Cultural Data Collection in Appalachia
One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1916, English folklorist Cecil Sharp and assistant Maud Karpeles traveled through Appalachia documenting over five hundred ballads, instrumental fiddle tunes, and dances. A long tradition of collector folklorists followed in his footsteps, including Alan Lomax and later John Cohen. In the summer of 2016, I traveled through the region, making my own way through this musical and cultural landscape, learning from those carrying forth the tradition of this music into the twenty-first century. I love and play this music, which is how I came to study it. To the extent that people are familiar with this music at all, they have learned about it through the filter of several early twentieth century ethnographers, each of whom had quite different motivations for their study. How those biases shaped our understanding of Appalachian music and culture is still felt today in this evolving tradition.
Appalachia
Appalachia (pronounced Appa-LATCH-uh) is a cultural region of the Southeastern United States. The area was settled initially by Cherokee and other indigenous groups, and by European settlers from Northern England, Ulster, and Scotland who immigrated there beginning in the 1700s. African people came through a variety of routes bringing the African gourd banjo and other cultural influences. The string band, ballad music, and dance that developed here grew from the intersection of these cultures. String band music played on fiddles and banjos developed in the backcountry of the Southern Appalachian mountains as the music for square dances, as well as a rich tradition of ballad singing. Today we call this music “Old Time” and it forms the historical roots of country and bluegrass music heard around the world today. There is a vibrant international Old Time music community playing the fiddle tunes and dancing the dances that have been passed down through the folk process. This summer, four thousand of us gathered to play the music in Clifftop, West Virginia for a week. All through the warm months, a festival can be found each weekend in the area to camp out and play music.
The region has endured much hardship through mineral and lumber resource extraction, unsafe working conditions in coal mining, and fleeing post-industrial jobs. The median household income of Letcher County, Kentucky, one of the places I visited, is $21,110, less than half of the national average.
Concocting England
In July of 1916, Cecil Sharp went on a mission to collect cultural data from the Southern Appalachian mountains. He used three data types: ballads, dances, and fiddle tunes as evidence to support his argument. From visits with Olive Dame Campbell in North Carolina, who had begun collecting years ahead, Sharp believed he had found a vast community of ancient Anglo-Saxons carrying on the culture and traditions of English peasants. He set about documenting this core sample of living relics, seemingly unchanged since their time of immigration from England. This concept took its root in German folk theory.
It was also echoed by British Colonial administrators justifying their paternalistic “civilising mission.” Indeed, they imagined that the people of India were an ancient Aryan race in a pre-British state of development.
Troubling, right?
Sharp was interested in the preservation of his erroneous conception of a pure Anglo race.
Remember, data collection is not a neutral activity; it is usually funded by a researcher looking to support a hypothesis. In Sharp’s case, he set about proving his ancient Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic survivals in culture theory. Other ballad collectors at the time set about a similar project. In fact, these collectors set themselves in steep competition to provide evidence of the the “Old Country” living on in Appalachia. Of particular value were the Child ballads, a seminal collection of English and Scottish Ballads collected by Frances James Child in England in the late 1800s.
As a data collector with a thesis to prove, Sharp went so far as to invent a new name for and reshape a dance that he called “The Kentucky Running Set.” Phil Jamison described the phenomenon here: “Cecil Sharp perceived the ‘predominant culture’ of the southern mountains to be ‘Anglo-Celtic.’ …in his eyes they were ‘English peasants’ whose culture had remained ‘pure’ and undiluted, even after many generations in the southern mountains. Therefore, he presumed the Kentucky dances to be survivals of old English country dances. These dances, however, were neither as old nor as English as Sharp imagined.” Sharp then convinced dancers in Kentucky to raise badly needed funds for their school through performing the dance in Sharp’s style, generated out of Sharp’s nationalism and misunderstanding, to audiences in the North as a fundraiser. In 1937 Alan Lomax was in the audience. Phil Jamison excerpts an interview with a local eyewitness: “Grazia Combs of Perry County (born c. 1890) was amused by, and skeptical of, these dance performances: ‘I’m going to tell you honestly that I always figured that somebody come in here from outside and concocted that thing up.’ It was not like any dancing that she knew. In her eyes, the Running Set was ‘not dancing,’ but ‘running.’” In this way Sharp amplified his own misunderstanding and altered the course of history.
