North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Samantha Biddix Bumgarner: Country Music Pioneer

383 Samantha Biddix Bumgarner Country Music Pioneer Robert Hunt Ferguson    In early August 1936 a young Harvard student, aspiring folksinger, and fourstring banjo player named Pete Seeger made the long drive from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Asheville, North Carolina. His destination was the eighth annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, organized each year by the amateur folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford’s festival was one of a small but growing list of folk festivals held throughout the South. At this festival, Seeger was enthralled by a bespectacled woman in a rocking chair plucking the banjo. The woman played the five-string banjo with such dexterity that Seeger resolved to imitate her, deserting his four-string banjo forever. Within two years, Seeger had dropped out of Harvard to pursue his dream of being a folksinger. He would later go on to record some of the most beloved songs in American folk and pop music, while countless aspiring musicians learned how to play the five-string banjo through his popular instructional books. Though Seeger often credited Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s festival with inspiring him to learn the five-string banjo, it was the woman in the rocking chair, colloquially known to adoring crowds as “Aunt Samantha,” who first captivated Seeger. Samantha Biddix Bumgarner, who often performed under the name “Aunt Samantha,” was a country music pioneer. Bumgarner recorded for Columbia Records in 1924, becoming the first female string-band musician to make a recording for a major music label. Her New York City trip took her far from her home in Jackson County, North Carolina, where she had resided since the 1880s. Aside from traveling for music performances, Bumgarner lived most of her life near Sylva—a small mountain community in southern Appalachia. Despite her influential role in opening up recorded country music to future women, little is known about Bumgarner’s personal life, especially her early Samantha Biddix Bumgarner performing at festival, date unknown Bascom Lamar Lunsford Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, N.C. Samantha Biddix Bumgarner 385 years. Few interviews were conducted with her, and she serves mainly as a footnote in country music recording history. The few snippets of her life that survive in the historical record are questionable in their veracity, further complicating the construction of an accurate picture of this influential musician. Like many Americans who gained nominal and fleeting fame in the first half of the twentieth century, locals repeated stories about Bumgarner, sometimes stretching reality. Throughout her life and after her death, folklorists and journalists passed down well-worn stories about Bumgarner and her music, sometimes reflecting myths over truth. But like many musicians of her day, Bumgarner never seemed to mind tales invented on her behalf and may even have participated in their creation and proliferation. Still, what we do know about her, and what we think we know, reveals much about life for women in North Carolina who bucked tradition and operated under traditional gender roles while navigating a rapidly modernizing society. This essay considers the gender barriers Bumgarner faced in the maledominated early country music industry. It also considers how Bumgarner, as a woman from western North Carolina, both produced and challenged images of hillbilly life that popular audiences consumed along with the growing popularity of country music in the 1920s and 1930s. By recording for a major record label far from home and by often performing at folk festivals, Bumgarner defied stereotypical notions that dictated southern Appalachian string-band music as a rough world made up of even rougher men. It is significant that fans, fellow musicians, and advertisements often referred to her as “Aunt Samantha.” The nickname suggested that a familial title transformed Bumgarner into someone who did not threaten strict gender roles of the time, while making the southern Appalachian musician seem more “hillbilly” to appease her audience. Additionally , Bumgarner’s music, often described as “quaint,” sometimes led the listening public to make inaccurate assumptions about Bumgarner’s home region— western North Carolina. Instead of the backward or time-honored region that listeners imagined from her songs, southern Appalachian residents were actually grappling with the dual strains of tradition and modernity in their daily lives—as evidenced by the important yet limited nature of Bumgarner’s musical career. In the early 1900s, southern Appalachia became a destination for many writers , missionaries, and educators seeking to document, “modernize,” or “uplift” people in the region. Local...