Bobby McMillon

Partial Transcript: My name is Bobby McMillon. I was born Robert Lynn but they always called me Bobby, and I gone with that throughout my life. I was born in the town of Lenore in Caldwell County, North Carolina in a little hospital, it's no longer they are. My mother and father came from two different areas. So my mother grew up not far from where I'm at right now. And I live in Yancey County in the South Toe River section of the County, not too awful far from Mount Mitchell. But my mother's people were from this area. And my dad's grew up in East Tennessee. He was born in what was known over there as the McMillon settlement. It's just south of Cosby, it borders the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the land that they lived on. It was maybe a half a mile to the border of the park up the mountain a little ways. So it was situated kindly between the borders of the Park and Hartford, Tennessee, which is near Interstate 40 now. But back then, nobody ever heard of the interstate going through that part of the country. But my Grandfather McMillon was a Primitive Baptist elder. And he served the church there in the McMillon settlement. And: he preached over on Little Pigeon going towards Gatlinburg, and a number of churches. They'd have meetings, used to, maybe one or two weeks a month at one church and then go to another one of similar order.
(00:08:22) And he—my dad was one of 11 living children, one was stillborn. That there were 11 of them, and he would come along about the middle. And when World War II came along there were a couple of his brothers joined the armed forces in World War II. And so part of the family was grown by the end of World War II. And my dad was about—I guess he was about 14 or 15, when the World War II ended. And the year after the end of the war, my grandmother was—I thinks she was canning. And the house that they lived in was one of those old weather-boarded houses. It was a two-story house. It had a portico on top and it sat a few yards across the property from my great-Granny's house where my grandfather was born. And my great grandmother, Granny Roadie they called her, she'd call my granny—who I called Maw Maw—over to do something for her. And she had been canning, and at their house the kitchen was sort of like a lean-to. It was built on to the house after, you know, the rest of the house had been built, because they used to cook on the fireplace. And then when the cook stoves come along, people began building kitchens onto the older homes. Anyway, the stove overheated, or whatever she was canning, and it caught the kitchen on fire. And one of my aunts was in the kitchen and one of my uncles he run in and he grabbed her and got her out. And some of the boys they got upstairs and through the quilts and a few things over the portico, got it out of the house. But it was just gone in a few minutes. You know, there wasn't insulation back then and the wood probably was dried out. So the house—the home place burned out. Well, the Primitive Baptist would do a lot of traveling and preaching in other regions. And my grandfather had been up to Caldwell County in North Carolina area. And the church, one of the churches that he had preached at, their pastor retired or died or something and they wanted him to come to North Carolina. And he had put them off and told them he—you know, most of his family was in Tennessee and he wasn't sure about moving. But after the house burned down I reckon he thought, well, that would be a good idea because they found him a place to stay at. And he moved the members of his family that weren't already grown over to North Carolina. And that was about 1946, in the first part of the year sometime. And so he finally settled in a section of the county in the northern part of Caldwell County called Blue Creek. And there were a couple of Primitive Baptist churches in the county, and he went back and forth between the two.
(00:12:31) Well, my mother was raised. She was born in a little community called Lunday, across the river from Double Island in Mitchell County. The Toe River divides the county for a good portion of their way, Mitchell and Yancey County. And Mama was born in Lunday, and that's where her mother had been born. My grandfather—she was a Woody—my Grandfather Woody—Dewey Woody—he was born back up here on this mountain up above White Oak. I'm not sure exactly where the property was, but on the old maps they call that the Woody Ridge up there. The story went that my great-grandfather and one of his brothers, they had in this part of the county. They were born and raised in a Pleasant Grove section in the northern part of Yancey County, it's called the Deaton Bent area. But when they grew up and married they were going to start their family lives in this end of the county. And my great-grandfather had got the land on Clear Creek, it's just up above the Carolina Hemlocks a little ways. And his brother, Uncle Wyatt Woody, had the land up here at the head of White Oak, and they swapped. And so I great-grandfather moved up there and he built a little log house, but he still had—most of his work was consumed up in Pleasant Grove. And so he left my great-grandmother to tend the property of there at this end of the county while he will he went back home to help his dad on the farm up there. Well, that was about 1882, '81 and '82. And so in those days, you know, it was nothing but a hardship to get anywhere just about. And so communications would be cut off for a long time. And she stayed up there for most of that year with just a quilt over the door space where a door should have been. I guess they didn't have the hinges for the door. And they said at night she could hear the bears going after the hogs. And just had to face all that, never knowing what might come through that quilt for I don't know how many months it was the Grand-pap was gone. But anyway, finally he come back and stayed. And they had all but one or two of their children up there on the mountain between sometime between 1881 and 19 and 03. My grandfather was born up there in February, on the 21st, 19, and 03. And they were there about six months. And my great-grandmother had died, I think, the year before. And then my, great-great-grandfather died that fall. And when he died my granddaddy's daddy took them—took the whole family, left here, and went back to put the growth. And my granddaddy grew up there. And when he was—

