Appalachian Folk

Appalachian music is the music of the region of Appalachia in the Eastern United States. Traditional Appalachian music is derived from various influences, including the ballads, hymns and fiddle music of the British Isles (particularly Scotland), and to a lesser extent the music of Continental Europe.

First recorded in the 1920s, Appalachian musicians were a key influence on the early development of old-time music, country music, bluegrass, and rock n' roll, and were an important part of the American folk music revival of the 1960s. Instruments typically used to perform Appalachian music include the banjo, American fiddle, fretted dulcimer, and later the guitar.Ted Olson,
Music
," ''Encyclopedia of Appalachia'', 2006. Retrieved: 28 January 2015.

Early recorded Appalachian musicians include Fiddlin' John Carson, G. B. Grayson & Henry Whitter, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, Clarence Ashley, and Dock Boggs, all of whom were initially recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Several Appalachian musicians obtained renown during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including Jean Ritchie, Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford, Hedy West and Doc Watson. Country and bluegrass artists such as Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs, Chet Atkins, The Stanley Brothers and Don Reno were heavily influenced by traditional Appalachian music.

History

First immigrants: from the British Isles

Immigrants from Northern England, the Scottish lowlands, and Ulster arrived in Appalachia in the 17th and 18th centuries (with many from Ulster being "Ulster Scots", whose ancestors originated from parts of Southern Scotland and Northern England), including Cumberland, and brought with them the musical traditions of these regions, consisting primarily of English and Scottish ballads{{{sndwhich were essentially unaccompanied narratives{{sndand dance music, such as reels, which were accompanied by a fiddle.

Ballads

Many Appalachian ballads, such as " Pretty Saro", " The Cuckoo", " Pretty Polly", and "Matty Groves", descend from the English ballad tradition and have known antecedents there. Other songs popular in Appalachia, such as "Young Hunting", " Lord Randal", and " Barbara Allen", have lowland Scottish roots. Many of these are versions of the famous Child Ballads, collected by Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. The dance tune "Cumberland Gap" may be derived from the tune that accompanies the Scottish ballad " Bonnie George Campbell". According to the musicologist Cecil Sharp the ballads of Appalachia, including their melodies, were generally most similar to those of "the North of England, or to the Lowlands, rather than the Highlands, of Scotland, as the country from which they he peopleoriginally migrated. For the Appalachian tunes...have far more affinity with the normal English folk-tune than with that of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander."

Fiddle tunes

Several Appalachian fiddle tunes have origins in Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland and Scotland, for example "Leather Britches", based on "Lord MacDonald's Reel". These may have come to Appalachia via printed versions which were very popular throughout the British Empire in the eighteenth century, rather than directly from Gaelic areas. The style of the 18th century Scottish fiddler Niel Gow, which involved a powerful and rhythmic short bow sawstroke technique, is said to have become the foundation of Appalachian fiddling.{{Cite web, last=McClatchy, first=Debby, date=2000, title=A Short History of Appalachian Traditional Music, url=https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/appalach.htm, url-status=live, access-date=2021-10-12, website=www.mustrad.org.uk, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20000830071506/http://www.mustrad.org.uk:80/articles/appalach.htm , archive-date=2000-08-30

Church music

The early British immigrants also brought a form of church singing called lining out or calling out, in which one person sings a line of a psalm or hymn and the rest of the congregation responds. This type of congregational singing, once very common all over colonial America, is now largely restricted to Old Regular Baptist churches in the hills of southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

Continental Europeans

There were German, Polish and Czech cultural pockets in Appalachia as well as many Dutch and French Huguenot immigrants. These cultures largely assimilated, but some songs and melodies, for example the German "Fischer's Hornpipe", remained in the repertoires of their Americanized ancestors. A recording of the fiddler Tommy Jarrell playing "Fisher's Hornpipe" can be heard online.

The "Appalachian" or "mountain" dulcimer, thought to have been a modification of a Germanic instrument such as the scheitholt, (or possibly the Norwegian langeleik or the French épinette des Vosges) emerged in Southwest Pennsylvania and Northwest Virginia in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, settlement schools in Kentucky taught the fretted dulcimer to students, helping spread its popularity in the region. Jean Ritchie was largely responsible for popularizing the instrument among folk music enthusiasts in the 1950s.

Appalachian yodeling is thought to have entered the Appalachian mountains in the 18th century, brought by immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland, where it was generally used to communicate over longs distances in mountainous terrain similar to the Appalachians. Vocal feathering, practiced by singers including Doug Wallin and described as a "half-yodel", (or more accurately, according to Judith McCulloh, as 'A sudden or forceful raising of the soft palate against the back wall of the throat and/or a sudden closing of the glottis at the very end of a given note, generally accompanied by a rise in pitch'), may also be Germanic in origin.

