American Folklife Center, Library of Congress Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004) folder 08.05.10 projects moving images American Patchwork, 1978-1991, Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old Complete Dibbs- AL Interview-transcripts (orig w/ tcode) Appalachian Journey-Noble Old 15 Complete Dibbs - AL Interview Transcription (orig w T code) Appalachia Noble Old [*AP JOURNEY - by ROLL Roll 1 DAY ONE - with no time - codes*] SINGING MAN About 70,000 square miles of those hills face the frontiersman in America back in the beginning of the middle of the Eighteenth century and it took a long time to settle them, even today things are pretty difficult there. [*Alan's Mountaineer Story. S?M.*] I remember a friend of mine met an old mountaineer crying in the road and he said, " What are you crying about?" He said, "Well, it is so darn hard to farm this steep farm of mine," he said," I have already fallen out of the field three times this morning." Well, it was a joke, but it was a rough country. A song that came my way really early that came from the mountains tells about actually getting an oxcart over one of the passes from South Carolina to the heart of the Smokey Mountains, it goes like this and it really depicts the grimness of that effort. Singing. MAN "Taloodio" was the name of the Soloola pass and when they got their ox carts through there they began to ROLL 1 2 be able to sort of civilise the mountains. Well the people who drove those roads were rather different group than many of the pioneers in America, they, their origin was, they were called Scotch Irish, their origin was in the Western part of Ireland, they were descendants actually of the Vikings, the Norsemen and they had that Norse unconquerable, independent spirit and their story is very interesting. They were brought to Ireland early on to make a colony to try to split Ireland so that the English could keep control of it and then their English sponsors turned on them and made life difficult and they poured out of Northern Ireland into America, they landed in Pennslyvania and William Penn gave them frontier rights and told them they had to treat the Indians right but those Norsemen were a tough bunch they imposed on the Indians, they broke through the boundaries and headed south down the Shanon-doer valley and it was their effort that really that mainly opened up the South Western frontier. Boon was a member, Daniel Boom who pioneered the ROLL 1 3 wilderness trail, Walker who opened up the Cumberland Gap was one of them, Severe who was the first Governor of the first independent American state, the state of Wytoga, a Scoth Irishman. They were poor folk and they were hardy, they were aggressive and they were Presbetrian to the core. Their whole social organisation was around the Kirk. Though they were highly moral and imposed very severe rules on themselves and their children. A curious combination of rowdiness and morality characterised them and one of the remembered their very important role in the American Revolution, he said, "My folks came over here to help to subdue Americans but when we learned that the English were imposing on the colonists, well we just swapped sides and we licked the British at the battle of Kings Mountain, which was true. Well when that happened, while the Scoth Irish irregulars were occupied in that way, the Cherokees attacked their farms, motivated by British money and when the pioneers heard this they turned on the Cherokees with fury and there was carnage that was almost unequalled in the bloody history of the American frontier. They swooped ROLL 1 4 down on the Cherokee who by the way were, in a way lots more civilised than they were in many ways. The Cherokee lived in towns and they had a central government, they even had a feminine parliament and they were, had a, the Cherokees also were extremely accomplished military people so they were hard to defeat but the pioneers outnumbered and outgunned them and they burned the farms, threw children into the blazing fires, they killed every man they could find and sold many of the young people and the women off to slavery so the Cherokee power was forever broken and the hands of the pioneers were forever bloody and they remembered that although, and it bit deeply into their conscience. Well I am sort of wandering now, but anyway we got him into the . . . [*01.07.00.25*] MAN Do you want to stop a minute? For a moment . . . . . ? Crew chat INTERVIEWER How did the fiddle come in? [*01.07.17.15*] MAN Oh they brought some fiddles with them of course but they weren't nearly as common as we had an idea [*2.00 5124.*] ROLL 1 5 they were. [The fiddle is the main [*1*] instrument of the frontiersman] but the fiddle only came into general use in Europe in the 16th, in the 1600s and it became the dominant instrument of Great Britain in the 17th century so it was really late even there, that was the time of the migration, [but] a lot of the people who came from Britian didn't have a [*2*] fiddle and [it was slow [and] in becoming common in the real frountier because the pioneers couldn't make fiddles. They could make mouth bows and banjos when they learnt that from (2) the blacks, but they couldn't make fiddles so they will remember with absolute ecstatic delight the first time they ever heard a fiddle sound.] This girl . . . It is well summed up in the verse about when, lets see . . . [*01 . 08 : 31.24*] Sindy hear the fiddle, She had heard it once before, But when she heard my . . . oh Christ. Oh . . he took her by her lilly white hand and . . . He took her by her lilly white hand, And light her like a pigeon. ROLL 1 6 And make her dance the "Weavely wheat" and scattered her religion. Wow. INTERVIEWER So that reminds, when one listens to that music it is almost as if it is in a kind of conflict with religion? MAN [*01:09 : 03.29*] The fiddle was called of course the Devils' Stocking horse and there was a proverbial saying, "Thick as fiddlers in hell." Even in Scotland it was a companion of the devil and it was the fiddle and the bottle that lead people astray from the sober ways that the Kirk was trying to inculcate. INTERVIEWER Do you think that is where the expression "fiddle", fiddle ones expenses or to fiddle ones taxes comes from? MAN 01:09: 31.04 Probably, probably, but on the frontier, the fiddle was like a cockcrow in the wilderness and they had started a fiddler come into a community and people would flock in there maybe for two weeks to dance to him, there was no other way they were going to get to dance for a fiddle because he was the only man ROLL 1 7 that had one. So this fiddle was very, very you know, important and both threatening and a delight and they made, oh I think the biggest American musical literature is on the one hand the hand on the other hand the fiddle tune and the fiddle is just as important now as it ever was. [* 1:10: 20.00 *] [As I went around the South I found it was the leading instrument in every district, every district, there are more fiddlers by far than banjo players and guitar players and a huge literature of tunes from Ireland, from Scotland, from France, from enormous number of sources and that is one of the main things we've found in the mountains and we also discovered that a lot of the fiddle skills were reflective of the black influence on the American frontier music, ] see on the coast, the blacks were the largest percent of the, were the major population and they learned how to plough and they learned how to run a dairy farm and they also learned how to make music in the C18th way. There are more advertisements for escaped fiddlers than almost ROLL 1 8 anything else in the anti-villain literature. INTERVIEWER Who did the black fiddlers learn from? MAN [*01:11.32:01*] They learned from their masters and the foremen on the plantation and very early they already their kind of square dance, the Virginia Reel is a black version of the square dance, a good deal livelier than the somewhat more sober ____ dances and they adapted this reel and jig to a far more sophisticated stlye, I mean far more _________ and jigging, they synced them up, you know they synced them up and they also played very heavily bowed rythmic fiddle and one of the things I found on this trip was a black fiddler and his banjo playing brother who played the tunes as you will see in the style that really pre-dates modern music in many ways. [*01:12:25:16*] They knew the early version of Old Joe Clark and the knew the early version of Lychburg Town, (singing) . . Going down town, going down town, going down the Lychburg town to sell my tobacco down. ROLL 1 9 Times are getting hard, money is getting scarce, I'm going down to Lychburg town to sell my 'bacca down. That is an oldtime black song which is all across the South but particularly important in the mountains. INTERVIEWER How is the, I mean there the black people playing the fiddle, in what way does that, is that different from. MAN [*01:12:59:01*] Oh, well it is. . .as I say it is very much more, [* [ *] the fiddle is treated as a pardon me, a percussion instrument with them and much more heavy and short bowing, but you will see that heavy short bowing here with the Thomas brothers, you see their style really reproduced and done in a far more, perhaps more refined way in playing a Tommy Jarol, the master fiddler of the nearby North Carolina mountain town. [ *]* ] INTERVIEWER He picked up black influences there? MAN [*01:13:33:06*] Well not so directly I mean [ *[ *] the black influence was all through the whole of the Southern music, see Southern culture was really a ROLL 1 10 collaboration although the blacks were slaves, they came from an area where the culture is at least equal of that of their European masters and they brought tremendous sophistication [* ] *] and they brought even despite the fact that they lost their language, [* [ *]they brought 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 most was their mastery of rythm and of music and of a sense of life, life was just full of delight and it wasn't for C17th folks. [* [ *] It was a misery, you remember half the people there on the coast were indentured criminals from the slooze of British cities, [* ] *] but at that time was pretty much of a hell hole and those who couldn't make it sometimes taken to the gibbet and if they hadn't committed such severe crimes such a stealing a loaf of bread they were sent to the colonies to serve out their days. And those were the people that encountered the Africans who had come from a much more pleasant background than they had, although they came in shackles and the two groups although it was a miserable situation the two groups ROLL 1 11 made a culture together, in extraordinary fashion over 300 years. INTERVIEWER Can we just stop. MAN . . .them strings, hell would break loose in that school house. [*01:15:36:2*] INTERVIEWER I think it would be nice to do that again. MAN That is what I was trying to remember but I couldn't remember the whole you know. INTERVIEWER Can you do it again? MAN Do you want Alan to pick the book up? It would be quite nice if. . . crew chat. INTERVIEWER It is lovely that snaking around, lovely image. MAN This is nice, by the way. . . INTERVIEWER This is a good book. MAN I think this is the prettiest. INTERVIEWER It is a great book. [*11014100 .