Partial Transcript: They were farmers, yeah. And his people, they were Democrats. It seemed like—I don't know why—usually the Democrat families had most of the land. They had a lot of land. His granddaddy was—his name was Greenby Woody. It stood for Green Berry. I don't know if that was supposed to have been two different names are just one name that they called him Greenby. And he was—must have been a heck of a man. He was an architect and a carpenter and a farmer and a justice of the peace. And was just brilliant. He made the blueprint for the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. And my granddaddy said there was remains of his tools and workplaces at the old place when he grew up. He said he had had—there must have been a chestnut tree or something that he had made a worktable from that it about so wide that he said it was just flawless. And they would take a—they could make a vice out of a great big limb. And I can't tell you just exactly how it's made. My granddaddy he described it one time and even drew me a picture. And they called it a cripple hoss. And it was a homemade vice and you could hit a pedal down here and it would close up and hold what you needed held still until you could work on it. But anyway, he grew up that way. And they went—they were sent to school. By the time my granddaddy come along they had got up to where there was eight grades I guess. Part of them was there near their home place there in Pleasant Grove. And I think the last year or two that he went to school, they'd walk down the river to what was called Toe Cane on the railroad track and then up Cane Creek to Bakersville.
(00:19:12) And anyway, my grandfather met my grandmother and married her in 1923, in December of 1923. And they lived off for a while at my great-grandfather's place. The boys, during the time of World War I, had built a new house. The old house they lived in was fine, but, you know, time was passing and I don't know they needed more room I guess than what it would hold. I don't know why there was so many children when my granddaddy was growing up. But anyway, his oldest brother oversaw building of it. And up the holler from where they lived they built a house for my great grandparents and some of the boys was left at home. And he said that his brother, Bryt Woody decided how they built that. Said that it came out, I forgot now, it was less than an inch off the square when they got done with it. And he said he could just look at a line and tell if it was straight or flat or level or whatever. They didn't have all of the tools that they have now. But anyway, they built that house and a spring come in from above it would go into the kitchen. And they took a copper pipe and wrapped it around the stove and sent another end of it down in the basement. It sat on the hill and the front was kindly opened. And you could go down some stairs on the porch and they built a shower down there. And you had hot water that came down. Hardly anybody had that in those days.
(00:21:13) But anyway, they lived there for a while after he married. And my grandmother, she about had a nervous breakdown. My great grandfather he was kindly ill and she was—I can't remember now if she had had my oldest aunt or was pregnant with her. One time my granddad was off working—and, yeah, she'd had the baby. And great grand-pap had took the baby and put it in the cabinet and wouldn't let her get to it. I don't know, just deviling her is what he was doing. But she would take it personally and it just—she got so nervous that she couldn't hardly stand it. And so they moved. They swapped with my granddad, one of his older brothers that lived at Double Island, and they went down there and stay for a time. And then they went across the river to where my grandmother was born, near her mom and dad's, and lived over there for the next 20 years I guess. And that's where my mother and her two older sisters, they had been born there I reckon in that part of that settlement. Lunday was once known as Galax at one time. But the railroad men when they came through, they'd give names to little whistle stops and points where the train would stop, and they'd call that Lunday. L-U-N-D-A-Y. We pronounce it Lunday, but Lunday was the spelling of it. And there was a store there, a great big rock, and the store was built on that rock. And there's a swinging bridge, the swinging bridge is still there, that connected with Double Island and the people from that side of the river.
(00:23:20) And my granddad, he first worked on the railroad and then he later got a job with Harris Clay Company. It was located there at Lunday in the bend of the river. Just up above Lunday the river makes a bend and goes around at Tacona. And there in the bend of the river, was the Harris Clay Company. And they had dug across of the Yancey County side and the rocks and everything was sent over to the Mitchell side where the plant was at. And he worked there until, I guess about 1946, something like that, I guess probably the mid-20s. He worked for about 20 years for the Clay Company. And then a Carolina Mineral plant tests of the tracks a little ways there at Cona, built a fieldspar plant there. And he worked there for a time. He helped them when they were—when they invented the flotation devices that helped with the minerals in some way. I'm not much on the rocks and that part of it. I should have been a little more because my granddad was. He was keenly intelligent on things like that. They built a whistle, he was their troubleshooter, and they built a whistle. And see he lived just across the mountain, which was down the river, which made a big bend in that section. And he could hear the whistle from home. And if they called him in the middle of the night he'd go in to fix whatever had tore up. And he told me that the depression times they just about killed him a-working. And he said that he'd just about cry at times from where they'd haul wheel bars, just whatever it was they had to do. But he said there was big lines lined up at the office, men trying to get jobs. And he said if you lost your job somebody was waiting to get it. And you just had to do the work. And so he suffered through that time.
(00:25:53) And then about '46 or so, I don't know if he built the building—I don't know who could the building up—but up at Cona, at the road, they put up a store. And my grandmother would run it while he was at work and then when would he get off he would go and help her out until closing time. It was just a one room store where you can go in and get stuff. We've got pictures of it. But anyway, they run that until about '49. And in the meantime, my grandmother's older sister, Lily, she married Clyde Wilson, he was from Micaville originally. He had worked around in different parts of the Appalachians. They'd lived up in Bluefield and West Virginia, somewhere in Virginia, maybe Lynchburg or somewhere—I can't remember now. But anyway, he had settled and come to Hickory, North Carolina and was working at a plant there, they call them shops—the furniture—around the furniture places. One of the truck drivers that came in bringing stuff to them lived at Lenore and he told them that he ought to come up there and live. And he got a job at Lenore mirror and moved to the Kings Creek community in Caldwell County and rented a house from Mr. Gordon Broyhill. And Gordon Broyhill was one of the brothers that started the Broyhill Furniture Industries which has made furniture, you know, all throughout the 20th century. And a lot of the times, their furniture would be sold on game shows when TVs come around, a well-known brand. But Mr. Broyhill, he was in charge of the timber end of it and his son ran the sawmills that provided the wood for Broyhill. And so my great uncle, Clyde Wilson, he rented a house from him. And my grandmother and granddaddy came down on a visit with them and Clyde introduced him to Mr. Broyhill. And Gordon Broyhill had an apple house that was set down below his house near the Wilkesboro Road at highway 18 that goes through that end of the county. And he was interested in having it turned into a grocery store. And so he talked my granddaddy into moving there and turning that into a grocery place. And he went. I don't know why he decided to make a change, but he did, he went. And they turned it into—the Apple house into a grocery store and filling station. And they bought their gas from a Maringer Oil Company which was, I guess they were affiliated with the City Service brand in those days. And now I guess it's called Citgo.
(00:29:39) But any way, the upper end of the store building was their living quarters. And so my mother was in high school at that time at Bowman High School in Bakersville. And she didn't want to go or leave—pickup, you know, before she got out of school anyway. And so she stayed with—at the home place. My grandfather still owned his home up here in Mitchell County. And her oldest sister had married and had a daughter, and they lived there in my grandfather's home. And so she stayed there with them until she graduated from Bowman High School in '50 I guess it was. And on one of her trips to—the store that my grandfather run it was right next to the beginning of the Blue Creek Road. And on one of my mother's visits to her mom and dads at the store, my daddy and some of his friends and brothers was down there at the store and she met him that-a-way. And so they got acquainted, and she was still living up here. And he wasn't much at writing. He'd get his sister to write her letters, and I read a few of them. And it was funny, back then people—in those days, you know, education was just getting—winding up in this part of the world. Back then my grandparents had education. My grandfather went, eighth grade was about as far as you could go then without going off somewhere to go to college. And my grandmother, I guess she went to the fifth/sixth-grade. But by the time my mother's generation came along, you know, they had developed high schools and had a way to get there and everything. And so you had different ways of viewing the language then. And I guess they were aware that some of our dialect was not standard English. And I'd get tickled. I'd read—you know, you'd make a sentence like you say, "I'm sorry that things happen that way." And so some of the people was aware that words were you ended them in the "E" sound, like the name Sarah were been called "Sar-e". And so the young generation that was getting school educated they knew that it should be Sarah. And so they wanted to be seen as following the times I guess so they would say Sarah a lot of times, and other words, of that nature, you know that's just an example. So anyway, my aunt, when she wrote she said something about my daddy couldn't meet my mother one weekend that she was down and he was apologizing. And so my aunt who was writing letters in his place, she wrote the letter and said, "I'm 'sorre' that I couldn't meet you last weekend." She thought that that 'y' was wrong in sorry. And I've noticed things like that in a lot of old-time letters where people would mistakenly make a word wrong by trying to make it right. But anyway, my parents married in January of '51, and then I come along that December. And about the first place that I ever remember being was at my grandmother and grandfather's store—my Grandmother and Granddaddy Woody. And my mother, she was a nervous sort of person. And my grandmother took a big hand in raising me from the time I was little. She said if she hadn't have gotten me to walking she thought mama would've left me laying forever. But she kept at it until I could. Be anyway, Mama depended on—Nanny I called her—my grandmother. I called her Nanny and my grandfather Pawpaw.

