had to do something make a little money of them so they can make a new piece on the farm they had to make a little-bitty on the side and sell that and buy what they need my granddaddy he made brandy but again the buck part it is to make any money he took he said took full bushels out and make one gallon Brandon if he'd give 12 cents a bushel for them apples that were 48 cents it cost him decided to work and then he had to pay a dollar and 10 cent tax on the gallon so he had it he had just blockade it you know to make any money flip it out what is block hating me well that means you know it if they had to munch on it and hide it out when the Gators come around and all the sand word left I'm here to come and they hid out all the whiskey all the brandy out in the wood they didn't want them encounter had to make in [Music] guerilla warfare really took place that lasted until prohibition was repealed in some counties the county official took it very seriously and they just went in with guns and trying to kill whomever they found and the Mountaineers were armed and they fought back and they come up there and cut all the Democrats still and let the Republicans still on you know come by them homeland and around the middle they come by his meal well cut another for you today I'm gonna end I called him up and everybody go to Michael dad work the next time I can learn said that yeah yeah said Oakland and Louisville cut some of you all down to you next time you come back up here so he put him up another and they came back and he killed he killed one and shot Tom Brown went through his long neither died if his brother hadn't heard deechi room and come over turned him over so he told me in the both men died working on the road with he showed us when the bullet went in blue t-shirt Oh shows us why they cut it out like that it didn't go gone through it this mood is he an old had to do this split the skin and it pops out [Music] they will remember with absolute ecstatic delight the first time they ever heard a fiddle sound this is a an account from 1870 I have in this book here where a fella is telling about the first time you ever heard a fiddle and he he says lordy I thought that was the prettiest sweeping his music that I'd ever heard it I wanted to holler and jump up and down I just couldn't sit still on that log bench when that tune started sneaking around the schoolhouse I let out of Yale and left off that bench and commenced to dance and clog around and everybody was hollering and laughing and every time he touched the boat of them strings hell would break loose in that school laughing you see that hand sliding on that string that doesn't happen in the fiddling of the old country that's the black play and notice how he shakes that middle body of his I mean there's another sign of the black influence because Tommy you see grew up where there was lots of contact between black and white music [Music] the source of Tommy's hard-driving syncopated mountain music is among blacks who handled the fiddle like a rhythm instrument and marry it to the banjo some strong drum to create a the hoedown Jim's that shaped the southern dance floors [Music] and I remember that my mother had a first cousin and he he tried to play a film and he saw for a fact seeds and got him a little friendlier playing itself and so he said he will not do much with it and he told my mom's enrolled that boy keep talking about that fiddle imma give it to him so I walked over there about five six mile get that fiddle my daddy put straying [Music] [Music] [Music] when the railroads came into the mountains at the middle of the nineteenth century the work was done by blacks there was no mercy on those blacks they drove them hard and they they kept up their spirits by singing like lead buddy Wow Steel's running like lead Wow and the Mountaineers were leaning over the edge of their Mountain and listening and learning about the man who drove the steam drill down and died with a hammer in his hand [Music] [Music] perhaps the greatest of all American folk songs is the is the Ballad of John Henry now when John Henry was composed and sung by the blacks on the railroads it really wasn't done as a ballad it was a song of sexual boasting John Henry was a steel-driving man and that song celebrated his sexual prowess and all blacks when they listened to it laughed and this is what the railroad workers needed they needed some humor to keep them going [Music] [Music] more and more we learn about the mountain communities where blacks and whites live neighbors and swap favors and stole each other's music with a banjo which is a sort of sprung drum he really began to be able to play rhythm with both with both hands [Music] this was of course a an instrument of African origin of the banjo and was given by white musicians the fifth string so there was a constant high pinging drawn there that was put in between every every beat black influence was all through the whole of southern music southern culture was really a collaboration although the blacks were slaves they came from an area with a culture at least the equal of that of their European masters and they brought tremendous sophistication [Music] they brought a a different approach to religion they brought a whole different way of looking at the relations between people they had a different sexual system and of course the thing that appealed to everybody the most was their mastery of a rhythm and of music and of of a sense of life the old buck dance tradition of black America that fueled the minstrel show and fueled the flatfoot dancing tradition of the