Phil Jamison

Partial Transcript: My name is Phil Jamison. I live just outside of Asheville. And I’m a traditional musician, play old-time music—fiddle, banjo, guitar. And I'm also a dancer. I do flatfoot dancing and clogging. And I call square dances. I teach at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, and I teach in the traditional music program there, teach some of those things there.

Partial Transcript: Well, as a teenager, I was playing guitar. And when I—by the time I was about nineteen or twenty, I'd pick up the banjo and found myself playing for a local dance. And at that time, I lived in New York State, and there's where the college was. And I was playing for a local dance. And one day, the dance caller didn’t show up, and somebody had to call. So I gave it a try, and I got involved in learning how to call square dances. Many of the dances that we're being done that I was finding were at VFWs and Grange halls. And fire halls and such. And they were just community dances, and I loved these dances and sought them out as much as I could. And in 1980, when I moved to Western North Carolina to join the Green Grass Cloggers, I continued seeking out dances and learning more as much as I could and continued with dance calling.

Partial Transcript: Well, for many years I was traveling on the road with the Green Grass Cloggers. This was a full-time professional clogging team. We went all across the US and overseas. And when we’d perform, people would say, Where is this? We play music as well as dance. And where is this music and dance from? And we would say, Oh, you know, the Scotch-Irish people brought this music and these music and dances with them to the mountains when they came over. And now, here it is. But it just—that never felt right. We knew there was African-American influence. I was playing the banjo, and the banjo has its roots in Africa. And some of the songs we were singing were blues or Tin Pan Alley songs and gospel songs. They certainly didn’t come from the British Isles. So it just didn’t seem right that the dances could have come intact from the British Isles and, 200 years later, be what we're doing today.
And I looked at the dances we were doing. And I understand that the settlers had jigs and reels. But now, we were doing square dances and clogging, and they have definitely changed. There's something that had changed, had transformed them. And just like the fiddle styles in the Southern Appalachians are different than what you'd find in the British Isles. There was something that changed it over and transformed it. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it. I'd heard of Cecil Sharp—the ballad collector—coming over here and coming across dances in Eastern Kentucky. And he was finding people singing the old ballads like Barbara Allen and such. And when he saw that—and he knew that those had the roots in British Isles. Of course, they do. But when he saw the dances, he just assumed the same was true with the dances. And that just—it just didn’t seem right to me. So I started doing some research and it took about a dozen or more years until I had a story to tell of where I think these dances came from.

Partial Transcript: Well, when we talk about traditional music, there are certainly vocal traditions, and there's instrumental traditions. And in the British Isles, the ballad tradition is generally a cappella—solo singing. It's not group singing. It's not accompanied with instruments. And that tradition certainly come over here intact. And people still sing many of the old ballads that can be traced back. But if you look at the vocal traditions here in the mountains, there are so many other elements to it—to that tradition—parlor songs from the 1800s, and Tin Pan Alley songs, and gospel songs, and shape note singing, and blue songs. And the instrument—many of those other traditions involved harmony singing. It involved backing up with an instrument which you didn’t—wouldn’t have found in the old ballad tradition. So that's something that changed in this country.
With the instrumental traditions, the earliest instrument that was brought across would have been the fiddle—and the fiddle or the violin as you might want to call it. And those instruments were certainly used for the dance music in the British Isles. And they were used in this country. This would have been the instrument that was used on the frontier for dances. There were no other instruments. And the reason the fiddle made it into this tradition is not only if you had a fiddle, it was small and easy to carry. But it was an instrument that could be manufactured on the frontier. The woods, you can go out and cut down trees. You could make the top out of spruce and the back out of maple, and the strings be made out of some kind of twisted catgut. And the bow would be a horse's tail. And those are all things that you could get anywhere you were. You didn’t have to have a factory to ship this instrument to you.
So people played homemade fiddles. They made them out of gourds and all kinds of things. So it was homemade music. And that was the instrument that was used for the dances initially. Later on, the African-derived banjo joined in the mix in the mid-1800s probably as a result of its popularity through minstrel shows. But, also, there were African-Americans living in the mountains who played the banjo. And the banjo in the fiddle made a fantastic combination. So by the late 1800s, you had banjos and fiddles played together. And accompanying with the banjo certainly would have changed some of the fiddling styles. And in fact, the African traditions not just in the banjo, but there were black fiddlers throughout the mountains too who contributed repertoire and stylings to the music. And that would have changed the music right there.
Some of the fiddle tunes that we play nowadays whether it's "Soldier's Joy" or "Billy in the Low Ground" or “Leather Bridges,” those certainly have roots in Scottish tunes. But there are so many others that we play that certainly didn’t come from the British Isles and very likely came from the black tradition in this country.

Partial Transcript: Well, "Cotton-Eyed Joe," "Liza Jane," "Cumberland Gap." I mean, probably the majority of the fiddle tunes that we play at dances did not come from British Isles. Every once in a while, there is one that you say, Oh yes, that one is one of the old ones from the British Isles, but most of them didn’t. Most of them are American creations. And when we say American creations, we have to assume that it's going to have some black influence because that is truly what made it American and separated it from the British tradition. That was what added certain syncopations, certain rhythms and so on to the music, and as well as the dances.
And in the late 1800s, once the railroad was built into the mountains, people could purchase mail-order instruments from Sears and Roebuck. And that's when you see guitars, and mandolins, and string bass, and other things coming in to fill out the band. So if you go to a square dance nowadays, you'll find all these instruments, uh, that did not come from the British Isles. And you see that the instrumental traditions just like the vocal traditions have radically changed over the last 200 years, and probably continue to change. And the dance traditions, the same could be said for those, and that the dance traditions are a hybrid, if you will, of different traditions, drawing from the British Isles, from Africa, and Native American.

