Echoes
of Ancient Tones
British
Folkways and the Roots of Bluegrass Music
Tom
Barnwell
(Copyright
1999, Tom Barnwell and Bluegrass Unlimited Incorporated)
In
1970, I set out to try to understand why so many of my friends hated each
other. To understand why I had so many
friends who hated each other, and to understand why this has anything to do
with the roots of bluegrass music, I need to tell you a story. I think it is a good story. In fact, it's
the best story I know.
To
start, I must tell you that both branches of my family have deep roots in North
Carolina, roots that go back hundreds of years to the mountain pioneers. But I am not from North Carolina myself,
because in 1935, at the age of seventeen, my father left the mountains and
moved to Jacksonville, Florida to work in the construction trades. That is where I was born (in 1943) and
raised. At the age of seventeen I too
left home and went away to be educated in Boston. So the values I learned at home were mostly those of the southern
highlands, the values I learned from my childhood friends and neighbors were
those of the lowland South, and those I absorbed during my formal education
were from good old Yankee New England.
By the time I graduated for the last time in 1970 I had good friends --
intimate friends -- in all three places: the southern highlands, the southern
lowlands, and New England. I admired
and loved them all, each group with its own strong values and caring ways. But
it was also apparent that the values and ways of these three groups of people
were very, very different.
The
touchstone of those days for the young was civil rights, and I got involved
with the civil rights movement as an adolescent in the late 1950s. Most of my friends were also concerned about
civil rights issues, and they all had strong ideas about how the cause of civil
rights should be advanced and the wrongs of the past righted. The problem was that, even though they were
seeking to solve the same problems, the proposed solutions of my three
different groups of friends were very different. Each of the three groups
believed that their own views were pretty much obviously correct and that
people from other places with different opinions had to be either poorly
educated, badly misinformed or else just outright immoral. Holding these simplistic and insulting
opinions, of course, did nothing to endear them to one another.
I
was very confused. Where had all this
intransigence come from? How could
people, all descended from the same mass of immigrants, have developed such
radically different views? It seemed to
me to be the great unanswered question of 20th century America, and I found it
so troubling that I set out to find an answer.
I figured that the answer was somewhere in the recent past history of
the U. S., the history of the Jim Crow laws, the race ghettos and the Civil
War. So I started reading history. Over twenty years, I read hundreds of
volumes about conditions before the Civil War, about the Civil War itself,
about the post Civil War South, and about the early 20th century. It was all fascinating, and I gained a truly
great respect for the all the peoples who came before: rich and poor; black,
white and Native American; and northern and southern. But it still did not make good sense. I was looking for why things had become the way they were, but I
kept finding references to the same entrenched sectional attitudes of the 1950s
and 1960s which dated to well before the
Civil War. It was as if the values
and attitudes of the regions were in the rocks, or the soil, or the air and the
people who were raised there just absorbed them, generation after generation.
During
that same period, I also became addicted to bluegrass music, and since I could
read books far better than I could play instruments, I read everything I could
find on the topic. I read about
bluegrass music, and I read about other southern roots music (minstrel,
ragtime, blues, old-time, etc.). I
especially enjoyed Rosenberg [1] and Cantwell [2], as well as some of the more
recent works [3-5] of other authors. I
considered my interest in bluegrass music to be separate from my interest in
history, but here too I found a historical puzzle. All of the bluegrass authors essentially agreed (and Bill Monroe
himself said) that bluegrass music – just like minstrel music, ragtime music,
blues, jazz, modern country, and rock – came from a merging of European musical
styles and instruments with African musical styles and instruments. But it was clearly more complicated than
that. Bluegrass music's deepest
wellspring was clearly in the folk music of the southern Appalachians, which in
the early part of the 20th century was enormously vibrant, widespread, and
varied. It was a huge musical patchwork
of fiddle, banjo and singing styles, like a great quilt covering the
mountains. Here were Bill Monroe's
"ancient tones" and "high lonesome" singing styles in great
abundance. Here were the abundant aural
traditions sought out and documented by men like John Lomax and Ralph Rinzler,
and promoted by men like Bascom Lamar Lunsford. But where had all of this come from, and why was the music and
the musical traditions of the highland south so different from the rest of the
country? Did all of this remarkable
diversity really somehow develop in the last couple of hundred years?
