American Folk Music Anth-2150-902 Term Paper

Too Traditional or Not Traditional Enough: How Folk Music Was Interpreted at the Bristol Sessions and the White Top Folk Festival

Part One: The Bristol SessionsBill Malone, in his definitive book Country Music, USA, has referred to the Bristol sessions as “one of

country music’s most seminal events.” 1

The mountains in the mid-Appalachian range are favored in many ways. The area is considered a

biodiversity “hot spot” featuring an “unrivaled” number aquatic species and one of the largest

concentrations of endangered species east of the Rockies. The Blue Ridge Mountains just east and south

of us features more diversity in trees than in all of Europe. 2

Contrary to widespread belief, nurtured by pernicious stereotypes found in the media for the

past century or more, those same mountains are home to rich cultural diversity. Misperceptions about

the American South in general and Appalachia in particular, abound. Much of this comes from the

region’s insularity; while it is not homogenous it is isolated. 3

The same factors that made the southern mountaineer a target of derision also made them a

symbol of cultural purity to many in the early part of the 20th century, “a living reminder of what the

archetypal American once was.” 4 It seems that almost since its inception the residents of these United

States have been nostalgic for by-gone, halcyon days. 5 The early part of the 20th century was no

exception; fueled by the migration of people out of rural settings into urban ones in search of work, an

influx of immigrants coming to our shores for the same reason, continual western expansion and

repopulation, and a burgeoning nationalism, cultural purists were growing alarmed at the prospect of

losing our (as they perceived it) Anglos Saxon identity. “What seemed important for the Anglo Saxon

theorists was that they had found at least one bastion of racial purity in a society increasingly given over

to racial and ethnic diversity, religious pluralism, and cultural amalgamation. 6

For the purists, though, it was already too late. The barbarians were at the gate and preparing to

storm the citadel. Except that in place of battering rams and siege ladders, they were equipped with

recording equipment and radio transmitters. “The decade of the 1920’s witnessed the first full-scale

commercialization of rural southern folk music, made possible by the developing giants of musical

distribution, phonography recordings and radio.” 7 Music broadcast on the radio in the 20’s was almost

exclusively live, featuring local talent. This created a boon to their musical careers and brought them to

the attention of a much larger audience than they could otherwise reach. In some cases radio exposure

led to a recording contract, as happened with Fiddling John Carson who could be heard on WSB in

Atlanta when it went on the air in 1922. He was recorded by Ralph Peer for OKeh Records in 1925 and

became the first commercially successful “hillbilly” artist (a term that Peer applied to his growing

repertoire of traditional music from the south). A number of record companies sent talent scouts into

the south to record local musicians, and some studios had provisional studios in places around the South

(Atlanta, for example), but Ralph Peer was the first to venture into Appalachia, “when he supervised a

field recording session for OKeh in Asheville, North Carolina in 1925.” 8

By the time Peer supervised the historic Bristol sessions for the Victor label in August of 1927 “at

least thirteen acts from that area had already recorded at various studios in the South, Midwest, and

New York…” 9, including Ernest Stoneman who had previously been recorded by OKeh and who was the

best known of all the regional performers. In fact, Peer enlisted Stoneman as a talent scout to assist in

lining up performers for the sessions he had planned in Bristol. Ralph Peer understood the commercial

potential for the music he was recording throughout the south, even though he didn’t especially care for

it himself. The Fiddling John Carson, which he labeled “pluperfect awful,” went on to sell thousands of

copies. The dialects and the tonality appealed to other southerners, but Peer was hoping to reach a

wider audience. In his work as an advance scout for the sessions, Stoneman brought in string bands and

musicians. This was, after all, the kind of music he played and the kind of music he thought would appeal

to the projected audience for the recordings. Peer did record a large number of gospel songs, and some

old-time arrangements, but “of the seventy-six recordings finally made, only seven…could be really

called instrumentals, and four of these were harmonica novelty items. Four other sides…were string

band recordings with only incidental singing—possibly inserted at Peer’s insistence.” 10 Clearly, Ralph

Peer had not come to Bristol to collect ballads and preserve a musical tradition.

