Joe Penland

Partial Transcript: I’m Joe Penland. I live in Marshall NC and I was born and raised here in Madison County. My family has lived in the Western North Carolina Mountains since 1765, I think.
I’m a ballad singer and storyteller, father, builder, and a general man about …. And being around town.

I love to tell the stories about the people who taught me to sing the ballads and my ancestors because I’m a firm believer that as long as we talk about people, they still live. There is that old saying that says a man dies twice… dies once when his soul leaves his body and he dies the second time when the last person says his name. SO that’s important to me.
Cas Wallin was teaching me to sing the ballads about life on the farm or in a small town 50 years ago… to bring that to life, it brings me great joy and I think it’s a great pleasure for the people who get to listen and experience that.


My family, European family has been in America for 12 generations. I believe since they came mostly at that time from Scotland and a few from Ireland that they were singing those songs… There were very few things they had to bring with them, maybe a bible; maybe a fiddle… but those stories and songs of their home land were the only things they had to remember their homeland and their family they left behind. I firmly believe they’ve been singing those songs since they came to this country.

Partial Transcript: These songs were mostly sung by the working-class people. They were tales of the kings and queens and dukes and earls as they saw them - which was not always in a flattering light. There were also songs that were made by the travelers who went from place to place to sing these songs and put on a play, an Opera, if you will, with people acting out the parts of these dramas with love and sex and violence, and then moving on as a troupe to do that to make a living. These songs are not about anything new to us or old to us. They’re the same songs and the same traditions and the same thing that we might see on a movie today or television today. It's human interaction and how things happen.

When the songs came to America though, a lot of them got changed to be more moralistic. You have songs like the Knoxville girl that was popular on the radio with the Carter family and other people in the 30’s that my father loved. He hated the ballads, but he loved the ballads when they had music and a little chorus behind them. But Knoxville Girl was known in Ireland as the Wexford Girl and in England as the Worcester Tragedy and The Cruel Miller. They just changed the names of the towns and it’s all about what happens if you have a premarital relationship. How terrible it can be. Usually the woman ends up drowned or beaten or killed. The man goes on off, but of course he gets caught to and gets hung in the end.


I don’t think those were quite that moralistic in the beginning. But as they came here with the Puritans to America, those things got added in or emphasized in the ballads.

Partial Transcript: Everybody loves tragedy and I think the songs that are about tragedies strike a note in people’s hearts, you know they can look at what happened and how that transcended into country music. It’s a heartbreak story; those are the ones that always make the top of the charts. Everybody has a little darkness in them, I think, and to be able to express that in a ballad or a song is a very cathartic for us. We know that’s just a story, and sometimes the tragedy is much worse in the song than what we’ve had in our life, maybe. It’s a source of relief. It’s a way that you can talk about hard things and let them go.
A lot of the ballads are dark. I don’t know many of the funny ballads; I don’t know many of the dirty or nasty ballads. Because nobody sang them to me and I wouldn’t have been allowed to repeat them. And the ones that I’ve heard are really so crude that I don’t think that they really fit in the tradition. There’s a lot of people who are going to argue with me on that.

The others – there’s so many beautiful stories and melodies. Melodies changed. Sharp collected, like, 200 versions of the House Carpenter in word, but the biggest thing was the variation in tune between people that might be within five miles of each other.
That was the nice thing about the ballads because there was no right way or wrong way to sing them. That’s not what I heard growing up on the porch when 3 or 4 ballad singers were together. Cause they always swore that the way that they sang it was the right way to sing it. Sometimes from the same mother or grandfather. Ballad singers had their favorites but instead of saying their favorite, they called it their song. They felt they had a claim on that song, the way I feel I have a claim on Pretty Sarrow. Because it speaks so much to me, that I sing it everywhere I go, it’s my favorite song so people say “That’s Joe’s song” – Well it’s not my song, the songs been sung for 200 years but it’s my favorite.

Partial Transcript: I think that sarcasm is genetic and wherever our ancestors come from where they …. Cecil sharp called the people here anglo-celtic or celtic-saxon. Because he didn’t want to sound like …. People weren’t from England particularly because by the time Cecil Sharp came here people’s families had been here 7 or 8 generations. So we were German and Dutch and African and Native American, Scandinavian, Russian. All those people came together in this great melting pot. The interesting thing is that people tend to want to hold on to the idea that the people who live here in the mountains generally are Scotch-Irish. I’m not an anthropologist, but I think that Scotch-Irish comes from the idea when the Scotts moved from Scotland over to Ireland, the Protestants and then came on over here. I don’t know what it means exactly, other than that seems to be something that people want to cling to, that part of their heritage.
Until recently it was not always accepted by the Caucasians who lived here to say there is anything other than good Scotch-Irish blood in their veins. Now it seems to be quite popular for people to say just the opposite. I have a friend who’s a Native American that tells everyone that his grandfather married an English princess.