Later developments

The "New World" ballad tradition, consisting of ballads written in North America, was as influential as the Old World tradition to the development of Appalachian music. New World ballads were typically written to reflect news events of the day, and were often published as broadsides. New World ballads popular among Appalachian musicians included "Omie Wise", " Wreck of the Old 97", "Man of Constant Sorrow", and " John Hardy". Later, coal mining and its associated labor issues led to the development of protest songs, such as "Which Side Are You On?" and "Coal Creek March".Stephen Mooney, "Coal-Mining and Protest Music". ''Encyclopedia of Appalachia'' (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1136–1137.

Many ballad singers, such as Texas Gladden) scales. It is unknown exactly when and how this style developed.{{Citation needed, date=October 2021

Instruments such as the guitar, mandolin, and autoharp became popular in Appalachia in the late 19th century as a result of mail order catalogs. These instruments were added to the banjo-and-fiddle outfits to form early string bands.

In addition, other instruments used include the spoons which are played by hitting two spoons together, making a 'click' sound that creates tempo, and the washboard which the players play by using their hands or thimble to stroke the riffs on the instrument. These are used in place of drums to produce percussion sounds. The washtub bass is another instrument popular in Appalachian music. Also known as the gutbucket,(or in other countries the "gas-tank bass" or "laundrophone"), it is usually made from a metal wash tub, a staff or stick, and at least one string, although usually four or more strings are used. The Bass may also have tuning pegs. The washtub bass originated in African-Americans communities in Appalachia before being adopted by white string bands.{{Cite journal, last=Thompson, first=Deborah, date=2006, title=Searching for silenced voices in Appalachian music, url=https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10708-006-7055-2.pdf, journal=GeoJournal, volume=65, issue=1–2, pages=67–78, doi=10.1007/s10708-006-7055-2, s2cid=144632511

Collecting and recording

Fieldwork

Around the turn of the 20th century, a broad movement developed to record the rich musical heritage, particularly of folksong, that had been preserved and developed by the people of the Appalachians. This music was unwritten; songs were handed down, often within families, from generation to generation by oral transmission. Fieldwork to record Appalachian music (first in musical notation, later on with recording equipment) was undertaken by a variety of scholars.

One of the earliest collectors of Appalachian ballads was Kentucky native John Jacob Niles (1892–1980), who began noting ballads as early as 1907 as he learned them in the course of family, social life, and work. Due to fears of plagiarism and imitation of other collectors active in the region at the time, Niles waited until 1960 to publish his first 110 in ''The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles''. The area covered by Niles in his collecting days, according to the map in the ''Ballad Book'', was bounded roughly by Tazewell, Virginia; south to Boone and Saluda, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina; west to Chickamauga, Georgia; north through Chattanooga and Dayton, Tennessee to Somerset, Kentucky; northwest to Bardstown, Frankfort, and Lexington, Kentucky; east to the West Virginia border, and back down to Tazewell, thus covering areas of the Smokies, the Cumberland Plateau, Upper Tennessee Valley, and the Lookout Mountain region.

In May 1916, the soprano Loraine Wyman and her pianist colleague Howard Brockway visited the Appalachians in eastern Kentucky, in a 300-mile walking trek to gather folk songs. They took their harvest back to New York, where they continued, with great success, their ongoing efforts in performing traditional folk songs to urban audiences.{{cite web , url=http://riamco.org/render.php?eadid=US-RPB-ethno.arc.0128&view=biography , access-date=2016-03-16 , title=Biographical note , work=Loraine Wyman Collection , publisher=Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online (RIAMCO)

Starting only about a month after Wyman and Brockway, the British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles toured the Southern Appalachian region, visiting places like Hot Springs in North Carolina, Flag Pond in Tennessee, Harlan in Kentucky, and Greenbrier County in West Virginia, as well as schools such as Berea College and the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky and the Pi Beta Phi settlement school in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They persisted for three summers in all (1916–1918), collecting over 200 "Old World" ballads in the region, many of which had varied only slightly from their British Isles counterparts. After their first study in Appalachia, Sharp and Karpeles published '' English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians''.Filene, Benjamin, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music, University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Among the ballads Sharp and Karpeles found in Appalachia were medieval-themed songs such as " The Elfin Knight" and " Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor", and seafaring and adventure songs such as "In Seaport Town" and "Young Beichan". They transcribed 16 versions of " Barbara Allen" and 22 versions of "The Daemon Lover" (often called "The House Carpenter" in Appalachia). The work of Sharp and Karpeles confirmed what many folklorists had suspected{{sndthe remote valleys and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains were a vast repository of older forms of music.Ted Olson and Ajay Kalra, "Appalachian Music: Examining Popular Assumptions". ''A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region'' (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 163–170.

Later in the twentieth century, Jean Ritchie, Texas Gladden

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