“The fact that such veteran Appalachian musicians as Clarice Shelor and Ernest Stoneman were

surprised at the kind of music Peer wanted casts some doubt on the accuracy with which Peer was

judging the actual nature of the region’s music. Fiddlers and string bands were certainly integral

components of Appalachian music in the 20’s…. Yet, Peer hesitated about recording fiddles and string

bands for his new series on Victor, or if he did tried to convert them into singing groups with

instrumental accompaniment. One reason was that Peer sensed he was developing a new commercial

art form—the genre of music eventually called country music—and that this art form was to be derived

from, though not fully reflective of, traditional mountain music.” 11

By its very definition, folk music is communal, belonging to the culture that was its wellspring

and which has nurtured it as part of a living tradition. Profitability and commercialism are diametrically

opposed to a tradition that is based on sharing. Furthermore, the very act of recording a tune is at odds

with a tradition that is fluid and ongoing. To arrest a tradition in time, to say “This is Sara Carter singing a

song titled Wildwood Flower” is true as far as it goes, but it leaves a great deal unsaid about where that

song came from and how it came to be in her possession. In other words, it ignores the tradition. As it

happens, Sara probably first encountered the song back in her girlhood in Rich Valley in a variant form

“based on a song written a half century earlier by Maud Irving and J.P. Welch, called I’ll Twine the

Ringlets.”

“It is impossible to know if anybody in Rich Valley still had the published sheet music, but the

song itself had been passed around from local singer to local singer.” 12

Beyond simply ignoring the tradition, the process of recording the song for commercial purposes

appropriates the tradition. This is artifice, not preservation. “My policy was always to try to expand

[emphasis added] each artist by adding accompaniment or adding a vocalist,” Peer observed in an article

in Billboard about the Bristol sessions, written in 1953.

Part Two: The White Top Folk Festival“It seems that they want to make it…a contest of old fashion music, folk music, I believe they call it,” [John] Blakemore wrote to a correspondent.” 13

Four years after the Bristol Sessions and less than thirty mile away as the crow flies, another

seminal musical event took place on the summit of White Top Mountain, in Virginia. The White Top Folk

Festival grew out of a suggestion made to Abingdon attorney John Blakemore that a fiddler’s contest be

held on White Top on the 4th of July. 14 In addition to being an attorney, Blakemore was a well-connected

politician and an officer in the White Top Company which owned the mountain. The wife of Blakemore’s

cousin John Buchanan, Annabel Morris Buchanan was a member of the Federated Women’s Music Clubs

of America and director of the Federation’s folk music section. A gifted musician in her own right, Mrs.

Buchanan hosted a weekly Monday Afternoon Music Club in Marion, Virginia and in that capacity had

become acquainted with John Powell, a southern classical musician of some distinction. “In addition to

being a composer and prominent pianist, Powell lectured, wrote articles, and sponsored associations

and festivals designed to promote the preservation of the folk music of the south.” 15 He was also an

advocate for the belief that mountain life, and especially the ballads that musicologists like Cecil Sharp

and others had “discovered” in Appalachia a decade earlier, represented the last bastion of Anglo-Saxon

purity in a rapidly expanding, increasingly urbanized, and ethnically diverse America. Texan Annabel

Morris Buchanan, Virginia composer and proponent of the Anglo-Saxon folk-song school John Powell

and local entrepreneur John Blakemore: from this star-crossed trio emerged the idea for the White Top

Folk Festival.

The idea of holding a folk festival was not unprecedented. By 1931 when the first White Top Folk

Festival was held there were three similar festivals in existence.

“The modern folk festival was born in Appalachia. Although the term folk festival had been used

previously for a few cultural events, it became fully established in the national consciousness when four

prominent festivals were created between 1928 and 1934. The first three, the Mountain Dance and Folk

Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, the American Folk Song Festival held near Ashland, Kentucky, and

the White Top Folk Festival, in southwest Virginia, all focused on Euro-American, Appalachian culture.

Only the last, the National Folk Festival, was not held initially in Appalachia, and was not monocultural in

content.” 15

Interest in finding and preserving mountain music grew out of the mountain settlement school

movement which was alive in the early part of the 20th century. The schools were meant to educate

Appalachian children. “[S]ome settlement workers conceived of the schools as folk schools where

mountain people were encouraged to preserve their own culture and were actively encouraged to

preserve their own culture in the form of traditional ballads, folk songs, and dances.” 16 All too often,

though, the tendency among these no doubt well-intentioned people was to focus on elements of the

local folk culture that reinforced their belief that the music and dance they found were cultural artifacts

which had been preserved since the days they were transported here from England and to ignore any

manifestations of culture that the local population might have contributed on their own. This duality

was also present in the folk festivals that flourished from the late twenties, continuing in some cases on

into the present day.

“What sorts of music were they [Powell and Buchanan] looking for? [T]hey wanted old-time

“folk” music of white mountaineers, and they emphatically did not want what they called the “tawdry”

commercial or country music that could be heard on phonograph records or the radio. To get what they

wanted, they knew they would have to exercise considerable control over the musicians. “We’d better

designate types of songs to be sung,” Mrs. Buchanan said. “If we don’t, they are just as likely to sing

‘When You and I Were Young, Maggie.’” 17 They also tried to discourage string bands, although some

were included.

The first White Top Folk Festival took place on August 12 and 13th and drew over 3,000 people.