*] [*110104925,*] ROLL 1 12 MAN [*01:16:01:03*] . . .pictures of this thing. I think you could even use that. It is really, this was a marvellous young Englishmen who had never had a book before so he was ready to work with, and we did the whole thing as a total collaoboration, I brought, gave him the stuff and he liked the idea and he really did do it. His illustrations, they are really illustrations. INTERVIEWER Do you want to put the book down again and pick it up? MAN This is a . . .are you ready? To let you know, Marc, how exciting this sound was even very late, [* [ *] this is an account from 1870, I have in this book here where a fella is telling about the first time he ever heard a fiddle and he, he says that. "Lorde I thought that was the prettiest sweepinest music that I had ever heard. I wanted to holler and jump up and down, I just couldn't sit still on that log bench when that tune started snaking around the school house. I let out a yell and lept off that bench and commenced to dance and clog around and everybody was hollering and laughing and everytime he touched ROLL 1 13 the bow of them strings, hell would break loose in that school house." [* ] *] [*01:17:21:22*] That is the effect of music on a musical people and that is one of the things that is so often forgotten about this, all of these folk tradition. [* [ *] Now these Scotch Irish Norse presbyterians didn't have a knowledge of symphony or Michelangelo or anything but they were very very artistically inclined and they ahd the whole heritage of Celtic and British tunes in their head and that was the invisible baggage that they carried on their trails up on the mountains, it didn't weigh a thing, [* ] *] but when they got to where they were, it made a wonderful bower of music for them to live in. [* [ *] They had the great English ballads, that we have now realised are the. . .one of the great human achievements, they have a lyric tradition that went back to Elizabethan and with lyrics that are quite the equal of the best lyric poets in Elizabethan days. (01:18:27:18) (Singing) "Black is the colour of my true loves hair. Her cheeks are like the rosey fair. ROLL 1 14 The prettiest eyes, the daintiest hands. I love the ground whereon she stands." [*01:18:39:17*] A mountain poem. [* ] *] And that is what they took with them and the fact that when they were discovered they had all this puzzled everybody very much because here were the people who sometimes didn't have shoes, who were living in log cabins, with their pigs right next door to them and sometimes in the same house because this is the way things have been in Europe with pigs, since time immemorial. You have to look after your pigs, you know, they are really part of the family and you count on them heavy for your meat supplies and there is a wonderful quote in here about how it happened and how they got that way. It says . .damn where is this thing? [*01: 19 : 29 : 08 .*] ROLL 2 MAN [*02 : 01 : 00 : 22*] Oh yes here is is. INTERVIEWER Wait a minute. MAN This is from an encounter between a, between an early writer about the mountains and old fellow he met way up some hollow. He said, "Well where did your people come from?" He said, "Well my folks come over here with Christopher Columbus on an old sail ship, but when they got up here they kind of got wild and took to following game and wandering to and fro, till the generations, they all evaporated and the only ones. . shit. Now my folks came over here with Christopher Columbus on an old sailing ship, when they got up here they got kinda wild and took to following game, to and fro, till the generations, they all evaporated and the only ones of them that were left here had just enough strength to climb up into these hills. And they actually found people in the hills area that didn't have any religion, they had gone beyond all the social convention, because they were cut off there for nearly a hundred by the country that they had settled [*1624 . 20 .*] [*203290 4 ROLL 2 2 and in a way there began there one of the great. . . . . .What I want to talk about now is the family tradition. crew chat. MAN [*02 : 03 : 02 : 08.*] Well there you see me walking down a typical modern North Carolina road way up in the Smokeys, we are about oh, 4000 feet near, Boon, North Carolina and I am looking up to go and see Stanley Hicks who is a member of a family that came from Northern Ireland and has just endless amounts of stories and ballads and dance traditions. I've heard about Stanley and he has heard about me, he knows I am coming. I've telephoned him, he had a 'phone. So we are hollering him down here on the, there he comes. Now this shows you what happens in the mountaineers, this tradition isn't static. It is growing and Stanley turns out to tell me a story that he just made up a couple of days before, just in anticipation of my coming. Well, the family tradition is, I don't know, I don't know what to do about this. ROLL 2 3 INTERVIEWER Terrific. INTERVIEWER That was lovely. INTERVIEWER That was absolutely lovely, lets go straight into the story. crew chat. MAN [*02 : 05 : 15 : 07*] Well Stanley was went on to tell me for example the story of the Black Bull of Norway which was one of the great epic dramas of Norseland. He had saved that up for me, that was the next thing he did and then he took me in the kitchen and gave me a drink of the best mountain liquor I had ever had in my life, in fact I used, when I was working that area I used to drive about 60 or 70 miles to go back to have another drink of it, it was smooth and firey as love. Well, he and I do everything, Stanley did, he lost some of his teeth so we put some of the stuff up here in, what do you call it, we put some captions up here so won't miss a single jewelled phrase of Stanley because everything he did is pure the mountain spring water. He makes dulcimers, he carves hundreds of different kinds of toys, he has every kind of story you can think of ROLL 2 4 he told us stories about the Hoop snake. Now, when he told the story about the Hoop snake it wasn't really sure whether he believed it or not. The Hoop snake is the imaginary snake that takes its tail in its mouth and roles down the hill after you and when it catches you, it unfurls its mouth and and sticks you with its stinger on the end of its tail. Well Stanley's hoop snake had short fur all over it. [*02 : 07 : 02 : 18*] INTERVIEWER But he comes from a quite a family because the book here, I'll give it to you actually, the book, there are all his parents and it is a long family the Hicks family, the tradition has been going on for a very long time MAN [*02 : 07 : 16 : 26*] It has, and I. . .great mountain folk lore, I mean folk lore runs in families, I've met people who have said it, every single generation in a family was as far back as they could trace it was a musician and you didn't dare marry into that family if you couldn't pick, or bow or sing because you get divorced. Well Hicks generation and Hicks is a Scots Irish name was all musical all talent, all the kids learnt to sing [*724 4122.*] ROLL 2 5 and various of them were kind of specialist, Presley Hicks makes the most beautiful dulcimers in the mountain, they go all over the world. You’ll see him carving here and then Ray Hicks, who is 7 feet tall or Just close to it, they used to love to invite Ray to Barnraising because they didn’t have to have a ladder. Well Ray is the greatest of all American folk tale tellers and he not only tells stories of Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk, but there are many more stories of that in the tradition but he embelishes them and they grow under his talent. He can make them last ten minutes or two hours, just at will, like all the really great story tellers of the past and Sal, his sister is as good a story teller as he is so what I did to get the family together on the front porch of the family house, that looks out over the grandest of mountains you could see Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina from their back porch. INTERVIEWER What is he doing now? MAN This is really awful. . .off mike. [*630 4018*] [*230225*] ROLL 2 6 cut. MAN This thing with Stanley is that, he plays the Dolls Harp and then does Starward mountain and that, there is a little devacation there we can do a little bit with mountain lyrics, Cripple Creek and that kind of thing and some of those songs that you like a lot Ok? INTERVIEWER Yes. But with the, I have great difficulty following the, some of the Ray Hicks stories because they are, I mean I have difficulty with the accent but it is also a very particular kind of language isn’t it? MAN [*02 : 09 : 41 : 00*] Yes it is. In fact one of the leading experts on American speech thinks that Rays language is the language that was spoken, or his accent is the accent of the original settlers and I think we can put into the film an English speaker from out in the Norfolk broads, it is almost exactly like Ray Hicks speech. He has a sort of gulping glotal stops at the end of it, but that is not a nervous habit, that is an old time way of talking. [*6312919 6322526 211224 6304017. 200225. *] ROLL 2 7 The way of talking is just as important as a particular dialect words or the particular way that consonants, the particular sounds of the speech, but how the speech goes and he has this very old fashioned style of sort of mountain oratory with his hand and all, that he is moving all the time. Another kind ofeloquence. [*02:10:45:23*] INTERVIEWER The sentences are constructed in an unfamiliar way. MAN [* 02:10:49:29* ] Yes, completely, and of course he is seeing all these adventures and Ray is a real philosopher and mystic like a lot of the Hicks's were, they didn't just live in the middle of nature that they didn't study. Ray told me that he has just had to give up hunting because he feels for the little animals so he said, "It is not so bad when you him them but when you think of them little old pitiful things out there just wounded and dragging off into the underbrush somewhere, trying to kick away, they are having to kick away lives." Alan I just can't stand that hunting no more, but, it goes further than that he thinks that all his surrounds has soul in it and he, his feeling for it and his knowledge ROLL 2 8 has been the source of his livelihood. He knows all the herbalism of the mountains, when I first went to see him, his whole yard was filled with orange Sassaphras bark, it was almost knee deep and his family has traditionaly hunted what they call Seng or Gin Seng which is the root that the Chinese prize for medical purposes and has been exported from the Southern mountains since the early days of settlement. INTERVIEWER The other thing about the Hicks's, or particularly about Ray, but about all of them is that, and mountain people in general is that extraordinary capacity for imagination and fantasy they have. Do you want to talk about that a bit? MAN [*02 : 12 : 30 : 25 *] Well, [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.] They brought with them this rich heritage from the whole of Britain and put it together into one living changing tradition with streaks and stripes of Welsh and everything in it. That is what the mountaineers really Roll 2 9 accomplished was to give a chance for Great Britain to crystalise and because of the isolation it had, this culture had a chance to grow on it's own for a while with plenty of stimulation, there were travellers through there and black influences came with the mountaineers and the Germans came with their gifts for hymology and so on but basically it was a British and wonderful British Amercan game that happened and out of it came the tall tales of Davey Crocket and ballads galore and all kinds of wonderful rhymes like...like [2:13:48:27] "Going up Cripple Creek Going on the run. Going up Criple Creek to have a little fun. The girls on the Cripple Creek are about half grown, they jump on a boy like a dog on a bone." And, "Old Joe Clark he had a house, 16 stories high and every storey in that house was filled with chicken pie." The rhymes that have made and the things that have made America alive like the first song I sang you about the Ox-driving song, basically ROLL 2 10 started in the mountains and the culture just kept on growing and it has lead to the growth of one of Americas most wonderful orchestras, the blue grass, the five piece blue grass band which in its way is just as exciting as the five piece hot or black orchestra from New Orleans. It came a little later, I think somewhat stimulated and somewhat competitive with the black orchestra but there it is now and the blue grass band is just as popular in Tokyo and East Germany as it is in New York, in fact a good deal more so probably. 