Partial Transcript: In the early 20th century, much of the music and dance of the mountains was portrayed and promoted as being Anglo-Saxon. And it was done, I feel, with a certain agenda to portray the people of the mountains as this unbroken lineage from the British Isles, as the—our ancestors, our—and quotes, ancestors from the British Isles. And part of this portraying of the music was a direct result of—it was sort of a pushback against immigration. And this—here we are in 2017, we hear a lot about anti-immigrant proposals in Congress and pushback against immigration. The same thing happened in the late 1800s when many, many folks from Southern and Eastern Europe came to this country. And Italians, and Slavs, and Jews, and so many people were coming. And the old guard in the US sort of freaked out and said, Wait a minute. We are the real Americans, not these people coming in.
And this is when the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in 1890. This is when the Pledge of Allegiance was instituted in 1893 as a way to indoctrinate and assimilate these kids of the foreigners to being Americans. And at the same time, folk dancing began to be taught in public schools as a way to assimilate these new European kids to be real Americans. So initially, they started teaching European folk dance or folk dances from the British Isles thinking that our ancestors were from the British Isles. And at some point, somebody said, “Wait a minute. Why don’t we teach American folk dances? And just what our American folk dances, where can we find them?”
Well, some people looked to New England where they saw country dancing which was an old tradition dating back to the colonial times. Other people looked to the southern mountains where they said, "These are people who have been isolated for generations with no contact with the outside world. These are the true Americans—these Anglo-Saxons—who settled in the mountains. And around this time was when Cecil Sharp comes over from England to collect ballads. And he's hearing this from people such as the president of Berea College who was promoting this idea of the southern mountains being primarily Anglo-Saxon. And that's where these traditions were from.
So he was hearing that. And he was finding people singing the British ballads which they were certainly there. So he sort of wrapped it all up in one package. And even though he saw banjos and heard people singing blues, he completely ignored all that and just said this is English—Anglo-Saxon stuff.

Partial Transcript: Well, Cecil Sharp first came down here to the southern mountains because Olive Dame Campbell ahead of time had collected ballads in places she had visited with her husband, John Campbell. And she had shown her ballad collection to Cecil Sharp in Massachusetts. And the following year, he came down. And basically, the Campbells took them out to meet ballad collectors. What was interesting though is that Cecil Sharp really had this mission that dated back to when he was in England—is to promote English music and dance. He was concerned in England that people were not singing the old ballads anymore, that they were dying out. And he wanted to promote the English—the true English ballads and dance traditions. And when he heard that people in the southern mountains were actually still singing these old ballads that had died out in England. That's what got his interest to come down here. And that's what his mission was—to collect these and put them in a book so that, presumably, people back in England could revive this ballad tradition and have their heritage again even though most of them were from Scotland not England. That's beside the point. But that was his mission.
Unfortunately, when he came here, he was looking through the specific lens, and anything else he ignored or he would claim to be English. And a good example is the song "Swannanoa Tunnel" which is from here in Western North Carolina. It's about the railroad being built up from Old Fort in to—coming up through the gap into the Swannanoa Valley. And it was a tremendous engineering job. It was built with convict labor. At one point, the tunnel caved in killing huge numbers of African-American railroad workers. And the song emerged from that called the "Swannanoa Tunnel" about it's all caved in.
So when Cecil Sharp heard people collected this ballad in Black Mountain, he wrote it down—he thought it was an Old English ballad even though, clearly, it's related to John Henry and many other African-American blues railroad-type songs. But even so, he saw it as an English ballad and included it in his book which is ridiculous. Other places, he saw African Americans singing. There was a woman in Virginia—an African-American woman—who sang "Barbara Allen." Here—okay, so an African-American woman singing a Scottish ballad—that's interesting. But he didn’t seem to pick up on these things.
In Kentucky, some of the railroad towns, he wrote disparagingly of banjo players and blues music. This was something he did not want to see. So he basically ignored all that and only focused on what he was looking for which is understandable. I get that. But it's—and it's fantastic what he collected. I just—I'm so glad he did but I just wonder how much else he ignored and didn’t collect.

Partial Transcript: Right. So in the settlement schools which were funded and run by northern churches, there was this idea of preserving and re-instilling the culture—the Anglo-Saxon or British Isles culture—that maybe was disappearing from the mountains. People were starting to listen to radios. And people—well, actually it was before radios—but people were starting to pick up banjos and perhaps sing blues songs and hear other things—other types of music. And this did not fit with the model of these people from the British Isles here at the mountains who want to—we want to support. And part of this comes from the idea of fund raising—the president of Berea College—partly to raise funds for his school, portrayed the Appalachian mountain kids as pure Anglo-Saxon heritage—these poor kids in the mountains who come from good honest folk from the British Isles and can't afford a good education.
So you, northern church people, need to send your money down here to support these schools so they can come to Berea College and, along with the education, the idea of promoting Anglo-Saxon culture and ignoring the rest. That was part of the mission right there and making them good Presbyterians.

Partial Transcript: It's hard to say what lasting effects somebody like Cecil Sharp might have had on the mountain music and dance traditions or the settlement schools for that matter. They did certainly promote some of the ballad singing but times moved on, and radio came in. And people were hearing all kinds of other things. So yes, the ballad tradition did continue. But radio and commercial recordings brought in so many other styles of music that I think it's sort of overshadow what influenced a ballad collector might have had on the lasting tradition here on the mountains.
As far as dance goes, Cecil Sharp did document dances that he saw in Eastern Kentucky at the Pine Mountain Settlement School. And, of course, like everything else he claimed them to be English which they weren’t. They called them English country dances, and they named it the Kentucky Running Set. And that was picked up by the teachers at the school who were trying to promote English things. And here was the great Cecil Sharp claiming our local dances as English. So those dances were promoted along with Maypole dancing on May Day, and English country dancing, and so on. English sword dances, and Rapper dances, and Morris dancing and so on was instituted at the schools and then also at Berea College where, to this day, the Berea Country Dancers still perform some of these English dances that were promoted by Cecil Sharp.
So you could say that he had influence on those places. But for the greater region, I don’t think that those places influenced the greater—the traditions of the greater region.

