>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> [ no sound ] >> Peggy Bulger: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the latest Benjamin Botkin lecture in the American Folklife Center's Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series and for those of you who don't know me, I'm Peggy Bulger and I'm Director of the American Folk Life Center and we are very, very pleased to have a unique team with us today who most of you know. Old friends of the Center, I should say, I'll tell you more about that later but I did want to tell you that for the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series this is really an acquisitions project for us. What we do is well be videotaping the entire lecture and then it will become part of our permanent collection and it will become also a webcast on the Library of Congress Web site. So if you know people who couldn't make it today and really wanted to see the lecture, definitely within about a month or two we will have this up on the Web site and you can see the entire thing and participate in this. Today I have the pleasure of introducing Alan and Karen Jabbour and they are going to be discussing the celebration of Decoration Day and many of you probably know about Decoration Day and if you don't you will know pretty soon. It's a widespread and time honored tradition, especially in the Upland South which is what they'll be talking about and it forms the basis of their recent book which is Decoration Day in the Mountains and after the lecture Alan and Karen will be signing copies of the books if you would like to get a signed copy and that has just been published, really just this past year by North Carolina Press. As many of you know very well, Alan was the founding director and my predecessor at the American Folk Life Center and hes served with distinction from 1976 to 1999 when he retired and got busier than ever. And during his 30 years of federal service he headed the Library's Archive of Folksong. He served as the Director of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. He was President of the American Folklore society for two years and throughout his years of Federal service he also, as many of you know, maintained a separate career as a respected fiddler and field collector. And Karen Jabbour contributes her considerable skills as a dedicated researcher and a wonderful photographer to their collaboration which we will see very soon. So were delighted to have them with us today so please join me in welcoming Alan and Karen Jabbour. [applause] >> Now -- it's up for me and after a while down again for Karen. So welcome to all of you. Great to have you here. Our presentation focuses on the Appalachian tradition of cemetery decoration. Referred to by the people who do it as Decoration Day or simply "a Decoration." In 2004 we studied Decoration Day as part of the environmental impact statement for the proposed North Shore Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The study in which we were joined by Ted Coyle and Paul Webb who, alas are not here today, was published in late 2005 and included in the final environmental impact statement in 2006. Meanwhile we continued to pursue the topic. We couldn't let it go. Paying more attention now to Decoration Day outside the National Park and to Southern cemetery features particularly rural Southern cemetery features from the Carolinas to Oklahoma. Now we're proud to share our book Decoration Day in the Mountains. There's the book cover. We guest curated an exhibit of the same title in 2009 and 2010 in Western Carolina University's Mountain Heritage Center and it has toured other regional venues. This Power Point presentation today focuses on Western North Carolina, like the book. But it also includes a generous sampling of our continuing research Many rural cemeteries in Western North Carolina hold Decorations. The general formats, subject to much variation, provides for each cemetery decoration to be set on a certain Sunday of the year, say the second Sunday in June. As Decoration Day approaches people go to their cemetery to clean, repair, mow and weed it. If they practice mounding they re-mound family graves by raking up a row of heaped earth running the length of the grave site. Leaning or fallen headstones are re-sited. If the site uses gravel it may be added to or re-arranged. Next they decorate the grave with flowers and other decorations. Some people decorate the day before Decoration Day, others bring flowers early on the morning of the Decoration itself. A few people use fresh flowers, still, but store-bought fabric flowers are typical today. They last longer. Until a few decades ago people also made crepe paper flowers at home. This old photo shows home-made paper flowers in Lauada Cemetery around 1960. This display case from the Mountain Heritage Center exhibit shows paper flowers fashioned recently by Helen Vance and Verna Kirkland. Though the craft is no longer practiced for regional cemetery decoration, their skill shows how strong the tradition remains in the minds of the older generation. In addition to artificial flowers many grave sites are graced by live plantings. Yet others use shells to decorate graves. In this Kentucky case fresh water mussel shells. Some graves also display personal objects meaningful to the deceased. A favorite coffee mug, a Scotch whiskey bottle, [laughter] from a Scottish burial too. Or a prize collection of teapots and pitchers. Graves also reveal tokens left by visitors as if to say, I've been here to see you. Small stones appear as tokens on headstones, often in Jewish