Mountain folk, especially those who have had the misfortune of being
mixed in troubles (feuds to the outside world) believe earnestly that
"when singing comes in, fighting goes out." "Look at the Hatfields and
McCoys," they say. "They make music together now at the home of one side
and now at the home of them on t'other side. They sit side-by-side on
the bench at the Singing Gathering down on the Mayo Trail come the
second Sunday in June every year. Off yonder nigh the mouth of Big
Sandy, across the mountains which once were stained with the blood of
both families. What's more, Little Melissy Hatfield and Little Bud McCoy
even sing together a ballad that tells of the love of Rosanna McCoy for
Devil Anse's son Jonse. And their elders sing hymn tunes long cherished
in the mountain church, whilst tens of thousands gathered on the hills
all around about listen with silent rejoicing over the peace that has
come to the once sorry enemies."
To be sure, there is the singing of folk songs handed down by word of
mouth from generation to generation. When the mountain people are asked
the origin of their music, the usual reply is "My grandsir larnt me this
fiddle tune," or "My Granny larnt me this song-ballet."
Since mountain people have brought their music out of the coves and
hollows for the world to hear through their Singing Gathering and
Festivals, the nation is fast becoming aware of the importance of folk
music in the life of Americans today. Great singers have taken up the
simple songs of our fathers. "Wipe out foes of morale with music," says
Lucy Monroe, New York's "Star Spangled Banner Soprano," director of
patriotic music for RCA-Victor, when she sang on September 11, 1941,
before the National Federation of Music Clubs in New York. "Let's make
certain that when the present crisis is passed, music will have done its
full job of defense," she said enthusiastically. The singer urged
federation members to become soldiers of music. "Let us enlist together
to form a great army of music!" she urged. Miss Monroe was commissioned
by Mayor LaGuardia to devote her efforts to the cause of music for the
Office of Civilian Defense. Whereupon she outlined a four-point program:
1. To visit large plants and industrial centers connected with defense
work to give musical programs and to suggest that the plants begin each
day's activities with playing the Star-spangled Banner--to tell the men
what they are working for. 2. To conduct community sings in large
cities. 3. To collect phonograph records for the boys in army camps,
establishing central depots in every locality in the country. 4. To give
talks, with song illustrations, on the history of the United States of
America in colleges, high schools, women's clubs, and music clubs.
Though some may see folk song, the basis of all music, endangered by
motion pictures, Kurt Schindler, authority on ancient European customs
and collector of folk music in other lands, believes the danger lies in
another direction. "The young students, the modernists, in their great
desire to keep up with the times wish to kill the old things."
All the forces working in America to preserve folk song should share
Kurt Schindler's fears. The press is cognizant of the farflung effort
throughout the land. The _Atlanta Journal_ (September 19, 1928) says,
"The collection and preservation of mountain folk music is a singularly
gracious work and one of rare value to history. Collected in its natural
environment, it is perforce authentic both in tune and idiom, and
sincere collectors are not content with this alone--they complete the
record by tracing the songs to their origins. Such is a most gracious
work and one which lovers of beauty, whether music or in legend or in
local history, throughout the South, would do well to imitate."
Far removed from the metropolitan area where great singers interpret the
simple songs of our forbears and urge the necessity of their
preservation, an untrained mountain minstrel is lending his every effort
to aid not only in conserving but in correlating as well the folk lore
of the Blue Ridge Country. He is a kinsman of Devil Anse Hatfield and
lives just around the mountain from where the old warrior lies buried.
"Sid Hatfield never was mixed up in the troubles in no shape nor
fashion," anyone can tell you. "He'd not foir a gun if you laid one in
his hand. But just give him a fiddle! Why, Sid Hatfield is the
music-makinest fellow that ever laid bow to strings. What's more he puts
a harp in his mouth and plays it at the same time he's sawin' the bow.
I've seen him and hear-ed him, many's the time."
And so have thousands of others. For Sid Hatfield spends his spare time,
when he's not working for the Appalachian Power Company in Logan County,
West Virginia, making music first at one gathering, then another. Sid's
repertoire is almost limitless. He plays any fiddle tune from Big Sandy
to Bonaparte's Retreat. And when it comes to the mouth harp, Sid just
naturally can't be beat. "I love the old tunes," he says, "and they must
not die. You and I can help them to live. Let old rancors die, but not
our native song."
To that end he has become a prime mover in a folksong and folklore
conservation movement called American Folkways Association. "There are a
lot of McCoys," he says, "who can pick a banjo and sing as fine a ditty
as you ever heard. There's Bud McCoy over on Levisa Fork. Never saw his
betters when it comes to picking the banjo. We've played together a
whole day at a stretch and never played the same tune twice. We just
stop long enough to eat dinner and then we go at it again. Bud's
teaching his grandson, Little Bud, and he's not yet five year old.