Cecil Sharp wanted to claim that these were English folk songs, well obviously when you read further in his documents that knows that they didn’t all come from England or even the United Kingdom.
Clinging to a national heritage is also a strange idea to me because in so many of these songs – by the time they were sung by the people who taught me – the idea of some of these places in foreign countries were so remote to them that they had no idea where they were. Yes everyone had heard of London and Paris, but nobody heard of Worcester or Carlisle. Nobody heard of these other little places that showed up in these songs, so it was really easy to change the names to something they knew. The Lily of the West was a song called Molly-O – Bob Dylan sang it, everybody else did as Flora the Lily of the West. And in the song it says, “When first I came to Louisville… some pleasure for to find… I met a woman from Lexington who sorta pleased my mind…”Or something near that. Well Evelyn Ramsey sang it “When first I came from Detroit…”

They were interchangeable because those foreign cities were forgotten. And of course the educational opportunities in the mountains until till the turn of the 20th century was very few and far between. Even up until 1927 I think when the state of North Carolina decided they were going to educate all of us.

Partial Transcript: I think that there was a great boon course in the 60s late 50s early 60s even in to the 70s of a folk revival. Because a lot of these tunes had gotten lost because it been transformed into some other kind of music. In England in the 60s we had Fairport Convention who brought music out of ballads and they did Matthew Groves, they did all the songs, Bob Dylan over here and Joan Baez were taking the old songs and making popular somewhere else. A lot of his tunes, Bob's tunes, came from folk tunes. I was in England and this, in my honor, this young man got a long American folk song that I learned from Bob Dylan and got up and sang Bob’s version of Rain and Snow. And I asked him if he would like to hear the version that came from Madison County and as far as I know this is the only place that Cecil Sharp found this tune was here in Madison County during all his travels… and he said “yes” and they had no idea that it was nearly as old as it was. They just thought it was something Bob Dylan found in a closet somewhere and sang.

Now course in England the ballads have a huge, huge following. Every town’s that got a pub and church has a folk club and they meet and they sing in a cappella, and some with instruments and sing these old tunes. But as I understand it that kind of fell apart just like it did here in America ‘til that 60s revival. And it's fortunate for us because it brought people in here - John Cohen, some other folks - who actually came and interviewed some of the last of the people of the oral tradition and took pictures of them and recorded their voices for us to hear. I don't know exactly why - we had available to us as kids we had little reel-to-reel tape recorders or cassette recorders later but we never thought about recording those people singing to us. And I'm not sure it would've been allowed, because the way we learned the ballads, as I've said so many times so many places, we learned it in what you call knee-to-knee. And that meant to say you said across from the singer and that singer was your total concentration. They sang a verse, you sang it back to them, They sang the second verse and you sang too. They sang the third and you sand three, as long as you could remember and you worked on those things until you could come back and go onto the songs up to 40, 80, 90 verses if you were really lucky and really sharp and it took a great memory to sing those songs. It was amazing to me the people in their 70s and the 80s were able to remember these tunes that they learned in their youth from their grandparents or the parents. Until I understood that when they were growing up that was the only entertainment they had.

Another thing we got from knee-to-knee, which people don't give much credence do I guess, is that we didn't get just the words and the tune from these people, because when they sang the songs they became the song. In their minds most of them close their eyes and they could see the actions of this song taking place and through their body language and their voice and expressions they conveyed that.

Any film I've seen people singing those songs they taught me loses every bit of that, because the people were stiff and nervous and weren’t accustomed to being in front of cameras… and accustomed to people sticking things in their faces. I look at it - I looked at a film the other day and I saw two of my mentors sitting there as if they were frozen on the front porch. And the only time I've ever seen them that still was when they were both dead. They always moved and had things… they always laughed and cackled or shouted. They weren't docile people. They lived life to the fullest every bit of it.

My friend Doug Wallington somebody asked “how often do you sing?” he said “I sing when I get up in the morning, I sing while I'm doing my work and I think myself to sleep every night.” and those songs were what people did. When they had gatherings on porches to break beans or play cards or whatever they would sing and sometimes they would sing in unison sometimes I was just sing in lines. And they would argue about this song or whatever. But that those were the songs they sang until the radio became so prominent and people could listen to songs on the Grand ‘Ol Opry. Or like my father, hear the same songs that had been smoothed up around the edges and had choruses to sing.

When I go to England one of the things I'm so amazed that is how the choruses got dropped or the sing-along lines in ballads here, most of them are really made for either unison singing for the whole thing or one person singing. Over there is a great tradition that there is at least one line at the end of every verse that everybody joins in and sings. Which I think is terrific and it makes the ballads a lot more participatory and if you're listening to very long ballad sometimes you need to be able to sing your part because it's hard to get lost it's not hard to get lost in the rhetoric or the repetition of some of the things. I'd like to see that more of that and I don't feel like that's a betrayal of anybody I think that's just going back one step further maybe.

Partial Transcript: I remember our school days we had one or two teachers or mentors who gave – the lesson they were giving - they gave a lot of themselves in it and when you learned in that way – whether you’re learning a skill or a fact or a song, when you learn that way it becomes very personal to you. and another great benefit of that – which I've only realize here is my old age - is that when I teach someone to sing the ballad in front of me if I teach them to play an instrument I become a much better singer, I become a lot more accurate and I'm a better player because I'm showing someone how to do things in minute detail. And so that helps me at my age to remember but, I suspect that was happening with the people who taught me also.
The things that stay with us or not always the things we read in a book we see in a film. When you touch someone, when you can reach and touch someone or they can reach and touch you – whether friendly or not, whatever it is - they have your complete attention and I believe in singing the ballads particularly, that it's almost hypnotic. That my mentors sang to me and I saw the picture they saw - that's how I felt about it – I didn’t know to be honest but that’s how I felt that I actually became part of that person and they became part of me.