Then,
in the early 1990s, I read three new history books that, for me, changed
everything. These books were Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer
[6], Voyagers to the West by Bernard
Bailyn [7], and Cracker Culture: Celtic
Ways in the Old South by Grady McWhiney [8]. They were all written in the late 1980s, and they were all books
of historical synthesis from a new field of history -- Cultural History. What
Cultural Historians call culture is a
total set of beliefs, ethics, and behavioral patterns that characterize large
groups of people. A "culture"
is defined to be almost everything mixed together: religion, language,
attitudes, opinions, beliefs, local laws, marriage ways, child rearing ways,
gender relations, music, art, manners of dress, vocations, avocations, and so
on and so on. In order for a culture to
be successful, all these cultural components have to come together to solve
most of the problems of most of the people most of the time. A culture must provide for defense, food,
shelter, clothing, and health. It must
provide for successful procreation, childbearing, and child rearing. It must also provide a sense spiritual
wellbeing in terms of the great human questions of death and our place in the universe. And finally, it must pass its values on to
future generations.
Historians
have traditionally used many dimensions to try to explain history, things such
as politics, economics, race, region, gender, religion, and so forth. These of course are all valid dimensions for
analyzing history and they do explain a lot.
But without including an understanding of the powerful and pervasive
(and often unsuspected) influence of culture, the picture will be forever fuzzy. Some things will just get missed.
The
first thing that has been historically missed (pun intended) is that there was not just one immigration
from the British Isles to North America before the American Revolution – there were four. These immigrations occurred largely from
four different areas in Britain at four different times and they involved four
different British cultures. All of
these cultures had co-existed in the British Isles for hundreds of years, and
they had many things in common. They
all spoke English, although they spoke different dialects. They all considered themselves to be
inheritors of English Common Law and they were all Protestants Christian. They
all believe strongly in individual liberty, and they all felt that they had
many individual freedoms as a birthright. But if they agreed on many things,
they disagreed on even more. Most
importantly, even though they all had a strong belief in individual freedom as
part of their folkways, they did not agree on what freedom meant or how it should be achieved.
The
first great exodus from Britain was the Puritan immigration from East Anglica
to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and New England from 1630-1641. During this period, Charles I was trying to
rule England without a Parliament and the Puritans felt sorely stressed and
persecuted. The Puritans were an
exclusive, insular culture who believed that everyone should believe and behave
basically as they did. They practiced a
strict, bleak form of Calvinism which permeated every facet of their private
and public lives, and they founded many Congregational churches throughout New
England. Their concept of liberty was
that of ordered liberty, in which an
individual’s personal freedom was defined and delivered by the laws and
institutions of society. They believed
strongly in the State as an agent of social policy, and they made many laws to
protect the rights of, and direct the actions of, citizens. To them, there were no rights other than
those defined by their laws and their church.
The
Puritan immigration mostly ended when the First English Civil War began. This war ultimately deposed and executed
Charles I, and installed Oliver Cromwell as the new head of state. Now it was the Royalists who were on the
run, and the result was a second great immigration from 1641 to 1673 – that of
the Cavaliers (Royalists) from the west and south of England to Virginia and
the southern tidewater. The Cavaliers’
culture was aristocratic in origin, and they brought with them their concept of
hegemonic liberty. Theirs was very much a classed society, with
the Cavaliers (First Families of Virginia) firmly at the top. Most of the land and a great deal of the
wealth and power belonged to this privileged class, who lived on grand plantations
with many servants and slaves. Below
the Cavaliers were the merchant classes of the towns and the yeoman farmers of
the countryside. Further down yet on
the social scale were the unskilled freemen and the indentured servants (of
which there were many). At the very
bottom were the African race slaves, who were indentured for life. The Cavaliers were serious about their
Anglican religion, but not quite as serious as the Puritans were about
theirs. There was some mobility between
classes, but the rights and privileges of the class into which you were born
mostly defined your liberties for life.
The
third great immigration, which started in 1675 and lasted for about twenty
years, was the immigration of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) from the
English Midlands to Pennsylvania and the Delaware valley. Most Quakers came from more humble origins
than either the Cavaliers or the Puritans, and their leader, George Fox, was a
staunch pacifist. As to liberty, they
held the remarkably modern view of reciprocal
liberty in which everyone was (more or less) equal, and everyone's liberty
was supposed to be as great as it possibly could be without limiting anyone
else's freedom. Quakers were remarkably
tolerant of other religions and cultures so long as they did not disturb the
peace or infringe on the liberties of others.
In Quaker households, everyone (including servants and slaves) ate at
the same table, and everyone was treated with respect. In the 17th century, the Quakers were
roundly disliked and persecuted for their views, but in England they had
friends in high places. William Penn
was a personal friend of the King, and he was able to obtain a huge land grant
in the Delaware valley to form a Quaker colony. The Quakers came to America by the tens of thousands.