Partial Transcript: In the days before the commercialization of the old-time mountain music traditions, it was community music. It was not a commodity. It was something you just did within your community either for your own entertainment or the entertainment of your family or the greater community. And music was part of community. And we talked about dances back then. They were community dances meaning it was a function of community. So many times after a work party, if you were raising a barn or bringing in the crop or making molasses or whatever, you get the community—friends, family, neighbors—together to do that work. And then typically, there’ll be food, and drink, and dancing, and music to follow up. And that was the function of it.
When it became commercialized at which would have been as early as the 1920s when radio and records started putting out this music, radio—the recording industry and the radio sort of leapfrogged a little bit as far as where it was reaching. What that did was change it, and commodify it, turn it into more of a—something you listen to, because if you're listening to the radio or a 78 RPM record, it's not something you're doing at a community function. It's something for your entertainment. And that fundamentally changed the style of music. And the musicians responded knowing that you don’t just play that same fiddle tune over and over and over and over again for entertainment. You'd have to do something more to make it catchier and more attractive through the radio or recordings. And that really changed the music.
And this is really what led to the development of bluegrass music from old time music, because the old time music is more dance-oriented. It was the music for dances. And bluegrass music, it became more of a stage show for a consuming audience that sits there and listens, and that you have to play it differently. There's—and the same happened with dances as well. Here in Asheville, Bascom Lamar Lunsford wanted to promote the Mountain music and dances. So they put them on stage for the tourists. And what that did is—particularly when you talk about the dances—is it turned it into a show rather than something you participate in.
And over the years, it's become more so, so it's—to many people was turned into clogging—is no longer people participating in a square dance, but it's a show of a performance on stage for an audience.

Partial Transcript: Well, the work parties took place across racial lines. And they were not just white people on the mountains, but they included black folks as well. And many of the—and if you think of it in the Deep South, in plantations where the work was done primarily by slaves, they would have been primarily African-Americans doing the corn shucking or bringing in the crops. And they would have their corn shucking frolics and dances following. In the mountains, the labor force was much more integrated. And they were free blacks in the mountains. They were slaves in the mountains. And they were many poor whites who would work side by side to bring in the crops.
So I find it interesting that in the mountains, perhaps the music and dancers were more integrated that they would have been in the Deep South where the work forces were more segregated by race. In the mountains where you have whites and blacks working together, you're more than likely to have interaction between the two and trading off of not just fiddle tunes, dance steps, dance figures, the banjo. And it went both ways. There were many black fiddlers. And there were white banjo players. And people learned from each other.

Partial Transcript: Well, in the mountains, they—the community was the social structure here and for a number of generations. And people were always coming and going. It wasn’t like—it was just one community that was here locked away from the world. So they had contact with the outside world. And people had come in, and other people would move on. But things changed dramatically in the 20th century. And particularly after the railroads came to the mountains and you have huge logging operations coming in to cut down the native forest. And you have—and with the—well, first of all before that, railroad African-Americans who built the railroads come in building the railroads. Then you have loggers coming from other parts of the country bringing their own music and dances and traditions with them. And you also have people from the mountains going to cities. You're leaving the farm either going to go work in the coal mines or moving—leaving there and going to northern cities. This huge out migration happened as well.
And that coincided with the advent of the recordings and the radio. So in a way the radio and recordings were a way for people that moved away to still be connected with the music of the mountains though the music was changing dramatically during that time period. But it really broke up the communities. I think also the development of better roads would have done the same thing too. In fact, better roads meant that people could move from one community to another more easily. And that meant that your local community was not quite so local anymore, but you could go to another communities, and that definitely changed things.

Partial Transcript: Right. So when people think of the hillbillies in the southern mountains, they often thing of white people. And that is the common impression. And it's true that there's not a lot of black folks in the mountains but what I discovered by looking at old census records that the proportion of blacks in the mountains used to be much higher than it is now. And in fact, the very first census in Asheville in 1800, one third of the population were slaves. One third. And there are only thirty-nine people, but one third. If you look at the census records, there they are. One third of the folks in Asheville in 1800 were slaves. And it was—it obviously took a lot of work to cut down all the tress and clear the land. And there was a lot of work to be done. The earliest settlers brought slaves with them. And it wasn’t like huge Southern Plantations but might be one or two slaves with a family to help get the work done.
And so there were certainly black folks in the mountains, and certainly Native Americans, Cherokee around here. Many of the Cherokee inter-married with whites very early on. So you have reports of people in a Cherokee village doing some of their own ceremonial dances. And then some of the reels and such from the British Isles—they would be doing as well. So things got mixed up very early on in the population. And it's unfortunate that when the music was commercialized, it was basically whitewashed. And part of this had to do with the record companies wanting to sell records. And the record companies were based in the north. And they were—recording was brand new industry. And they were trying to understand who we sell these records to.
And they thought that black people would buy records by black artist. And they thought that white people—white hillbillies would buy white hillbilly records. So as a way to market it, they created separate catalogues. For black folks—, they’re, you know, gospel and blues music. They had what they called race records. For the mountain music, they called—they had a hillbilly catalogue. So they had different—a different record catalogue for different types of music. And the records that they were trying to sell to the white hillbillies and the hillbilly catalogue, they weren’t looking for black musician.
So if you were a black fiddler, you didn’t stand a chance to get recorded unless you switched over and played blues or something that would be appropriate in the race record. So the music was very—became very segregated partly through the recording industry but also partly in the 1900s through the folk festivals to start it up. And Bascom Lamar Lunsford was trying to promote the music and dances of the Anglo-Saxons who settled here. Well, does he want to see black people up there on the stage? That doesn’t really fit with the image that we're trying to sell. And so black folks were not invited to perform at the mountain dance and folk festival. They just weren’t.
I found one instance of a little kid who was a tap dancer one year who, sometime I think in the 1940s, performed, but that was it. For all those generations of that festival, it was just white performers. And what message that sends to the black community is you're not valued in this kind of music. And African-American folks in Western North Carolina today don’t realize that it's part of their heritage too.

