Betty Smith Discussion and Concert

Partial Transcript: Introduces the program.

Partial Transcript: Betty Smith is one of the keynote saviors of ballad music in the Southern Appalachians, having extensively researched traditional music through oral histories of the North Carolina mountains and turning them into written history. Smith was a ballad singer first, a musician and teacher, and then a playwright and author. She plays the violin, psaltery, guitar, autoharp, and her beloved dulcimer.

How many people know what a psaltery is? Um, we have some smart people here. She’s, well, Betty is going to talk more about psaltery.

Smith was the talented daughter of a shape note and ballad-singer father and was brought up into a singing family. Her voice has been described as the purest, most beautiful, like a cup of herbal tea, clear as a mountain stream, and becomes an instrument as much as the one she’s playing. She has performed in concert halls, classrooms, workshops, and festivals. In Smith’s career, she taught and wrote music curriculum for early childhood education for public and private schools; taught in dulcimer workshops; taught Appalachian music courses; was a visiting artist at schools and colleges and universities; and planned county music festivals. She was awarded numerous awards. She has undergrad and masters degrees, and in 2008 was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters by Mars Hill University in Mars Hill.

Partial Transcript: Well, we were, we can talk about traditional music today and that’s traditional music. Some people call those “false-true love songs,” and they’re probably more false-true love songs than any other kind of songs in the southern mountains, except maybe fiddle tunes. But these are what we call traditional and they are what we call in oral tradition. Now sometimes I think the best explanation of what this is is it’s a literature of the mind.

When people came here, they brought the things of the mind and spirit with them, and it wasn’t just, it wasn’t just the songs and ballads and stories--it was everything that we know how to do today. It was how to farm, how to, how to cook and preserve food, how to sew and spin and weave, and how to treat people who are sick. But this is all, all of this oral tradition is, that was the beginning of everything we know today. Ah, Carl Sandberg wrote in, a, in Remembrance Rock, he said, “If a nation…falls, if a civilization or a society perishes, one thing may always be found. They forgot where they came from and they forgot what brought them along.” So this is, this to me is the music that brought us along, and, a, I think that, a, what, what I would like to do is to tell you a little bit about why we know so much about the music from the mountains.

When people first came to this country in, well in colonial days, they came mostly from the British Isles, Scotland, England. They came in the East Coast and this pretty much set up the language and the kind of music. But then in the 1700s they came by the boatload from Ulster, the Scots-Irish. William Penn said, “Come to North America,” and they came from Germany, lots came from Germany, but a lot of them came from, from Ulster. And they were, some were English, some were lowland Scots, who had, had moved into the Ulster area the, a, in the century before.

Well, in time, whether, maybe land got scarce, for whatever reason, they moved down the mountains, down through Virginia, down into, to North Carolina, and I’m sure nobody called themselves “mountaineers.” They were just people who lived in the mountains. For this, in time, industrialization meant that towns grew up and roads were built and railroads were built and rural areas got cut off from, from those, a, towns, and it wasn’t just in the mountains, it was any rural area. Same thing was true in Eastern North Carolina. Same thing was true in New England. They have mountains in New England, a, but anywhere it was really a rural area, and so wherever people, a, pretty much cut off from other kinds of music, then they’re probably gonna’ keep singing what they know.

Partial Transcript: But I don’t know, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a woman by the name of Emma Bell Miles. but if you want to read a book about what it was like in the mountains in 1905, read Emma Bell Miles’ Spirit of the Mountains. Emma Bell lived over on the mountain up from Chattanooga, and she was, she was an artist, she was a writer. She had a, a very hard life because she had a lot of children and if you saw, some of you, I understand, saw the movie, The Songcatcher. If you did, you know, you saw Emma Bell Miles. They didn’t give her any credit but she was in that movie. She was the artist. She was the one who had all the children and although her husband did not, was not unfaithful and did not got, get shot by the other woman, her husband was not a good provider, and so Emma Bell had a hard life trying to, to make, make life for her children better.

But, a, what Emma Bell said in 1905 was, “Nearly all mountaineers are singers. Their untrained voices are of good timbre. The women spin sweet and high and tremulous, and their sense of pitch and rhythm, remarkably true.” Now this is, this is the first thing that we’re really reading about how people, everybody sang.

Partial Transcript: And then the next one we hear about is Olive Dame Campbell, and those of you who’ve been to John C. Campbell Folk School in, a, in Brasstown, that’s the same Olive Campbell. Well, Olive Campbell was from New England and John Campbell, a, his father had come from Scotland, but John was born in this country, had been to seminary, but he’d never been a preacher. He had always been into education. And so he, a, Olive and John, in 1908 they packed up a covered wagon and set out to do, a, social research in the southern mountains. And one of the very first places they went to—they weren’t missionaries--what they wanted to know about was, they wanted to know the lifestyle; they wanted to know about, a, the economy. They were interested in every part of life in the southern mountains.