Partial Transcript: My grandparents had the biggest hand and raising me. My dad he had lots of brothers and sisters. And my grandmother and granddaddy McMillon, my grandfather was a preacher, he had lots to do. So I wasn't around them quite as much. But from the time that I was just a boy, I would sit and listen when the older folks would get together and they'd tell stories about things that had happened. About back black painters which was our word for panther, and bears and things that had scare peopled and stuff like that. At one point we lived in a home that was sort of out of the woods. And my dad, he worked in town. And if he would late at coming in or something my mother was always kind of nervous like she was afraid something would come get us, you know. And I guess that—I don't remember being particularly nervous as a child. But I certainly liked to hear old stories. Somebody put out the word that there'd been a bushytailed monster seen in South Carolina. And in my way of viewing, you know, South Carolina was just across the road a little ways, I didn't know how far it was. And we had a little house right near us, there was an old woman that live named Lizie Knight. And I guess I just always liked older people. And I'd go out and knock on her door. And she'd take me to the woods and we'd look for that monster, you know, and stuff like that. And so anyway from the time I was just a boy I'd listen to stories that people would tell. And at that time, I wasn't particularly interested in music. We lived at one house that was—Yeller, you just get away. Go on now. Why do you want to be a nuisance today?
(00:39:17) We stayed—Fred and Lou Brookster lived at Kings Creek, they're the ones that lived near the woods. And ever since the early 1900s when they had married, they traveled back and forth across the country. He was a barber, just a homemade barber. And they would go out West and follow where the—you know, the migrant workers they would work the avocado fields or whatever was growing up in California and places like that they. And they'd camp, and he's set up his barber business and they would just do like that. And they raised their family moving back and forth from North Carolina across in the country like that up into Washington State and I don't know where in all. And so anyway, they had a little house that would sit across the driveway from theirs. We rented it. And Fred's wife, Aunt Lou I always called her, she had a guitar that would hang on her wall and I would always notice that hanging there when we would go out there. And I didn't know at that time what I would know years later that she had grown up in a singing family. She told me years later that, as a child, she lived back in the—near the Draco section of the Brushy Mountains. They're a spur of the Blue Ridge on the easternmost part of Caldwell County. They divide Caldwell from Alexander County. And she said as a girl, her and her sisters would stand up on the mountain and pass the time of day singing old ballads and love songs because they were guarding the old folks blockading business, they ran a still. And so they had to watch out for the revenue agents. And while they were standing guard on the mountain they would past the time singing old-timey songs. And I eventually learned numbers of songs from Aunt Lou which I wish—Lord, if I had of known in her younger days that she had been such a singer I guess I should just been borned a little earlier so I could've learned more. One of her sisters that used to come to the house that I always liked when I was a child, she said knew more of them than she did but she was dead by the time that I got old enough to begin to learn them from Aunt Lou.
(00:42:24) Anyway, Aunt Lou one of her older brothers Henry Holsclaw, as a young man, he had been involved in that business, too. And he had wrote a number of songs about—they called it blockading back then rather than moonshining usually. And so he had wrote one called Blockader's Trail and it eventually got published in the North Carolina Folklore, the Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. And it seemed like another one. He wrote a couple of songs about murders that happened in that region. One a girl named Gladys Kincaid, was murdered by a black man I think in the Valmead Section or they were from Valmead one, it's in Caldwell County. And then there was a girl named Florence Septon that her boyfriend killed her. And he wrote these songs, and they had originally been printed at Lenore, like, on a broadside sheet. And he—but then they all got converted and joined the—get down now—the Pentecostal church. They were what you'd know as holy rollers now. And so they still remember the old songs but they didn't live that moonshining life anymore. But they were just one of the bunches of people that I began to learn old songs from. When I got up about, I don't know. I was—