Partial Transcript: Right. So a common perception is that the settlers who came from the British Isles got off the boat in Philadelphia. And all the land in Eastern Pennsylvania was taken up by Germans. So they kind of funneled west and south down through the Shenandoah Valley, the great valley, looking for land to settle. And there were Germans, and Scotch-Irish sort of leapfrogged finding new lands. And we always think about the settlement coming in from the northeast, coming into the mountains. And that is where the people came from. But once they were here, there was also what I think of as a backdoor to the region which is the river system. And if you look at maps showing the rivers that flow out of Appalachia, they all go down to the west. They'll go down to the Ohio River and, from there, to the Mississippi and down in New Orleans.
And what I discovered was that that is how people got their goods to market. Before you had highways and railroads, people would build these tremendously long flat boats—80 feet long or something. And they'd load them up with all their corn, and wheat, and hogs, and whiskey, and whatever else they want to sell. Wait for the high water in the spring, they would float down the rivers to the Ohio, to the Mississippi. They would take weeks to get down there. And there was a lot of music that was played along the way—I discovered. And once they get to New Orleans, they sell the boat—sell all the goods. They sell the boats for lumber. And they walk home up the Natchez Trace, 450 miles to Nashville, and then back up to the mountains.
And it wasn’t dozens of people, but hundreds of people did this every single year. So the idea of this isolated English-Saxons here in the mountains who were still maintaining the old traditions with no outside accesses is crazy. People were coming and going. And a lot of the fiddle tunes that we play have river names like "Mississippi Sawyer" is a good example of one. The rivers had a huge influence—the trade and travel and immigration to and from the region. And I think that that cannot be overlooked, that there was this direct connection with New Orleans which was French territory. So maybe, it's not surprising that there's influence from French dances too in the mix.

Partial Transcript: When the railroads were built into the mountains, it certainly—the railroad certainly brought in African-American railroad workers, mine workers, lumber camp people, and just opened the region up not only for people coming, and going but for goods—mail-order instruments from Sears Roebuck catalog. The reason we play mandolins here in the mountains is because there were a lot of Italian immigrants in New York City at that time who wanted mandolins. And the same Sears Roebuck catalog that went to them came here to the mountains.
So people here in the mountains were seeing this catalog with these mandolins and ordering them as well. So it brought in lots of instruments—autoharps too and many other manufactured instruments and goods and certainly changed the music traditions. There's no doubt about it. But also in terms of access, I find it amazing is that back in the day, you could take a train from Asheville to Swannanoa or to Black Mountain several times a day. And Cecil Sharp could hop on a train in New York City and get off in Asheville or Black Mountain or Swannanoa—any place.
So trains could really get people around. Some of the—Samantha Bumgarner from Jackson County who was a banjo player and singer went to New York City in 1924 to make a 78 RPM recordings. I don’t know the story behind it. But you could hop on a train and be in New York without too much trouble. So this idea of people being completely isolated is just not true. Sure, some parts there are some pockets where people don’t get out as much but that doesn’t mean that nobody gets out.

Partial Transcript: So the minstrel show—the blackface minstrel shows of the mid-1800s started up in the 1840s. They were really America's first musical stage production show. And what it was—what they were is white guys putting on black face to portray the music of southern blacks. And this, of course, was before the Civil War. And there are people who are curious about the music and dances of the slaves on Southern Plantations. Some of the early minstrel show performers come from the Ohio River Valley where there was, as I've said, a lot travel and interaction between races, black and white musicians trading things off. And this were some of the inspiration for some of the early minstrel performers.
The first fully pledged minstrel show started in New York City. And they were playing to northern urban audiences. And the typical instruments they would use would be a fiddle, a banjo, a tambourine and bones. And in addition to portraying the music, they developed characters who turned into sort of grotesque parody of southern black culture, and a very cruel one. But northern audiences found it very amusing and entertaining. And these prompted other minstrel show groups to do similar things. And they become touring around the country. And there are songs in our music repertoire that come directly from this like "Turkey in the Straw" and "The Arkansas Traveler" that were played in minstrel shows in the 1840s.
And a lot of the minstrel shows no doubt had a lot to do with getting these musical traditions spread and fed back into the tradition. So you have people in the southern mountains hearing minstrel shows and adopting some of that music as their own. So it fed back into the culture. But it was a very strange era in American entertainment and one that still has ripple effects in today's pop culture.

Partial Transcript: So minstrel shows perhaps surprisingly were not only popular with white audiences, but black audiences appreciated them too. And at some point—well, pretty early on, the white performers would sort of outdo themselves as being—trying to be the authentic interpreters of black music. And at some point, (laughs) black musicians said, Wait a minute. We are the authentic ones. Why aren’t we up there? And this was really the first opportunity for black performers on stage.
What's interesting though is that the black performers put on black face—blackened their faces as well and basically reenacted the same shtick that the white performers had created. So here, you have African-Americans in black face imitating white people in black face or imitating black people. So you talk about music and dance and culture going back and forth that happened. And this was the first opportunity for black performers on stage. And I have to say to this day when you see black comics in films or on TV, there's elements of minstrel shows still there.

Partial Transcript: One of the things about minstrel shows is that they—it wasn’t only African-Americans they were making fun of. They also did parodies of Jewish people and all kinds of other ethnic groups. So whether it was just sort of over the top stage satire and parody of any ethnic minority or anybody you can ridicule.