Partial Transcript: They went to Highlands Settlement School in Kentucky. And it was winter; it was December; it was snowing; and, after supper, they asked Olive if she would like to hear some ballads. Well, now, Olive was from New England, and she knew ballads. She had sung Barbara Allen. But that night, a young girl by the name of Ada Smith sat down on a low stool by the fire. She had a little banjo, which she strummed easily, and then she started to sing. Well, she sang Barbara Allen, but this didn’t sound like any Barbara Allen that Olive had ever heard. It was modal and she, she was just, it changed her life. She said that from then on, she looked for songs everywhere she went.

Partial Transcript: Well, at that time in the mountains, there were some, there were a lot of people working in the southern mountains, and so she met up with, a, the teachers and all of those people working in the mountains and that’s how Olive found out where to find singers.

Frances Goodrich (?) had started a school, a _______ school, in the weaving industry in what is called the laurel country, and that’s the country along the North Carolina/Tennessee border, and what you call rhododendron, local people call laurel. Well, Frances Goodrich is called the Godmother of the Southern Highland Guild. That was kind of the beginning.

And then Warren Wilson was the Rural Life Director of the Presbyterian Church, and all these people worked through the Presbyterians in Asheville except for the, the Campbells. They were founded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Now, a, Olive, in time, had collected 225 songs and ballads, and it wasn’t easy. She played piano, but now playing piano and writing down tunes are two different things. But she would learn the tune and then she would go and play it on the piano and pick out the notes and write ‘em down. And she actually was the first one writing down tunes. But it was very difficult for her.

Okay, in time, well, I should tell you, too, if you want to know about life in the southern mountains, all that research that Olive and John did is in a book called, “The Southern Highlander in His Homeland.” And that’s still available. A, Emma Bell Miles’ book didn’t last very long when it came out but it, a few years ago the University of Tennessee Press brought it out again and it’s available and it’s worth the reading. And so is “The Southern Highlander in His Homeland.” That’s, actually after John died, Olive took all his notes and she wrote the book.

Then she started a school, oh, she put his name on it, she started a school and she put his name on that. So she did lots of acts of love and she, a, but this, what, it’s a long story so I’m not gonna’ tell it all to you now.

Partial Transcript: But Olive found out that there was a man in this country from England, Cecil Sharp, who had collected in England, and he was up in the Boston area. He was interested in dance as well as music, and so he, a, was working on a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Well, through some English folk singers she found out that he really knew how to collect music, and so she took herself off to Boston to the home, he was staying in the home or a Mrs. Stora(?), and they tell me one of the main streets up there is named Stora(?), so she’s probably a wealthy woman.

Well, he, a, was laid up with gout, and I don’t think it was too convenient for her to be there, but I expect if Olive Campbell needed to see Cecil Sharp, she would and she did. And so she, a showed him what she had brought, about 75 of her manuscripts, and when he saw ‘em he started to get better. (Audience chuckles.) He said they were valuable. They were, you see, she’d already sent them off, some of them off to her old professor at Tufts College, where she’d gone to school, and to Harvard, to a professor there. They told her what she had done was valuable, and so when she showed them to Cecil Sharp, he said that some of her versions looked older than the ones he’d collected in England.

Now, he was going to, she’d convinced him that there were ballad singers in the southern mountains, and so he promised to come, but he had to go back to England first. Now this was during the first World War, and he had, a, he had reservations on the Lusitania and said, changed them at the last minute. But he did come and he stayed 46 months in the southern mountains.

Now, when he first came, he brought with him a woman by the name of Maude Karpeles. She would write down the words; he would write down the tunes. This is the first man who really knew how to write down tunes. And so, you know, they came the worst possible time; they came right after the great flood of 1916, and all the roads were, were in terrible shape. The dams were gone; the bridges were out; railroad tracks were twisted. It was just a terrible time to be traveling in the southern mountains. There, thirty-eight buildings in Marshall had washed away and people had died.

Well, they, they finally got to Asheville, where, where the Campbells lived by way of the Murphy line. And they rested for one day and John Campbell took them to the laurel country. Well, now, it’s like 40 miles from Asheville. It took eleven hours. When they started out from Asheville, and then when they got to, to, a, a, Weaverville, they changed to what they, a little four-wheeled cart they called a, a surrey, and it was just a harrowing ride. They said you could look down one side or the other and it was straight down.

And so the, in the, the good thing about it was that in no time at all, Cecil Sharp had used up all of his music paper and he was writing down tunes on anything he could find because he said that in England he collected mostly from old people, but here he collected from a lot of people. Most people sang, and he called it a community art form.