cemeteries where stone tokens are a well-known custom but occasionally also on non-Jewish graves as well, suggesting that the practice is spreading. Some tokens communicate with the deceased, written messages to loved ones, quarters left on the grave of a teenager remembered for borrowing quarters or caving paraphernalia that spelunkers leave on the grave of Floyd Collins, whose 1925 death stuck in a narrow underground passage in the Mammoth Cave system generated a media frenzy and a traditional ballad - for you ballad followers out there. Finally some contemporary graves are decorated with an array of statuary, trinkets and memorabilia in what we have come Workdays before a Decoration Day called for work clothes but Decoration Day calls for dressing up especially for the ladies. During their early part of the decoration people dressed the graves and also socialize and reflect on loved ones buried there. Perhaps there's a prayer. Then gospel singing begins and lasts until the preacher of speaker steps forward. The sermon is perhaps followed by another prayer and often by grace, actually, and more Gospel singing. Then the formal program dissolves into socializing and reflecting on the cemetery. Finally the group assembles at outdoor tables, sometimes at an outdoor pavilion for the ritual meal called "dinner on the ground." Some decorations that turn into a nearby church, community center or other site for dinner on the ground but they still call it dinner on the ground. The Decoration Day framework also allows for a special events to be included in it. Like a baptism or the sacred cacophony of praying separate Overall a decoration is a religious service in the cemetery when people decorate graves to pay respect to the dead. A varied form of Decoration Day emerged in the north shore region of Great Smoky Mountains national Park, the region lying north of Fontana Lake. As Fontana Dam was completed in the 1940s and the new lake's waters began to rise hundreds of families were removed in 1943 and 1944 from the valley of the Little Tennessee River and the streams flowing down into it from the Smokies. The land was transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The only consolation for the departing families was a plan formerly agreed to by local, state, and federal government to build a new road through the North Shore Region after World War II, providing access for park visitors and for the displaced families to decorate the region's 27 cemeteries. The new road was begun but construction ceased in the 1960s, a casualty, really, of the rising wilderness movement in the 1960s. Because the road extends through a tunnel then abruptly stops on the other side some wag, we haven't traced who yet, dubbed it "the road to nowhere," and the name stuck. This incidentally is the aboriginal X to nowhere from which all the other Xs so nowhere, roads, bridges. Recently I read about a hole to nowhere which was in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. So this one was the parent of that formula in our national culture. A protest movement arose in 1978, pressing the National Park to provide access to the cemeteries, most of which the park had abandoned to gradual reforestation. A highly successful and well publicized Decoration crossed the lake in boats to decorate Cable Cemetery. The grass-roots movement forced the parks hand. Soon the park was restoring overgrown cemeteries, providing boats and adding other help. Within a few years all the cemeteries, 27 in total, had been repaired and Decorations were scheduled for most spring and summer Sundays, usually ferrying the pilgrims across on boats. The movement bred an organization, the North Shore Cemetery Association, later renamed the North Shore Historical Association. Then it bred another organization, the North Shore Road Association to lobby for the long ago promised road. The North Shore Decorations differ from classic decorations in two important respects. First Park Rangers do the maintenance work community members once did, cleaning the cemeteries and, in most cases, mounding the graves. Though decorating graves with flowers is still left to community members on Decoration Day. Second, the journey to and from the cemetery is usually by boat, a radical new element but an element with ancient mythic associations involving crossing bodies of water from the secular into the sacred world. Then the classic Decoration Day sequence follows. Climbing to a ridge top cemetery, laying decorations on graves, communing with kin and friends above and below ground, Gospel music, taking up an offering for restoring headstones, offering a message in prayer, more music, more communing and finally dinner on the ground. [pause] Okay. [background noise ] >> Karen Singer Jabbour: One striking Decoration Day custom is the custom of decorating every grave. If families confined decorating to their own graves inevitably some graves go undecorated. But seeing gaps in the Decoration stirs a certain aesthetic and moral anxiety. People say it doesnt look right so many people bring extra flowers to decorate the undecorated graves. Going a step farther, some individuals or families take upon themselves the mission of decorating every grave in the cemetery or every grave in a certain section of a large cemetery. The Decorate every grave mission or calling is often passed down through a family over several generations. Here Regina Howell's son Clay and his friend Trevor carry out the mission in Cochrane cemetery for Regina who inherited it from her mother. Diane Peterson decorates a long double row of unidentified graves in Lauada