So the fact that I was learning some old song which was interesting to me because I was a young boy and it had a lot of sex and violence in it, that I was not exposed to at home was one thing, but the idea of being that close to another person in a creative way was much more important than what was transmitted. There are very few things today that you can do that with people, they’re too busy, they don't want to do that. Younger singers are learning the songs off CDs – and I don't care how they learn them – it’s important to me that people sing the songs, but I wish they would experience what I got from a person giving the song. That is the word I want to use: they gave me the song and I'll never forget that those moments. I can… I'm learning now songs that were lost to us. The singers I knew sang maybe 35 or 40 songs, I may have said this before but Cecil Sharp collected 256 in Madison County alone.
What happened to them? Where did they go? Either they were fragmented or they weren’t as popular – who knows where they went - but I'm so happy to go back and find people like Mary Sands in Sharp’s book and to know, not Mary Sands, but her grandsons and granddaughters and to know how she sang some of the songs because I was taught. Then I can infer by using what Cecil Sharp took down how she might've sung these other songs.

Been introduced to a woman, Rosie Hensley, who sang 35 songs in three days to Cecil Sharp. People don't get the impact until they understand and read the songs. They're not 3 1/2 minutes long on the radio they’re long-involved stories about people's lives. Three days, 35 songs.
To know that her husband at play the fiddle. Some of the things got lost. The fiddle music… when I was watching cartoons when I was little - I wasn’t too little ‘cause we didn’t have TV until I guess the 1960s or something like that. There were cartoons and even into my kids that … Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, Donald Duck… if you listen to those tunes they’re playing fiddle tunes in the back. They’re old German, Irish, English fiddle tunes. And to know that they were preserved by those people. Sharp took down some of them and unfortunately, they never were published. And what an important part of their lives the fiddle was. There were no pianos there were no guitars, there were a few homemade banjos but not really until the 20s, I would say, when we got Sears and Roebuck and mail delivery. People could buy a guitar for five dollars or a banjo, and those instruments were added just as soon as people could do it. But people whittled out their own fiddles and sometimes a fiddler would be the only person at a square dance, or a washtub bass or something else homemade, but as soon as those instruments were available, people got them and learned how to play them.

I get a lot of questions about “why do you think that the ballads were sung a cappella” and I hear this in England because that’s a big tradition to sing them a cappella – they were sung a cappella here because we didn’t have any instruments. But Sharp would be the first to tell you that Ruben Hinsley played along with his wife when she sang on the fiddle. And they looked forward to having a prize possession, which would be a pump organ that they could get sent in somehow to the rule places in Laurel.

Sharp predicted that the ballad tradition would disappear as it had in England as soon as industrialization and roads and electricity became available. And he was right. Because people’s lives changed. In those days, Sharp says, and I believe it to be true, way up past the time he was here that people in the mountains certainly worked hard but since there was no money involved, they raised enough food for their own existence or to swap with other people… They knew how important it was to do other things rather than be tied to the work. Now when public work became available that took up a lot of that time. So people’s leisure hours on the farm – cause people continued to farm and then tried to have a public job - were few and far between and if they were on Sunday they were taken up with church so the love songs kind of just fell by the way. The idea of people singing in the parlor or on the porch kind of fell by the wayside. The idea of the beauty of those old tunes, it was lessened, the importance was lessened. Because their time – they didn’t have the time to devote to it. Of course we know what's going on today in our society, I think about all of those things my father saw his life change and then I stop and think all the things I've seen in my short life how technology has changed, not just the way we live but how we live and how we interact with each other. Now people can be in a restaurant sitting across the table and send each other a text rather than speaking. Maybe that's better if they’re listening to music and they don’t want to interrupt it but it seems odd that people don't want to communicate like - we did not have to, we wanted to communicate. We wanted to be in close proximity with people that we knew and loved. We wanted to spend time with them that wasn't necessarily in the field and those things changed.

We didn't want to sing the songs the way we sang them because the radio is there and we heard these smooth versions with great fiddles playing beautiful accompaniment and guitar players who were immaculate - all the sudden people felt, I think, a little embarrassed at their ability to make the music or sing the songs wasn't what we heard on the radio. I think that had a great thing that damaged egos everywhere. My father, I never heard my father sing a song. My mother used to sing, and she sang in church you can hear there, and you could hear her if she was out doing the wash or whatever. But as far as just sitting down and singing, he didn't do it. My father didn't sing the ballads at all because he thought that's what poor people did. He had lifted his self up somehow above that. And there's the stigma of poverty that was attached to the love songs because they lasted the longest in the most isolated places where money didn't make any difference.