Partial Transcript: And so, um, I thought that, um, one of the really important things is that—what I sang for you first is not a ballad. That’s what we call a lyric, and lyrics could be, it could be a hymn, it could be a love song, could be a play party tune. Those are, could be a fiddle tune that had words to it, but a ballad, now that’s something else. A ballad has a story, and a ballad, a, tells a story in a certain way. Now, songs like Lonesome Dove, you might hear a lot of sentiment in those. You might hear how people feel about things. In traditional ballads, it’s not the thing. In traditional ballads, what you hear is a story, and the one word that I think of when I think of ballads is action.

So, a, I thought that, a, maybe I would sing a ballad for you that, a, was my grandmother’s baby-rocking song, a song that I don’t even remember learning; and, a, one of my aunts came and stayed with me for a week and she said, “But you sing that more like mama than anybody does,” and I said, “But I don’t remember learning it. I don’t remember learning it from anybody. I just seem to know it,” and she said, “Well, that was her baby-rocking song and you were the oldest grandchild, so you got more rocking than anybody else did.”

Partial Transcript: Well, a, I should say that, a little bit more about ballads, I guess. Ballads, a, you’ll hear people say, “Oh, that’s not the way I heard it,” or, that, you know, “Is that a pure version; is that the original version?” Well, there is no such thing. When they, when the songs and ballads came to this country, they weren’t pure. Some of the, some of our ballads and stories are known in Scandinavian, Germanic countries, in, er, Arabic, Turkish. Now, they won’t have the same tune if they’re a song. Or they might be a song in one country and, and a story in another country.

But you recognize, you’ll recognize the story, and so we don’t, we don’t know how old things were when they got to this country, and they sure didn’t stay the same as when they came in here because anything that’s in oral tradition is always in process. It’s just always changing. We can’t help it, we just can’t seem to, you know, it’s not reading classical music where you do it the same every time. No, this is, is always evolving.

I can’t tell you why sometimes I change things, and I know I do. Sometimes, I know once when I was recording for Folk Legacy and, a Caroline would listen to what I was singing, and if I sang something that didn’t quite, she thought was questionable, she ‘d say, she said to send it, she put a bridge in there, and he said, it was a long ballad, it was, it was Young Charlotte, and Sandy said, “Why did you put a bridge in there?” And I said, “because my mouth got dry.” (Laughter from audience.) (34:54) And that happens. Also, your mind goes dry sometimes, too. (More laughter.) And, or sometimes, you know, you just, you have to get a breath and so you kind of change the rhythm of it and it makes it sound different. Or sometimes some people get, you know, get creative and they put things in deliberately. I don’t do that, but most of it I think happens just because you know the story and it, and you just may change a word or two there. You may even change the tune a little bit.
Um, I know that sometimes ballad singers, it isn’t just that it changes from one generation to the next, sometimes the same singer might not sing it the same two days in a row. It’s just that way. And stories are even worse because, um, I know that, a…

Partial Transcript: I did a book about Jane Gentry, and I’m gonna tell you about her. And her daughter. A, Miss Gentry’s songs were written down by Cecil Sharp. Her daughter Maude Long’s songs were recorded by the Library of Congress. Songs and stories. Long jack tales, and when I got all of her stories from, and songs from the Library of Congress and I would be, I had to take ‘em off these tapes, and I’d be typing along and I would forget, I would be sitting there five minutes and I hadn’t typed a word because I’m listening to Maude tell stories. And what I found was, like, on one of the tapes they stop. And the next morning they start again. Her version of that story had some different animals in it, it did, you know, it was the same story, but I think that real story tellers tell stories; they don’t memorize stories; they tell stories. And so, a, it just happens when you do things over and over. And so, in time, things do get changed.
Some, a woman told me one time, I sang The Little Rosewood Casket, and she said, “That’s not the way you sang that in 1972.” (Audience laughs.) And I said, “you know what would be a miracle was if I sang it the same way I did in 1972.” And that was one my dad sang, and I probably didn’t sing it like he did either. But, ah, I, that’s when a, I love, I love ballads and I think that’s one thing I like about ‘em is that, you know, is just the way they work. I love a…

But I wanted to tell you that while Cecil Sharp was was, a, collecting, and this is still in the laurel country, but in Hot Springs, which was, a, on the other side of Madison County, and, by the way, Cecil Sharp said that of all the places he’d went, the first place he went was to Madison County (38:54) and that life was, it was the most primitive area that he went to and the songs were the best a versions of the songs he found because they had not been, they’d, you know, they weren’t hearing other kinds of music.