All
three of these original immigrant cultures proved to be strong and resilient in
the New World, and they all played important roles in early American
history. They all had strong (although
different) family values. They were all
relatively literate for the time, and they founded the first great American
institutions of higher learning – Harvard, the University of Virginia and the
University of Pennsylvania. They
founded cities and developed industry, agriculture, and trade. And although they never really got along all
that well with one another, they all provided strong and important leaders in
the American Revolution – men like John Adams of Massachusetts, Ben Franklin of
Pennsylvania, and George Washington of Virginia.
They
were all wonderful in many ways, but for the most part, they had nothing to do with the roots of bluegrass music.
We
now know that bluegrass music sprang mainly from the fourth great immigration
-- the (badly named) Scotch-Irish immigration that began in about 1710 and
lasted up to (and a bit beyond) the American Revolution. This was a great movement of peoples from
the British borderlands surrounding the Irish Sea – the north of England, the
south of Scotland, and the north of Ireland – to the backcountry of the
Appalachian Mountains. The lands from
which these immigrants came had for centuries been highways of invasion as
England repeatedly invaded Scotland, Scotland invaded England, and everybody
invaded Ireland. What these people had
in common was not a single nationality (they included English, Irish, and
Lowland Scots) nor a single religion (many were Presbyterians, but many others
belonged to other established religions or to small, local sects), but rather a
common history of having been repeatedly invaded and conquered.
The
culture that had developed in the borderlands was poor, impermanent, and
very tough. Many of the people there dwelt in small, rough houses where
entire families lived in a single room.
These dwellings were preferred because they were of no great value, and
they could be easily replaced when destroyed by the current enemy. These people felt almost no allegiance to
any central authority or government, but rather trusted only their own families
(kin) and their clans. The male
children were brought up as warriors to protect the clan, and they were taught
to be aggressive, proud, brave and very independent. Appropriate to the borderland, their vision of freedom was one of
natural liberty – a God-given right
which belonged to every man but which had to be constantly protected from others which sought to limit it. Others
could be Kings who sought to conquer, clergy who sought to persuade, or
neighbors who sought to extend their influence locally.
The
whole message of this culture to the outside world was "leave us
alone." And for many hundreds of
years, it had worked pretty well. What
resulted was a large patchwork of strong, local families and clans maintaining
their existence in the face of all comers.
In a time of large, strong families, the border families were very
large and very strong. They had a vibrant and rich set of folkways,
which were based on aural rather than written traditions. Their rich collections of stories and songs
were passed along by word of mouth and their music was learned by ear. Their religion was often centered around Field Meetings, which were out-of-doors social events of great import.
But
then around 1700, everything changed forever.
England and Scotland were united, Ireland was “pacified”, and all the
invasions ceased. Now Great Britain was
one country but a country with a problem:
there was a bunch of really proud, poor, independent, obnoxious people
living right in the middle of it. This,
of course, would not do, and so began a hundred-year period of
pacification. Pacification is a
relatively nice word for what was actually a very bloody business, with whole
families often being hunted down and slaughtered. First tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people
fled the borderlands, looking for a better life. Often immigrants first went to Northern Ireland and then later to
America, which is probably the genesis of the term Scotch-Irish. Between 1710
and 1776, it is estimated that a quarter million immigrants left the
borderlands of Britain for America. The
result was that a culture that was a thousand years in the making essentially
disappeared from its homelands in less than a hundred years.
When
they reached the shores of America, the reception of the Scotch-Irish was far
from positive. They were poor,
arrogant, proud vagabonds who often just squatted on any available land
regardless of who it belonged to. The
Puritans, Cavaliers and Quakers did not agree on much, but they all agreed that
these proud people had nothing to be proud of, and they drove them out. The immigrants mostly ended up on the great
crescent of the frontier -- from Nova Scotia on the north, down through the
Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Blue Ridge, and into the Great Smoky Mountains
of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia.
In the eighteenth century, this was a wild and hostile land, largely
uninhabited except by often-unfriendly Native Americans. But it was also a land of incredible beauty
and abundance for a people with the fortitude to tame this wild and violent
place.
So
the lost culture of the British borderlands found a new place in the
Appalachian Mountains. The single-room
rough houses of the borderlands became the mountain cabins of legend. The old Field Meetings of the borderlands
became the Camp Meetings and Brush Arbor meetings of the southern highlands.