Partial Transcript: Cecil Sharp, in 1914 found himself without a job. He was too old to be in the military and he had no skills that were useful in the war effort. He had a family, wife and children. And he was confounded on how he was going to be able to support them during the war. He had done some choreographing for drama and plays in England and choreographed play of Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights dream. And he taught dancing and folk dancing as well as collecting. Well of course, folk dancing in those days was primarily done my men. There was some women who were getting into it... So all the men went to war. And there was no more schools, there was no more money for folk dancing schools, there was no money to keep him. Fortunately, the producer of the play came to New York to put the same play on and offered him the opportunity to come over and choreograph the one in New York City. And he saw that as an opportunity to make money and send it home to his family. When he came, he thought, well I need the augment this the best I can. And since he was or considered himself to be the world's expert on English folk dancing. He started giving lectures in colleges and universities and wealthy clubs wherever anybody might be interested to hear about or maybe even learn English folk dancing. Actually started a chapter of a dance society – the English Folk Dancing society here in America and that was quite lucrative for him.

And while he was doing this he was - he met this woman name Olive Dame Campbell – Dame being her maiden name not her title - and she had been touring the south with her husband John C. Campbell who worked for the Russell Sage foundation and she would go with her husband – the Russell Sage foundation was documenting life in the south, education, religion, the industry, whatever, and how people lived. She went with her husband and she heard somebody singing Barbara Allen and she grew up in the Northeast and she remembered that song from maybe her mother or grandmother singing this song. But they sang it in such a pure and beautiful way – and it was completely unaccompanied - That she was interested so she started taking down these songs and visiting mostly with women while her husband was doing his research in these communities. One of the places that he was working was in the Laurel section of Madison County. And she documented many, many songs and she heard that Cecil Sharp not only was a professor, he called himself, of dance but he's also collected English folk songs that were quickly disappearing mostly from travelers or in America we call them gypsies I guess that still had their traditions.

So she made a trip to New York because he was staying with one of her friends – or in Boston, excuse me – she made a trip to Boston meet with him. And he did. He was staying with Mrs. Starrow. He had a terrible case of gout and wasn’t able to teach dancing. And she says she'd found him sitting in a chair and they talked briefly and she told him about the songs she’d collected. And he is quite impatient so finally she just dumped the things on the table next to him, all her transcripts. I started looking a look at them for a long time and this is this is this is the most important find that I've ever seen. He says, people give me this stuff all the time, he says this is what I've always been looking for.

So he made arrangements to - America of course was not in the in the war at this time, you know – America did go into the first world war until 1917 - but he made arrangements to come down south. A little bit into his character, he wanted to come south in the third week of July 1916. Well he had heard there was a devastating flood here all along the eastern continental divide and a lot of the train tracks were out. There was no transportation. Maud Karpeles says he went to the train station every day trying to make arrangements to get to Western North Carolina and they kept saying ‘It’ll just be a few more days, it’ll be a few more days’ and probably if he had waited five days the train service would have been reestablished. But he was so anxious to get here he wouldn't do that so he made plans for an alternate route to go from New York to Knoxville and then get on the L&N railroad, which is a very small maybe even a narrow gauge railroad that ran all way down to Copperhill Tennessee and back up to Murphy. Well the journey - which should've been a very luxurious journey in the Pullman car - turned out to be 48 hours on the train with an overnight stay in Copperhill which he described as - he said the rooms were execrable and people can look that up if they want to, what that means. And he was so glad to get out there but the whole journey took him almost three days and in the meantime Maud Karpeles’ luggage had been either lost or stolen. So when he arrived in Asheville was picked up by John Campbell his wife, he was very happy to go and stay in their dwelling. Which happened to be in what we called Biltmore Forest today. Quite up to snuff for him and it was his place of refuge that he would run back to and from the mountains when he would say I just can't rough it anymore.

But they brought him over even though the roads were gone and wonderful passages in his diary and the - but the best descriptions of course are in his letters to his wife, Constance, describing the events which he – it’s great literary stuff, I don't know why it hasn’t been published, just the letters - much better than his diary, talking about his fear and the primitive nature him of the transportation and whether it be the roads or nonexistent roads or the vehicles that they carried them… which he made fun in a great English sarcastic way. After talking about this wagon of sorts he finally - and they called it a surrey, it was anything but that and talking about coming, they found a semblance of road when they got to Marshall but when they came through they didn't find anything but mud and devastation. And the place stank and reeked of flood. He was so happy when they got through Marshall and over finally to White Rock to the Presbyterian missionaries. I want to say this is right, they came from ________ North Carolina to Shelton Laural and it was an eleven hour journey.

So they were there and they kind of recuperated with Dr. Packard his wife. He had been communicating through Olive Dame Campbell and John Campbell with these Presbyterian missionaries who had set up a mission schools, a hospital of sorts, medical treatment and a small industry in hooked rugs to help mountain people make a little money sold on the side.
And they had, in their opinion, paired him up with singers that he would like and they thought would like him. Though I don't think they had been exposed to anyone like him quite before.