'phone MAN It is the way you have a dance without any instruments in a small place. INTERVIEWER Oh I know who does it amazingly well, The Brissle Singers, when you dance. They are fantastic, I've seen them dance to that. MAN [* 0215 : 29 : 22 *] It is generally, it is, it is the characteristic form of North West Europe because North West Europe is the tag end of the Arctic and, here me this now, all American Indians do ROLL 2 11 "push to bale" (???), that is all they do nothing else. INTERVIEWER So there is a.. MAN It is all refrained. INTERVIEWER What were you reading? MAN And that is... INTERVIEWER He is about to read it again we are going to do that, are you going to read me that Celtic, Celtic, as you say poem, because we can talk about surrealism when we are running, are we running? MAN Yes we are. INTERVIEWER I mean I am fascinated by this capacity for fantasy in America. MAN [*02:16 : 14 : 02*] The, one of the sources and well, one of the main streams of the American fantasy imagination turned up in these dancing songs. I think part of it was black, but a lot of it was back to Europe. The songs had nice ryhma like: Girls on the Cripple Creek about half grown. ROLL 2 12 jump on a boy like a dog on a bone. ..and Stanley sings a good one here about Chickens are crowing on Sourwood Mountains. So many pretty girls, I can't count them. Eh ho dee idle lum ba day. A typical kind of dance song refrain, well these old song refrains go back to the Irish diddling, when there was no instrument, they diddled the dance they diddled with their mouths and then to the Celtic "push to bale" they call it, the mouth music and there in the Hebrides when I visited it it was still going full sway and you could have a whole evening dance with three men lalling or diddling in the "push to bale" and the text of one of those, I have here it is really a gives you a notion that the surrealism of America had its roots in a very old system. Here is a translation from a Celtic push to bale song; And you should have seen the eel, with his pipes playing a broadside. 2 :17: 33 : 18 ROLL 2 13 And the lark with its nest in the ganders beard. And the waterhen crooning and playing the Jews Harp. And the church, leaping and dancing all over the valley. So, what of our first song? Yankee doodle came to town, Riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his cap, And called it Macaroni. A typical piece of Celtic nonsense and another one; Oh there once as a man with a double chin. For one was skilled on a violin, He played in time and he played in tune. And he couldn't play anything but "Old Zip Coon". "Old Zip Coon" he played all day, till the ladies ran away, he played and he played by the light of the moon and the only tune was "Old Zip Coon". And so on, there was thousands of these and so on, this was what happened on the frontier and I think it is because really on the frontier ROLL 2 13 the world was turned up side down for the first time authority was, the old lines of authority were knocked to pieces, the old aristocrat system was out, the old system of the established church was out and people from everywhere were exactly equal. Every jug stood on its own bottom, it might mean that somebody that you had been able to turn down the week before you couldn't put down anymore, you were just as good as you were and this was not only a delight it was also a challenge. [*02:19:05:08*] The world was really crazy, suddenly there was no order and this kind of disorder which was both painful and delightful is reflected in the this kind of surrealistic poem that were the absolute mainstay of the early days of the frontier in the early C19th. Davey Crocket was completly . I can read you some Davey Crocket if you like? Davey Crocket who was the boaster of the frontier, you will have to wait, I don't know just where it is. [*02:19:39:23*] LOMAX INTERVIEW Roll [4] 3. 03:01:01:01 lomax 03:01.42.01 There is one little piece I wanted to have in here, I am just going to do it right now O.K. These migrants from Ireland had many songs about going to wild Americay. There is one in particular about a girl who had plighted her troth to John Riley and he disappeared from her memory and he was gone and this strange fellow comes up to her and tries to get her to run off with him and she won't do it because she has been faithful to John Riley and then he shows her half of a ring that they had split between them and the last two stanzas are just purely early Americana. Hold it a second. If you be he and your name be Riley, I'll go with you to some distant shore and I'll sail over to Pennsylvanie adieu to friends for ever more. They locked their hands and hearts together and to the church house they did go. They got married.. no sorry [*3:03:20:18*] She says "I'll not go with you to Pennsylvanie. I'll not go to that distant shore, for my heart's with Riley and I can't forget him; oh shit. I'll get it tomorrow. -2- LOMAX We ought to do something about the toys here, this is where they do the big toy scene here. INT. Do you want to break for lunch, LOMAX [*03:0422.06*] I think one of the things that people are going to like by the way and maybe I am just prejudiced . I think they are going to like to see how nice the relationship between me and those people is, they are not put off by me at all and we are talking to each other as peers, not down at all. They hear what I say about them, they like that. I think that is nice, I am very pleased about that. [*03:05:09;19*] There is a mountain fantasy at work for you. That is a mountain toy named a whammy diddle, that somebody right in this neighbourhood invented and Stanley's sister really knows how to work. If you run your finger down one side of it while you are scraping on the ridge there, the propeller turns in one direction and change the side and angle of the finger, it goes the other way. We had a mighty good lecture on that by somebody who said . Stanley said something remarkable about this. He ,are you hooked [*03:06:14:08*] up, he tried these numerous toys that were hand carved with the pocket knife, right out of the available woods, with a father's desire to make his children happy and to an extent to make up to them for the severity -3- of discipline in these families. The discipline was , in modern terms, Dickensian. Children were hit with whatever the parents has in their hands and if they disobeyed they were going to get the razor strop and get it many times because the situation was that the man had his kids and his wife and he was all alone in some cove and if they didn't help him produce, they starved. Those kids had to start working young. The little girl had to stand up on a chair on top on a pillow and begin washing dishes when she was 5 and the boys had to get out there and help him to bale, so the discipline was severe. They all looked back on it with a grin but of course it it is buried, damage deep in the psychies and it comes out in many ways in the songs and the stories and of course in the violence of mountain inter-action when people get a few drink but I thought [*23592112*] it was charming that Stanley understood the connection between the toys and this, that the father took the same hand that had been raised in anger against his kid, took his pocket knife and his wonderful woodsman's skill and carve these delicious toys that you are going to see, thereby hangs the [*2354111*] great American story. [*03:08:04:19*] I don't know if you know it but most contemporary modern farming machinery was first invented by American farmers mostly in the North East, the automatic reaper, the mechanical reaper and the gin and all these things. First in carved out -4- versions and the museums in this country are full of them, from them came the inventions that have revolutionised agriculture. Well the mountain people were mighty fine hands with an axe and knife, you know, a group of neighbours could raise a house in a day. Hew the logs out, get the chinks cut and everything and the house would go up and the family they were there that night. Every man had to be able to do that and Stanley still has that skill, so do many of these people that you are meeting here. INT Of course he makes instruments too? LOMAZ Yes. yes he makes instruments. Much more [*03:09:13:21*] important again is all the things that he can make to keep his place going. The bird lures are just as important to Stanley as musical instruments. INT What are those? LOMAX He makes whistles and various kinds of lures to get in all the animals that he wants to and that of course goes as far back as people. INT Imitating the animal's cry? LOMAX [*03:09:45:10*] The animal's cry. South American Indians living in the jungles can do the sounds of all the animals that are surrounding them, -5- exactly and that is the origin of course of programmatic music in Europe too, a little bit of it reflected in some of the programmatic music that comes before Mozart. INT What do you mean? LOMAX Well I can't remember, but Mozart's various [*03:10:08:25*] kinds of suites about animals and birds, things like that and if there is a popular tune in the mountains today it is the Fox Chase. You know the way they get foxes in the mountains is not with people mounted on geldings and red coats but they sit around the camp fire and listen to the hounds chasing the fox in the hills 'That goes ole Boy, he's got him now "Listen to old Ringo go, coming right up on that fox" Drink whiskey all night and lie about their dogs and never move from the spot. Thats how you hunt foxes in the south. No horse could ride through those tangles. Here is Stanley with one of his father's tools, a windmill. INT His father was a musician too. LOMAX Oh yes. INT Which one is his father? LOMAX This one Robey Hicks INT Who was a fiddler. -6- There is a Nathan Hicks in there. MAN Shall we break for lunch. [*03:12:08:13*] LOMAX Looking at Stanley looking at his own [*03:12:21:27*] playing of the dulcimer, I wonder whether he sees what it is. It is an outline of a woman lying on her back and their hearts lie there I think they put those hearts there because the machine, the little instrument is often used in playing love songs. Stanley of course uses it in the mountain style to play dance tunes, but I think that is quite mountainey and probably