Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr (review)

Celebrating deeply rooted as well as recently revived and constructed cultural connections between Scotland, Ulster, and Appalachia, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia has sold remarkably well for a book published by a university press. Authors Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr offer ebullient if at times romanticized interpretations of Appalachia’s indebtedness to one strain of the region’s diverse cultural heritage. Other significant regional influences discussed only briefly in the book include English, German, African American, and Native American cultures.

Wayfaring Strangers is, at one level, a companion book to The Thistle and Shamrock, Ritchie’s weekly National Public Radio show that has promoted the contemporary Celtic music renaissance since the 1980s. The Thistle and Shamrock website in early 2016 underscores the marketing ties between book and radio show, as the cover image for Wayfaring Strangers appears at the top of the site (www.thistleradio.com). Ritchie, a native of Scotland, was based for some years in Charlotte, North Carolina; along the way she befriended Orr, who for many years was president of Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina, and who founded the Swannanoa Gathering, an annual summer enrichment program offering workshops on Appalachian and Celtic music and related cultural topics. The Thistle and Shamrock may lack depth of cultural analysis, but that shortcoming is more than compensated for by host Ritchie’s passion for the music and her consummate taste in selecting recordings. A book cannot offer the visceral immediacy of radio, yet Wayfaring Strangers takes a similarly impressionistic approach, attempting to engage the senses through glossy color photos, other lustrous illustrations, and a companion compact disc with twenty recordings of traditional music from both sides of the Atlantic. (The CD is a pleasant if inessential “mix tape”—it features only two previously unreleased recordings.)

Not possessing a focused narrative, however, the book alternates between trying to interpret intercultural connections between Scotland, Ulster, and Appalachia and trying to present a general cultural history of Appalachia. In pursuing the latter effort the book engages in numerous generalizations, such as: “Those who call the mountains home are forever spellbound, according to Appalachian writer Emily Satterwhite: ‘Appalachia instills in its residents an abiding sense of place that fortifies those who stay and consoles, beckons or haunts those who leave’” (p. 176). This blanket assertion (partly borrowed by Ritchie and Orr from another source) ignores the fact that Appalachia is defined by valleys as much as by mountains; claiming such unified essence for the region’s residents—that they are united in being “spellbound” through feeling “an abiding sense of place”—is to engage in regional stereotyping.

Ritchie and Orr juxtapose their accessible if simplistically conceived historical writing with short expository pieces from other people. The section entitled “‘Voices of Tradition’ Profiles” reveals that the authors relied heavily on a small circle of contacts and interview subjects—prominent urban folk music revivalists as well as several regional culture figures associated with western North Carolina—to provide context and perspectives. Absent from this group of invited consultants, though, are several scholars who have long been central to this line of investigation, including such leaders of intercultural conversations as R. Celeste Ray, Thomas G. Burton, Richard Blaustein, Michael Montgomery, and Billy Kennedy. Dialogue with these scholars might have introduced substantially more intellectual rigor and thematic focus to the book’s narrative and would have ensured a more nuanced interpretation of Scottish-Irish-Appalachian connections. Alas, Ritchie and Orr’s bibliography ignores virtually all thematically relevant published works by these scholars, mentioning only one journal article by Burton.

In their respective roles Ritchie and Orr have long been agents of cultural mythmaking, and Wayfaring Strangers is a compelling if ultimately compromised compendium of information, reflections, images, and recordings compiled to advance the...