Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from Goldenseal (review)

Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from Goldenseal. Edited by John Lilly. (Music in American Life.) Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999. [231 p. 0-252-02499-0 (cloth); 0-252-06815-7 (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]

In this volume, Goldenseal editor John Lilly offers twenty-five of the magazine's articles profiling West Virginia traditional musicians. Issued quarterly since 1975 by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Goldenseal magazine is not well known outside the state and is held by few academic libraries. Since its inception, however, it has been the preeminent source of information on West Virginia folklife. Filled with photographs and easily accessible to general readers, it features articles by local freelance authors and, occasionally, by prominent folklorists and music scholars such as Charles Wolfe, Kip Lornell, and Ivan Tribe. Although the magazine covers a full range of historical and cultural topics, many of its articles are on musical traditions, reflecting a special interest of Goldenseal readers.

The musicians featured in Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from "Goldenseal" are divided into five categories: fiddlers, banjo players, dulcimer players, guitarists, and family bands. Lilly's goal was to present a balanced rather than a comprehensive sampling, and he has omitted some prominent West Virginia musicians (such as Frank George and Jenes Cottrell) but included others who are less well known. For that reason, the work is less a who's who than a montage, with representatives of various traditions and regions. Readers familiar with the folk music of West Virginia will have heard of Clark Kessinger, Melvin Wine, and Nat Reese, but many of the most engaging stories are about relatively unknown musicians, such as ninety-two-year-old African American banjo player Clarence Tross, who incorporated unusual rhythms into his music, and singer-guitarist Blackie Cool, whose profile reads like a history of rural West Virginia life and music in the twentieth century. The articles vary in approach and emphasis, though interviews with the musicians themselves represent the principal source of information and provide much recounting of life experiences. (Notable exceptions are Tribe's and Wolfe's articles.) The informal, reminiscing quality in most of the articles is due in part to the influence of former Goldenseal editor Ken Sullivan, who encouraged writers to tell the broader cultural story. Some articles lack adequate organization and focus; in the profile of the Currence brothers, for example, the subjects speak mostly about health matters. But often the unstructured approach is enlightening and entertaining. The lives of musicians like John Johnson and Carl Rutherford have been filled with extraordinary and meaningful experiences that are best communicated by an informal writing style.

Researchers of regional music traditions will be pleased that a university press has published a work on traditional musicians who, for the most part, did not enjoy commercial success, but who deserve attention because of the roles they played within their communities. A few of the musicians, such as Doc Williams, Everett and Bea Lilly, and Molly O'Day, traveled widely and enjoyed modest recognition, but most chose to stay closer to home and perform, with notable results, within the complex fabric of their local economies, entertainment traditions, and belief systems.

Since Mountains of Music is a collection of self-contained articles rather than a survey of traditional music in West Virginia, readers seeking the latter may wish to consult Gerald Milnes's Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). The two books complement each other, and Milnes provides additional information on the musicians profiled in Mountains of Music.

The value of this collection to music scholars is clear, but limited. The interview transcripts will serve as primary-source material useful to researchers exploring the broad range of influences in the lives of traditional musicians. But those interested in the music itself will be disappointed that musical description and analysis...