Partial Transcript: Well, in Hot Springs there was a Presbyterian school, the Dorland(?) School, and Miss Jeffrey(?) there sent word, and that’s the way they did things back then, she sent word to Frances Goodrich to tell John Campbell to tell Cecil Sharp to come to Hot Springs because there was a woman there who knew a lot of songs. And, sure enough, John Campbell took him on the train. There were six passenger trains ran between, both, well, three each way between Asheville and Knoxville. And so that was the way to go back then, especially with, a, you know, with things in such, the roads in such bad shape. And so he took him there and, a, the very next day he went to see Jane Gentry. And now, if you heard, if you know about Ray Hicks or Stanley Hicks or Orville, a, well, Jane was a Hicks. Her father was a Hicks. Her mother was Harmon. And when she was twelve hears old, her father moved the family from Watauga County over to Madison County. She, you probably heard Ray Hicks talk about, now I got this from my great, great, great grandfather. Well, he was Jane’s old _____ Harmon, the greatest story teller of them all, was Jane’s grandfather. And so in that family there wasn’t just singing, it was stories, too. And so when, when Sharp went to see her, I guess he thought she’d be shy about singing, and so he said, “If you’d like to, you can sit in one room and sing and I’ll sit in the next room and write down the songs.” And she said, “Well, if you can stand to look at me, I can stand to look at you.” (Laughter) And she proceeded to sing twenty songs for him on that first day.
I guess he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. But she sang more songs for him than any other singer he’d found. She sang 72 songs, and you have to remember—what he asked for and what he got pretty much was English folk songs still being sung in this country. And that didn’t mean that was all the songs she knew. She knew hymns, she knew local ballads, she knew a lot of children’s songs, she knew a lot more. She also was a great story teller.
Ah, but you see, she, it didn’t bother her. I mean she sang all the time. Her children said they always knew where their mother was cause she sang all the time. And, if you went in her kitchen, you’d end up with a lap full of beans or a handful of apples and you wouldn’t notice you were working cause she’d be singing or telling stories. That’s just what she did.
And, so, a, in time it was, a…well, I should tell you that she had met up with somebody, not like Cecil Sharp, but she, there was a big hotel in Hot Springs, the Mountain Park Hotel, and there was a man by the name of Irving Bachelor, who‘d come to Hot Springs and met Jane Gentry and thought she was the most wonderful woman he’d ever met. And this was the Sunday editor of the New York World under Joseph Pulitzer, and he, a wrote a book about her that was burned in a house fire, but he still wrote short stories and articles about her. And one of ‘em appeared in American Magazine in 1927 called “The Happiest Person I Ever Knew.” And he said he’d searched all over the world, he, because he met all of these great writers. He knew, a, he knew, a, Mark Twain. He had talked, he had interviewed John Burroughs and Cornelius Vanderbilt, people who were talented, people who were wealthy, and he never met anybody he thought was truly happy until he met Jane Gentry.
And she, a, and that family they just said, you know, was probably the hardest working family you ever saw. She ran a boarding house She still had her sheep. They moved into town so that her nine children could go to the Dorland(?) school, and so a… Here, she’s running a boarding house, she’s got nine children, she lives next to the school, so she goes to the school a lot, but, a, this is, is just, is just incredible cause, you know their, their philosophy was, you know, while you’re resting, go out and chop some wood. This was, you know, it was…
But, I thought, one of the songs that she sang for him that day that he said was one of the most beautiful tunes that he collected…he called it The Rejected Lover.

Partial Transcript: Well, it didn’t, I wouldn’t say, a, well, my dad was from Randolph County and my mother was from Rockingham County, and, a, they were the first generation to move to town. And, a, I was born in Salisbury but I don’t remember Salisbury because, a, they moved away from there. This, you have to remember, you’re not as old as I am. This was during the Depression, and so I’m sure that my dad had to find a job and they moved to High Point, and, a, so, but my dad came from Randolph County. My grandmother was a, was an Adams, and, a, one of the first ballads I guess that I learned was Omi Wise and my grandmother’s grandfather was the sheriff who arrested old Jonathan Lewis, who drowned little Omi Wise in Deep River, and everybody in the family seemed to know that one.

Partial Transcript: But my dad sang shape notes. When, a, when he was a young man, he even belonged to a group, and, of course, they sang shape notes in church, too, then. But he, he knew ballads, a, so, I mean it, you know, not a big thing. Nobody said I’m gonna’ sing a ballad, they just sang what they sang and, but he did know ballads. He sang a, Little Rosewood Casket, and The Little Monkey, and he sang The Dying Cowboy, and he sang Give My Love to Nellie Jack and Kiss Her Once for Me. That’s one of those that I always think of as parlor songs, you know that you sing around the piano. My mother played piano by ear, played everything in F. I can’t sing in F (audience laughter). But, you know…

Anyhow, but my mother’s mother is on her side of the family, was her mother who sang, who knew all the songs. But my, the Adamses came from Ulster in the 1700s and they came down, they came straight down from Pennsylvania down to, to, a, and stayed there. Now, a, Jane Gentry, the one that I did the book on, her family came down to Randolph County and, a, and then, a, one of her ancestors was, he was carrying goods from across to Elizabethton, Tennessee, and he had to go right through Watauga County, and that’s how, and he liked it and moved his family up there, and that’s how her, that’s how those Harmons and Nixes got up there.