He came to Laurel in a white probably a lightweight wool suit with a Panama hat and patent leather shoes some people say… I don't … I never have read that to be a fact, but I'm sure he was as well dressed as he could be as an English gentleman and Maud Karpeles, his assistant, came in a long Victorian dress to a place where there was absolutely no road at all - maybe a sled road, which we’d call it, which is a path. Most of the roads were just along the creek, and you had to cross back and forth several times. But he quickly caught on that these were selected singers and even though they sang things that he was very interested in, he wanted to get outside of the religious constraints of the Presbyterian Church and meet the real people, he thought.

And so that's what he did - he took off – he and Maud took off and they’d hear about a singer and they’d walk sometime 6 miles to get there. They tried - they actually crossed a foot log across the Laurel river twice. The first - it was over 40 feet long and no handrails or anything just a log across the river. And he and Maud made it across precariously and they came back and they did it again and Maud froze in the middle and he says either of us could have been killed probably if we’d fallen to the rocks in the rushing river below and finally she made it across and they determined they weren’t going to walk cross anymore foot logs.
Well people said “that's only way you can get across the creek” well he sought out little fjords that they could wade across - him in a suit, her in a Victorian dress, which doesn’t sound like… I'm not…. that's what it says in the diaries. But there's no way that a woman could cross a raging River in the big Victorian dress. They crossed the creek and would go to places then I have to cross it back, but they wouldn’t ever get on another foot log. He had some aversion, both of them did, to riding mules which was the standard way transporting people around the mountains, if you didn't have a wagon people lent you a mule. Well they didn't do that, they preferred to hire somebody to carry the luggage on a mule and they walked behind.

So his health was terrible. He had gout, he had other ailments. He didn't live too long, only 8 years after this adventure anyway and he would stay there until he just exhausted himself. He'd have to go back and try to stay a couple days with the missionaries to boost himself up.

But he was excited about what he found and his descriptions of the people - if taken out of context like all things - can sound quite derogatory but in actuality from the readings and the letters I read, he loved the people here. He described them as a sort of English peasant but he didn't say that in the derogatory fashion. He said but they're different than the English peasant he’d encountered before he came over in that that they carried themselves with pride. And their manners were more like an upper-class in England. That the way they greeted people, the way men would doff their hats, They way a young person would come up and put his hand up and say my name is Joe Penland what's yours? How friendly and giving - these people who had absolutely nothing really other than just food were. And how freely they gave him the songs.

Contrary to popular belief, there were people who could read and write that he visited. But the majority of people probably did so very crudely. But he made the statement after he'd been here that somebody needed to inform these missionaries that the people they were trying to cultivate were much more cultivated than they were.

Yes everybody should read and write if they want to but as far as their way of life, it's much more civilized than the cities that he had come to. So he loved the people and they in turn loved and remembered him. And considering, when you look at his writings and writings about him, that he was a sarcastic, he was egotistical, all the things that show up about him – but somehow he clicked with these people. And maybe let his guard down, I don't know what it was, but they loved him and they gave him these songs and they were happy. There’s a wonderful thing in one of his diaries or a letter home to Constance - I can't remember which it was - where he would write down the tunes sitting on the porch and Maud Karpeles would write down the words and they were listening to the singer and of course they’d have to sing it over and over to be able to get it down and when he they got down one, a man who’d been singing – Cecil Sharp turned and says, “here's your song” it was all in notations, and the man says “I’d hardly recognize it.” Which is a great moment.

But anyway he collected these things – but he did find that he could get to Hot Springs. Rail service was continued to Hot Springs, where he met a real gem in Jane Gentry, who sang so many songs for him. She knew the songs. She was from a different tradition than the Laurel singers, she was from Watauga County – I guess that’s where it was up there around Beach. And she was part of the Hicks family. Which is a… later storyteller Stanley Hicks and those people who were famed now for that story telling tradition. And her grandfather was a man named Council Harmen, who we all believe brought the Jack Tales to America. So her songs, she knew a lot of the same songs, but she sang them in a different way. She sang some of the songs more like were heard in England, in that they were less in the minor key and they had little frills in between, like the little singing “ooh ahh” kind of things. It took the dark circumstance and put this little frivolous thing in the middle and made it not so dark. But she lived near the railroad line. He’d go back and forth to Asheville, and stay with John Campbell in their luxurious home or some people don’t know that Hot Springs North Carolina had the Mountain Park Hotel which was arguably the most sophisticated hotel in the south. It had 500 rooms and a mile and a half of verandas. It had a covered carriage way all the way to the depot, it had the first golf course in North Carolina… had of course the hot springs and had a dining room that would seat 500 people with waiters and china and silver and crystal and all those things. And his two favorite places to stay in America were the Mountain Park Hotel and the Algonquin Hotel in New York. And that’s where he said “we found quite suitable rooms.” So he and Maud would come there to rest.

And *Jane Gentry would introduce them to other singers in Hot Springs but *Jane herself was just such a treasure to him and it made his life so much easier, that if he was tired or sick, that he could come to Hot Springs and still collect. He was ecstatic about being able to collect so many songs, he never thought that it would be in the 100s. In the end it may have been 4,000 songs all together all over in America. Or at least versions, not songs particularly, but versions. So that made his life easier and it curtailed his visits back to Laural. Where I’m sure Rosie Hensley had more than 35 songs in 3 days. And I’m sure that Mary Sands had more than 25 songs that she sang for him in a week, interspersed with raising her family. Mary Sands walked miles to get to see Cecil Sharp. She was not young, she was 44 years old, she was 8.5 months pregnant with her 10th child. So she had 9 babies at home and her husband and raised the garden and in between all that she found time to sing songs for him. Sometimes he had to go to her house to hear them. But that was a place where he always – he found a place where he could return.