mountains is still alive as it used to be you see the source of flat footing in this foot dragging sliding except except style that peppers the dance with hot licks in between those actual dance mimes in between those feet are talking the language of the dance to each other and what's linking them is this complex body based kind of polyrhythm that the African dance body style permits you to do and that you can't do unless you're rhythmic impulses are flowing from your middle body [Music] as the whites adopted black style they adopted two already very ripened and very sophisticated dance style they had themselves as you can see here they're not so fluid in the middle body they are old stooped some of them and their arms have beginning to have that sort of loose flowing rhythm that the blacks had and their feet are sliding and they're getting a lot more syncopation and a lot more tricky with um's in because of that [Music] they call this mountain dancehall high up in the Smoky Mountains the stomping ground collaborative built the stomping broth has made his living as the bulldozer operator he's a community developer so he decided that since tourists were coming into this area we would make a shrine for dancing he has dance teams from all over the place and he himself and his family are all champion but they call flat footers [Music] Khalid which is Sun dancing here he's reputed to be one of the world's champion dancers he said no a thousand steps [Music] the Spanish found gold here others have taken out semi-precious stones timber and endless trains of coal but the true treasure of these are the people and their balance like this monster he put into the wild boars laughs 91 year old Nimrod workman loves these old ballads and they've kept his heart alive during his long hard life as a coal miner and during the struggles for unionism well I went over here a pool clock my wife packed my bucket a prize money packed my bucket I'm using Houston pool clock on ten nine ten eleven o'clock in the night and come back out come up that off and when they paid it up they paid you by the day they gave me two dollars made his hands [Music] is a mighty long time for the labor come tall down in that cold man down in the dark hole where the breathe bad now same thing that sing alone that's cool I serve no coldest get in you alone no way to get hit out of them wrong doctors can't do it I hit start and you die I just killed a minion too many 100 I keep my lungs exercise for the doctors they told us quotas didn't get you this way but it did not prove they had to trade in the company store or they had to pay fees to the company hospital and the record shows that the big coal companies paid over paid for their hospitals in towns ten times over with the profits they made out of the miners whom they were paying only a pittance to the miners also like mining it was a life of risk that comes out in the famous Merle Travis song about I was born one morning when the Sun didn't shine I picked up my shovel and a walk to the mine I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and the straw boss hard well damn my soul he load sixteen tons and wanted to get another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me cuz I can't go how old my soul to the company store and that was the truth Nimrod lived through all of that and he learned what it was like and he came out of it a fighting union organizer hoodie he won't work when I said I want I said for you to do only Harry said you can't do killing you before you mean I said I mean you'll finish two dollar system working less eighteen to twenty we can't just quick feet of time man I want read didn't know what a poor man has to go through with and what his children has to go through well he went through some dangerous times when thank you organizing yes I did that went to system um I didn't know if we're gonna get me your shut off my side are my brain shout out for rides gonna get something never know what I'm gonna fight for my you know its mother Joan and I know which mother don't Nimrods people what a better life with the help of their union only to face the juggernaut of strip mining that's desecrating this beautiful mountain country and I'm gonna ask you strippers s who gave you information to steal our land to kill her land they can't produce we can't make a living off in her land shame on you down in the valley and a mile from me or the crows no longer cry there's a great big earthmoving monster machine stands ten stories high where the ground he can eat hits aside he can be about a hundred tons attaboy he can eat up the grass it's a fact but he can't put it back the other thing is tourism and the government buys up land for public parks doesn't leave the people on it insists that it's more important for the that the land be used for recreation for the people from the hot lowlands than the people who inhabit it and so crowds out the original settlers to make room for an amusement park called the Land of Oz that's the South here south pinnacles above been azalea but to put the land dogs I went up fine made music one day and they've got the skeet and outfits up by and you've got golf courses up by and they've got the lever thing up right you're mentioning where they call the Land of Oz up right and we used to walk in there and camping man and now came because if they've got it all posters no we used to ride a horse a shoe but then my nephew doing a pint said you can't ride through here in the moment and I spend well just take it ain't cheap and I spent see that's where we got our living that I've got the feeling I