Partial Transcript: So the Native American influence on the Appalachian music and dance traditions are a little bit harder to trace because at a very early point in time, there was a lot of inter-marriage between European-Americans and Native Americans but there are certainly instances of—that I've come across of Native Americans picking up the European violin and playing for dances. So—and as early, I think it was like the 1600s of fiddler and main played for dances—a Native American fiddler. And I found other references to Native American fiddlers obviously further south. And here in Western North Carolina, some of the great fiddlers of the early 20th century where Native American.
So they certainly—there were certainly interchange across cultures there. One thing I find sort of interesting is that Native American flute music never made it in—never had an influence on the Appalachian tradition. And that's always been a little bit of a puzzle to me but—so as far as musically goes, it seems more one-way coming from Europe rather than Native American influencing. That's harder to say. As far as the dance goes, early Native American dances were often described as stop dances, kind of heavy footed dances—typically done in a circle format. And there are some of the Appalachian square dance figures that we do, that are in a circle format. Some of the spiraling type moves that perhaps were influenced by Native American dancing.
And some of the earliest clogging teams came out of Cherokee and Soco Gap. And they were performing here in Asheville. So it's very hard to say exactly what the Cherokee influence is but it appears that there is some. And it certainly was Cherokee participation in these traditions.

Partial Transcript: Well, certainly drums were involved in Native American music. But that I don’t think I could find a trace of that in our current musical traditions. The drum—drumming in our music doesn’t exist. It was also eliminated from black culture after slave rebellion pretty early on where white slave owners thought that the slaves were communicating with drums. So drums were outlawed through the southeast and Southern Plantation. So drumming—perhaps that's why we don’t have drumming in the music. I don’t know. The drumming—the percussiveness comes from the footwork of the dancers. And to sort that out a little bit, Native Americans and Africans did not dance with hard soled shoes on wooden floors. Europeans did.
So when you look at the dance steps most likely the ones that are highly percussive would have come from the European tradition as opposed from Africa or Native Americans. And some of the other steps that are perhaps more sliding or shuffly could come from those other traditions.

Partial Transcript: In Africa, the ring form was a very common form of the dances, and which makes total sense around the world, you'll find people dancing in circles, whether it's around a fire or whatever in a communal setting. The idea of dancing in lines and squares is probably more from the European tradition where you have buildings that are square or rectangular. But the—one Appalachian figure that I found—that I believe does have African roots is the dance figure called Bird in the Cage. And this is one that is very much associated with the Southern Appalachian tradition. You don’t find it in New England dances. It's definitely from this region.
And the earliest reference to it that I found was from a slave narrative—someone who was a slave in the Deep South talking about the plantation dances and talking about the Bird—doing the Bird in the Cage. That's the earliest reference I found to it on the Southern Plantation. And, yeah, if you look in the European tradition which is where Cecil Sharp said it came from, he said it was some English pagan sacrificial dance, something like that. There's no—nothing in the English country dance or British dance tradition that resembles it at all. But if you'll go to Africa, there a number of instances of rings of dancers with a single dancer in a ring imitating a bird. And to me, that seems to be the clear ancestor of the Bird in the Cage figure which is now done by people all over the country.

Partial Transcript: Playing music for a social gathering used to be the role of a servant, Old King Cole called for his fiddlers three. And in this country, the servants were black. There were certain white fiddlers who played for family and friends at community—small community gatherings. But if it was a public dance, what I discovered, what surprised me is that the fiddlers invariably were black or Native American, but more likely black. And this goes way back to colonial times. And when you think about it that makes sense is that if you were African-American whether you were free or enslaved and you're in this country, if you learned how to play that European fiddle and play the music for the white people and wanted to dance too, you would be in a better position in life.
You wouldn’t be out there working in the fields. You would be playing in the big house for the white people. You would be given better education, sometimes musical education supplied with an instrument. And so I found instances of black fiddlers playing for white dancers going way back to the 1600s. And this was throughout the US, not just in the south but in the north as well and in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island—everywhere. It was black people playing music for white people. And they—in Africa, there's actually a fiddling tradition that goes way back to the 13th century. So the idea of bowing an instrument was not foreign to folks from Africa. But if you learn the European’s violin and learn that style of music, you'd be in a better place. And what I see happening is that the musical styles changed in this country so that the fiddle tunes had elements to them that were not found in the British Isles. And that would have been the—whether it's syncopation, syncopated bowing patterns and other things that would have been added by these black fiddlers.
If you look at advertisements for runaway slaves, many of them refer to so and so being an excellent fiddler, some of that was banjo player too but fiddlers. And an enslaved person who could play music for the white people was highly valued and was just—had a better place in life. If you recall the film that won the Academy award a few years ago, 12 Years a Slave, that tells a story of Solomon Northup who was born a free black in Saratoga Springs, New York. He played violin for dances at the balls at Saratoga. He was captured into slavery, sold to the Deep South. And it was his playing the fiddle that saved him, kept his sanity, put him in a better place. And eventually twelve years later, he was able to convince someone of his—that he actually was a free man. But that—Solomon Northup was one of those fiddlers, one of the black fiddlers. And these black fiddlers were in the mountains as well. So certainly, it would have influenced the white fiddling tradition.

Partial Transcript: So the fiddle that we play for our dances is basically the European violin which did not originate in the British Isles but came from Italy. So you think of these Italian violins being developed and then spreading out from there. And they came to the new world. And they came to the British—it wasn’t that they just came from the British Isles and was there for many generations and then were transferred over. But the fiddling traditions grew up at both places at the same time. So Alan Jabbour referred to them as being cousins rather than a direct—a descendant these fiddling traditions.
And so, they certainly have things in common. But the fiddling that you would hear in Ireland today has evolved in the last couple of hundred years, just as the fiddling over here has evolved. And they've evolved in different ways. The fiddling over here more—obviously influenced by other traditions such as the black tradition.

