Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia by Josh Beckworth (review)

My academic tenure has been guided by two beliefs: scholarship grounded in a personal connection to the subject yields the most passion and perspective; and music that springs directly from the soil closest at hand has the greatest power to affect us. Josh Beckworth’s Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia hews to both of these principles, revealing insight informed by a personal subjective relationship tempered through objective research. With family connections in Crumpler, North Carolina, the author is intimately invested in the people and place of his investigation: William Henry Whitter, half of the celebrated hillbilly recording duo Grayson and Whitter, also resided in Crumpler. Consequently, Beckworth’s narrative sparkles with the immediacy of family interviews and is enlivened by original photographs, many of which were first published in this book.

A striking example of Beckworth’s methodology is revealed in the chapter devoted to the sprightly fiddle tune “Nancy Blevins,” which was transmitted by the White Top, Virginia, musician Albert Hash, who played with Whitter. Beckworth doggedly searches for the tune’s origin through convoluted genealogies and eventually traces the music back to the colorful Nancy Baker, née Blevins, who smoked a clay pipe, was associated with witchcraft, and, in a twist of fate, was also the grandmother of Whitter’s fourth wife. The accompanying portrait and gravesite images of “Nannie” Blevins animate this history of the tune with vivid associations despite the intervening century and a half since it was created by the adolescent girl shortly after the Civil War.

While the careers of pioneering country musicians Gilliam Banmon Grayson and Whitter were created nationally through commercial recordings made between 1927 and 1929, their lives and music were bound to the soil closest to hand in their southern Appalachia communities. Grayson’s life was rooted firmly in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, at the nexus of Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, while Whitter’s early life and career were circumscribed by the textile mill town of Fries, Virginia, perched on the New River. The partnership of these two musicians embodied the union of their respective cultural geographies. Grayson’s traditional mountain music felicitously married into Whitter’s entrepreneurial drive and the diversity of cultural influences nurtured by migrant labor lured to the company town. Country music could never have arisen without such urban society.

Beckworth’s narrative of country music’s origins proceeds through his biographies of Whitter and Grayson and their associated historical and cultural contexts. Always Been a Rambler is very much a music history that devotes equal measure to the music and the history, fully examining the ways one informs the other. The author navigates this challenging balancing act by conceiving his book as two large divisions of collected essays designed to be read either independently or sequentially as a single narrative.

Historians will profit from the personal details that contribute nuance to an overview of Appalachian regional history from the Civil War through industrialization in the early 1920s. Musicians will gain perspective on song repertoire and transmission, as well as the origins of hillbilly music. Beckworth’s installment in the Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies series successfully illuminates and confirms the seminal role of Grayson and Whitter as original voices in one of the nation’s most enduring musical expressions.