Cemetery. While her mother, Virgie, from whom she inherited the responsibility, supervises. Decorating every grave is a powerful reminder, aesthetically and socially of the cemeteries communal equality. The origin of Decoration Day is not clear. People have decorated graves from time immemorial but similar customs like the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest have one fundamental difference. They are on a fixed day on the calendar whereas the Southern Decoration Day is on different Sundays for different Cemeteries enabling people to attend multiple Decorations. The evidence points to the development of Decoration Day as an American Protestant tradition and specifically a southern American tradition. Two events indicate that Decoration Day is at least as old as the Civil War. In 1865 the African American community in Charleston South Carolina reburied union prisoners whom the Confederates had buried in a mass grave, then held a service on the site that included decorating the grave with flowers, singing, speeches, and preaching and Union soldiers marching. The event was reported in Charleston and Northern newspapers and historians today cite it as the first Memorial Day. In 1866 and annually thereafter the Ladies' Memorial Association of Petersburg Virginia organized an event at Langford cemetery commemorating confederate dead, buried or reburied there. The Petersburg model seems to have inspired the Northern Decoration Day which became our Memorial Day. General John Logan was commanding general for the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans. His wife, Mary Logan was visiting Petersburg in early 1868. Passing through Blandford Cemetery she was touched by seeing flowers and tiny flags on confederate soldiers' graves. When she described it to her husband he issued a general order instructing Union veterans to decorate the graves of fallen comrades on May 30th. Thus, Memorial Day was inspired by a Southern Decoration but refocused on the fallen in battle. When General Logan issued the 1868 order a Philadelphia newspaper proclaimed it inappropriate to imitate a custom of the hated rebels. A Richmond newspaper responded that the Northern Decoration Day was, "A miserable mockery and burlesque upon a holy and sacred institution peculiar to Southern people." Both comments support the existence of the Southern Decoration Day before the Civil War as does one fascinating geographic detail. Decoration Day is a national holiday in Liberia which was settled before the Civil War by former American slaves. It has no trace of the Northern Memorial days focus on war-time deaths of freeing the slaves. It is about cleaning graves, white washing them and honoring ancestors, like the Southern Decoration Day this seems to be its source. There is other geographical evidence. Westward from the Appalachians to the plains, Decoration Day is a wide spread rural custom. The same features appear from North Carolina to Eastern Oklahoma. The annual Decoration date varies from cemetery to cemetery, the ritual meal is called "dinner on the ground." Preaching, prayers and singing are key features. Certain foods like stack cake are a Decoration Day tradition. Decorating every grave is an associated custom. A Decoration Day map coincides with the map of 19th century migration westward from the Appalachians. It is surprising that a cultural tradition so wide spread and so meaningful to its practitioners is so little noticed, that is, outside the group of its practitioners. Encyclopedias and other reference works ignore the Southern folk Decoration Day, those acknowledging it sometimes imply that it is an offshoot of the post Civil War Northern custom. Others confuse it with the Confederate Memorial Day observances declared by Southern states after the Civil War. The Southern folk Decoration Day differs from, but seems to be the inspiration for, both the Northern and Confederate Memorial Days. Appreciating Decoration Day calls for understanding the structure and history of the cemeteries themselves. Cemeteries are dynamic despite their stony illusion of permanence. Not only do new burials gradually change the Cemetery but older burials are also subject to change. Many an Appalachian cemetery contains newer headstones for older graves. Cemetery dynamism also occurs in a broader way. Many cemeteries began as family cemeteries, sited somewhere on family property, often on a ridge away from the home site. Some family cemeteries evolved into community cemeteries. Families intermarried or are invited neighbors to use the same plot and over time the cemetery grew, both in burials and in community breadth. Sometimes the community cemetery evolved into a church cemetery. When we encounter a church with a cemetery beside it or up the ridge behind it we may think of it as an example of the church's cemetery but often the cemetery came first and the cemeteries sacred ground attracted the church. Here we have a church in Double Springs' cemetery with the plaque inscription on it saying in loving remembrance of those who sleep here, we dedicate this church to God in their memory. Clearly the cemetery was there before the church. An important part of cemetery evolution is the appearance of grass and the gradual decline of mounding. Rural cemeteries were once bare earth and clean swept, containing only plantings chosen to adorn them. In this they resembled the bare and clean swept dooryards of rural dwellings. The modern domain of grass, which began in urban can cosmopolitan homes and parks, steadily spread into the rural south. Instead of being plucked, raked ,or scraped