Partial Transcript: I guess when I was about 10 or 11 and began to pay attention to the world around me a little more. My grandfather, as I grew up, they ran the store there beside where the Blue Creek Road started. It was called Woody's Grocery and Service Station. But he kept his home up in Mitchell County. And the year before I was born they had moved back up here and stayed a year. And he built a house up above the road there at Lunday for my aunt, uncle that Mama stayed with there at his house to live in. And they were living up here. And when I was born at Lenore the first thing Mama did was bring me up here and stayed a while. But anyway, they returned to Lenore and then and run the store. That he would come home ever-so-often, and as I grew up I began coming with him. And so—and my mother's little sister, she married a Hopson man, Charles Hopson at Green Mountain that's here in Yancey County and raised her family there. And her boy—her first three children were boys. And the oldest one was about three years younger than me. And we sort of grew up around each other and were big buddies, still are. But we—but Nanny and Pawpaw would go back to their home at Lunday and I'd go with them. And he had, in his bedroom, there was a big tall machine set in there. And I come to find out it was a Victrola, it was a RCA Victrola. It was in a cabinet, and the front doors opened up down here and the horn was back behind where the records laid. And then you'd open up the top and you could crank it up at the side and he had all kinds of records there. And so me being so close to him and Nanny, I asked him who did he like to hear back in those days when, you know, in the 20s, 30s or whenever that they used the record player. And he said, well, he guessed that his favorites were a group called the Carter family. And he said he also liked the Chuck Wagon Gang and numbers of other ones. Well, I found some of these Carter family records. He had—one of them was on the victory label. It was Keep On The Sunny Side was on one side of and on the backside was River of Jordan. And he had—he also had Lonesome Valley and one called The Birds Were Singing Of You. And when I'd go home with them I'd crank it up and I'd listen to them just all the time. And I thought they were so beautiful and I understood why he liked them so good. It was just beautiful music.
(00:48:06) And that is what started me on my quest for songs. Because up until that point, you know, being so young and inexperienced I thought that people had wrote songs to be recorded in the past, throughout the years. And I began to notice that there were people in the community and around different places that would sing songs that were similar to ones like maybe he had but that they had slightly different tunes or different words. And so that got my curiosity up. And I was in, you know, kindly in a fog about it for a little while. And one day, I don't know that was in the summertime, I was about 12, I guess, or 13. I was 12 when I really got interested in the music. But a year or so later in the summertime one day my mother went to town and dropped me off at the library in Lenore. And I was always an avid reader. You wouldn't know it to hear me talk, because I got my dialect from my family. And I just decided years ago there wasn't no sense in being different from that. But I could always read—I'm going to digress for just a second. When I was six years old my dad took me and my mother and went to San Diego, California on my sixth birthday, December 20, 19 and 57. And he had two brothers that lived near San Diego that were in the electric business, and they had begged him to come out there and go to work. I don't know—and to this day, I've even asked him before he died what he done. And I don't know, I can't remember what he told me. He wasn't an electrician, he didn't work at that. In Caldwell County he worked in a furniture factory. And years later, he was a carpenter and did carpentry work most of the rest of his life, I guess. But he went out there and we stayed we stayed for about two years. And the whole time I wanted to be home with Nanny and Pawpaw. And it was so different. There weren't many trees or no water hardly. There were a lot of hollers but they called them canyons out there, and they were growed up with bushes and stuff. There was some kind of foliage in them canyons that—I used to have to walk to school. It was about a mile and just before you got there, there was a canyon in the way. And I'd go down through that canyon and up the other side walking, sometimes by myself. It's a wonder I didn't get killed doing that. But anyway, I never, ever liked it out there. And I think that was one of the reasons that, when I came home, that I was closer than ever to my grandparents. I stuck to them like glue.
(00:52:07) We came back in February of 1960 and stayed for about three months. And I was going to stay. Mama—Daddy wrote mamma and wanted her to come back, he had got some prospects or something. And I didn't want to go. And Mama, I finally had her talked into it, but daddy wouldn't have it. So they made me go back. And we only stayed about six months that time. And we came home and I never went back. And it was—it would be from the first week in December of 1960 until 2004, I believe it was, that I went to LA and sung in the Santa Monica Mountains at a festival they had up there. And my host drove me down to San Diego to spend some time with my uncle that still lived in—he lived in El Cajone. And that's the first time I had seen that country for 40 some years. And I still it didn't bring back any longings to be there or remain there. But I mean, I enjoyed getting to visit my family. I had a number of cousins that had grown-up. But anyway, somehow or another I've always felt like that was some kind of pivotal point that made me draw so much closer to the older ways., Whereas my parent's generation always were, you know, living in the present and looking towards the future, it seemed like mine looked back. And I always did anyway. And so I stayed as close to my grandparents and the older folks that I could. And my grandfather let's see—right, anyway, when I was about 13 or maybe 14, I'm not sure exactly, let's see, probably 13, yeah, that sounds about right. Because when I was 13 or 14—when I was 14 I started high school and it was prior to that. Anyway, in the summertime while school was out Mama, dropped me off at the library in Lenore one day. She didn't drop me off, she didn't drive at that time, my aunt I guess was the one that took us. I was always a big reader. And I wasn't ever interested in the children's section much, I was done past, way past that. And so I happened to be—I must have been in the reference section just looking for titles of books. And I saw one called the Frank Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. And I thought, now, what's this? And I pulled out one and one of them had a number of old sayings and things like that and it. And one said Folk Ballads and I thought, that sounds interesting. I pulled out and got to looking, and in it were songs that I knew. And not just one text but there would be an ABC version and D on up some of them. The one on Barbara Allen it went through Z and into the AAs and BBs where the collectors had learned so many variants of that song. And it opened my eyes that, hey, these songs are old. And some of them I began to realize they were hundreds of years old. And I slowly began to read about and learned that these songs had been, after they had first arisen, and people were singing, they didn't have record players and radios and things like that, but just the word-of-mouth. And that's sort of the way that I had heard them sung, by word-of-mouth. And they had traveled the ocean over and come over to this country. And then many of them had developed here in this country, too. And so I used that as a starting point in which to learn about the origins of some of this folk music, and what it was about. And so that really wetted my interest up even more. And so—

Partial Transcript: Well, there was a Harvard professor named Francis James Child that spent, I don't know, three or four decades I guess looking up the manuscripts of all the old ballads from England and Scotland and Ireland that he could find. He was mostly interested in the words, he didn't know the tunes, he wasn't a musician. And he didn't care about the lives of the people that sang them, just where they came from. And he put out the English and Scottish popular ballads, there are about, five volumes of it. And there were about 305 or 306 pieces that he selected as the oldest and best of the old ballads that were known back at that time. And so song hunters began to use that as the guidelines ago by to—in there collecting—and they would compare songs that they found among ballad singers to versions of the songs in the child collection. And so it seems that the 17th-century seemed to have been the flowering of balladry in Scotland and England. A few of the ballads are much older than that. I think the oldest one that they have been able to trace was one based on a version that is called Sir Hugh or The Jew's Daughter. And it went back to an old Jewish legend that once a year, or ever-so-often, that the Jews would select a Christian child and they'd sacrifice him. I don't know what they were sacrificing him to, or they'd kill him anyway if he wasn't a sacrifice. And, you know, people had that crazy belief for a long time that they were up to something. It's like a lot of people mistrust the Masons now. You know, just any organization that's different than the norm, I guess. But it went back—that song I think went back to the 12th or 13th century evidently. I think the root of it, there was nuns, the Prioress's Tale. One of the Chaucer's Canterbury Tales refers to a legend that's similar to the song about the Jew's daughter. And in this country, in some cases, it was called the Jew's Daughter and some it was just called, a pretty fair maid came out and enticed a little boy into her house to retrieve his ball. And when he went in she took him to a back room and tied a napkin around his head and stabbed him with a knife and then buried him in a well. And s— but most of the ballads, the greater part of them, seemed to have flourished in about 17th-century, the 1500 or 1600s seemed to be the flowering of that in Great Britain. And of course, at the very end of the 1500s and the very beginning of the 1600s and the 17th-century, rather, people began to come to this country. And when they came, they brought songs with them, that they had heard in England and in Scotland and places like that. And so they brought them with them. And it didn't always just go down father to son or mother to daughter or grandparents to grandchildren like that. It did a whole lot. It was—a lot of songs a lot the families that were real closely knit stayed together, a lot of them in isolated areas for a long time, they did preserve these, you know, father to son, and so on and so forth like that for years.