The following year 4,000 people attended a slightly expanded festival which featured seventy-five

individuals and groups. “Mrs. Buchanan was ecstatic. “Oh, it gets me thrilled every time I think of it,” she

wrote John Powell after it was all over. And I wake up in the night, happy and thrilled again…at being

part of this folk world. Oh, Mr. Powell, don’t you feel that we are pioneers in something that may be

really making American musical history?” 18

The following year, Mrs. Buchanan was inspired to write a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of

the newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inviting her to attend the 1933 festival. This was

by no means a long-shot. Mrs. Roosevelt’s father, Elliot, had spent some time in the area, living in

Abingdon and working with his brother-in-law in some business ventures that included lumber interests

on White Top and a coal mine in Coeburn, Virginia. Elliot Roosevelt died when Eleanor was a young girl,

but she was fiercely loyal to the memory of her father and viewed Abingdon and southwest Virginia

through a sentimental “halo of romance.” Mrs. Roosevelt accepted the invitation. 19

With the publicity surrounding Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit, Festival organizers anticipated large

numbers of entries and attendees. According to a newspaper account from that year for the first time,

“a series of local elimination ‘contests’ may be held in order to give time for the completion of the

program in the two days on which it is scheduled.”20 John Blakemore, a prominent local Democrat in

addition to being part owner of The White Top Company which controlled the mountain, arranged to

have the road to White Top improved. He also had a pavilion constructed using native chestnut wood

with a massive stone fireplace.

Part Three: The Legacy of Traditional Music

“It is not mountain music or hillbilly music. It is something that belongs to all the people which we and our ancestors of other generations have loved. And I don’t think it is dying out. If you could see the young people—as well as the older people—who are participating in this music up here, you would lose a great deal of your fear that this tradition is being weakened or lost to us.” [Remarks made by John Powell from a WRV radio broadcast recorded at White Top Folk Festival in 1938. Transcribed by David Winship]

“Lovers of old-time sentimental songs had no need to despair about their disappearance, for they could hear such numbers or similar ones on hillbilly records.” 20

By just about any measure the 1933 festival could be considered a success. Accounts vary but

anywhere from 10-20,000 people attended the two day festival. John Powell waxed ecstatic when he

gave the following assessment:

“For two days music and dancing take possession of the great mountain. Every visitor becomes instantly a part of all that goes on, and his own traditional heritage pours into the general stream…. There is a sense that we are a folk and that in that fact lies some of the secret of the Golden Age.” 21

Annabelle Buchanan, whose had conceived the idea in the first place, was starting to have her

doubts about the direction the festival was taking. Even before the 3 rd festival opened she expressed her

misgivings. “For two cents I’d throw up the whole thing,” she wrote to Powell. “I believe we are doing

more harm than good.” 22 Mrs. Buchanan finally did ‘throw the whole thing up’ in 1937. By then, the

White Top Folk Festival had become a cultural festival more akin to the Highlands Festival which is

currently underway in Abingdon, than a folk music festival. It did include music, but also handicrafts,

stories, and dances. 23 John Powell continued to shape the musical portion of the program to suit his

vision of the importance of Appalachian folk music as a last bastion of America’s cultural antecedents.

With the success of the 1933 John Blakemore saw the commercial potential of the festival and sought to

exploit that potential in any way possible. Newcomer Richard Chase was responsible for adding Jack

Tales, Morris dancing, and puppet shows and other fanciful flourishes to the venue. 24 In spite of John

Powell’s confident assertion in 1938 that the tradition would live on, the last festival was held the

following year. So ardent were the White Top Folk Festival organizers (excluding Annabelle Buchanan) to

preserve the tradition that they manipulated the tradition to suit their own ends. “In rejecting certain

types of music, the White Top Festival people were also rejecting major historical developments in the

lives of the plain people of the South.” 25 Like Ralph Peer in Bristol four years earlier, Buchanan and

Powell were manipulating and exploiting a musical tradition to further their own ends. This was not

preservation, it was contrivance. It was also exploitation.

[John Powell coaches C.B. Wohlford, veteran mountain banjo player at White Top]

Just as Clarice Shelor had to learn words to accompany traditional ballads that she had played

her entire life, at White Top contestants figure out that “instead of playing the tunes they knew and

liked best…musicians who wished to have a shot at the five and ten dollar prizes were learning—from

books, records, other musicians, or wherever they could—the tunes they knew the White Top

organizers preferred.” 26

There is another interesting connection between Eleanor Roosevelt and the White Top Folk

Festival that needs to be explored in order to fully understand this paradox. Classical composer Charles

Seeger, father of folk giants Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger, took an interest in folk music when he heard

Aunt Molly Jackson sing at the New York Worker’s Collective in the 30’s. In FDR’s Administration Seeger

worked with Eleanor Roosevelt setting up Resettlement Communities for displaced farmers and other

displaced rural populations. A lot of the people he worked with were artists and one of the projects they

worked on was collecting folk music. This had a tremendous influence on him both personally and

professionally. “A distinguished composer, scholar and teacher, his long career transformed our

understanding of how folk and classical music interact and define American culture.” 27 Seeger was an

avid musicologist, going to such lengths to capture the folk idiom that he traveled in 1921 through the

mountains of western North Carolina with his family in a make-shift camper visiting local families and

trading music with them.