But after life got easier – this is Joe Penland’s opinion – after he found an easier way to collect songs, he curtailed his visits to Madison County or to the Laurel section of Madison County – which I think was a great loss, because I know there are songs that we sing today that he did not collect over there. “Black is the Color” is one everyone sings. That was a song that was a song that was sung there. True Lovers Farewell was another great song over there that he didn’t collect – he did collect it in Kentucky and other places…

Unfortunately for him, I think, he came back to America two more times in 17 and 18 and he wanted to explore the Kentucky regions – which were pretty fruitful. But it was few and far between, there was a lot of rugged visits for him, which was harder on his health every year. But he never replicated that first three months that he came looking for ballads in Madison County. He never found that many singers and that many songs in such close proximity no matter where he looked. And you read his diaries you read his letter and you could sense the disappointment he really felt that he had just come to one place and that was just one of many – but what he’d found in the end was he came to the biggest and best place, for him, first. It’s like drug addiction – he can never get that first high again – you know, he can never get back there and I’m sure it worried him. But it’s just the way it happened. If we made a movie about him… that would be the last place he went. He’d spent three years struggling to find something then all of a sudden he comes into this treasure trove.

However he did it, I’m thankful to Cecil Sharp because if he hadn’t have taken these songs down, they would be lost to me. He’s not as revered in parts of England as he is to me. Of course there’s the Cecil Sharp house, which is the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. And that’s an ongoing concerns, there’s people still trying to collect ballads from people all over the United Kingdom. And that is strong. And there are some people who don’t like him. And I was staying with some people in Whitney and I said I wanted to see some of the _____ dancers and the woman said, “Cecil Sharp just made that up – he just invented it.” I don’t think that’s true, but that’s the opinion of some people that when he could find a discovery that he’d invent a discovery. I don’t think that’s right. But like a lot of people who have excelled in their profession there’s always going to be people jealous of that and there’s always going to be derogatory comments about people who put themselves out there and try to do something for the greater good. People need to understand that Cecil Sharp never was a wealthy man. He certainly did not get rich teaching folk dancing and collecting songs.

If – he did publish lots of books but in 1916 – what would a book bring?
I have a first edition of his 1916 book that’s still credited with 80 songs in it from Olive Dame Campbell. And that book when it was new was probably two bucks. Well it’s a shame that somebody in his family didn’t put up 5 or 6 cases of them, cause I can tell you, you can’t find one for two dollars now.
Later Maud Karpeles did a double version of that book in 1932 which did not give as much credit to Mrs. Campbell. And then there was another publication in 52 and one in 60 – and now the book has been put back out and it can be order on Amazon and it’s called English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians by Cecil Sharp and I don’t care who makes the money from it – everyone should get a copy cause it’s really a wonderful, wonderful way to explore the history of music, not just in this country but in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and other places too.

Partial Transcript: Cecil Sharp’s first love after he came back to England from Australia and got married and had a family, he taught music in a couple places. He taught piano lessons at first and then started teaching some things in colleges. But it was a hard way to make a living – but it’s what paid the bills. In his spare time, he was very interested in English folk dance and how you had to go out and find really old people who even remembered the dance steps. And that’s what he would do in his spare time. While he was out doing that he ran across this traveler, a woman, and she sang what he thought was a very primitive version of an English folk song that had been modernized. And that really wetted his appetite. And he almost got in trouble over it, because he used to carry a phonograph and record these people. He was in this wagon, which is where the people lived – with this very attractive gypsy woman, recording her songs when her husband came home and this discovered him… fortunately, he was able to play back the song and got out of there without harm coming to him. That really wetted his interest.

And he was very concerned that in the last part of the 19th century – some of the folk songs were modernized with music and they were published in things called broad sheets…there was this version that was set in stone. For the first time there was something that was written down and this was the way you sang the song. And then there was the big music hall thing that started around 1890 in England where there were people putting on music productions all over the country, big and small. And like our radio, those were the songs that people wanted to sing. And some of those for lack of a better term were bastardized versions of the ballads and stories. Even today, I was just there three weeks ago and I heard these people singing these show tunes from the first part of the 20th century, because that was so popular and they were made catchy with catchy little tunes and little phrases. And you could see what would probably become our vaudeville – it was already established there. And that is what the sophisticated people learned to sing. And the ballads were dropped. And it was very hard, except for very old people who were farmers and the travelers – were the few places that he could actually get these old folk songs or what he believed were the old folk songs. It has been said, and I believe correctly, that he collected more in the first few months in America than he’d been able to collect in England for the 15 – 18 years he’d been collecting before that.