not the way the instrument was used in Northern Europe where it comes from. My guess is it is part of the Norse equipment that came there with the Scots-Irish so called into the mountains because it is most frequent in Scandinavia and Northern Germany. It is not as common in the mountains as the banjo by any sort but it is the same kind of an instrument because it has one string that you play most of the tunes on and the rest of it is a drone so normally it is used to accompany songs and to play the tune over between verses because that was the way the instruments were largely used on the frontier. Somebody played the tune on the fiddle or dulcimer or whatever, as you sang it and then played it again in between verses. there were lots of time, the longer the music lasted, the better if you could sing the song over from stanza to stanza with this nice legato, mournful sounding of this -7- three stringed instrument, well it was all the better for that. [*03:14:28:14*] The dulcimer is very much manufactured and played these days in the area where Stanley lives, some of the best dulcimer makers are there and then over the ridge into Kentucky on the Cumberland plateau there, there are other nests (?) of dulcimers. Jean Ritchie made it popular all over this country and the world, she came out of a dulcimer valley and in fact when I met her, that was one of the things that entranced me about Jean, she was a member of another musical family like the Hicks are. Stanley makes dulcimers and his dulcimers go everywhere. His brother-in-law Presley, that is not his name - Presnel makes even more beautiful dulcimers and Stanley also makes old fashioned coon skin head banjos. Now that used to be a very hard thing to find. INT Is that the kind that Frank Proffit is playing there? LOMAX Its right there uh huh. That is pretty [*03:15:44:00*] close to the original banjo. In fact when I did a programme about the music of Williamsburg in 1730, the Black music, Stanley made me a banjo, I never saw the man at that time but he made me one to the specifications of the pictures which we will show in the film with slaves playing the banjo. The banjo is clearly an African -8- instrument. Its African name is Banya or something close to that and then it then it is called Banjar in the West Indies and on looking in the literature I have discovered that the mountaineers also sometimes in the old days called it the Banjar. [*03:16:29:23*] The Banjar in its original form was four strings, loosely strung instrument, all the African stringed instruments tend to have loose strings so they not only give a tone but they also give a kind of a swish, because Africans like a buzz in their music all the time, they put strings on the head of a drum to make the drum heads buzz, that is the dirty tone notes that they want to be there all the time. That is for another broadcast but anyway the Banjo was that sort of an instrument and then it was picked up by Southern whites and a man named Sweeney who as obviously another one of out Scotch-Irishmen put a fifth string on it and that fifth string is shorter as you can see than the others. It is the thumb string and that is the one that sounds all the way through so you have your drone on top, see, and that is very very important about mountain music, because its all the top end of things. INT Is that the tenor drone you talked about with Tommy Geral? LOMAX Right, the tenor drone so all the time you [*03:17:37:29*] have, all the way through everything, this unchanging, ding ding, and then you play -9- the tune against that, normally the drone is down at the bottom, that is not the way it is in the high lonesome tradition where the top of the register is where all the expressivity is and not many people have noticed but a few that in mountain harmony, you put a part about the melody part and in Hillbilly harmony you have the high lonesome tenor riding over the top of the harmony just like the tenor drone does on the banjo which is what gives it its mountain sound and that is typical of what these incredible Scotch-Irish people did to everything that came to them. They took it and shifted it around in their emotional gears so that the banjo became the most exquisite instrument for playing accompanyment of medieval ballads. I mean once they were accompanied by other things that I am sure sounded very much like the five string banjo but as you know from these performances here, they just somehow set your heart trembling, that ringing tenory sound and that banjo that Stanley makes, the heads are made of coon skins. He actually goes out into the woods and kills his coons. [*03:19:18:13*] INT Can we stop. [*03:19:29:05*] LOMAX INTERVIEW ROLL [3] [*4*] [3:01:00:19] INT What is that? MAN Its the report of the death penalty. INT Tell me about that. MAN I refer to 1 o'clock, the guard being [*4:01:28:26*] formed in a square, the condemned was led forth by the sheriff and some associates and with a smile upon his features, took his stand upon the cart, which was his open coffin beside his sister and his brother-in-law. The procession moves forward through the streets accompanied by large crowds, male and female white and black, mostly being in carriages and many horse back and on foot. At the gallows throngs of people were already assembled, the number of females being almost equal to that of the males. [*4:02:15:07*] I wonder if it mentions the song in here. This is the story of Tome Dooley's execution, May 2nd 1868. Now the song is a record of a true event. Tom Dooley was a wild young buck. a veteran of the civil war and he came back home and apparently he had a hard time settling down. He was very handsome and he ran with many women as the ballad pioneer tells us and he ended -2- eventually on the gallows, singing a song of his own death that he had composed in prison. This was quite a common custom at that time. There were many American ballads that were actually composed by the condemned men while he was in jail, asking for mercy and compassion but Tom Dooley didn't ask for any compassion because it is said that he was shielding the woman that he loved. He was going with two women Anne Milton and Laura Foster and Anne learned that she had acquired a social disease, syphillis from Tom and that it was probably, the source was probably Laura Foster, so they made a conspiracy which was rather elaborate and Tom got poor Laura to meet him in a lonely place by promising to marry her and when he got there, he according to this folk legend, stuffed her own scarf down her throat and held her while Anne rushed out of her hiding and stabbed her in the belly with a knife because it was her intention to kill Laura's baby as well as Laura. [*04:04:27:07*] Now fate overtook these criminals because they lost their nerve and buried her in a shallow grave high on the hillside and rain came and washed a lot of the dirt off this poor lady and somebody found her fairly soon, she still had the colourful scarf that she had been killed with on her person and that is what, according to the story I heard, that attracted their attention. -3- [*04:05:05:04*] Tom Dooley has a good deal to do with our broadcast because it comes to us from the family called the Proffits. A friend of mine named Frank Warner and his wife became ballad hunters in American about the same time that my father and I did and they had a little portable recording machine that they took in the mountains in 1938 and the first song that they sang was Tom Dooley as performed by Frank Proffit who they proceeded to cultivate and become main friends with over the whole life of both of them. They were always in touch and they helped the Proffit family a lot, it was a hard time in the mountains in those days and Frank was a remarkable man, he was a philosopher and a song composer, some of the songs you will hear on the programme, that he actually composed but it was he who sang and shaped and arranged the version of Tom Dooley the we all know. I learned it from Frank who was a big buddy of mine and we got together with singing sessions with Carl Sanberg and other folks of that dim day when only a few folks cared for ballads and I learned Tom Dooley and I was touring the country then and I sang it wherever I went. Its a great ballad, telling something as tersely as any song ever told any story and it was my arrangement of their arrangement that was picked up by the Kingston Trio who proceeded to kind of massacre it in college boy fashion but made it very popular and it is really a world [*04:07:04:04*] song but that is where it came from. We are -4 going to hear it from Frank Proffit who learned it from his father and sings it in something close to the original way. Folk music started before the royalties started coming in. Often the family had nothing to eat but potatoes three times a day and sometimes not enough of those at that. Do you want to hear it? [*04:08:30:28*] [*[*]Well this is about as close one gets to the real source of things, this is Tom Dooley sung by the son of the man who actually gave it to the world. This is Frank Proffit Junior who lives in the high mountains near.., North Carolina, way up in the Smokeys and it was his father Frank Proffit who sang it for my friends the Warners who came down into the mountains ballad hunting back in 1938 and I learned it from the Warners and I sang it all over the country and on my radio shows and it became known that way and some time later on the Kingston Trio picked it up and it is now a world song. [*]*] Its strange for the Proffits to think about it. Frank Junior said it changed his life and [*[*] here in this book it says about Mr. Proffit, who is now dead, the source says, "Before the folk music started, that is before royalties stated coming into the family, often the family had nothing to eat but potatoes three times a day and often not enough of [*- 5 -*] those". It gives you an idea of what life was like back in those hills at times. [*]*] [*04 :09: 48 :06 [*] The story of Tom Dooley is really fascinating. Most people don't know the actual facts but I just got this headline in mail, it is from May 2nd 1968, the New York Herald, the day of Tom Dooley's execution, it tells here about each song (?) came out to see him executed and how he rode in the cart and sang the ballad which he composed in jail [*]*] which many criminals of that period and in earlier English history used to do. Hangings were public events , in fact in old England they were one of the main forms of public entertainment and Tom Dooley was a sensational case because first of all he was very handsome . He wasn't exactly a criminal, he was more like a wild young loser that everybody knew used to like to play around and drink whisky and run with the women. He ran with a few too many women and that is what got him in trouble according to the legend. [*04 : 11 : 05 : 29 [*] He was going with two or three women at the same time and one of them it is said, Laura Forster gave him syphillis which he inadvertently passed on to another of the women named Anne Milton who he was much closer to and she, when she found that out, she insisted that they murder Laura Forster in vengeance [*]*] so Tom Dooley wrote Laura a letter saying that he would like to meet her and marry her and to meet him in a 6 certain lonely place which the poort girl did and he came up and offered her, to get off her horse and offered her a drink of whiskey and when she lifted the bottle up to her mouth he stuffed his scarf down her throat and Anne rushed out of hiding and stabbled Laura in the belly a number of times, aiming not only to kill Laura but to kill the child that she was carrying, then these two miscreants were frightened and they tried to bury Laura and they dug the grave too shallow and somewhere in these tapes they tell in a most terrifying way about the rain coming along and wshing the dirt off the shallow grave and someone passing very soon afterwards, saw the scarlet scarf that Laura had been killed with and they knew that Tom had something to do with it, arrested him and he stoutly took credit for the whole thing, the blame, the blame I should have said, Tom took the blame for the whole thing and everybody thought he was shielding Anne but he stuck to his story and the song was one of the techniques that he used to protect the woman he loved, that is the romantic part of the story so he made the song in jail , played the banjo, sang it in the jail and supposedly sang it on the way to his execution. This is a song that was known really only in this district before Frank came along and then I came along and got it off Frank and then Kingston Trio came along and got 7 it off the air and that is how the whole thing began. 