But, a, but my family stayed right there in Randolph County, and, a, and the song Little Omi Wise talks about Adamses Springs. I don’t know, but my great grandfather was William Adams and, a, his brother was killed at Gettysburg, its, a…

But it’s a, I don’t know, I just, well I knew some songs, you know, that I’d always heard, but then, I don’t know, must have been in the 50s I just started, I would hear songs, and I’d think, “Well, we used to know that song,” and I got started and I couldn’t stop. I’ve just, I love ballads and I just went… You know, George Brosi, who, a, sells, he has, he’s in Berea, and he deals in Appalachian literature. He said I had a better library than most universities did cause I looked for everything I could find about ‘em and, a, so I can’t tell you, except I just have this passion for, for old songs. Does that make any sense?

Partial Transcript: Well, you know what, it’s, it is funny how, a, some people just latch onto things like Olive Campbell and Bascom Lunsford. I mean, you gotta’ know what you’re talking about is valuable or important, but you also have to figure out how to, how to preserve it and what to do about it. And different people do it in different ways. But I have this thing about tunes. I, I can read music cause I took violin when I was growing up, but that’s not the way I learn songs. I, if I can hear it, I can usually learn it. And now that I can’t see, you see, that’s important because they’re already in my head now.

I, I, you see Olive had to sing every song until she learned the tune. And so did Bascom Lunsford. They sang every song until they learned the tune. Now, sometimes, tunes just stay with me. If somebody gives me a song and I really like it, it’s not going anywhere. I remember songs that I haven’t sung in years, but I’ll know the tune. I might have to think about the words some, but I’ll know the tune.

Partial Transcript: Oh, I don’t even know. One time I tried to make a list and I lost the list. I got to about three hundred and I lost the list (audience chuckles) and I never started again, so I don’t really know. (Soft laughter continues)

I just, a, I think that singing is one of the most important things. I, I remember, I was, there was a writer, she was in Ireland and, you know, when you stay with people sometimes they, they put you up, like if you’re a man, they put you up with the boys; if you’re a woman, they put you up with the girls. So they put her up with these two girls and, and she told them how much she enjoyed their singing and that she wished she could sing, you know, and they said, “Ha, but you can. That’s the way the Lord made us.” You know, and I kind of think that we’re supposed to sing. How come we have singing voices if we can’t… Now I have a frog today that you don’t, that doesn’t sound too good but, a…

Partial Transcript: Yeah, I’ll come back to some, a, maybe some more of Jane’s songs. I was gonna tell you, a, one thing about her, too, that I didn’t mention is that she loved riddles. My dad was one of these people who had all these little verses and she did, too. And she, a, she always said riddles really fast. Well, when Irving Bachelor came to see her, that was the New York editor, and he thought that he would like to be able to just have them talk and somebody else would write down what she said. So he got a stenographer. There was a big hotel, Mountain Park Hotel, and he got a stenographer from the hotel and he brought him over and he said, “Do you think you can write down what this lady says?” And that young, brash young man said, “Anything a woman can say, I can write it down.” (Chuckles) So she looked at him and she said, (tongue twister, spoken very fast).

(Audience laughter.)

And that was just one of her riddles, you know, and she. And they said he just threw up his hands and left. (Laughter continues.) But he could’ve…You know, you have to be on the inside with riddles, anyhow. The, she was saying,

“As I ran around my cornfield, there was that pig Bo Backum (?)
In my cornfield, and I went home and I got Tom Tackum (?), my
Dog to run Bo Backum out of my __________________.

Well, he could have found out if he’d waited around, but he didn’t.

I’ve always thought she was one of the smartest women I ever knew about. Ah, she, one of her grandchildren told me that, a, when she was a little girl she apparently had a, she had some…a lisp or something that, and, a, that she stayed with her grandmother a lot because I remember that her mother died when her four girls were fairly young, and so she stayed with her grandmother a lot, and she said that her grandmother played games with her. And she would be, she would, she would say, “Now, I’ll tell a, I’ll tell a riddle, you tell a riddle.” Or she would say, she would be singing and she said she would just go out on the back porch to get something and the song would just stop right there. Then she’d come back in and they’d pick up right where--she said it was going on all the time. And she would say things that she had to say back to her grandmother.

Well, her aunt told her when she was grown, she said, “Don’t you remember that you had a speech impediment?” and she said, “I never had a speech impediment,” and they, mom said, “Of course you did.” And I thought about that, and I thought, you know what? ______, that’s before ______, who said exactly that. You make ‘em talk, you know, and she was doing all the right things to get this little girl to talk to her, to sing to her. And I just think she’s one of the smartest women, yeah.