Now that said, I don’t think he ever had the time to go out and be a full time collector. But it was so hard to find things all over England – but if you look at the size of England compared to North Carolina, not even thinking about the Appalachian chain that he was trying to collect in – it’s a much larger area here. He came here with one purpose when he came to Madison County. That was generally his purpose the whole time he was in the Southern Appalachians. When he was in the North he was teaching in schools and … he was trying to collect some dances here too, but no, that was the pinnacle for his career. It provided for 5 or 6 publications that he was able to publish when he was in England. And it was the main source of his income. But it was a stroke of genius and fortune on the part of Olive Dame Campbell, to be able to connect with him and they agreed to work together. Cecil Sharp, as a side note, was very concerned that anybody he worked with, not to infringe upon their rights or territory, as he called it. So, he has letters with everyone he worked with, whether a professor in a college in Virginia, or Olive Dame Campbell, giving him permission to come into what he called their territory to collect the songs. He was very honorable in that.

Partial Transcript: His greatest legacy is the Cecil Sharp house and the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the American version of the society, which is strong and well here. There is a man in Durham who is very active in that society and still teaches those dances. But to have Cecil Sharp house and that organization which is actually staffed… and to have huge archives, not just of what Sharp collected but of what other people who have worked with him collected… Sharp had a terrible blow in that three of this closest confidants and people who really were helping him collect dances and song in England were killed in the First World War. And two of them were killed on the same day while he was here. Only Von Williams was the only one left, when he got back, that was really seriously interested in it. And after Sharps death, Williams took over the ED&FS, even though they didn’t have a house place… and developed that into something. And he ran that until his death and then Maud Karpeles continued to work in that and Douglas Kennedy, if I’m not mistaken, continued… and he’s the one that married Maud Karpeles sister, Helen.

And they pretty much – that family kept this thing going and kept people researching and found money and ways from everything from the crown to the government to be able to help them fund and keep this thing alive. Much like Bascom Lunsford did with his collections in the Smithson- in the Library of Congress and Mars Hill University in those collections. But they have a huge, huge archive of almost all of Sharps works and photographs there along with other important collectors. So, the idea that his work stopped in 1924, when he died, but it was really just the beginning. It made an awareness that stayed very strong until this day.

In this country, I don’t think there … maybe there has been, I’m not qualified to say, I know that Lunsford worked really hard all his life to collect these things and to keep them together. He did his best to have them documented. He took native people and mountain people to Washington to dance for the President and for the King and Queen of England of that time. He did everything he could to promote the culture he felt was so important to the Mountains.

But in the time after his death there was not that much happening here. There were other collectors. There were other really important American collectors and people are starting to talk about them now. We talk about Sharp so much because it’s the 100th anniversary of his coming. But there’s so many others, the names escape me right now. Most of them were people who came down from the North to trace these songs around – because they weren’t just sung here, they were sung all along the eastern seaboard and of course out west there was another whole turn of the American folk song, where songs changed with the environment. Just because Madison County had the Laurels – which was probably one of the last places in the 20th century to become modern, it may not even be now by some peoples standards. It’s a paradise for us who live there. It doesn’t mean that these songs weren’t important to families ever since they started coming into this country in the 15th century.

Partial Transcript: I think that the collectors who came after him in the 30s and 40s, following his lead and reading his books and seeing where he’d gone and taking his work and his books as a Bible as maybe as you’d say, kept the fire going but it was a very low flame. It was only when there seemed to be an interest in England and in America in modernizing these folk tunes… let’s be honest, I’m a song writer, but it’s a lot easier for me to take a song that’s already been written… it’s in public domain and make it more interesting to modern ears. I made a record called On Shaky Ground where I did that with some of the ballads – but that was done in the 50s and 60s, when the Kingston Trio did Tom Dooley, it was collected right here in North Carolina. Nobody thought that kind of harmony and stuff would work in the birth of Rock and Roll, but it did. And it gave birth to other people who were interested. Young Joan Baez started singing when she was 12 years old and Bob Dylan when I’m sure he was writing songs, but he wrote songs after the ballads because he found that darkness to be something that was in his character. And when people started hearing new artists sing the old songs in different ways – then there was that revival. And people still, in my generation still listen to those artists.

But after the mid-70s, except in a few isolated places and with certain individuals, those songs lost interest again and there’s just a lull in it. And there’s been this little dull roar in the background and it’s still not to a crescendo yet. It’s still very hard to go out and find people who can sing old songs. It’s getting hard to find people who can sing early Joan Baez or Bob Dylan. It’s a generational thing. And find people who are interested in that. I think there are artists out there who are going to find these songs again and they’re going to come to them – and they are recording them actually. Like Bruce Springsteen just did a whole … one of those people… and they’re going to bring these songs to another audience who wouldn’t have listen to Pete Seeger or Joan Baez or any of those other artists of my youth in the 60s. They certainly would never had heard of Cas Wallin or Dillard Chandler. Until they start delving into the notes that are on the back of these album covers, where they see that these famous people actually heard these tunes on rare recordings and built from that. _____ Ramsey is a banjo player from here, he’s known all over the world. He didn’t have any fame in America at all really, just a little brief thing.