out of dooryards, grass began to be planted there. Eventually, but more slowly because of a natural conservatism about sacred ground, cemeteries began to follow suit. They were, after all, dooryards for the dwelling of the dead, hence the name "graveyard." Some cemeteries shifted over, others held back. In community cemeteries whether to sow grass was often left to each family. To this day in some cemeteries that are mostly grassy, a few families, conservative cultural holdouts, remove all grass and weeds As grass spread, many families edged their gravesites with stone, brick or concrete boarders. There may be many motives for gravesite borders but keeping out both grass and the grass mowers help popularize such enclosures. Others covered the gravesite with white sand or gravel to protect them from the invading grass and mowers. To be sure grass has many virtues. As rich top cemeteries filled up and grass was set on graves were added down the slopes grass offered protection against erosion. But cultural changes can have unanticipated consequences, and Southern mounding became a victim of the new grass domain. Nobody can be sure how mounding became a Southern custom. No analogs from every continent have been cited, graves are roughly mounded at the time of burial when mounding compensates for loose earth settling. But re-mounding graves annually, long after settlement has stopped, became part of the ritual preparation for Decoration Day. The mounds running the length of the grave came to symbolize the body buried below. Re-mounding the earth each year was a sort of ritual re-burial. Further, re-mounding and decorating with flowers in the single-row style resembles mounding a garden or a field for spring planting. Thus, in a paradox that symbolism is capable of, mounding manages to signify or symbolize both re-burial and resurrection. Mounding is receding throughout the Appalachians but we found some cemeteries where it remains the dominant style. A few in transition and some where only a few graves are still mounded. Most of the parks North Shore cemeteries are mounded but a few are leveled and grassy. Here, the park rangers do the ritual mounding and pass it along as part of their occupational folklore. Finally, one sub-region that we have called the Balsam Highlands, mainly in Jackson counties, Canada township, but also across the county line in a few Transylvania County cemeteries, has invented a new style. It allows grass between the graves but mounds each grave and dresses the mounded graves in white gravel. The gravel-dressed mounds are visually striking and highlight the colors of the flowers. Going one step farther, three cemeteries are covered continuously with white gravel, both mounds and intervening space creating an undulating white sea. Thus, cemetery dynamism has invented a style that resolves the cultural dilemma between the old clean-swept and mounded style and the new flat and grassy style. The Balsam Highland solution, as we have dubbed it, is major evidence of the creative coherence of this sub-region. [pause] Actually, during the time that we were visiting the same region and working on this project we saw one of the cemeteries that we showed you that was completely mounded and bare and turned over to completely sodded and flat and those people who didnt want it put up border and put up gravel on their family graves. >> Alan Jabbour: Christian cemeteries historically have experimented with ways to protect graves from rain, livestock, wild hogs, and people. We think of grave markers as being vertical but a number of grave-protecting structures cover the grave horizontally. Mounding itself may be considered a horizontal device for shedding water. If so, it has been augmented by many other horizontal devices. They are profoundly functional but they also reflect the impulse to make a grave site beautiful and to invest it with respect. Thus in some cemeteries one may find grave covers of stone or concrete. Horizontal rectangles laid over and covering roughly the space of the grave itself. Some are for individual graves but some protect the grave site of a couple and a few cover entire family sites. Some lie flat on the ground, others rest on a foundation. Using a foundation leads naturally to adding walls and the result is a rectangular stone or brick box standing anywhere from a few inches to a few feet off the ground. The walls may be made up of single or multiple cut stone slabs or of brick but the top is typically a single large slab, just like a ground level grave cover. Box crypts do not actually contain human remains. The burial lies underground so they are sometimes called false crypts. A variant of the box crypt in North Georgia uses slot and tab construction. Another variant of the box structure uses posts Occasionally grave covers are built with rounded or peaked roofs, The same peaked stone roof may be added to a box crypt The people in the Tennessee Cumberlands invented a solution that's all peaked roof and no box. The so called cone graves or tent graves. The idea of roofing leads finally to grave shelters, also known as grave houses, which can be found throughout the South. Grave shelters can be low with simple posts and a peaked roof like a table grave with a roof. Others are low slung but more closed than open. At the other end of the spectrum are shed-like structures, often open sided or with lattice and tall enough to walk into. Occasionally one finds a family grave shelter housing several burials constructed with home carpentry or perhaps with pre-fabs from Home Depot or Lowes. There are other members of this large