Partial Transcript: Now, somebody else that you need to know about if you don’t is Bascom Lamar Lunsford. And he was born on the Mars Hill College campus in 1882. His father taught there, but he came from a family of fiddlers and ballad singers. His mother sang ballads. And he’s another one that I don’t know how he knew what to do; I don’t know how he knew it was so important but, to collect, but he did all through this whole area. And he, he has the largest collection in the Library of Congress, about 2,000 pieces, but over 300 are what he calls, what he called his, his “memory collection.” That was recorded by the Library of Congress and by Columbia University. So he didn’t write ‘em down either. He record, he recorded, a, and you can get recordings of his. You can get recordings of his, you can get recordings of Maude Long, a, hers are through the Library of Congress, but his are through other recording companies, and…

But he was, he found out something that Cecil Sharp did, too. Sharp said that the kids would just hang around the door, and he said something to one of the little boys and he said, “But I like to be where the beautiful music is.” And the songs, the children seemed to know the songs that their parents and their grandparents knew. Well, I guess they didn’t have babysitters back then so whatever was going on, they were in the back room on the bed even if it was bedtime, so, but a, Mr. Lunsford found that out and he went around to schools

Partial Transcript: Now, I met one of the women that, a, her name was Louetta Payne (?). She lived, she lived in Swannanoa when I met her, but it was in 1926 when she was nine years old that Bascom Lunsford came to the Roaring Forks school, and that’s up near where I lived for so long in Madison County. Ah, I lived about nine miles up on Bluff Mountain from Hot Springs. Well, Roaring Forks school’s not that far away. He asked the teacher if she, if any of the children knew any ballads, and the teacher pointed out little Louetta, and he asked her if she’d sing and she said, “Not here. They might snicker at me.” So he said, “Alright, if I take you across the road to that house over there, would you sing for me?” And she said, “He put me in a rocking chair and I sang all evening.”

Now, he would pay fifty cents for the best ballad, and she said that he paid fifty cents for a ballad called Little Margaret. Now Little Margaret, a, if you look in English collections, she’s gonna’ be Lady Margaret and Sweet William. But by 1926 in the southern mountains, she was Little Margaret. And Little Margaret is a, that is a, is a ghost story. And that helps cause, like, ballads don’t tell you everything. You have to, you have to use your imagination. It’s more like radio than TV, so you have to, a, you have to use your imagination some, but in the end you’ll probably figure out what was happening.

Partial Transcript: This is, some of you will recognize this tune…as the Shady Grove tune. Now what Mr. Lunsford told me one time was, he said the reason the mountains had so much music was they just kept using it over and over again, so you might find, you might know half a dozen songs with the same tune or all those verses that were in that song that I sang of Jane Gentry’s about “Who’s gonna shoe your foot,” all those songs show up, those verses show up time after time. And if you, if you look at the verses that go with fiddle tunes, why you can sing, you could sing hundreds of verses to any one of those fiddle tunes because they’re all little four-line verses. And doesn’t matter which one comes next cause it’s not a ballad, it’s not telling a story, it’s just, a, just all these little verses that will show up and, a, but this one is, this is one called Little Margaret and a… (Softly) Let’s see if I can get…

Partial Transcript: There is one that I would like, a, to do for you that, a. There was a woman in Berea by the name of Maude Kilburn (?) and, a, Maude Kilburn (?) was 17 years old when Cecil Sharp came through Berea. She was in Dr. Raines’ (?) English class and that’s where he did some collecting at that time. Now, a, her children apparently didn’t know that she had sung for Cecil Sharp until one of her daughters went to work for the Library of Congress and saw her mother’s name in the, in the collection.

But that collection is English folk songs from the southern Appalachians, and that is the best collection that has ever been done in any region and could never be done again because it was done before radio, before recording. Most of the songs were collected before the boys came back from World War I. Ah, so it’s just, it is an absolutely incredible collection.

It should have on it, a, “Cecil Sharp and Olive Campbell.” And the first, the first edition did have that, and I wanna see it again because I think that, that a, all the, I mean, he collected like 1600 songs in 46 months, but I still think that her part of that collection should be recogn… It is recognized, but it needs to be more so, I think.

And, ah, but Maude, a, she’s. she was like 85 years old and she started to remember songs that she hadn’t sung in years. And a, it was, I had collected, I collected from her and so did Loyal Jones who was in Berea, and so Loyal was talking to her one day and he said, a he said, a, she, he said, “Do you know Lady Isabelle and the Elf at Night?” and she said no, because a, a lot of times, I mean the singer doesn’t know what the collector calls it. She, a, well, he, time went on and she said, “Do you know that ballad about the woman who pushes the man in the water?” And he says, “But that’s Lady Isabelle and the Elf at Night.”

(Audience laughter.)