I remember going to a festival in England and having more than one person come up to me and say “did you know Cas Wallin?” and I thought how in the heck did these people now about Cas Wallin? There’s only a couple of little recordings, but they were big. I sang Freeze Arrow – I sing an abbreviated version, and say if you want to hear the whole long thing, you can buy the record, but I sang it in a club and they had a little reception after that and this man came up and he says, “That’s not exactly the way I learned it.” And I said, “Well who’d you learn it from?” and he said, “I learned it from Cas Wallin.” And I asked, “Did you know Cas Wallin?” and he said, “Oh, no, no! I just heard the record.” But people who ask me about these singers and I’m just astounded because I know we could go 15 miles from this place and ask people if they know these names and they’ll say no.

Bascom Lunford, everybody is going to sing his version of Mole in the Ground, or they’re going to sing Mountain Dew. They know who Bascom Lunford was. But outside of Western North Carolina there are very few places that you can go and learn about the man who started the longest continually running folk festival in America and collected literally thousands of songs and dances. Not only from the European settlers here but from the Cherokee. But some scholars will dig through that or some young person will … and there’s going to be another revival. Because it’s such a valuable and important thing that someone will find a way to take it to a brand new audience. I think that is Bascom Lunsford and Cecil Sharp hadn’t taken the time in the first part of the 20th century to take these things down, that would not be available today. It would be lost.

Partial Transcript: My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a preacher, evangelist. He was a cousin of Bascom Lunsford. He played seven instruments. He died when my mother was 13. And I had a life threatening illness, several years ago, and one day I was thinking about how much would I give to hear my grandfather’s voice? And I thought about what my legacy was. Was it a piece of land, a house, an insurance policy… a few things that I had written? What was an important part of my life that I hadn’t shared to my children or grandchildren. And that’s where the ballads came in… because I was fortunate enough to be able to sit with the last people who carried that tradition on orally. And I was determined that my grandchildren would be able to hear my voice. So before then, and I wasn’t healthy, so I wasn’t able to do a lot. I tried to recreate what I heard in my head many, many years before. And I worked at it for weeks. And every time I would sing the songs, it seemed like they were just too modern. I knew that was not what I heard, what I learned. And I was about to give up and one day I walked into this little room where I had a tape recorder and had recorded 12 songs one after another. And I was hearing the voices in my head. And I thought how powerful it is that its come to me. Its all been filed away back there for 40 or 50 years and now I hear and now I have the time to reflect on how important that time was to me. And how important those people were to me and thirdly, how important the songs where. But those experiences were something that I wanted my children and grandchildren to know that I had had. I think that was a big part of the person I have become.

I personally think that it’s really important that the ballad tradition and the oral tradition continue for many reasons, but they’re all personal reasons. I can’t give you any scientific or….

That’s another reason it’s important for it to go on, because I get so much pleasure talking about it.
I could talk about building houses, but that’s not nearly as interesting.

Partial Transcript: My personal opinion that it’s important is that when we lose the ability to transfer our histories and our personalities to another person directly, we’ve lost what’s important in communication. For myself, if I could be so bold as to say that my family has been singing these songs in America for 350 years, I certainly should not be the one to stop it. And I hope that there are young people who want to carry on this tradition. I don’t feel there will be hundreds of people flocking to the ballad tradition. It’s too hard, it’s too time-consuming. It’s not something that you can learn in just a few minutes. I’m not saying there is a right or wrong way to sing it, just to learn the stanzas and the story, it takes a long time and people are not willing to do that. But I do know – and I met a young man the other day, he’s going to Mars Hill University, and he is very interested in learning the ballads. And he’s interested enough to come to events where there are ballads. He’s interested enough to contact me and ask if I’ll sit down and sing with him. I met a young man from California and he called me as asked if he could come and get a ballad lesson, and I said I guess… it’s a long way. He said he’s coming anyway. So we stayed up for a couple of hours and he learned to sing one ballad, knee-to-knee. But he took the time, and he was a musician and he learned quickly. So there are people who are interested and I’m very excited in helping anyone who wants to do it. But I don’t think that there’s going to be a huge revival in the ballads and I think that its future is precarious at best.

Partial Transcript: We stand to lose such an important part of who we are and how we became this person. The people who live in this country – this country made up of people from all over the world, the things that were important to our ancestors, the things that caused them to come here to begin with – are in a lot of these songs. I think that’s important to people. People love to read historical novels, people love to go visit where they think their ancestors came from… and I think that the ballads particularly, the love songs, are a concise history of what’s happened to us as American over the last four or five centuries. It deals with things like religion, like marrying out of your class, it deals with monarchies, with the unavailability of land or food. It deals with the human condition that’s dictated by the 1% of people who control all of the wealth.

This is not old stuff, this is all new, this is our here and now. And if we want to learn how our ancestors dealt with it, we need to listen to the love songs because it tells the story of that. It reminds us – to use the cliché – that history repeats itself. That nothing is changed…. In the 16th century – the most powerful person in the world was a woman. That could be repeated. Maybe now with Angela Merkel in German. The wealth distribution was about the same as it is now. People were and are still persecuted because of their religious beliefs, because of the color of their skin. It’s not new. We’re dealing with centuries and centuries of problems that we’ve not solved. We need to stop thinking about them as new problems, we need to look and see how long this has been going on. If you want to know about it, sing the ballads.