Partial Transcript: So if we compared... the fiddling traditions from the British Isles to those of United States and in Southern US in particular, there are certainly distinctive differences. And one is in the British Isles, they—the tunes are more—I could say more melodic. And in the southern fiddling tradition, they're more rhythmic which is likely a direct result of the African influence. I find it very interesting that Cecil Sharp, when he was documenting dances in Eastern Kentucky, complained about the fiddle music he was hearing as being, I think, he said melodically impoverished. And he just found these tunes over here just not as melodic as the ones he was used to, and that's probably true. They were more rhythmic.
And he suggested substituting some proper English tunes in their place as a proper accompaniment to the dances. But the music had evolved in the generations before he showed up. And some of the African-American tunes that are thought to have derived from African-American music, some of them had shorter parts and more repetitive parts. The English and British Isles tunes are very structured, are structured that way, because the dances were structured that way. In the Southern US, the dances—the tunes were structured the way dances are structured, meaning not structured. The dances are much more free form and which allows the fiddlers to play crooked tunes, having drop beats or extra beats or extra parts. And the rhythm is the most important thing. The beat rather than the phrasing of the tune is important. So that the dance traditions really would have shaped and guided the development of the music.

Partial Transcript: So in the 1920s once the radio came in, all of a sudden, you can have people hearing music from outside their local community. And this was a big deal. And the same with recordings too when they came in. I often fantasized what it would be like to have grown up in an era where the only music you ever heard was that that was played lived right then and there. Can you imagine what that would have been like if you've never heard recorded music, you never heard the radio? The only music you've ever heard was being played live. And what that would mean is how you would value that musician who has this magic to make this music. And I think it must have had a huge effect in communities that our music makers are extremely valued people and would have a huge amount of respect for people who could actually make this music.
And I'm sure that would inspire the next generation to pick up an instrument and do it too because you see your elders getting that kind of treatment. And when the music was commercialized through radios and recordings—I don’t know. It had different effects. Did it make it—did it cheapen it that all you had to do is turn the radio on or put the needle on the record, and there you have your music? We don’t need live musicians anymore. Or did it, through hearing other musical styles, encourage more people to pick up instruments and play? And I'm sort of—I don’t know what the answer is to that—which way it is. But it certainly opened up people's repertoires to hearings so much more kind of music—different kinds of music. And when you hear those other kinds of music, you hear a song you like on the radio or on a record, you make it part of your own. And that's really when a lot of regional fiddle styles changed.
The earliest 78s that were recorded in the 1920s, the ones from North Georgia are totally different than the ones from Kentucky or from Tennessee or from wherever you want to go because there were certainly regional styles. But then once everybody started learning everybody else's music, it became more homogenized. And you don’t hear those styles quite so much today. Nowadays, anybody can—anybody around the world can tune into YouTube, and learn a tune from Western North Carolina. So it’s not regional anymore.

Partial Transcript: In the 1920s, when, really, radio stations were starting up, they were initially thought—it was initially thought that all people wanted to hear was, uh, like classical music or opera. And it was sort of a revelation when a few stations started having some rural fiddlers Hillbilly type of entertainment on there and realized that this was really popular. And in the 1920s, several stations started up what they called barn dances. And these were not actual dances. They were just radio variety shows that featured country music—fiddlers, banjo players and singers and so on.
And one of the most influential ones was WLS in Chicago which had the Chicago which had the Chicago Barn Dance, WLS being sponsored by Sears Roebuck—World’s Largest Store. And a number of musicians from the southern mountains went to Chicago and performed there. And their music was heard across the country. And so that certainly would get this kind of music spread out. But also in Nashville, the predecessor of the Grand Ole Opry—that WSM in Nashville. What became the Grand Ole Opry was the idea of having rural fiddlers, banjo players, string bands play on radio and they found it was tremendously popular with rural audiences.
So within a few years, there were radio barn dance programs and country music programs all over the country. Here in Asheville, WWNC had a station where Bill Monroe was playing on, you know, in the very maybe first year of being Blue Grass Boys, early days of bluegrass music. And the radio certainly shaped the traditions of what kind of music was popular on the radio. It wasn’t just fiddle tunes for square dancing, but more vocal oriented things. And not a cappella ballad singers either. It was the popular thing in the 1930s were brother duets—the Blue Sky Boys, The Monroe Brothers, the Callahan Brothers and on and on, the Delmore Brothers. That was the popular thing. And you’d have typically guitar and mandolin duo singing—doing maybe an early morning show for the farmers and maybe an evening show—whatever.
And then I think that back then, you should do early morning show and then do evening shows in the region—maybe at a local school house and then, be back to do the early morning show. And they’d be on this radio station for six months and they'd move to Atlanta and be on one. They’d move to Charlotte and be on one. And that was the gig that musicians had in the thirties.

Partial Transcript: So these radio stations were limited in how many watts they could broadcast except across the Mexican border. And so this—as a result of these certain stations one called XERA that was built right across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. And this was a station that—I forgot—where there a million watt services—huge amount—that the FCC had no control over. It was part of the Mexican government’s way to get back at the US for capping all the good airwave bands. But this was a station that was run by a quack doctor, John Brinkley, who’s actually from here in Western North Carolina originally. And he promoted an early form of treating male erectile dysfunction by implanting goat testicles into men. And this is what—and he was being shut down by medical examiners in this country. This guy didn’t even have a medical license, and he was doing this. But the way to promote this bogus operation was through this radio program. And he brought down entertainers such as the Carter Family to perform. And then he would do advertisements for his hospital where men would come, get rejuvenated.
And so I thought it was very strange that, here, you have the Carter Family from Southwest Virginia. You think of this family a wholesome group from back in the hills. They’re down there promoting this strange operation at this hospital across the Rio Grande. And this station was so powerful that you could hear it from Nova Scotia to the Northwest.