and varied class of horizontal grave forms. One occasionally encounters an outsized horizontal mound of large rocks laid over a grave like an ancient Scottish cairn. There are also beehive like, cylindrical sculptures stacked up carefully with rocks like this family cemetery in the Tennessee Cumberlands. Taken all together these horizontal forms reinforce the horizontality of the grave itself. Headstones and monuments reach vertically for the sky but these earthbound horizontal structures evoke the caskets Appalachian cemeteries are not always creatively attended to. The eastern woodlands may overtake some small family cemeteries after the family leaves the region, and community cemeteries may also be at risk. Church and civic cemeteries are stabilized by institutional support but community cemeteries depend on informal community commitment to maintain a sacred place. Sometimes community attention to a cemetery wanes or wavers but neglect can be reversed by the cemetery heroes whose praises we now sing. We've already noted the devotees who decorate every grave for Decoration Day. Other cemetery heroes take on a more challenging mission, conserving a whole community cemetery. Such heroes can reverse the down-slide and restore a cemetery to healthy state again, enlisting in the process other community members to make the cemetery both functional and beautiful. Laura Burns restored Watkins cemetery just outside Riceland City in Western North Carolina during an era of neglect, then she chose her daughter Flonnie to carry on her mission. And then, because she lived past 90, she chose her grandson, Harold Collins and his wife Theresa to carry on beyond Flonnie. Others in Watkins have caught the spirit such as Janice Inabinett, who now tends a group of African American graves within the larger cemetery. And Watkins cemetery now flourishes and has an active Decoration again. At the entrance to Birdtown Cemetery in the Cherokee community, a memorial honors Luther Murphy, "For his many years of dedicated service to the Birdtown Cemetery." His daughter Catherine Murphy Crisp continues to prepare Decorations for their family grave sites but since Luther Murphys passing broad cemetery responsibility, not just keeping up and maintaining, but digging graves as well, has been assumed by a younger Cherokee group known in a triumph of forthrightness as the Free Labor Group. The community cemeteries of Western North Carolina and the upland South are a widespread and distinctive cultural form. Poised on Appalachian ridges they are typically surrounded by forest like outdoor cathedrals. Along with camp meetings and religious retreats, Decoration Day probably traces its lineage to reform Protestantism's embrace of outdoor religious services. Community cemeteries are delicate cultural inventions, lacking centralized institutional support, another aspect of the reformed Protestant lineage, they depend on a decent consensual democracy that accommodates individual decision making, permits variation and involves the community without formal dictation. Community cemeteries are a bell weather for the rural way of life in the upland south. Their health signals a health community fabric. Richly decorated cemeteries and creative problem solving like the Balsam Highland solution that we shared with you earlier are sure signs of community integrity and commitment. Decorations continue to attract people of all ages, but, in some cemeteries, a dearth of flowers reveals a drying up of cultural energy, a shriveling of devotion. What can be done to sustain community cemeteries? One kind of help comes from the outside. Perhaps media coverage of the North Shore Decoration or a book or exhibit created by the likes of us, or even certain regulatory processes in the larger world, can help draw more attention to Decorations in the cemeteries in which they take place. Conferring on the tradition and the prestige that naturally flows from its being admired and respected by people from afar and people with institutional connections. But the most important help comes from the inside. Of the various solutions to the traditional vulnerabilities of community cemeteries, none is more important than cemetery heroes who arise spontaneously out of their own volition from the community's ranks, responding to a higher calling to save their cemeteries and who, through their devotion, inspire others to replace neglect with positive action. The entire North Shore revolution that we described earlier in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a grass roots protest movement to decorate cemeteries in the park was led by Helen Vance and her sisters. Their great achievement in bending the National Park service to their cultural needs might seem unique when contemplated from afar, but it takes nothing away from their achievement to see them as drawn from the regions cultural lineage of community cemetery heroes. If asked to list important forms of Appalachian folk art, few people would include a decorated cemetery but the cemetery is seen as an integrated whole, on or after Decoration Day, is a compelling panoramic canvas. A strikingly beautiful folk art created by communities together over time. We hope that the words and photographs of our book convey what we experienced attending Decorations and visiting cemeteries in the Appalachians and beyond. A sense of the decorated cemetery as a folk art capable of breathtaking beauty and expressing powerfully the deepest values of Appalachian culture. And that's the end of the road. Thank you all very much. Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.