Partial Transcript: In those days all people had to keep knowledge going with their memories. And they had fantastic minds. I used to talk to old-timers that would tell me of a conversation that occurred prior to World War I and they'd tell me, word for word what was said. And I thought, how can they do that? I can't tell you what was it said, exactly, last week. And in some cases it was confirmed that such-and-such had been said. And I come to realize, well, you know they didn't have mass communications and they didn't have TVs ability to send news across the world instantly. In those days people's lives were, in some cases, they were simpler. In many cases, everybody's life is complex, but yet the means of getting information around and ways of spreading entertainment it had to be done orally, by word-of-mouth. And so they relied on their memories. And many times I've been in a school situation telling stories and singing songs to children. And I'll ask them, "How many of you'uns have everyone ever worked in a garden?" And of course in this part of the country, many of them had. And I'd say—well, I said, "Who did you learn it from, what you know about gardening?" I said, "Did you get it from a book?" "No, I learned it from Mama or Daddy," or "Pawpaw or Memaw taught me what I know." And I said, "Well, did they learn it from a book?" "No, no their parents or grandparents somebody, older folks, taught them." I said, "Well, that's right." I said, "They had to remember what to do to grow that stuff." I said, "What if they forgot? We'd be getting mighty hungry if they couldn't remember what to do." And so I said, "They had to use their memories in order to pass information like that along." And I said, "It's the same way with singing the song or telling the story, you use your memory." And so that way traditions are carried on from generation to generation. And it's true that people had fantastic memories. I've known of people that could remember a song that was 40 verses long. And comparing it to the oldest record where it had been recorded maybe in the Perseus relics, which was printed in the 1700s, or the Rockburrow Ballads printed in maybe the 1600s. It was just almost word for word. And this was several hundred years later from somebody that had never read a book. And so people had phenomenal memories at one time that wasn't cluttered up with all the things that we clutter our minds up with today. We sort of have to specialize in order to remember what we do. And so anyway—now I've lost my train of thought. What led me into that?

Interviewer
We were talking about how the ballads came to this country.

Bobby (01:07:29)
Right, right. So anyway, you know, Jamestown was settled from England in about 16 and 07 or '08 sometime in that period of time. The Pilgrims came over about 16 and 20, 12 or 13 years later. And, likewise, they brought with them all of these arts. And they come here and there wasn't no schools or nothing to go back, they had to use what they had learned in the old country, and also what the Indians had taught them when they came here, in order to survive. And so immediately, I guess, songs that they brought and that they sang to their offspring or to their neighbors, they were retained and passed along even further. I have read accounts that some—there's one of the ballads it's one of the first ones I ever heard, it was called, Lord Daniel. It was based on a ballad in the child collection called Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard. Evidently, it's been better preserved here than it was in England. And they think that the first—some of the first colonists brought versions of it over and it spread quickly through the growing country and took root better here than when it began to be fading out over in the old country. And so anyway, there was some education as the country grew. As a matter of fact, in the first part of the 19th century, prior to the Civil War, there was better education than there was for 80 years afterwards. That pretty much broke up people's lifestyles, the war between the states. And after that, there wasn't much education, there wasn't much law in the South—in this part of the world anyway—for a long time. It took time to get back to what it had been.
(01:10:11) But, anyway, people used their memories and they passed along their arts and their crafts and their songs and their stories. And I don't know, but in the early 20th century, they began—finally begin to, the folklorists, were writing about a lot of these customs and songs and how they got spread about. They tended to not see the big picture. They'd think that songs just went from, like I said, from father to son or mother to daughter and so on like that. But yet, people were always moving around in those days. And they can go back now and find evidence that even in isolated communities people moved around, they traveled, they went places. And they came back a lot of times. I've heard a lot of the old-timers, especially one in Wilkes County and numbers of one's in Madison County, talk about going off in the early years of the 20th century and working in lumber camps. And while there, they would hear songs and they'd learn them and they'd bring them home and sing them and then introduce them into their community. So it was a fluid thing, it wasn't ever static, it never just stayed isolated.
(01:12:00) And I heard—now my mother's sister that married at Green Mountain, Charles Hobson his parents were born in the 1800s. And I used to go to their house all the time when I was growing up and listen to them tell stories about what had happened in the old days. And his father, Ike Hobson, the grandchildren always called him Paw, that's what I always called him. He would tell us booger tales and witch tales, stories that happened when he was a young man. And Granny Hobson, she would sing a few of the old love songs that they used to know. She raised her grandchildren on one about the Titanic and they' just cry their self to sleep at night because it was sad when that great ship went down. And she had another one called Poor Little Joe about an orphan out on the street, and he died in cold and the snow. There were a lot of sad songs in those days, but people seemed to like them real good. And anyway, Paw, I remember him telling me—and I recorded it—I used to, when I was about 17, my daddy took me to town one day and he bought me a little handheld RCA tape recorder, it's about that wide and about so big. I guess it's in there in house of somewhere. I don't use it anymore, it's about wore out. But it would hold a 5 inch spool. And I began to record the old-timers singing on that. At that point I had done wrote down lots and lots of old songs that I had heard the old folks singing. But I went to—when I'd go up to Granny and Paw's house I would, previously, I would record say a Carter family song on a bit of the spool and I would play it for Granny and Paw because, you know, their record player was long gone and they hadn't heard those songs in years. And they were familiar, of course, with the Carter family. And I'd play that for them and they'd listen to it. And then when I'd turn it off we'd go to talking. And inside, you'd go in the front door and Granny's chair sat here behind the door in the corner and she faced over the other side of the room where Paw sat. He sat near the TV and he faced the front door. And there was a stove in the middle of the room near were Paul sat. And on this wall on the front, just as you went in the door on the right, there was a couch. And I would sit down there on the end of the couch and talk to Paw. And after I'd play him the song or whatever I'd just sit the tape recorder down there beside me. But in the meantime, I'd hold the microphone in my hand right beside my leg and I'd have it turned on. And I would get him to tell me old tales. And he told me so many. I've got hours of tape recordings of him, probably more of him talking that in the other one individual.