Little Bud can step a hornpipe too. Peert as a cricket!" A slow breaking
smile lights Sid's open countenance. "Reckon you've heard of our
Association," and, not giving anyone time to answer, Sid is off on the
subject nearest and dearest to his heart. "We've got the finest
Association in the country. Got a nephew of Fiddling Bob Taylor in our
Association and by next summer we aim to hold a Singing Gathering down
in his country--the Watauga country in Tennessee. Folsom Taylor, that's
his name and he's living now in the far end of the Blue Ridge in
Maryland. He helped us with the Singing Gathering we held in the
Cumberlands in Maryland this past summer. We've got another helper down
in Tennessee. His name is Grady Snead. He was in the World War and about
lost his singing voice but he's not lost any of his spirit for mountain
music and old-time ways. Why, every summer ever since Grady got back
from the war he's gathered his people around him in Snead's Grove--he
owns quite a few acres down in Tennessee--and they have an old-time
picnic and they have hymn singing and ballad singing and fiddle music.
This past summer our Association joined in with them at the Snead picnic
and you never saw the like that day in Snead's Grove. People thick as
bees and pleased as could be. We started off a-singing a good
old-fashioned hymn all together and that put everybody in good heart.
Never saw such a picnic in all my born days. There's nothing like a good
old-fashioned all-day picnic to make friends among people and then mix
in a lot of good old-time music. That's what Americans were brought up
on and that's what they're going to live on more and more through these
troubled hours and as time goes on."
That day at Snead's Grove, Sid Hatfield told them about the Association
and how already different organizations had united with it. He told of a
preacher over in Maryland who had joined in whole-heartedly. "He's
adopted the great out-of-doors for his temple in which to worship with
song and prayer. Robinson is his name. Reverend Felix Robinson, as fine
a singer and as fine a preacher as you'd ever want to sit under."
Then Sid put down his fiddle and his mouth harp and drawing from his
coat pocket a crumpled paper, he began again. "My friends, I want to
read you this piece in the _Chicago Daily News_. This is the place to
read it. We ought to be warned about what can happen in this country to
our music, by what has happened to some of our people. Though maybe
sometime it's been for the best. This piece was writ by a mighty knowing
man. His name is Robert J. Casey and he flew from Chicago for his paper
the _Chicago Daily News_ to hear with his own ears the music of the
mountains from the lips of mountain singers at Traipsin' Woman cabin on
the Mayo Trail the second Sunday in June, 1938."
There was a moment's breathless silence over the great gathering there
in Snead's Grove. The look of fear and apprehension gave way to that of
eagerness and hope as Devil Anse Hatfield's kinsman read with quiet
dignity:
"'One breathes a sigh for the Hatfields and McCoys who maintain the
Democratic majority in cemeteries along the West Virginia line. One
voices a word of commendation for the Hatfields and the McCoys who drive
taxi-cabs in Ashland or run quiet, respectable and legal beer parlors in
Huntington. And looking from one group to the other, one realizes that
something has happened to the hill country.
"'A person of imagination standing on the tree-shaded porch of the
Traipsin' Woman cabin up in Lonesome Hollow probably still can hear
echoes of "the singing gathering" which only a few hours ago
demonstrated the essential durability of the hill folks.... Where a day
or two ago there was only a neutral interest in such proceedings, now
people are talking of Elizabethan culture preserved completely for a
matter of centuries by people who lived on the wrong side of the tracks,
just a few rods from the fence of the rolling mills.
"'There is a tendency in some quarters to look upon the sing-festival as
a permanent and predictable community asset. But that is because the
sophisticated and urban population is ignoring the present status of the
McCoys and the Hatfields, as for many years it has ignored the
crack-voiced "ballet" singers and the left-handed virtuosi in its own
backyard.'"
Sid Hatfield paused in his reading to say a few words on his own. "There
is one, not calling any names, who discovered a forgotten England in the
Kentucky uplands." He turned again to read from the paper. "'One who set
down the words of the amazing ballads and studied music in order to
capture the changeless arrangements for psaltery, dulcimer and sakbut,
who has no such illusions. The music of the hills today is a thin echo
of tunes that were sung on the village greens in Shakespeare's time.
Tomorrow it will be gone!'" Sid Hatfield's voice lifted in warning.
"'And with it will vanish the early English idiom of the hill
folks--their costumes, their customs, their dances, the singing ritual
of their weddings. Pretty soon there aren't going to be any more hill
folk--if indeed, there are any now.
"'"The Hatfields and McCoys, they were reckless mountain boys," whose
history is now as stale as that of the Capone mob. Their feud, which ...
threatened to provoke a civil war between two states, gave rise to the
general belief in the lasting endurance of the hill dwellers. A race
must be hardy as the ragweed when it could not be exterminated even by
its own patient effort. The tenantry of the flatlands might be excused
for believing that a special Providence intended it to survive, despite
poverty, malnutrition, bad housing and wasting disease forever and ever.
"'And so it might have survived, for the hill people had "the habit of
standing." They had set a precedent of fertility and hardihood and the
will to live for a matter of centuries.... But there had come influences
over which not even the carefully nurtured stubbornness of 300 years
could prevail.... The railroad and the concrete highway and the
automobile and the black tunnels of the coal mine.