wouldn't do that Billy Wright died for owner mate I don't know one in a lace me or not but I believe it real I want to go out with thee I don't want it checking so but the ironic end of it all it seems almost as if the Mountaineers are being punished for the extremely ruthless way that they in their turn attacked the original inhabitants of the mountains the charity's one of the blots on American history and this was done by the Mountaineer so now in a sense they are threatened with the same fate from the government from the strip miners from the from tourist industries but in my trip through the country there I felt that in spite of all these ironies all these tragedies all these conflicts that there was a something positive and wonderful occurring the mountain people are reshaping their own culture for themselves they've revived the moribund square dance on a mounted it was fancy stepping and turned it into a dazzling display of choreography there folks turn out in droves to see these performances and watch mom and sis showing off their legs in their Mountain Li two tubes when I'm out there I'm in my own little world I'm hearing everything and I'm listening but I'm thinking I'm going to do next now move my feet he does me good I work over an arena you're in a grind for eight hours you come out you know you're going to dice that matter your tar you think well am I going to be able to dance I'm really had a hard day but you go out there and you hear that music so you hit that floor you forget about what you've done eight hours ago [Music] this group is danced in Paris in New York but their figures are still traditional you see the very same ones in this Kentucky set filmed 40 years ago albeit that the dances in Kentucky are a bit more stiff wasted in less formal [Music] when this new kind of danced all theme long if it it arose in the small factory communities and I think represented the the discipline of the beltline of the factory and all the interlocking cogs both administrative and mechanical just make them to be possible it also puts women apart with men when it comes to showing off their fancy black pudding however this freestyle dancing is now losing ground among young people who seem to prefer precision clogging in military ability in unison I don't want something I have to work in that I have to continuously count and watch and do exactly what someone else says that's too much like work [Applause] [Music] the huge crowds that applaud the precision clubbers represent the modern passion for spectacles of regimented movement practiced precision clock we we drill ourselves so that each one does exactly the same movements at exactly the same time [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] here is in scores of other local both left over bluegrass orchestra reigns supreme [Music] here at last the british-american tradition has given rise to its own Orchestra a sort of five piece Dixieland stream band certainly as a virtuosic as any gypsy Orchestra and they are playing what I've called Mountain Music and overdrive [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're gonna do an old arm in here no one ate deep our turn on the heat recorded it back in 1936 called boggy mountaintop [Music] and now we have a bluegrass string ensemble with a wind instrument added a blues harmonica [Music] those is a bit different for many of the people we've met he's of cornish descent and he's not uptight at all here doodles is in his element at a Georgia rabbit hunt where instead of guns he and his friends use the ancient Tallyho hunting stick anything you can't donkey tomorrow you can take your feet with a little fork here and twist you didn't hire like a dragon I'm calling I mean the rabbit's doing that as I have anyway we survived just you might say on their own you talk to the land rabbits were important for the meat on the toll that was all the meat to wear on the table see there were nothing where Birds something like that we would eat just regular birds you know I mean it didn't have to be a Potter here a quail or what have you we just if he was a burden had meat on him we got him we eating we'd have bird ties and I can hit hit a bird if he gotten 50 foot of me he's gone he's mine thought I was dead it was a flip [Music] [Music] [Music] I tell you what I believe with all my heart that a person loves music he's better person the mothers know music Gibson it gets him to my blood it goes into me to just all and I get the biggest thrill out a smile on the face when I'm trying to entertain anybody or singing to them money can't buy they say when you not leave this world so you don't take nothing with you but they're so wrong they that's worth mistaking I told my said when you dig my little hole right that I said add three foot to it I said their memories it'll take that much to hold my memories and I said I'm taking my memory with [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Reina d'Àfrica

Views: 2,156,724

Rating: 4.843801 out of 5

Keywords: square dance, buck dance o clogging, clogging, bluegrass, folk, Appalachian, Apalache, banjo, Lomax, fiddle

Id: MXh8SDp0H-E

Length: 56min 26sec (3386 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/RochelleH]

Non-American, and I've got to say that the Appalachian culture is one of the most unique I can think of in the U.S. Great music, too.

[u/non_compus_mentus]

Tough life - makes for good music. I wonder if there are any more recent documentaries depicting modern Appalachian life? I tend to picture "Winter's Bone", which may not be all that charitable.

[u/ProdigalTrev]

Awesome.