A related but perhaps less intentional blunder occurred when Bascom Lamar Lunsford (b. 1882, North Carolina), musician, dancer, and key regional figure, set about creating a platform for celebrating traditional step dance with his Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, NC. Much like the development of bluegrass music destined for stages out of participatory traditional mountain music, he took a social dance form, not meant for the stage, and gave it one. With this format, he accidentally encouraged the creation of team clogging: a competitive, performative, non-traditional outgrowth of the social dance.
The collectors who set about preserving their concepts of tradition changed it by interacting with it. Sharp built the case for his Anglo-Saxon time machine by ignoring the fact that Appalachia was full of riverboat trade, university education, and all the cultural interaction that resulted. At the time, fiddlers on the Ohio riverboats were spreading tunes far and wide. Multi-racial bands were playing banjos and fiddles along barges. Dance forms from European and American cities were influencing country dances. What emerged from this interaction was a distinctly Appalachian culture marked by its integration of banjos originating in Africa, Native American flute and fiddle, fiddle tunes from Europe, and the new music made on them in the Appalachian backcountry. Phil Jamison has contributed fantastic scholarship in his 2015 book Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance for a deeper look at these historical interactions.
Legacies of Cultural Data Collection: Feedback loops
Looking at any data set, it’s critical to ask what data is missing. In Sharp’s case, evidence of African-American influence, Native American culture, contemporary culture, and the aspects of culture that disproved his theory of Anglo-Saxon cultural survival did not surface. They were blind or omitted spots.
In this work, we must consider who benefits from the data collection. Sharp went on to be lauded for his field work and to this day the English Folk Dance and Song Society maintains the Cecil Sharp House in England.
This summer, cultural historian and radio host Paul Brown interviewed Sheila Kay Adams on his radio show Across the Blue Ridge, focusing on historical mountain music and its contemporary outgrowths in Old Time, bluegrass and country music. Sheila Kay Adams is a direct descendant of one of the people whom Sharp and Karpeles documented. As a seventh generation descendant of the unbroken unaccompanied ballad singing tradition and a National Heritage Fellow recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the state of North Carolina, she is considered an authority.
Sheila: “Now, Granny said it almost died out two or three different times. It got a little kick in the butt when Cecil Sharp showed up and made big deal over these songs that a lot of ’em knew. Well, then in the ’30s, who was [it] Frank C. Brown I think came up to Beech Mountain and made a little trip over this direction and so that gave it another little boost in the ’30s. Well in the ’50s, Alan Lomax showed up and he came back in the ’60s and again his last time was 1982 and in between then was John Cohen, so we had a lot of collectors that were coming into the community and out.”
Paul Brown: “And when you say that gave it a bit of a boost — “
Sheila “Yes it did.”
Paul: “What are you saying? It sounds as though you’re saying that even here, there was a little bit of danger to the tradition, and in a way it was helpful that people who had not grown up here noticed that there was something of real value and that was communicated back into the community.”
Sheila: “Well yeah, you know it’s like any other kind of thing that you do whether it’s quiltin’ or, you know, makin’ apple butter or cannin’…”
Paul: “You can take it for granted.”
Sheila “That’s right, you take it for granted, especially when everybody is singing around you. So what they had a tendency to do… the collectors would come in and spend a lot of time with the community and then they would leave and then they would send one of them a copy of whatever it was that they did. And so that would galvanize the next generation to learn it. And Sharp predicted that the tradition of singin’ a capella ballads would be extinct in the Laurel Country by 19 and 50.”