"'... The day of isolated communities and isolated culture in the United
States is already past.... The hill folk have been known to the flatland
people chiefly for feuds and moonshine. Perhaps tempers are no less
quick, but it's less trouble to get to court and have grievances
adjudicated according to law. And the music is going--and the
traditional dances. It is one of the defects of all educational systems
that they make it easier for a person to forget by removing the
necessity for his remembering.'"
Sid Hatfield again voiced his own observations. "Time was when old folks
could recall every word of hundreds of ballads." He turned once more to
read from the newspaper in his hand. "'... and every note of a music
whose disregard for melodic rule made it exceedingly difficult to
remember. Now, when such things can be written down, no "grandsir" will
bother to repeat them to the youngins and the youngins will get their
music from the radio. By that time there will be no doubt that Queen
Elizabeth is dead.'"
Devil Anse's kinsman surveyed his listeners. "My friends, we've got
a-bound, me and you and you," he singled out a lad here a man, a woman
there, "to put our shoulders to the wheel and save our old ways and our
old music."
Then he told about the American Folkways Association and its purpose.
"We aim to unify efforts to conserve and cultivate the traditions and
customs of the Blue Ridge Country where conditions are ideal for a
renewed emphasis on living a simple and natural life ... to preserve the
past and present expressions of isolated peoples in the Southern
Appalachians which are untainted by any form of insincerity or
make-believe. There is growing interest among city-bred people in the
folk-ways, and through research and actual experiences, they are
learning to appreciate the simple folk-life that is still intact."
Sid, like Devil Anse, understands crowd psychology, though neither calls
it by that name. Sid had the attention of his hearers and he told them
more. "We're getting our eyes open more every day to the boundless
treasures in America. People all through the Blue Ridge don't aim to
stand by and see things disappear because new ways have come in. They've
started all sorts of gatherings and festivals to keep alive the things
that mean America!"
With quick gesture he enumerated upon his fingers as he named some of
them: "There's the Forest Festival held in October at Elkins, West
Virginia, with a pretty mountain maid for its Queen; the Tobacco
Festival in Shelbyville, Kentucky, that pays homage to the leading
product of the Blue Grass country, next to the race horse, of course;
there's the Mountain Laurel Festival at Pineville, Kentucky, in May,
glorifying the beauty and profusion of the mountain flower; the Virginia
Apple Blossom Festival in April in the Shenandoah Valley at Winchester,
Virginia--a wilderness of blossoms that has made beautiful a once lonely
valley; the Rhododendron Festival in Webster Springs, West Virginia, in
July, that vies in charm with a like event in Kentucky; the Sweet Potato
Festival in Paris, Tennessee, that pays tribute to the yam; the American
Folk Song Festival in the foothills of Kentucky. Then there's the Snead
Picnic that our good friend Grady Snead has been carrying on every
summer ever since he got back from the war across the waters; there's
the Mountain Choir Festival over in Oakland, Maryland, in the month of
August, when hundreds of mountain boys and girls gather together to sing
hymns and old ballads too; there's the Arcadian Folk Festival and the
Poet's Fair and the Arcadian Guild all bunched together at Hot Springs
National Park and McFadden Three Sisters Springs where down in the Ozark
Country folks welcome the advent of 'the Moon of Painted Leaves' and
pattern new dreams in the valley of pastoral fancy, listen to the Pipes
of Pan, meet old friends, and make new ones in a sylvan environment,
where poetry slides down every moonbeam. Every sort of gathering right
where it belongs, where it was cradled through all these long
generations."
Sid paused a moment for second wind. "When we look about we're bound to
own this is a mighty changing world. Time was when the mountain people
rode to the gatherings in Brushy Hollow in jolt wagons. They kept it up
a while, loading the whole family in the jolt wagon. But times have
changed.... A body has to sort o' keep up with the times, like Prof.
Koch. Bless you, he loads his whole pack and passel of boys and girls in
a bus and packs them hither and yon 'crost the country to show out with
their play-making. The Carolina Playmakers just naturally fetch the
mountain to Mohammed." Sid flung wide his hands, brought them slowly
together. "To get all such folks to work together that's why we formed
the American Folkways Association. What's more we've got us a magazine
to tell about what we've done and aim to do--the _Arcadian Life_
magazine, with our good friend Otto Ernest Rayburn as editor, 'way down
in the Ozarks." Sid Hatfield smiled pleasantly. "There's no excuse for
folks not being neighborly nowadays. No matter where they live, what
with good roads and the automobile--we've just got a-bound to be
neighborly. To sing together, to make music together, to show out our
crops and our posies and our handiwork together. Here in Snead's Grove
today is the third time we've bore witness that our Association is not
just a theory. We made our first bow in the Kentucky foothills in June,
the second in Maryland in August, and now in Tennessee. In October we
aim to join hands and hearts and our music in Arcadia under the Autumn
moon."
That day in Snead's Grove in Tennessee they wanted Sid Hatfield to keep
right on but taking a squint at the sun sinking in the west, he said in
conclusion, "I've got a long ways to travel back to the West Virginia
mountains but I hope we'll all be together again here in the Grove next
summer, this day a year, the Lord being willing."