04:13:4305 Looking at Frank here. Frank is leading a very fruitful life. He has been made a teacher of folks song and folk music and folk lore in the North Carolina schools, it is a job that needs to happen in every part of the world . Here we have the real person who really knows the tradition, going around telling folk tales and teaching the songs to kids in his State and he is doing vast good. He is very shy and very very diffident but very very earnest and talented as you can see . He sings in the quiest way that really prevailed in these mountain cabins. These folks didn't sings their heads off . They sang gently and quietly very often and this sort of banjo accompanyment is typical of the kind of music that these very genteel mountaineers made for themselves. 04 . 14 . 65 . 12 Frank's father was a remarkable man . I never knew him but the Warner's stayed in touch with him and helped the family and went back every year and they found new songs and gradually explored that end of the mountain and a tremendous treasure of folklore turned up from this Proffit family and their relatives, the Hicks. Now the Hicks family, shall we go on from Frank, have you enough of him? 8 04 : 15 . 24 . 76 We might talk a little bit about some of the songs he sings. [One of the best of Frank's songs is a famous English ballad called 'The wife wraped in the weather skin' .] Now the mountaineers had their trouble with women like every other of every human group and this lady was very much of a shrew and she kept talking back to her husband as you weren't supposed to do in the back woods. In the backwoods the rule was A woman served a man at table, served until he had finished and then the chldren sat and ate what was left. Now that may seem very barbarous but actually the man was the protector of the family and they had to get him fed and had to make him ready because he had to be ready for action. The man walked ahead down the mountain trail carrying his rifle at the ready . , The woman walked back of him carrying all the burdens . This was understood by everybody because they needed that man there with that rifle to protect themselves from maybe attacks by Indians or outlaws and if you didn't know that rule, you didn't understand the mountains, so anyway this lady, [the heroine in this ballad was a bit obstreperous so they have a comic song of how her husband went out and skinned and sheep and wrapped it around her, instead of beating on his lady, he beat on the sheepskin, so when her relatives complained he had a good alibi and all these people as you see then they listen to the song . find 9 this absolutely delicious because it is very close to the conditions that they grew up under, Ray and Stanley and the singer Frank. You will see that in the scene. [*/*] [*04 .17 . 46 . 08*] INT man [*04 . 18 . 17 . 27*] [* (A) *] [*/*] There was a halcyon period at the beginning of mountain settlement and the rivers were clear and the lands were fertile [*\*] and there was a big market for their hogs and they were turning the corn that they made into wondrous whiskey, that there was an endless market for it as well on the frontier and on the highways that fed the growing frontier so at the beginnings the mountains prospered and then as time went on various kinds of economic interests moved in and the timber began to be cut away and the best lands began to be grabbed and coal companies came and monopolized all the mineral rights and the miners were turned into underground slave heroes as we will hear in another part of the broadcast. [*04 : 19 : 22 : 01*] [* (B) *] [*/*] Gradually the edge was taken off the prosperity and the land grabs by big interests were terrible and so soon the whole area was turned into wage slaves. [*\*] We have Ray Hicks and we should have him here telling the story about how he worked for $1 a day and his father for 50 cents a day and his grandfather for 25 cents a day and his father for a nickel a day. There is that long and bitter history and they had to walk, if they were going to be married, 10 they had to walk 20 miles to the County court house and they would save up their money for the $1 marriage licence. there were no doctors, there were no decines, they healed themselves with their won herbs and there were many people who heard about the plight of the mountaineers and started educational institutions to help them. There were no schools there and there were missions to help the mountaineers ands omea mount of good was done there but in the meantime the folks were very realistic about what was happening to them and they made very may songs and told many stories that reflected the hard times that were continually pressing in on them. The story of this ballad was made by Frank Proffit after a terrifying mountain flood that simply washed away all the crops and killed all the animals and ruined the farm. There were some of those floods that were so awful that the area wouldn't recover from them for maybe 15 years. There was no relieve in those days they just had to tough it out. That is what this song 'This Poor Man' is about. It still means a lot to Frank. I was raised in Texas on a song that really came out of the mountains that became a cowboy song. "Rye whiskey I cry. If you don't give e rye whiskey I surely will die" LOMAX roll 5 LOMAX Moonshiner, moonshiner The most valuable thing you could make out of your grain crop had always been in the tradition of these Norse Presbyterian Scots/Irish mountaineer frontier folk, the most useful way to use their corn and it was especially so in the mountains since there was no way to really get it to the market. I mean they were two days away from a place to sell their bags of corn crop so it was much more economical to turn it into whiskey and have six jugs over the back of the mule and to go town and get some cash, have shoes for the kids and a new dress for the old lady and that system actually helped to make the frontier prosper. THe Federal Government kept on trying to move in and regulate it because this was a profitable area and they wanted to tax it and one of the first American wars was they Whiskey rebellion. (phone rings) When I did my forklore work in Great Britain I became totally convinced that without strong spirits of this kind, the people could never have lived in the place because of the cold and th edamp and the fog and by the time you get to the Hebrides where they have only four, or two or three -2- decent months of the year , whiskey is so strong that according to Boswell, one little noggin of it would keep a man absolutely warm all day as he finished on teh frigid waters of the Mynch between Scotland and the HEbrides. The whosle background was whiskey making and that is what kept everybody going. [* 05 : 03 : 49 : 22*] Well in the mountains the Scotch/Irish and other frontiersmen continue this tradition and the Federal Government already in Pennsylvania have interfered and there was a war called th4e Whiskey Rebellion and George Washington had to step in and adjudicate and a negotiated solution was made with the Scotch/Irish men on the frontier who were ready to take on the newly established continental army , the new Republic and so for a while the moutaineers continued to prosper with their stills. [*/*] [There were stills with every family , the the Federal Government tried prohibition and abolish whiskey making and so on and guerilla warfare really took place that lasted until prohibition was repealed, but the things that happened were really gruesome. [*W2*] In some counties, the county officials took it very seriously and they went in with guns and tried to tell them and to kill whomever they found and the mountaineeres were armed and they fought bakc in no uncertain terms. [*\*] -3- There is a wonderful story about a bunch of sherrifs getting a little boy and saying "Well we will give you 50 cents to guide us to where your father is running his still" and he said "Give it to me in advance because you aint coming back from there." [*05 . 05 : 32 . 09*] INT Do you want to tell me the story about Stan Hicks and the still. Stan Hicks watching with a rifle. LOMAX Yes Stan has a wonderful story which when television expands a little bit we can have the whole of on the air but his father gave him a shot gun and told him to stand guard when his father was making - having a run of whiskey. Stan was so young he thought it meant 'shoot at whoever came ' and so when some neighbour stopped by to see how it was going, the little boy put up and hit the man in his back side with buckshot. He let out a yell and the father came running. It took all afternoon to pick the buckshot out of him - big joke. His father said, "I didn't mean you to shoot him, I just meant you to shoot in the air to tell us if somebody was coming" [*05 . 06 . 36 : 07*] It was made into a comic thing but it was a sort of national joke. It was serious for the people who were in this situation and what happened of course was that they pushed them and the whiskey began to be made quickly and they used car radiators as the stills and they forced the whiskey in all sorts of ways and some of them became -4- very poisonous and many people died as a result. The whole thing was utterly horrible. Literally hundreds of people were sent to the penitentiary. There were so many people on trial in some of the county seats that they couldn't even get in the court room, they were standing in line, just to be tried in these poor counties. You really have no idea of the hardship that was worked on these folks and when you come down to it, they were continuing an enormously clever adaptation because they turned these crops which were basically unmarketable into something not only sound economically speaking but made it possible for people to even live in these northern lattitudes. Remember therewere no stoves in those places. There wasn't any heating. [*05 . 08 . 14 . 