There is no other one like it. It’s, I’ll have to sing it for you because the woman does not get, she does not get murdered, she doesn’t get betrayed, she takes care of her own salvation in the middle of the night, and she even squares things with her conscience. And the bird is her conscience. So, ah, but this is a, this is, well, I should tell you that what, what Miss Kilburn (?) called this was Pretty Polly. Well, Pretty Polly is a broadside ballad. And she knew that, she knew the broadside ballad. She called both of ‘em Pretty Polly cause this had a bird in it. But, a, she knew which one she meant, it, you know, so it doesn’t matter what the name of it is long as you know the song.

But while I’m talking about broadsides, I should mention that, a, a, broadsides are more generally more journalistic. They were, they were sold on the street corners in the British Isles and in this country, and they were songs that people wrote, or stories. It could be, a broadside could be anything. It’s just that they were ________ kinds of…and they were, they were also a, a little different. They didn’t tell stories in the same way that the old traditional ballads told stories. They a, they might talk about villain, the villain, you know, and they would sound much more like, much more sentiment in ‘em and, but then some of ‘em got, a, were sung by people who knew the old ballads and got polished up till you can’t tell the difference. Some were still, were so bad that they didn’t last. Well, that’s true of all songs, isn’t it? I mean, people write songs all the time; some of ‘em last and some of ‘em don’t. Bu, a, but this is one that I love cause there’s no other ballad that tells this.

Partial Transcript: Well, I just think that, well when I taught a long time ago I taught Title I in Head Start, and the kids didn’t know any, any of the songs that I knew growing up, and the only songs they ever knew were like TV jingles. My dad always had little sayings and songs and they didn’t know any; they just didn’t know any songs. And so I wrote curriculum for twenty years, most of it traditional songs because, a…

The history of children’s songs and games is the same as the history of the ballads. And, a, those, like children’s games were known in…they it would be the same game; it wouldn’t have the same tune; it might not have the same words, but the game, you would recognize the game. And, usually the song, but a, a, who am, John Lomax (?) who was one of the very first ones to record for the Library of Congress, he said that children determine what is gonna be saved and what is not because they don’t sing anything they don’t like. So, a, but if you look at, at you’ll find the same games on, in the mountains, on the streets of New York, on the Sea Islands of Georgia. You look at collections and you’re gonna find some of the same things, which means that children have liked it. They have, they wouldn’t have kept playing those games or singing those songs if they didn’t like ‘em, which means that by the time I’m teaching them, they haven’t heard ‘em; they don’t know anything about ‘em/ So I’m, I kinda guess I made it my mission to see that they did.

And the thing was that I, a, the first, I wrote for Open Court first and then for Children’s Music Workshop, and the Children’s Music Workshop used those in schools in New York sometimes. And the kids loved ‘em. You know, I mean it’s not, it’s almost like, a, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. If it’s a good song, it’s a good song. And, a, but we were talking today and he asked me why I thought it was important, but I think that what you know, like all songs you know and the stories you know, or whatever it is, it’s important to know what your family knows, what your community knows. It makes it, it makes you feel a part of something.

And I’m afraid that that’s not what you get from computers, and I don’t think you do. I don’t, I think that’s done alone and I don’t think that, a, it does the same thing for young people as knowing, as singing, even if you’re just singing the hymns in church, you’re singing the songs that your family knows, a, that your, other people that you know. You’re a part of something. And it’s sad to me that a…

But I also found that when I had, I did some, a, residencies where I would be in a school for a month, and it’s amazing what you could do in a month because, a, they do like the songs; they do like the stories, if you just have enough time.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, and, and like it said, a, Miss Gentry, that family, that, that’s how you keep the children on the job, too, you know, because you’re telling ‘em stories and you’re singing and, and her children on a rainy day, why they didn’t have to have somebody to come and entertain. They entertained each other with all these songs and games that they knew. And she had nine children, so, you know, they had enough to play about any game you could think of.

But, a, yeah, I, I don’t know what it is about a, I mean, I know that people just say, well, you know, it doesn’t have anything, these old people, it doesn’t have anything to do with me, but it actually does. I mean the past is important for the future, and, a, we do need to know, we do need to know that, a, what has gone before us, but it is really sad that especially, a, but if they don’t know it when they’re in kindergarten, they aren’t going to know it, I’m afraid, I mean, a…

Partial Transcript: But I had a month at this middle school in Brunswick, Georgia, and I found, I had a principal who was wonderful. And the first day that I went there, she took me around and she let the teachers tell me what they thought I could help them with. And then, I found that all of the, all of the students were set up with language arts, history, and music, in groups.

