Appalachian Music and American Popular Culture: The Romance That Will Not Die

Appalachian Music and American Popular Culture: The Romance That Will Not Die Bill C. Mahne A recent ad for a popular New Orleans-based rock band, the Subdudes, noted that, in addition to their contemporary qualities of musicianship, the group also projected an "Appalachian flavor." Though unexplained, the phrase was merely the most recent example of an uncountable number of scattered references to "Appalachian" or "Mountain" that have crept into descriptions of musicians, songs, styles, or quality of life over the last century or so. Such usage is often merely lazy—a short-hand term to describe a quality that the writer, critic, musician or fan cannot explain or comprehend. But it also reflects an impulse often encountered in the attempts to define American folk music styles—the investing of music with descriptions or labels that connote or conjure up certain qualities of life that are appealing to listeners (as in Downhome Blues, Western Swing, Plantation Melodies). The linking of "Appalachian" and "music " began approximately 100 years ago, as did the perception that such music was not only different from other music but that it was also better in certain aspects. These perceptions first took shape in the minds of a small cluster of academicians and professional musicians, in the period running roughly from the turn of the century up to the beginning of World War I, who had discovered that people were still singing very old British songs Bill C. Malone's doctoral dissertation became Country Music USA (published in 1968; revised edition, 1985), and was the first scholarly history ofthe subject. His most recent book is Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). 68 in some of the mountain counties of the South. The discovery of Appalachian balladry was both cause and effect of the larger discovery of the Southern Appalachians and the conception that they constituted a special place.1 Appalachian Music's reception as a unique and presumably homogeneous form of cultural expression was shaped by a variety of contradictory perceptions. While the music was presumed to be very old, and even of Elizabethan British origins, it could also be described in Emma Bell Miles's suggestive phrase, as "real American music."2 It was attractive to those who wanted to believe that a subculture still survived in the United States that was different from the racially heterogeneous and crassly materialistic society that prevailed elsewhere in America at the turn of the century. Although dramatically different from mainstream America, Appalachian society had nevertheless preserved a body of music and folklore that was reminiscent of the nation's cultural roots. Appalachia was, in short, both a museum of early British music and a source ofAmerican music. Appalachian music and dances, it was argued, were relatively uncontaminated by modern or commercial influences— Cecil Sharp, for example, described the "Kentucky Running Set" as a dance that pre-dated those collected by John Playford in 1651.3 The early assumptions that Appalachian Music was very old, relatively pure, and simultaneously British and American have never really died, nor has the corollary view that such music was inherently decent and moral. Although the songs spoke often of such topics as murder, violence, feuds, seduction, illicit love, and moonshining, the music nevertheless seemed to convey the image of a simple but decent people who lived in primal and direct relationship with the earth and nature.4 Mountain music stood in strong contrast, it seemed, to such urban-born styles as Ragtime and Jazz which, like the city itself, exuded a tone of sinfulness and immorality. Until the 1920s little awareness ofAppalachian Music existed outside the circles of academicians or concert audiences who read Cecil Sharp's books, or who perused the small body of available songbooks, or who had access to the recitals given by such professional musicians as Howard Brockway and Elaine Wyman. While some songs of presumed Appalachian provenance had become available, almost nothing was known about the singers from whom the music was collected, and even less about the styles of performances indigenous to Appalachia. In the decades since the 1920s, however, two conceptions of Mountain Music...