20*] I remember a man told me and this is about ballads, he said "When I was raised in Virginia, we were in a little old log hut an dyou could look on the floor and see the chickens walking around in the crack, there were cracks in the floor and in the winter time the wind came up there something terrible. How the singing was, "We all sat around the fire and sang and the one that was singing the song got to sit closest to the fire" so that is why I learned songs so good when I was a little boy, so I could get in there close in the warm while I sang and that was the way, that was how important these songs were to people and a great art was transmitted in this group. The art of -5- singing unaccompanied, singing ballads unaccompanied. Now this is something that most of us have forgotten, occasionally we got a taste of it when Dylon drops his guitar and sings or half speaks a verse and we really get to hear what it is he says, as the poet is saying to us. or when the tenor in a moment of passion and intensity in an opera, the orchestra dies pretty much away and he sings one of these wonderful Italian arias, and you really get the message there. Well mountain song was all that and a good deal more because these ballads, you see, they told very dramatic stories, incredibly dramatic stories and they reported dialogue, what the lady said to the Lord and what the lover said to the King and all that. INT Give me an example. LOMAX [*05 .10 .15 : 13*] Every single verse had a different emphasis, so the melody varied from verse to verse that was the whole art of ballad singing, is varying the verse to stanza to stanza. Now that is what these mountaineers kept alive into our own day and it is going to come alive again in our culture, partly because an awful lot of the country singers have continued to do it and a great many of the young people who have taken up folk singing now, Joan Baez and Bobby and some others have begun to realise that is where it really is, its not just a simple tune and a simple text you can make the same from the stanza to stanza. Its [*-6-*] really changing the thing. I can't really do it you know, it takes a life long living in it to do it well. If you want me to do it I will try a little bit. This is what we get at its peak in the workmen material. [*05 . 11 . 38. 15*] IN I think what Mark meant was either give a demonstgration yourself or speak very specifically. LOMAX One of the greatest ballad singers of the country, one of the reasons I went to the mountains to film. INT Lets find the tape. LOMAX [*05 .13.3213*] Nimrod Walkman, named after the Hunter in the bible and many famous hunter figures. This is Nimrod Workman. [*05 : 14 .07.26*] One of the people I wsent into the field to put down for ever on tape was this man Nimrod Workman. I had heard him perform and realised that he was one of the most remarkable American folk artists that had ever been discovered. Nimrod knows ballads that go back into the middle ages, one of those he is singing now, he has also made songs as modern as yesterday's headline and he is a union organiser and a tremendous moral man and a philosopher and here we [*- 7 -*] have him singing one of these unaccompanied ballads, the story of an adulterous wife who falls in love with a little page boy named Musgrave , no, yes, falls in love with a courtier names Musgrave and a little page boy runs to tell Lord Barnet, hanky panky uis going on in the palace and Nimrod tells it with gestures, how the little pageboy swims through the river to get to Lord barnet and then Lord Barnet mounts his troopo and sounds his horns when he comes close to the castle where the adulterous scene is going forward and lovers wake and they hear the horns and the lover is worried but the lady said "It is just the shepherd's whining for the sheep" She is not interested in any interference at that moment. They go to sleep and end up with Lord Barnet standing at the bedfeet. [*05 :15 :57: 01*] Here the ballad splits, sometimes its Lord barnet who bites the dust and sometimes its Musgrave and sometimes they kill each other in a fight with bare broadswords. In this one it is little Musgrave who triumphs and it is rather surprising considering what a good presbyterian we have here singing this song. {*05 :16 .32 .29*] INT You said 'Musgrave', its not Mategross. Am I getting confused" LOMAX I think I am getting mixed u INT And Lord Barnard, it is not LordDaniel? [*-8-*] LOMAX Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave. INT He calls him Lord Daniel. LOMAX All right, I told it all wrong INT You told it beautifully though. LOMAX [*05 17 . 13 28*] I tell you Nimrod sings this with illustrated gestures and we haven't run into that, so far as I know anywhere else in American balladry, now the only other time that I have seen it has been with certain gypsy families in Scotland and this gives me the notion that maybe there is a gypsy in the background of the workman family. Gypsies did come to the mountains and we have an occasional gypsy song. Gypsy laddie, which is know all over the country. [*05: 17 : 52 11*] Sings [*05 . 18 . 15 . 26*] And of course she runs away with him and the ballad goes on. There is an occasional touch of gypsy in our southern lore. I think this gestural thing may go back and have that origin. Nimrod can't explain it. He just knows it came down to him with the traditions somewhere. Nimrod is one of the profound Americans as you will get to know him and believes in taking a very active part. He got 'black lung' when he was in the mines, he was in the mines for years and years , like many [*- 9 -*] mountaineers in Kentucky . He was in that terrifying . . . . . . . County World doing the whole of the union organisation, he was a solid union man and a solid John L Lewis supportrer and if it hadn't been for people like Nimrod we wouldn't have unions dand the terrifying conditions that used to exist in those frightful Kentucky mines would never have been changed. They had no safety regulations in those places. The miners had to get out a certain amount of coal and if they didn't, that was just too bad. [*05 . 19. 39:11*] For instance if they made a chute and a lot of slate came down with a lot of coal they weren't paid for getting the slate out of there, it might take them a day, they were only paid for the coal they produced and they were killed by the hundreds in every kind of horrible accident you could think of . Sometimes they would be on the top of the coal cars and the mules would run away and they would be just flattened between the top of the coal and the coal car. Sometimes when they brought electricity into the mine,all the wires that ran the railroad were perfectly open and they would be going around the corner real fast and their pick might hit the wire and they would be electrocuted. These men loved a challenge, once they got into the mine you couldn'r keep them out of the mine , no matterwaht the conditions wre, they all went back . They tried to quit and then they would have to go back again. One of [*-10-*] the reasons was it was paid money of course, they got cash for their families, otherwise they lived in the kind of destitution I was talking about earlier, uncertain day labourer in a fading rural economy. [*05.21.08.01*] Well Nimrod got 'black lung' you know through breathing too much coal dust and when the company gave him a bad time, he got mad and he made a song about blacklung and he was in West Virginia at that time and he got in after Senator Bird of West Virginia and he picketed Senator Bird in Washington with his group. They told him "Nimrod you can't picket the White House." He said "I am not a picketting the President, I am picketting the conditions that we are working under down there." He said "When they were through with me, you just go home and wait" and then Senator Bird came on and according to Nimrod they had passed the bill and he got his pension. Nimrod reminded me of something that happened very early in my collecting days. I was in Harlem in 1937 when the union had just won and I went to the cabin of a mountain family- I can't remember their name, what shall I do? [*05:22:35:03*] LOMAX ROLL 6 LOMAX What time are we going 8 o'clock INT Yes between 8 and 9 LOMAX [* 06 . 01 . 17 . 00*] On my first trip for the library at Congress with recording on a little acetate disc machine, I spent the summer with my wife and friends recording in the Cumberland Plateau, in the mining country and among other things this little mining family recorded a little mountain girl. It was late in the fall and it was cold . She was standing in front of the fire o keep warm, her little thin skirt and panties and bare feet, standing on her toes to warm and she sang the song that has become I suppose the main anthem of the industrial union organisation which she had composed about her father. [* 06 . 02 . 19 . 28*] My Daddy is a Miner. etc., Which side are you on [* 06 . 03 . 20 . 21*] Well it was a moving experience for a folk lorist because what this child had done and so many of her ancestors did, was to take an old tune and put new words to it and this one goes way back, it goes back to an English ballad that tells about how a young lady went to pursue her sailor sweet heart [*-2-*] when he had left her and gone sailing over the world and then it goes 'There was a wealthy merchant, in London he did dwell, he had a loving daughter and the truth to you I'll tell. Lay the lilly o, Lay the lilly o, Which side are you on, which side are you on. Like many great parodies it makes you forget the original song and the little girl's song has gone around the world, well Nimrod was such a song maker , he would take old tunes and put them into new models. [*6 .04 .20 .13*] We should take the phones off the hook, this is a precious day, just take the god damned things off, nobody is calling. take both phones off the hook Howard. [*06 05 49 15*] I heard maybe the original of this song or maybe one other use when I was in Kentucky about a kind of scrofula disease that was running through the country. The Marrow bone Itch. This was the tune that my friend Nimrod picked up to use for, interestingly enough a song ccalled The Watergate Boogie which is a pun about the Watergate boogie running all over him. It is difficult this tradition of political parody in the whole of the Anglo-European heritage. Watergate boogie (sung) Can't hear words [*06.08 : 10.14*] Well really these Kentucky people taught us all about making topical songs. We had a lot of investments from them to begin with . Aunt Molly Jackson was a companion of my youth really and we all learned from her and the people there in Harlem; this tradition wasn't a bit sacrosanct. , You could pick it up and use it for your own defence and they did it in a big way. INT Who was Aunt Molly Jackson? LOMAX She was born there in Del County and was a midwife and a housewife and a union organiser. "I am a union woman " - Oh Christ I can't remember anything any more. She made great songs and came to New York and became an important cultural hero. # INT She taught you a great deal. LOMAX [*06.09. 