Partial Transcript: One thing that Paw told me about that gave me a picture of how life was back then he, at one time, worked in a lumber camp. And it must have been—he was born in 1886 so it had to have been probably 1906 or maybe 1904. He could have been 18, I don't know. He was a young man. He went to work for a lumber company and his way of telling it, it took me the longest time to figure out where was out. He said it was way yonder across the Blue Ridge and it was in Caldwell County at the foot of the mountain below Jonas's Ridge. At Lynnville there's a community called Edgemont and Mortimer, and that's where he said he worked at, near Mortimer. He said there was an R Gauge railroad was up in there. And of course, then, when I finally figured out where he was talking about it all went into place because I'd been there many a times when I was growing up in Lenore. We used to go up in the gorge on Wilson's Creek, it drains that valley. It starts out on Grandfather Mountain and comes down and forms the wilderness area on the back side of Brown Mountain. And up at the head, right at the foot of the mountain, there's two communities, Edgemont and Mortimer. And it, of course, was just a big wild, wooded place in those days. And they had lumber camps up in there. And as a footnote, it all got washed away in the 1916 flood.
Interviewer
It's in my film. I have a picture of Mortimer. I'm going to give you a copy of it so you can see that.

Bobby (01:18:22)
Oh, I'd love to see that yes. Well, anyway he said that they would cut timber up in the mountain there and load it on a log train. And he said that they'd come down the mountain and they'd come up on the commissary. He said there was with women working there cooking for them. And he said on the—he said at night they'd sit around the fire until bedtime and they'd have some fiddlers and musicians that sat playing and they'd sing and cut up and have a big time. He said one day that—said they was coming down by there and he said one of the fellows was real popular, he was a good woodcutter and he was nice looking young man. The women all thought he was real nice looking. So the cooks they'd all just wave and hoot and holler at him. He was out on—standing on what do you call on the outside of the train holding onto—the fly? I don't know there's so many terms. But anyway, he was waving and as it come down the train was just under the trees in places. And it come down and he was paying attention to them women and waving at them. He didn't see this low hanging limb and it knocked him off. And it throwed him under the wheel. He said that wheel rolled right over, and he said that they went out to him, how they got the train stopped. They went over to him, said he lived just a little bit. But he said he just turned as black where that—he said it's just like it about near cut him in two, and he died. And he said that night said there wasn't a bit of singing or anything going on, it just was all quiet. It took a while for them back to their normal activities. He was—I believe he was a Buchanan from up in Mitchell or Avery County was where he was from. And he said they sent his body back to the mountain and he was buried. Anyway, that sort of—stories like that give me a picture of kindly how they lived back in those days, and how stuff got transmitted around, stories would. And, got to stretch a little bit. Anyway, that's a little bit about how songs, they came over. And it was amazing to me, when I was—I guess I was 15. Was I 15, about 15 or 16, it was when I first had my tape recorder, I guess. You know, no, it was before that. Anyway, one day I was up at Green Mountain and me and my cousins went up to their Aunt Lucy, she married a Gourtney. And she knew a lot of number of old songs. And I went to get her to sing for me, to her house, with my cousins. And we was up there and she was singing songs like Barbara Allen, A Pretty Fair Miss In The Garden and 21 Years—just songs that were popular when she was young. And we were outside the house at about that time, from inside, I got hearing her husband Nate Gourtney and he was singing one, my ear just sort of picked it up. I heard something about merry maids and a battle Lord and I thought, what in the world. And he was shaving in the bathroom. We were outside the window there a little ways and he got to going on. And when he come out I said, "Where did you learn that song from?" And he said, "That's one that Pap taught me." And I don't remember what his name for it was, Fair Ellinor and the Brown girl. And finally—and that was the first of the—I'm about to sneeze.

Partial Transcript: That was the first of the really old told that I ever heard out in the field. And he sang the song through. He started it out ♪♪ Father, riddle, dear, riddle dear, father dear mother oh tell me whether to Mary fair Ellinor or bring you the brown girl home. ♪♪Oh the brown girl she has house and land, fair Ellinor she has none. It's the best advice I can give to you is bring us the brown girl home. He called him up his merry men by one, by two, by three. ♪♪Sing saddle for me, my milk white steed fair Ellinor I'll go see. Sing saddle for me my milk white steed fair Ellinor I'll go see. He rode till he come to fair Ellinor's hall. He tingled full loud at the ring, and none was so ready as fair Ellinor herself to arise and bid him come in. ♪♪ What new what news Lord Thomas for me, what news have you for me? I came to that. I came to ask you to my new wedding, bad new Lord Thomas for me. ♪♪ She called it up her merry maids by one or two or three. Sing saddle for me my milk white steed Lord Thomas's wedding I'll see. ♪♪ She rode until she come to Lord Thomas's hall, she tingled full loud at the ring. And none were so ready as Lord Thomas his-self to arise and let her in. ♪♪ He took her by the lily white hand and he led her to the hall, and there he sat her at the head of the table betwixt the merry maids all. Lord Thomas, Lord Thomas is this your bride? ♪♪ Think she looks wonderful brown, when you my have had as fair a young lady as ever the sun's shined on. Oh the brown girl had a little penknife, the blade were wonderful sharp. Betwixt the long ribs and the short she pierced the fair Ellinor's heart. Lord Thomas, Lord Thomas are you blind or neither can't you see? ♪♪Can't you see my own, my own heart's blood come betwixt down by me. He taken the brown girl by the hand and he led her from the hall. And with his sword cut off her head and kicked it against the wall. He placed his sword against the ground the—♪♪