Partial Transcript: Right. There are places in Western North Carolina where people have promoted what we’ve heard tune that was mountain music which would include all-time and bluegrass to promote it in a music venue not so much for dancing anymore, but more for listening. And, uh, these places typically on a Friday or Saturday night will have different bands show up. Oftentimes, it’s like an open mic where you can go and sign up for a slot, and they’ll give you ten minutes to get up there and play.
They are good events, and they do build a certain sense of community for the people who come to those. And there’ll be some people who’ll be there every weekend, uh, to hear people play. And sometimes, there’s some dancing, sometimes people will get up and do a little flatfooting. They don’t really do square dances. Sometimes, they’ll have a cakewalk as a way to raise some money or raffle of a cake. Um, and they tend to be—the people who I see at those places tend to be either older people or their grandchildren. And the middle range—the twenty-somethings—probably wouldn’t be caught dead there. But that’s sort of the ages that I see. And they do build some community. But it’s not like it was back in the day when the community was really local, because you have people driving from, you know, whether an hour away or whatever to go to these. But in a way, they create a community there.

Partial Transcript: So there’s a tradition here in the mountains of having cakewalks. And the cakewalk is basically a way to raffle off cakes and raise some money for whatever event you're at. Sometimes you see them at school dances or fire halls or local music venues. And the basic idea is the band on stage plays some music, and everybody antes up a dollar, say. And then you’d go around the big single-file circle at some point. The music stops and they’d draw a number out of a hat or however they want to decide it. And somebody wins a cake, basically takes the cake. And that’s where that expression comes from that takes the cake.
But—and these—you’ll find cakewalks are done not just here in Western North Carolina, but people do them across the country at small rural dances. And they have a very interesting background, is that the cakewalk in this country started out on Southern plantations as with African—enslaved African-Americans imitating the dances of the white folks in the big house.
Slaves were aware of the dances—the so-called sophisticated proper dances that the white folks were doing—and provided music for those dances in many cases. And after hours, parodied them and had a satire, had fun making fun of the white folks. So they would do the same kind of promenading round, you know, looking all important, and just mocking the white people. And the plantation owners would observe these dances sometimes and think that the slaves couldn’t dance any better. And they find it very amusing. And the idea was we'll award the cake to the most outrageous dancer or most outrageous couple. And it sort of became this tradition of winning a cake with the most outrageous dancing you could do.
When minstrel shows started up, this tradition of the cakewalk was transplanted to the minstrel show stage. And you have white people, white guys, in black face imitating Southern slaves doing outrageous dancing and, you know, as sort of a staged production of a cakewalk. And when African-Americans got involved with minstrel shows, you have African-Americans in black face imitating the white guys in black face or imitating the southern Slaves or imitating the white aristocracy back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And it became such a rage in the country in the late 1800s that you have competitions starting up—stage competitions at Madison Square Gardens and other places—of a cakewalk with big prizes whether it’s a gold watch or whatever more than just simply a cake. And you had white couples participating in this as well. So—and people are getting cakewalk lessons. Everybody wanted to learn the cakewalk even the Vanderbilts wanted to learn the cakewalk. And so you have white people imitating the black people imitating the white guys and black face imitating the slaves imitating the white aristocracy. And it just goes back and forth across racial lines multiple times trading this idea of a cakewalk winning a cake by your dancing. And now, it’s just sort of evolved into this rural tradition of its way to raffle off a cake. But it’s still called a cakewalk.

Partial Transcript: Well, to people who would claim that bluegrass music is a direct descendant of the music from the British Isles, I would point out the prominence of the African-derived banjo, the Italian mandolin, the Spanish guitar, the Hawaiian slide steel guitar, Dobro. Those instruments certainly were not part of the music of the British Isles. So, yes, you could say that some of the fiddle tunes that bluegrass bands play could be traced back to the British Isles, "Billy in the Lowground" would be a good example. But there are a lot of bluegrass bands who play "Angelina Baker" which is not a British Isles tunes, but is definitely American, proudly black minstrel show tune. It just doesn't work to say that this music comes from the British Isles or from Irish music. They share certain elements and were influenced by some of the same fiddle traditions, but there’s so much more going on in bluegrass music.
The—let alone, if you think about the vocals in bluegrass music, a lot of the vocal harmonies come from shape-note singing and from black gospel singing too. So you’ll be—I just don’t see that you can say that it has that direct connection.

Partial Transcript: Something else about bluegrass music that a lot of people are aware of is that Bill Monroe who is the father of bluegrass music, as a kid, learned a lot of his music from an African-American musician, Arnold Schultz, who was a fiddler and guitar player. And Bill Monroe if he was sitting here beside me, he would tell you that a lot of the blues in bluegrass comes from that tradition.
Now, Bill Monroe, before there was bluegrass music, played with his brother, Charlie, as the Monroe Brothers. And they were one of these brother duets of the 1930s who played at different places from Chicago to Atlanta to Asheville on different radio stations singing duets with mandolin and guitar. And this—the mandolin guitar in this kind of duet singing was really the foundation of what became the bluegrass band. This is in the 1930s. When he formed the Blue Grass Boys—I mean he calls it the Blue Grass Boys, because Bill Monroe was from Kentucky, the Bluegrass State. But he added—had a fiddle and a base player added at first even before he had a banjo. The first banjo he had was a clawhammer banjo and then eventually met up with Earl Scruggs and added the three-finger classic bluegrass style banjo. So it wasn’t really until the mid-1940s that that bluegrass ensemble came into being. And—but the core of it is this brother duet—mandolin and guitar duet—from ten years earlier.