15.18*] Oh yes and taught the country too, taught the country . It was from then though actually although Woody was very good topical song maker, he caught on fire when he heard these Kentucky songs because they were much hotter than his were , they came out of this terrifying Harland struggle when they fenced off a whole county and wouldn't let people have anything to eat while they were striking. INT You went down there yourself didn't you? LOMAX I didn't go down at that time, no. I didn't. Nimrod is a person out of that whole period and it is really amazing when you think about it, this man who sings with enormous passion, songs about the crusades, - 4 - one of his best ballads is about a knight who is captured by the Turks in the crusades and another one is about Lord Baron and little Maddy Gross which is the kind of carryings on that happened at home when the lords went away on the crusades, their ladies took up with the foot pages in the castle and many other songs felt completely at home in the union struggle. [*06.10.43.13*] I think that has always been true of this breed of folks, to them their culture was not anything sacrosanct or dead, it was a living force in their lives and the ballad singers felt that and the instrumentalists felt that, so when they were given the chance to go on the air and make a new communication systems over radio and were given a chance to record, they took to it like a duck to water and they made country music which has now become the mainstay of that whole part of the country, it has made everybody feel good about being a backwoods southerner where everybody felt ashamed about being poor white trash before and now country music is one of the things that makes it comfortable to live there, where it was uncomfortable to live there. I think that is almost the most important function of the folk traditions is to endow a place with the delights, the special delights of creativity, one way or another, whether it was stories or painting, or pottery or song, it doesn't matter. In American cases it has been pretty largely with song amazingly enough and very much so with this southern mountain tradition and -5- [*/*] as I said the mountains, there are 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition this time + space to re-shape itself. While it was being cut to pieces by the industrialisation of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here, reforming itself, taking on a new life on the frontier, of life out of the corn fields and out of whiskey stills and out of the feuds and out of the loneliness of living and the difficulties of living in a new land.[*\*] [*06.13.02.01*] Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it as been to leave home completely and pull up your roots and face the wilderness, because the wilderness was exhiliarating and terrifying, especially difficult for the women of course but the mountains provided a little bit of space time for a new culture to grow [*\*] and the results are I think splended things that have made life much better in this country and I think are going to be a factor in the future culture of the world. [*06.13.48.04*] For instance the Australian aborigines I understand favourite music is country music. In the war, World War II when we were reaching out to broadcast to China back of Chang Kai Check's battle lines, we used my Kentucky mountain fiddle records, solo unaccompanied fiddle and the Chinese loved those records, that was the one thing we could find that they liked. They didn't like jazz at all, they like that solo unaccompanied fiddle. -6- INT What about the unaccompanied voice like Nimrod, would that find an echo also, LOMAX [*06.14.30 11*] Yes, well, you have got to remember that there is another main point about this tradition, is that solo unaccompanied singing goes with hunting tradition and herding and North West Europe was hunting and herding world, the herdsman singing to himself, looking after his animals or the hunter coming back and singing about what has happened to him, what he has seen on his lonely trips through the wilderness looking after his game and this solo unaccompanied singing is true for the whole of the Arctic , all the hunting peoples of Siberia sing solo unaccompanied and its very common among American Indians too, solo unaccompanied singing, it is a way of addressing nature and talking directly to the animals and the spirits of nature that you need to be friends with and also interestingly enough solo dancing , solo dancing in place is an Arctic phenomenon. You know very well that tap dancing has now become the rage. Tap dancing is as old as [*16.16.07.06*] the Arctic. I have a beautiful film from Ireland which I just thought of today about dancing in front of the fire. A little tiny cottage with a lot of people sitting around and a man stands up to dance. He has only got about three square feet to dance in , he is not bothered because his arms are down by his side and he is cutting an awful lot of capers with the feet, his feet which take him over rough ground and through the -7 snow and all kinds of places, he is showing his foot skill and everyone is fascinated because you know the Irish traditions of foot dancing is unequalled in its complexity and the real native dance of North West Europe is solo, solo step dancing by males to show off their prowess, they are the returned hunter, you see and that is true again all the way across the Arctic and it peaks with Fred Astaire right, it continues with Fred Astaire into vaudeville and in the mountains and the whole frontier, in the lumber camps, the lumberjacks used to dance in their spiked shoes and sometimes just for sport, they would go right deep and pull up a whole board from the bar room floor with a twist of their ankles and the mountaineers liked this type of dance because again it represented the individual who was what the community depended on, the hunter, the fisher. [*06.17.47.22*] LOMAX #10 ROLL [9] PAGE 82 [*1011 1408 4123.*] [*Roll 10. Cutaways 10 . 01. 30. 28 [?] 10 . 11. 07. 09*] A: [*/*] These wonderful green hills have been the scene of one of the most ah exciting and productive ah cultural experiments of the last 200 years. In this co - land um, people came ah bearing strains of ah the Norse adventurer, of Celtic fantasy, of the Protestant revolution, that helped to free mankind from the old tyrannies of kings and emperors, [*\*] and ah, they bought with them, ah - they'd been often considered impoverished culturally, but they bought with them their whole treasury of, of British balladry, which after all caused the romantic revolution and inspired Keats and Shelley. [*/*] They also brought with them the tune bag of the Celtic world, probably the richest ah tune memory ah that we have in, in - on the planet. [*\*] [*10. 12. 09. 03*] They also brought with them ah, an, an incredible hardihood and ability to adapt, to adjust to the most onerous of conditions and to, to keep ah rebounding with vitality and originality to everything that faced them. The history's really fascinating. LOMAX PAGE 83 A (continued) Ah, they came actually from a kind of um, a frontier area in Britain, the land that lay between Scotland and Ireland, a land of many wars, and the south east - the south west end of it, in Argyllshire and in that part, ah, had a Norse population, had a, a loose feudal system but one in which um the commoners and the peasants them - themselves to have a great deal in common, because they, they were all raiders, they were all putting up with the, the ah task of, on the one hand, of linking with the, the, the wild Highland - wild Scots Gaelic Highlanders; on the other hand accommodating with ah imperialistic plots [*10.13 . 18 . 24*] of, of, of the Britons to the south. And ah they were equipped with the cultures of all those ah elements. So when the time came for them to move into, into Northern Ireland, and there they were asked to do a very dirty job, to, to split the, the culture that had lived in Ireland for, oh, 1500 years - the only untouched ah Gaelic culture that we know anything about, ah, and to break it, with - with their Protestant colonies. They were prepared for that. LOMAX PAGE 84 A (continued) They were prepared for that. They, they arrived there, ah, able to build forts, to defend themselves in their battles ah against the Irish and to ah - and they very quickly developed a, an extremely prosperous land there. Out of that land came a whole host of - of, of ah, new kinds of singing and new kinds of enterprises, and in spite of the fact that their lives were hard there, and barely hard because ah, as soon as the ah - as soon as ah they, they had established themselves, the rack rents and the, and the rises on taxes, and on import duties, they, they, they began to feel restless, they wa - they wanted to move on again. And so this was their second frontier in Ulster that they made, and there of course, ah, they had ah fantastic music of bagpipe and fiddle and ballad. I think we should have some of that. I've got it on the tapes. [*10.14.47.00*] Ah, and ah, there for the first time, people began to sing with the bagpipe. A wonder - wonderful sound that -and ah, ah, the um. . . ah. . .the. . . LOMAX PAGE 85 A (continued) Then an opportunity came for them to go to America, and ah, they were the folk who were almost ah, ah, assigned the job of opening up of the frontier. They immediately moved West and as the saying is ah, ah, when they got there they fell on their knees and thanked God at how beautiful the col - co - they fell on their knees and thanked God at how beautiful and rich the land was, and then they immediately fell upon the aborigines. And, ah, it was basically, mm, ah, a Scots-Irish population that went to war with the splendid ah In - Indian civilisation that existed at the time - the Iriquois, the Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw. These peoplehad had towns, they had square houses, they had streets, they had parliaments. That was ah, that was ah- The women were equal in those cultures, and [the um pioneers of course were astonished and awed by the Indians at the beginning. They had everything to learn from them. From them [*10.16.17.18*] they got corn and squash and beans and tobacco and all the thi - and the, and the ways of ah of the woodland and of the land.] They learned the plant names and what the me - what was there that would cure them. LOMAX PAGE 86 A (continued) All this they got from the Indians. (But these Scots were avid learners. They, they were literate. They most of them read the Bible and ah, they ah, quickly absorbed the, the way of life that the Indians had developed there. And immediately in their avaricious exploratory Norse aggressive way, began to push the Indians. And ah, in a hundred years they had broken the power of these very very well organized ah, ah, native American groups and had grabbed off all their land.) [*10.17.11.24*] Ah, one of the amazing things that happened there was that ah, ah, when the British began to resist American move for freedom, it was the mountaineers that first beat them in ah the battle of Kings Mountain - did I tellthis before? I think I did. Yeah. - Um. . . The way these people sang, the way they ah - the singing tradition of north west Europe that these people carried was focused on text, on lyricism and on single melodic lines. This was - [*10.17.52.16*] DIRECTION LOMAX PAGE 87 A: You know, Mark, I've been looking in the last few years at, at musical patterns from the whole world, and ah, learning ho - just how distinctive the one that I carry - because I'm of Scots-Irish descent, too, and I'm Southern - ah, how distinctive it, it, it really is. Cos no other part of the world in which people have cultivated to such an extent the art of singing in solo long narrative songs of extremely complex, um, ah, um, structure, and ah playing ah, ah, solo instruments. That's about what the Scots-Irish had, a solo singing tradition, focused on ah, ah, clear tunes and subtle ah narrative texts. Ah, they had used that to develop the - a great ballad