Partial Transcript: Well, let me finish what I was going to tell you. One of the songs that Maw Maw sang was called I Dreamed a Dream The Other Night, and for some reason that's always stuck with me real close. It's hard to say exactly, you know, what your favorite song is because they'll changed from time to time. But that was always—I don't know it went back to a song called Locks and Bolts but she called it I Dreamed a Dream The Other Night. This young man he dreamed of his true love and when he awoke, she was gone. And he went after her and her uncle had her locked upstairs in a house. And she come to the window when she heard his voice and said, "I'd come to you, my love, but the locks and the bolts do hinder." And he said, "As I stood there all in amazed all in those pains in humors, my patience flew, my sword I drew, and quickly I went to her." And so I don't know, there was something about the way he overcome his adversity and won his true love back that I just always admired that. And I don't know it's just one of the songs that had a good tune to it, too. And it was one of my favorites, but law, there's so many ballads that I could say the same thing for. But I loved the songs that Maw Maw sang. I knew numbers of different ballad singers. I mean, I met people of the years. I was fortunate that I happened to be at the right place at the right time. I met, through a sheer accident—I quit a job—I got mad one day and I just quit. And that night, my best friend, one my two best friends, he called me and said his uncle wanted me to go with him to Union Grove they was going to have a fiddler's convention the next day. And I said, "Well, I just quit my job, I guess I could." And he said, "He said that he'd let you drive his Corvette this weekend if you'd go and he'd be on duty." He was a—he delivered babies in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, north Wilkesboro, and he was on call and I could take his Corvette and he'd let me drive it this weekend. So I agreed to that and went down to his house, and we went from there to Union Grove. And while was there I met Jean and Lee Schilling that run a dulcimer shop in Cosby. And I found out this man and his life they lived in Cosby and they were singing songs. And they had a vending place in the barn there at Union Grove where they were selling recorders and homemade dulcimers and maybe records even. And so I went and introduced myself to them and told them—I said, "You know, my family, my dad's side is from up in your region, near Cosby." And I said—as a matter of fact I didn't know it at the time, but Gene Schilling, whose father was from Cosby, we were related through my grandmother McMillon's people. But I never did get to tell her, I didn't find out until after she was dead about that. But anyway, they ran the Folk Festival of the Smokies. And she said, "You know, I don't really know a lot of songs from my own home area and I wished you'd come and do a set at our Festival." And she said—and you know, I told her a little bit about myself and who my likes were and everything. And she said, "If you like the Carter family," she said, "AP and Sarah's daughter Jeanette is coming and we'll introduce you to her." And so it didn't take me much to agree to that. And so I went over there a week or so ahead of time before the festival started to help them get ready. And they had it in a big field on lower Cosby. And there were people that came from all over this country. And it was at the end of the hippie generation and there were hippies there from New York and out West, Washington State. There was a banjo picker from British Columbia that was there that played an Uncle Dave Macon song. And I got to meet Jeanette Carter while I was there. And they asked me to, you know, to do a funny song and a song that had happened, too place in that region, and whatever else I wanted to. And I ended up singing a Carter family, sort of like a hymn. It wasn't exactly a hymn but it was more or less.
(01:32:54) And I'd always give a description of my song and where I learned it and where it come from. And after I got done I went backstage, I was putting up my guitar, and the door to the room back there where we waited behind stage to go on it opened up and Jeanette Carter walked in and she introduced herself to me. And she said, "I appreciate the words you've said about my family." And she said, "You know, I'd like you to come up to where I live." And said, "I'll take you and show you where my dad was born if you'll come and visit me." And so I said, "Sure I will." And so that's how I get acquainted with Jeanette Carter. And through her I met her mother Sarah who was just always my favorite of all the recording artist I ever heard. I thought she had the best voice of any of them. She sang the lead on all the old Carter family songs. And she introduced me to her and we got to be good friends. And so—and through Jeanette I met Grandpa Jones and his wife. The first time he ever come to that region to see were the Carters was from and to do program she had become and me and Grandpa and his wife all stayed at Jeanette's house that weekend. And so, you know, that began my career into performing. Also, my best friend that had called me about going to Union Grove his last year—he went to college at Chapel Hill—and his last year, because he knew that my interests were so deeply embedded in tradition, and our other best friend from King's Creek he was a good singer and he was always around. And so my friend, Cody Lowe was his name, he took a class, a folklore class, as an elective his last year of college. And he invited me to come down and come to his class. So it was a pretty good ways to Chapel Hill from Lenore, but I went. And while I was there I went to his class one day and they were doing a program on Gandy, dancing. He had—his class, he took it under Daniel Patterson at UNC. And so after it was over, he introduced me to Dr. Patterson and we went back to his office. And he said, "What kind of old songs do you sing?" And I said, "Well, just old love songs that I learned from people." And he said, "Well, sing us one or two." And so I broke into, I think, what was it—I think The House Carpenter and one of Mawmaw Phillip's songs, forgot what it was now. And he was sitting there and his eyes kept getting wider. When I was done he was sort of flabbergasted. He said, "You know, I expected you to sing something like, May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight Mister." I said, "I know that one, too." But he said that, "I assumed you knew some folks songs that you had probably learned from records from maybe songs that were popular off of from the 30s or 20s, whatever like that." He said, "You've shocked me to death with—when you began singing some of the ones you did." And I said, "Well, that's just what I learned." Anyway, he became a real good close friend of mine, and still is. He's about—he's in his middle 80s now or late 80s maybe. He, over the years, a couple of people in his class that year that Cody had taken a class with were pivotal in the folk movement. One of them was George Holt, who became—who started the Folklife office of the North Carolina Arts Council. And it was about a year later that George invited me to come to the first North Carolina Folklife Festival.
(01:37:52) And I went down there and saw the Blue Sky Boys and Elizabeth Cotton, Tommy Gerald and I don't know who and all else. Lord, there's so many people, it was at Durem that year. And then another person that was in Dr. Patterson's class went to work at the Smithsonian. And he came the next year as an agent for them looking for people to take to the bicentennial the year they would have it, and as representative of Appalachian folk music. And so he came to the house and I sang for him. One of the songs I sang was the Titanic. And he sat there just about laughing through it. When it was over I was about ready to thwarp his head. I said, "What was so funny about that song?" And he give me this—I don't know, I can't tell you to this day exactly—jargon about the satire of it and that made it funny. I said, "That made it funny, people drowning, little children losing their lives?" I said, "My little cousins cried theirself to sleep at night." But anyway, I finally—he finally got it across to me his point. And I knew he didn't mean nothing by it. He was originally from Alabama I think, so he should have known something about the way I would've looked at it, I guess he did. Anyway, it was long about that time that I met—I went over to Sodom with him. He was—that was in Madison County and he was looking to get some of the singers, ballad singers, from over there. And that's when I met the Walden's and the Norton's: Candace Walden and Priscilla Walden and Dilly Norton and Evelyn Ramsey. And already knew Bart Ray, he was a fiddler, He was related to them as well. I'd met him about three years before that at Cosby. And I met Sheila Adams. And we just were always close friends after that, the whole bunch of them. I've been to their home many a time listening to them sing and tell tales. It was a wonderful adventure. I mean, I could talk to you all day about different ballad people that I've met and knew. And they were the real stars to me. I mean, I admired the Carter family so much and Grandpa Jones and people like that. He was just the same good feller offstage as he was on. I thought he had a temper, but he was a good guy.