Partial Transcript: Let’s see. So it’s been about a hundred years—close to a hundred years since this music—traditional mountain music was first recorded and made available, commercialized on 78 records and radio. And what we’re seeing now is sort of a repeat of that story. What the records and radio did was it made the music available in this new format, and commercialized it, and made it available no matter where you lived pretty much, and homogenized a lot of the local traditions. So you could be living anywhere you wanted and you could play North Georgia style fiddle. You didn’t have to live in North Georgia.
And so now a hundred years later, we have obviously the internet and YouTube. And you can be anywhere in the world. You don’t have to access to buy that record. You’ll be close enough to that radio station. You can tune in from anywhere and download from anywhere. And I think that has taken it one step further or maybe a giant step further. So it’s far beyond the local community. It’s beyond international borders now, and that you can live anywhere in the world and learn this music. What it does though is it sort of boils it down to just the notes without the cultural context. And it divorces it from the community and the culture where it originated.
And okay, so it’s okay on one level. But to me, it is so much more about the culture of this region and the community of this region where the music—we could say where it comes from. But it doesn’t all come from here. Go back 300 years ago, it wasn’t here. So it’s evolved over the last 200 years to be what it is here now. And it does have a place here. So I find it interesting that, you know, I haven’t tried this recently, but I used to be—I could sort of detest how much music and dance is part of a local culture. I would go, say, to our local grocery store—Ingles—and ask the person—the kid bagging groceries, “Do you know what a clogger is?”
And if you do that around here, I think it would still hold true that people, Yeah, I know what a clogger is. If you leave this region, go to other parts of the country, a clogger, you talk about plumbing problems. What are we talking about here? So the fact that the kid bagging the groceries at the grocery store still knows what a banjo is and knows what this kind of dance is tells me that it’s still—even though everybody doesn’t participate in it, they’re still aware of it. It’s still part of the local culture.
And when you get on the internet and you go through YouTube, it does remove that. And anybody anywhere can learn this music out of its context. Uh, on the one hand, it’s great that it means that anybody can learn it, but it changes it. It just removes that one step further from where it came from.

Partial Transcript: In many ways, the music and culture of Appalachian represents America. And it is a melting pot. It’s not just transplanted British Isles culture. But it has Native American and African-American and French and German and English and Scottish all in the mix and more. So it is a culture that developed that is distinctly American. You can’t say that it’s African. You can’t say that it’s English. You can’t say that it’s Scottish. It’s none of those things, but it’s truly American. And I see that it’s that combination of the cultures that is what makes America America. You know, there’s always going to be pushback to immigration at certain times and a certain nativist sediments come up that people don’t want newcomers coming and xenophobic fears.
But, you know, America’s been about immigration since people started coming over here and stealing the lands away from Native Americans. It's been about immigration. And that’s why when we go out to dinner, what do we go for? Pizza, Chinese, Mexican? How about that? We think of those as American cuisine now. They’re not from the British Isles. So the music and dance of Appalachia is really, in my mind, a good case study of what America is all about.

Partial Transcript: I think an important message is to in looking at this music and dance is to realize there’s a story behind it. And things did not just come out of thin air. And when you hear someone playing music or you see someone dancing, there's a history behind it. And it wasn’t a craft this person just got from who knows where. It has to come from somewhere. And if you trace things back, you find that oftentimes the roots are forgotten. And we talked about the invisibility of African-Americans in this culture and these traditions. That’s part of it right there. We wouldn’t have this music and these dances the way we do it if it weren’t for that influence. But you don’t see that nowadays. You see a white guy up there playing the banjo in bib overalls. You don’t realize that the banjo has its roots in Africa.
So I think it’s very important to look at where the stuff comes from, um, the fact that the Pledge of Allegiance was instituted in 1893 as a way to assimilate children of European immigrants. And nowadays, everybody grows up with the Pledge of Allegiance as if it’s always been here. No. It was put here for a specific reason and became part of what we do here in America. So I just think that looking back on our history can inform a lot.

Partial Transcript: What do we lose? You could wonder why is it important to dig in the past and understand where these things come from. Why can't we just play the fiddle tunes and dance and enjoy it for what it is? It is important to understand where it comes from because it—I think it can inform us as far as where we go into the future to realize that things are not—the culture is not static. And it’s constantly changing. And we incorporate new things along the way that within a generation or two become part of the tradition. You know I have seen bumper stickers and say bluegrass music old as the hills, you know, age to perfection.
Well, I’m almost as old as bluegrass music, you know. It evolved right before I was born. So it’s not that old. But it just takes a few generations for people to forget where stuff comes from. And I think that each generation adds their particular step to it as the tradition keeps changing. And I think to just understand who we are as a culture, understand where it comes from is important.

Partial Transcript: When we do square dances, there’s someone up on the stage typically in front—behind the microphone to call out the dance moves and queue the dancers when to do things. That’s part of the square dance tradition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-si-dodo-si-do, swing your partner, promenade and all that. And this is something that’s not found in the European tradition at all. In Europe, people learn the dances more formally by going to dancing school and you learn what to do and then you go to the ball and they say, We’re going to do such a quadrille or dance now and the music starts and you do it.
I was also curious as a dance caller, where does tradition comes from. And so I started looking at the earliest references to dance calling. And what I found is the earliest one I could find was 1819 in New Orleans, a black musician who was calling out the figures. And the European observer who wrote about this said said—remark to how odd and how strange this tradition was. And many—the other earlier references to dance calling, they're all black fiddlers in the 1820s across the country who remarked—European observers remarking this strange American custom of calling out the dance moves. And what I realized is that dance calling comes from the black tradition just like the banjo. And it was a way for African-Americans to do the same European—the dances that the European white folks were doing. And there were black fiddlers playing for the dances, playing for dancing masters at dancing schools obviously aware of the dance figures.
And then the references to African-Americans doing the same dances, but slaves were not sent to dancing schools. So how could they be doing the same dances? The only way was to call out the figures which is certainly part of the African-American—African tradition of call and response in the music. And dance calling, what it did was it took the dances away from the dancing masters. It turned them into folk dances. And it allowed the dances to be transformed as new things got added, became a folk tradition, and enabled the dances to travel west with the settlers and bring these dances anywhere you want to go. You didn’t have to go to dancing school anymore. And that’s one of the most surprising things that I discovered in my dance research, is that until somebody can show me an example of a white caller earlier, I’m sticking with the notion that the first dance callers were black.