tradition and a great tradition of love songs, and nonsense songs, and dance songs, and their dance tradition was, was largely solo, ah, with a late intrusion of um, of group dancing that came from Europe which they had preceded to develop into their, their main form of ah courting and socialising and celebrating on ah Saturday night, on occasions of leisure. This is what they had. (continued) And ah, it was very well ah remembered and developed by them and so in, in the, in the - in this ah south eastern part of the country, they encountered an, an equally powerful but absolutely contrastive black tradition, which was all [ONE] which was all choral[?], which was all syncopated, which was all rhythmically rather than melodically oriented. And they were the first ah English speaking people to make a marriage between these two, and gradually ah their dance tradition was affected by um, by the blacks, and the blacks by theirs. Their fiddle tune tradition was picked up by the blacks, and, and altered and then, ah, then farther - those ah new tunes were further altered by, by black - by white tra - ah, musicians in the mountains. And so over this period of history in the southern mountains and the southern backwoods, there was a gradual mingling of north west Europe with its somewhat stark and, and ah sinuous kinds of ah music making, with the thick, sophisticated - with, with the thi - syncopated ah choral [?] styles of the, of black art. LOMAX PAGE 89 A (continued) And out of it came ah the song styles that led into jazz and most of the popular music that we know today. And what this programme does is to show that um, that ah synthesis, that marriage, step by step, from the very first, ah, unaccompanied ballads, because that's - unaccompanied singing was what the mountaineers did, ah, right on to the end when the mountaineers showed their ah hot 5 piece orchestra. 10.21.63.22 ROLL ENDS? END ROLL 10 LOMAX ROLL 11 PAGE 90 This man Nimrod Workman, ah, has a memory that goes back ah to the dawn of British time. He spent 45 years ah in the coalmines. He was one of the people that brought the union into the mountains, but yet he knows ballads that come from the beginning of the Middle Ages. One of them is a story of what he calls Bangham and the boar. Originally it was Sir, Sir Lionel. Sir Lionel rode, rode out, he heard a woman screaming, he rescued her from a wild boar, and, and ah then the giant appeared and he had a battle with the giant and finally defeated him. That's the origin of the story. But, ah, like many American balladeers, Nimrod has reduced it to a simple pungent incident. Q: And he's taught it to his daughters. A: And he's taught it to his daughter, Phyllis, who um sings it for us, while Nimrod listens. And then they - to them it's very vivid because, ah wild boar hunting still goes on, they know the wild boar is about the most dangerous animal in the woods, and even the old ah wild hogs are pretty dangerous if you have them cornered. LOMAX PAGE 91 A (continued) So to them the wild boar is a very vivid character. [? *11. 03.59.23*] Now another song they sing is a - has even more ancient origins. [*[*] The Celts have always, among many people, believed that ah the animals had a language. When I was in ah the Hebrides I heard songs that ah were couched in the language of the seals and of every bird in the um, in those rocky islands. Because those sea people often had to live off birds, and birds' eggs. So they knew how to call them, how to get to them, and they had songs about that. So in the whole Celtic world you find stories about um, ah, knowing the an - ah, the language of the birds. And ah, [*[*] there's an old song called ah the birds courtship, which Chaucer picked up and turned into the Parliament of Fools, and which occurred in a - ah, in a British broadside where they, they have the meeting of the Woody Choristers, where all the birds come together to talk about the faithlessness of love. One bird after another. And ah, then it says: the sparrow on her nest, I loved alas but it was in jest. [*[*] LOMAX PAGE 92 A (continued) And ever since that self same thing, I made a vow I near would sing. The bullfinch, he was in a rage and nothing could his wrath assua - No. Then quoth magpie, I was crossed in love and now my dear is lost, in wanting of my heart's delight, I mourn for him in black and white. And Phyllis has 3 verses of that rare old song. [*? 11. 05. 31 . 18*] And another of her songs, even more interesting is ah the ballad of Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave, the story of a - DIRECTION A Ah, another of, of Nimrod's oldest and most favourite - [*[*] Another of Nimrod's oldest and most favourite song is the - is a ballad about adultery. Ah, Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave, his page. Who betrayed him with a lady while Lord Barnard was away from the castle, and, and the little foot page sees what's going on and he runs to warn ah, to apprise Lord Barnard of what's happening. [*? 11 .06 .12. 26*] LOMAX PAGE 93 A: (continued) And as, as ah old ah Nimrod tells the story, he acts it out with his body, and so far as we know, he's the only ah one of our ballad singers that does that. DIRECTION A: Well um, one of the... One thing that happened to the ballads in America is that um, the folks chose the ballads that interested them, they didn't keep them all, and the ones that ah - their, their favourite ones were about - their favourite ballads were about passion, murder, about ah people moving over into sinful love and, and dying as a result. Many about this subject, and the most ah vivid of all is the story of Lord Barnard and - ? Q: PROMPT A: The most vivid of all is ah - And ah, the most vivid of all is, is the one about the um, page who'd betrayed his master's ah - about the page who went to bed - I'm sorry LOMAX PAGE 94 A: This is a ballad about adultery, about ah, a courtier betraying his lord's ah lady, and bedding her, and about the little foot page that runs to warn him. And ah... Old Nimrod ah dramatises it, the whole story, with his action, a very rare thing with ballad singers anywhere. I suspect it's a gypsy trait, because we have things like it among the gypsy singers of Scotland. Q: Is there a particular reason why the Scots-Irish should have chosen passionate - ballads about passionate love? A: Well I think there's a reason for the American Scots-Irish choice of ballads of, of passionate love where the lovers come to no good end, because ah, ah, sexual ah... because ah extra marital sex was really a sin in the Calvinist tradition, a terrible sin, and ah it was preached against, you could be [ONE] for it, very much condemned, and the - there was a real uptight morality in this whole Presbyterian tradition. So, ah, men and women could sing about it, just so long as ah, as the protagonist came to a bad end. LOMAX PAGE 95 A (continued) And that's true also of this ballad, ah, Loving Henry. Here we have the two things coming together, the talking animal and ah the end of illicit love. Ah, the girl invites young Henry to come back and see her, they are lovers; when he leans over from his saddle, she stabs him with her little dirk. And then she and maidservant throw him into the well, and the little poll parrot has seen it and ah this parrot of course is the spirit of the dead man, and she beseeches the parrot not to tell, but he refuses - refuses her gift of a golden cage with golden bars, and flies into the highest tree, and the girl is exposed and, and she and the maid are ah, ah, executed. Assuagement of a guilty conscience. But a lotta fun along the way in fantasy. And that's the story of many of our ballad singers, and many of our best ah classical ballads. [*? 11. . 10. 01 . . .*] LOMAX PAGE 96 A (continued) In the new American ballads, it's, it's a little bit more direct. There you have a girl who's generally ah, pregnant, out of wedlock; she asks the boy to marry her and ah when he ah refuses and she threatens a shotgun wedding, threatens to let her old man know, because as they say in the mountains, when that happened, you could hear the shotgun - you could hear the hammer clip on the shotgun. There was no beating about the bushes, the old man would find the young man, walk in with his shotgun and say: Well, are you gonna do right by her? And he -if he said, no, that was the end of him, right there and then. And he would never never be ah convicted for a crime of that sort. [*? 11.10.45 . . . *] So here's the man, ah, caught between ah the devil and the deep blue sea: doesn't love the girl, doesn't wanna be tied down. There she is with her, her clinging desire for him and ah, so he says: Let's go for a walk, let's take a ride, and out in the wilderness somewhere he stabs her or beats her to death with a stake, takes her by her long yellow hair and slings her round and round, and LOMAX PAGE 97 A (continued) throws her into a river and leaves her there to drown. That's the favourite American ballad scene, and it was-interestingly enough, you can call it what Dreiser calls it, the American Tragedy, because his main first big novel is a novel with the same tale. [*? 11. 11 . 27 . . .*] Ah, [CLEARS THROAT] this was the result of the - this was the consequence of our, ah very stern 19th century attitude toward female continence and ah the sanctity of the marriage bond, which was a necessary thing for America, it was a thing that made the country strong and firm, and clear and able to grow, but, ah, was very very hard on many many people. [*? 11. 12. 04 . . . *] So, that's the ballads. CUT LOMAX PAGE 98 A And then ah 900 miles from home - CHAT 11.12.23. . A You can chart the history of the mountains in their songs about transportation. A lot of the first ones were about walking in: Lay down boys and take a little nap, lay down boys and take a little nap. Lay down boys and take a little nap, 14 miles to the Cumberland Gap. These are men who were hoofing it with their ah rifles over their shoulder. And then when serious settlement came, they had to get ox teams ah to haul their goods over the mountains, and it was a terrible struggle. I grew up with one of these songs in Texas. It was about the Saluda Gap. I didn't know until recently that the Saluda Gap was one of the main empty ways into the, into the ? 11.13.10. . . . um Appalachians. And um. . . this song went: (SINGS) 11.13.52 . . . LOMAX PAGE 99 A And that helped to make - open up the mountains with ox teams. Later, ah the wagoner was the big figure. He came on - he was the person who transported the goods to market. He was the person who brought goods in to the lonely mountain hollows, an ah, I suppose half the songs were really sung about the wagoner. He was an elusive faithless lover of course and, and um, ah. . . if you wait just a minute, I'll find it . . . um . . . (SINGS) 11.16.22. [11.16.06..] And then with the railroads, hundreds of songs with the blues note in them. (SINGS) 11.16.06 . . Well, next question. CHAT Lomax Page 100 ? 11.16.42: À [SINGS] 11.18.05 That was one of a whole school of American songs, right across the country, about lonesome cowboys and lonesome folks. That's the big lonesome American song. Ah, but it all goes back to the wagoner with his [ONE OR TWO] wagon, rolling through the countryside, with the young ladies falling left and right in love with him. Now. . . Q PROMPT CHAT 11.18.35... CUT ROLL 11 ENDS Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.