Partial Transcript: Well, like I say, it was always the people that lived at home in the mountains that were the real stars for me. And, in my lifetime, my own close family had always meant so much that it's one way of keeping them living and trying to preserve it and pass it to other people who wouldn't know their life stories like I did, but yet could have glimpses of what it was like and what life was like. And I don't know, sometimes just like when I was sad I used to always listen to sad songs. My aunt would say, "Why are you listening to them old things, they just make you sadder?" But they didn't, they didn't make me sadder, they helped me get through what I was feeling. If I had a broken heart and would listen to a song about somebody else with a broken heart I guess somehow I empathized with them and thought, well, their situation is worse than mine. And it got me through. There's lessons to be learned of some sort, which I might not be able to verbalize or put into words to make others understand, but just through doing—doing the material—telling the story or singing the song, maybe I can help somebody with a problem or something or maybe to see that there were other people that, through the years, that had problems, too. And it would help them along the way and give them, at the same time, a picture of what life once was like and the beauty of it. Maybe they could glimpse, through songs about the sailor boy, the big blue ocean out yonder, sailing on the deep blue sea. Or somebody would say there's one song it started out, "In a little town far cost the sea where the steeple towers far above the trees." I mean, you know, they can just picture that in their minds and it would be a real thing. When I learned the song about Fair Ellinor and the Brown Girl from —Nate Gourtney was a third cousin of mine. And I thought, golly gee, you know, to hear about these things in a book it has sort of a cartoonish type quality to it in a way, but to hear somebody sing about it, you can feel like it really did happen or that you could go down the road, and there would be a castle or a knight or something like that. But is sort of brought and made the past real. You could see that there really was a time when these things happen, rather than hear them as a story or see them on TV in a representation that is fictional version of things that had happened. And so, it's always been important to me. After—well, George Holt convinced me to finally get into the visiting artist's program. And I worked for a number of years as an artist in resident schools trying to bring children—to make them aware of their heritage and to see the value of it. And I would tell them some the things I've told you today about the music and about how people lived and give them examples of the material that I learned. One of the first schools that I was ever in one of the assignments I would give them was to go home and try to learn—I knew they probably wouldn't be able to find, you know, songs of the sort that I was—had learned, but they might. But anyway, generally I'd just tell them I'd say, "See if your family member knows—a relative—knows a story, a saying, a song, a riddle, anything like that and turn that in." And I got loads and loads of sayings, especially, lots and lots of sayings. But a lot of them would put down riddles and some of them would tell jokes even. Some of them were X-rated, too. I began soon to find out they didn't have the qualms that my generation would have had in writing something that explicit out for a grown-up to see. We would have hid stuff like that when I was a child growing up.

Partial Transcript: Well, they would lose—it's really hard to say. To me it's a horrible thought to think of them losing the ballad traditions and the stories and the songs, because it would be like you just erased part of the meaning of the community where I'm sitting if it had nothing to go to that would connect it in a meaningful way with its past. It would just be terrible, a terrible loss to lose the ballad tradition. And so much of it has been lost. But, yet, there are people that still, in their own way, try to keep it going the best way they can. I used to think it was so strange when I was a young man just beginning to perform and get out. I became aware of the efforts that a lot of people had made in going back and interviewing old-timers and trying to capture some of the material. And I thought it so strange that this music, especially that I'm familiar with that we've learned here in Appalachians, it's not young Appalachian people that's preserving get, it's Yankees. It's people from other places that's grasped an appreciation of it and is coming here and trying to use methods to save what we should have been trying to save all the time. But, you know, my parents grew up listening to Hank Williams and Ernest Tub and people like that. And that was good. I mean, that was just a new thing then. And but it was a step newer than what their parents would have heard when they was young.

Partial Transcript: Well, it's changed a whole lot. There's a lot of people that think that a song that Bill Munro recorded was the authentic original item. But, yet, Bill Munro and his brother Charlie they sort of got the idea going of bluegrass music. But yet some of the people that played for them like Flat and Scruggs, they also used tunes that they had learned from JE Meiners Mountaineers that were contemporaries with Bill and Charlie Munro. And a lot of their material was traditional, and it evolved into bluegrass, too. So a lot of the original tunes of bluegrass came from some folk songs. Charlie Munro recorded a version of—he called it Down in the Willow Garden of Rose Connelly. It's an old ballad that nobody knows just how old it is. He did a version of that. And so then it became part of the bluegrass style of music. Songs like Little Bessie, I've heard Granny Hopson sing a version of that. Different pieces from the old age were incorporated into evolving styles of music till today. You've just got the people that either—I don't know, maybe in this current generation it's a little more well-defined that it was even when I was a gap man. There were specialized people that knew the differences in the different kinds of music, but yet the general public it may have all been fuzzy to them. I think maybe today people have been little better grasp and maybe a little better appreciation of the traditional art forms than they had, say, 30 years ago. So I hope that continues. And I hope that there's a growing number of people that takes an appreciation to the old music. A lot of, you know, the old-timers say, well, that old song it's so old it went back to Ireland. Well, you know, I don't know if it did or not, but I know a lot of the Irish music is beautiful. And a lot of the Irishman that came to this country kept their music a-going. And some of it was folk music versions of ballads that some of the old-timers knew that were sung. In 1982 I went to the world's fair and while there I met Mick Maloney, who was an Irishman who lived in Philadelphia. He taught up there in the college in Philadelphia. And he was a big mover of the Irish musical movement. And he's made lots and lots of records. And he had me in my sister-in-law come up there one year, in '89 I believe it was or '90 something like that, and be a part of the American Irish connection. And, you know, sing our songs to compare to the Irish tunes and the connections of Irish music.

Partial Transcript: Sure. I'll do the I Dreamed a Dream the Other Night. I learned this from Mrs. May Phillips. I knew her as Mawmaw Phillips. Some of her grandchildren called her Mawmaw and some called her granny. She had so many grandchildren there's a number of different terms for her. I just always called her Mawmaw. She was born in Cocke County, Tennessee in 19and 00 and lived till 1980. And she knew lots and lots of old love songs and meeting house songs. And this is one of them that she learned. It's a young girl. ♪I dreamed a dream the other night, all in my arms had her. But when I woke it was a joke, I was forced to lie without her. ♪♪Her yellow hair, like streams of gold was lying on the pillow. She is the prettiest thing, I love her so well. Ill follow the railroad after her. ♪♪ I followed on to her uncle's house, inquiring of such a fair one. They answered, 'Sir, there's no such here and why do you inquire about her?' ♪But when she heared her true love' voice she hastened to the window. Says, 'I freely would come to you my love, but the locks of the bolts do hinder.' ♪♪ As I stood there, all in amaze all in those pains and humors, my patience flew, my sword I drew, and quickly I went to her. ♪♪ I'd taken her by the lily white hand. I led her over hills and valleys. ♪♪ Saying, 'Come on young men who love like me, take one and fight the other.♪♪ And that's it.