And so I decided that I would do a ballad study. Now, I know that that sounds like a, well, there’s no way it’d work, but the thing was that they had history first. Well, in that part of the world there are pirates, Indians on the coast of Georgia, so we studied local history and we learned what some of the stories, stories are in local history. And then we decided to write, we had to work on, learn how to write poetry a little bit, but we wrote, we wrote poetry hoping to make ‘em into a song so they, a. This was the whole point was we were... First we had to learn about how ballads work and how, how, what it means to write a ballad and so we studied history, we studied ballads and poetry and then they started to write.

And the first day I got, I told ‘em if they wrote one that was singable I would set it to music Now I wouldn’t rewrite anything, but I might help ‘em turn it around cause sometimes you can do that, you’re not really rewriting their work, but you’re turning it around so that it fits, so you can get a tune to fit it. So I got three. So I took them that, that night and I recorded, I put it on tape so that when they heard their song, it sound like they’d been recorded cause I was playing, I was playing a tape. And this big blond guy stood up, and he said, “Maam, that’s cool.”

(Audience laughter.)

They started coming in there so fast I was, I was putting them to Mary Had A Little Lamb and everything else I could think of. But, yeah, that’s all it took was that one guy would say it’s okay. He was a big man on campus, I think, and so. Ah, you know that some of them were good enough so that they put some of ‘em in the Costal Museum. They weren’t all great or anything, but they loved it, and what they did was, in doing this they made a scrapbook, one for them and one for me, which meant they did scrapbooking. They took pictures of everything, so they did photography. They, a, they had…

My husband came down and they built a dulcimer on the weekend. So I left the dulcimer that good shop class built limberjacks, (?) little dancing dolls. A, I taught the, the violin class how to play dulcimer so they’d learn how to shuffle their bow cause it’s the same rhythm that, that you do on the dulcimer when shuffling the bow. So, you know what, we had a great time that month; and they all, I mean, all you have to do is put it out there so they can get it.

Yeah, we taught everything but, and that principal never said, “We have to do math. We have to study for some kind of test,” you know. That’s what I, I sometimes heard was that we couldn’t have the time we needed. But she, it was like she said, “This is your month,” you know, and we did, so we had a wonderful time, and, a, but I just think, a lot of people think that middle school is a very hard age. Not if you have enough time.
It’s, it’s not as easy to just go in one day like you do in an elementary school where the little ones, they’re fine, they love to sing. If, if you have the right songs, but, a, I just think we’re not putting the music out there where they can hear it. They don’t know if they like it or not.

Partial Transcript: The psaltery, a, the one I play is a big one, a, it’s like, a, it’s like a forerunner of the harpsichord, and it’s in the family with the hammered dulcimer, same family, only it’s plucked instead of hammered. Yeah. It sounds more like a harp than anything else because it is plucked. Yeah, there aren’t many of ‘em around. Now, ____________ plays the hammered dulcimer. We have a little group at Highland Farms, and it’s called the Dulcimer Jam. We don’t call it a class but (audience chuckles) ‘cause we do it just for fun and so we have mostly mountain dulcimers, but we have a guitar and a concertina and a hammered dulcimer.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think it’s like Carl Sandburg said, that when you see a civilization perish sometimes it’s because they forgot where they came from; they didn’t, a, they forgot what brought them along and I really think that what, what, you know, what our ancestors have known is important. That’s how we know what we know, and they, you know, you can hear people say, “Well, that’s the old people’s stuff,” but…I, they don’t know how much of their lives are like they are because of what people have done before them.

And, you know that when, a, when country music started, when you started hearing country music, what that was was, like, a, Bradley Kincaid (?) sang Barbara Allen every Saturday night for four years by request. That was country music. Ah, you know, it was Uncle Dave Macon (?) playing Sail Away, Ladies, Sail Away. But that was what country music was, and Mr. Lumsford really thought, what he thought was important was that people in the mountains understand that what they knew was important. And that is one way that he, that he tried to keep the music alive.

I’ve been going to the Asheville Festival, this was my 52nd year that I’ve done that festival, and he started that with a, there was a festival in Asheville called The Rhododendron Festival, and they asked him to, he’d been collecting and they asked him to bring some singers and dancers and, and bands. It was kind of like, we’ll have a little local color, you know. Well, the, the next day the headlines in the paper were about that local music. And that was kinda’ the beginning of the Asheville festival.

But he helped to, a, start the National Folk Festival, a, he helped start, a, Renfro (?) Valley. He started festivals all across the state, in the middle and the east and, a, his thing was that he wanted people to understand that their music was important. And he wanted other people to feel that way about it, too. But that, you see, every one of the people who really done things, like Olive, they did them in different ways, but that was his thing, was that, a…

And he said, one time he said, “If you want to save something, you commit it to memory, because if you commit something to memory, you’re probably going to say it or sing it or whatever it is,” but I think our ties are important, yeah, they sure are, cause we’re a people who don’t know a thing about any of it. But, and we need ‘em, but if you really want to save something, then you, you commit it to memory and then you , you go around singing it so that somebody else learns it.