From the Irish Sea, the high, unaccompanied singing of the Presbyterians of the
Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides became the singing style of the Primitive Baptists
and the high lonesome sound of the Appalachian balladeers. The fiddle was the folk instrument of choice
in the eighteenth century, and fiddle songs abounded at both community
gatherings and in lonely cabins. The
ancient songs rang through the Appalachian backcountry as they had through the
British borderlands for nearly a thousand years. And the patchwork of insular families and clans that had once
covered the British borderlands -- with their local ways, their local stories,
and their local music -- now covered the southern highlands.
Right
from the first, life in the mountains was very hard and often violent. The fighting between the Indians and the
settlers was particularly intense, but eventually it mostly died down and there
was a lot of mixing. Most of the people
I know with mountain roots have some Native American blood, as do I. Similarly, the part of the Revolutionary War
that was fought in the mountains was a particularly vicious affair in the
tradition the border wars.
The
Appalachian settlers had relatively little to do with founding the United
States or starting the Civil War. In
some sense, the Civil War was started by the Quakers, who were the first to
recognize race slavery as totally morally reprehensible and unacceptable. The Quakers started the Underground Railroad
and they were very active in the early abolitionist movement. But because they were Pacifists, they did
not fight the Civil War. The two great
antagonist of the Civil War were the Puritans and the Cavaliers, settling once
and for all, perhaps, a titanic cultural conflict which had raged for many
generations on both sides of the Atlantic.
The people of the southern highlands fought on both sides in the Civil
War, although more probably fought for the Confederacy than for the Union. Both were disliked, but the Union seemed the
more intrusive. In the mountains, it
often really was brother against brother and the fighting was clannish and
personal. As always in the mountains,
the primary issue was natural liberty
and right to be left alone rather than any strong feelings either way about
race slavery.
The
culture of the mountains has always been profoundly conservative, and they have
always resisted change even as they have assimilated outside influences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in
mountain music. For example, the 5-string banjo became the rage of nineteenth
century America after Joel Walker Sweeny adapted it from an African plantation
instrument (the banjar) in the 1840s.
It was the defining instrument for minstrel music, which was the first
of many adaptations of African-American music to popular venues. The banjo became the folk instrument of the last half of the nineteenth century, an
many settlers really did travel to California with "a banjo on my
knee." After the Civil War, the
banjo made its way back into the mountains where it slowly joined the fiddle as
a co-equal instrument of choice. By the
turn of the century, there were hundreds of local banjo styles to match the
hundreds of local fiddle styles that had been in the highlands for
centuries. One of these banjos style, a
three-finger technique developed around Shelby, North Carolina by people like
Dewitt (Snuffy) Jenkins, would emerge through the genius of Earl Scruggs to be
the defining banjo style of Bluegrass music.
Strangely, by the time this happened, the 5-sting banjo had almost
disappeared from all other musical forms, even from its African-American roots.
Similar
tales to this can also be told about the mandolin and the guitar.
The
history of the peoples of the mountains is not well known nor well
documented. Not being a people of
letters, they did not write much about themselves. Their history was largely ignored by the early historians of
Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, who saw themselves as the center of
American history and culture. The
mountain dialects of English, with a history as old as any in North America, were
defined by scholars to be simply "incorrect." Working conditions were always hard in the
mountains, both on the subsistence farms and in the slave-like conditions of
the "Company Towns" associated with the mills and the mines. But somehow the families got by, generation
after generation. The Great Depression
hit especially hard in the mountains, with hundreds of thousands of mountain
sons and daughters leaving, never to return.
After all was said and done, they were just a bunch of ignorant
hillbillies trying to get menial jobs in more affluent areas. How could people such as these possess
anything of lasting value?
But
some people refused to buy this image.
And I believe that the most import person this Century in this regard
may be Bill Monroe himself. As he said
many times, he could hear the ancient
tones. He knew through the folklore
of his youth that he belonged to an ancient, proud and honorable culture which
knew itself well, but which was largely unknown and unrecognized by the outside
world. He knew it long before the
historians knew it. He knew the quality
of its values and he knew the quality of its art. And as he constructed the modern music known as Bluegrass, he
deliberately made it the newest link in a long, long chain. A chain that stretches through the
Appalachian Mountains, through the lonely cabins and the Camp meeting, through
the hard times of a new world and the hard times of the old, back to the hills
of the borderlands of the British Isles – back to where he came from.
1) Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
2) Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1984).
3) John Wright, Traveling the High Way Home History
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
4) Richard D. Smith, Bluegrass (Chicago: a cappella books, 1995).
5) Barry R. Willis, America's Music: Bluegrass (Franktown: Pine Valley Music, 1992).
6) David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
7) Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (New York, Random House, 1986).
8) Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1988).