Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia

Introduction

Introduction N ORTH GEORGIA begins at the edge of the old rolling cottonbelt plantation country, along a line running roughly east and west through Atlanta; it extends up through the red _ . clay hills, piney woods, andtextile-mill towns ofthePiedmont , into the Blue Ridge Mountains up to the borders of North Carolina and Tennessee. This varied landscape has given rise to and nurtured a variety of impressive musical traditions, emblematicof southern folk music, and well-springs of later American music. Among these are the stirring antebellum spirituals and lined-out hymns of black country churches, the old-time black frolic tunes and bottleneck blues, the bitter hammer-and-pick songs that helped build the railroads and highways, the ebullient dance music of the Piedmont fiddle bands, the mournful and tragic unaccompanied mountain ballads, the raucous backwoods banjo tunes and songs. Since the early part of this century, when these forms, though in flux and transition, were flourishing, great changes in communications and in the social and economic order have transformed their physical and human settings. One might wonder, as we did when we began field collecting in north Georgia in 1977, whether the sounds of these traditions might still be widely heard in mountain cabins, old-fashioned churches, and back-country dance halls; or whether they had been obliterated or changed beyond recognition as distinctive regional forms by the interstate highways that have sliced through the ridges and valleys of northwest Georgia, by the sprawl of shopping -center and condominium development out of Atlanta up into the mountains, and by the pervasive influence of gospel, pop, and country music via radio and television. We learned that these older folk styles had by no means vanished, although, with a few exceptions such as some traditional church practices, they were no longer central to community life. Indeed, we found exceptional examples of all the important older forms, and at times these seemed to have grown in strength and beauty in the struggle for survival. The people who have chosen to remember and continue to perform them emerge as extraordinary folk, usually older, individualistic and at times even eccentric, possessed of keen memories, authentic and exemplary performing styles, and a commitment to the "old-time way," not out of antiquarianism or nostalgia, but for reasons of personal and artistic choice. Folk Visions and Voices was produced over several years of collecting this music across north Georgia, of interviewing the singers and musicians in order to learn about their lives and the part these traditions played in them over the years, and of developing a documentation in drawings, paintings, and photographs, of the people and their environments. The original mode of presentation was a traveling exhibition of the visual work, with a tape-recorded anthology of selections from the field recordings playing in the gallery. When possible, live performances were given by the people we had come to regard as our artistic collaborators rather than merely sources or informants. The culminating exhibition of the project at Nexus Incorporated's Third Floor Gallery in Atlanta in 1980 was opened with a two-day festival of the singing, playing, and dancing of most of the tradition bearers the reader will meet in this book. Growing out of our field collecting and the exhibition, this book continues the original intentions of the project. A broad and diverse collection of north Georgia folk songs, ballads, instrumental music, and religious songs is presented in accurate transcriptions of melody Introduction xi and text from field tapes. These examples are placed at the ends of chapters that center on a family, a performing group, an individual, or several individuals representing a given tradition. The drawings, paintings, and photographs complete the presentation. We have emphasized the folk and their stories because we feel it is important to reveal in some depth the lives and attitudes of some of the exceptional people who have carried the older forms of folk music and culture into the last decades of the twentieth century. They provide this picture in their own words as much as possible, although the author is present as a first-person participant in the conversations. We feel it is a distortion to edit an interview, with its leading questions and interplay of two personalities, into a longmonologue . Of necessity we have done some condensing and at times collating as we developed extensive interviews intobiographical xii Introduction chapters; yet we have...