In 1936 Seeger traveled to North Carolina with his son Pete to Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s

Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. That same year Seeger visited the White Top Folk Festival. The

difference in his reactions to these two festivals is instructive. In preparing to attend the Asheville

festival he told Pete (who he had just introduced to the five string banjo) “If you want to hear how this is

played come with me tomorrow. I’m going to hear a fiddle contest in Asheville, North Carolina, and

you’ll hear some of the best banjo players in the country.” 28 His visit to White Top left him thoroughly

disillusioned, abjuring those “well-meaning, self-advertising city cultivators of the folk” who were

running the…festival.” 29

Conclusion

It has not been my intention to chronicle the history of folk festivals of the 30’s or to perform a

post-mortem on the White Top Folk Festival in this paper. A glance at the long list of notes which follows

shows that these areas have been well-chronicled already. My interest here is in the attitudes and

perceptions that greeted southern folk music as it emerged into the national awareness in the 20’s and

30’s in such settings as folk festivals or through recordings and how these in turn shaped the music. In

Part One we saw how Ralph Peer shaped the music for commercial ends. In many cases the musicians

themselves were complicit in this arrangement. Katie Doman writes that A.P. Carter had to persuade

Sara and his very pregnant sister-in-law to make the trip to Bristol, telling them that they could make

fifty dollars for each side they recorded. 30 In Part Two, it was folk impresarios attempted to co-opt the

tradition to fit their own agendas. Always in the middle were the folk, who were playing the music they

grew up with, the music they loved, the way they always had. Ironically, many musicians who had been

recording for years appeared at the White Top Folk Festival. Henry Whitter who had recorded for OKeh

and Gennett, and was featured as a harmonica player and guitarist at the Bristol Sessions in 1927; Jack

Reedy, who recorded for Brunswick in early 1928 and again for Victor Company in Bristol in the fall of

‘28; and Frank and Edd Blevins, who recorded for Columbia in Atlanta in 1927. 31 When Frank and Edd

Blevins moved to Marion in 1929, they hooked up with Jack Reedy. There are no recordings by the

Reedy-Blevins band, but they won top honors at the White Top Folk Festival in 1933, performing a

special program for the First Lady performing “Johnson’s Old Gray Mule” and “Chuck’s Old Hen.” Most

of these musicians favored old-time mountain music, but they were string bands and both Blevins and

Reedy were considered innovators on their respective instruments (fiddle and banjo). They weren’t

worried about labels or legacy; to them, it was music pure and simple. It is instructive in this context to

look once again at the difference between the strict “constitutionalist” interpretation of folk music

advocated by John Powell, and to a lesser extent Annabel Buchanan, and the interpretation that Charles

Seeger developed over the decades. “In the interview he [Seeger]recalls how “gradually over the course

of the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60’s and ‘70s, I knit together folk music, popular music—and even

what we call primitive music—in with my composed music, and to me it’s one whole community process

that you can’t separate.”

“Popular music merged or got interconnected both with the inheritors of the ballad and hymn

tradition on the one hand, and with the symphonic tradition on the other. Popular music just broadened

itself by interpenetrating it [sic] with these other items, mostly through the commercial disk and the

radio and, of course, TV.” 32

After describing attempts at defining “folk music” as “vexing and imprecise,” Grove Music Online

goes on to devote several thousand words to that end. Usually the soul of brevity, Wikipedia’s “Folk

music” article is at least that long. Under the heading “Traditional folk music” the following points stand

out:

For [Percy] Scholes, as well as for Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartok there was a sense of the music of the country as distinct from that of the town. Folk music was already “…seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived,” particularly in “a community uninfluenced by art music” and by commercial and printed song.” 33

On reflection, I think I prefer Dave Van Ronk’s definition: “In the 1950’s, as for the previous two

hundred years, we used the word ‘folk’ to describe a process rather than a style.” Van Ronk also hit the

nail squarely on the head when he said “The thing about these [folk] revivals is that the ‘folk’ have very

little to do with them.” 34

What is traditional folk music? Who gets to decide? Is it academics and elitists like John Powell

or the Grove’s Encyclopedia of Music? Or is it the people, who are responsible for the music in the first

place? I say let the people decide.