Paul: “Sheila Kay Adams talking with us at the Bluff Mountain Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina June 2016 about the visits of music collectors, starting with Cecil Sharp from England in 1916 and their impact on the survival of the ballad tradition of that part of the southern mountains.”
Sharp’s data collection activities at once misread the culture completely while playing a part in its survival. In a letter from the woman who began the collecting work Sharp later continued, Olive Dame Campbell wrote to Sharp, “We would like to have the people recognize the worth and beauty of their songs; we would like to have the singing of these songs encouraged in all the mountain schools and centers; we would like to have them displace the inferior music that is now being sung there… The people have already begun to be somewhat ashamed of their songs; they need to have them appreciated by outsiders…” Campbell’s gaze here imagined that “their” songs were old English ballads, and the ‘inferior’ music being sung was not native but foreign. The people whose data was collected both benefited from that preservation and suffered the proliferation of Sharp’s misunderstanding. In his All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, David Whisnant addresses the Sharp effect directly. “An intervenor, by virtue of his or her status, power, and established credibility, is frequently able to define what the culture is, to normalize and legitimize their definition in the larger society, and even to feed it back into the culture itself where it may be internalized as ‘real’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’…”
Who benefits?
In considering Sharp’s selective vision of what ballads and dances were valuable to document, we must consider his English benefactors and English mission of racial preservation — Sharp’s agenda of a cultural Imperialist civilizing mission that echoed closely colonial rhetoric. His funding came from lectures he gave on his cultural collecting in the North and England, as well as benefactor Mrs. Helen Storrow of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Behind Olive Dame Campbell was the Russell Sage Foundation from New York. Whisnant continued on to examine the institutional interests and power dynamics at work behind any such mission of data collection and cultural revival.
Hindman [Settlement School] grew up in an area dominated by unregulated, large-scale extractive industries, whose powerful executives were happy enough to hear mountain children sing old songs and see them dance new dances… but would have taken a dim view indeed of any effort to encourage those same children to question the consensus ideology of the coal industry… “Rescuing” or “preserving” or “reviving” a sanitized version of a culture frequently makes for rather shallow liberal commitment: it allows a prepared consensus on the “value” of preservation or revival; its affirmations lie comfortably within the bounds of of conventional secular piety; it makes minimal demands upon financial (or other) resources; and it involves little risk of opposition from vested economic or political interests. It is, in a word, the cheapest and safest way to go.
Of course this kind of cultural journey is ripe fodder for appropriation and misunderstanding by outsiders. In the liner notes to Rich Kirby and Michael Kline’s 1977 record “They Can’t Put it Back” on June Appal Recordings, they write: “Old-time music is another ripped-off resource. It has been carted off to Nashville and comes back insipid, sentimental, electrified and mass-produced. Radios have replaced fiddles and TV square dances; mountain people watch grotesque satires of themselves on Beverly Hillbillies.”
In working with data, these are the key questions: What data is missing? Who benefits from this data? Does the data return to serve its providers? This same thinking could be extended to guide approaches to cultural exchange. What’s missing? Is this inclusive of diverse perspectives from the culture? Who benefits from this exchange? Has the community whose cultural production I benefit from gained anything? Is the output, if any, of this interaction available to the participants?
This is the spirit of respect and care I hope to embody as an outsider learning about Appalachian culture. There is a dream of solidarity here as a fellow marginalized person. Further, there’s instructive sensitivity we can apply to our own approaches to cultural data from Sharp’s project. Cautioning one’s own agenda — David Whisnant writes, “The “culture” that is perceived by the intervenor (even before the act of the intervention) is rarely congruent with the culture that is actually there. It is a selection, and arrangement, an accommodation to preconceptions — ” May we all be aware and explicit about our intentions and methods.
Thanks to Cowan Creek Mountain Music School, Swannanoa Gathering, Augusta Heritage Center, Phil Jamison, Paul Brown and Sheila Kay Adams for your insights and inspiration to write this essay. Thanks to ian curry for editing help. This essay is also available in The O.C.R.’s Journal, available in print here, priced to cover costs.
