Artist Statement

Artist Statement:

Before I returned to school I worked on a decade long project called Louisville Is For Lovers which was an annual album release of Louisville musicians playing love songs. In the beginning, in 2000, the motivation was limited. At the time I realized there was a lot of good music being produced that was largely being ignored by the larger markets. I picked Love songs simply to try and have a common theme amongst a varied array of genres, but the only criteria was the music was original and recorded in Louisville. In the beginning I thought It would be a way to help good artists get noticed. And even though one band from that first release, My Morning Jacket, is now one of the largest selling bands on the market,  most of the bands played for a couple years without any market success and gave up. So what began as an effort to help artists that may have not fit in the mold of popular music turned into a decade long effort to preserve regional music before it was too late.  In the course of 10 years I collected and preserved music from hundreds of artists from a host of genres from rock to gospel and a capella to electronic and performers from the ages of 3 to 85.

I eventually had to let go of the project at the decade mark because it was becoming a full time job that didn’t pay and I had nothing to fall back on, but I stuck with it so long because it was important to save relevant regional music even if it wasn’t marketable to a larger audience. So I came to Berea and in a serendipitous moment someone noticed my resume and passed it along to the Special Collections and Archive and I was hired in the Sound Archives to again work in regional music. My job consists of reviewing field and festival recordings of music being played in Appalachia and putting selections online for educational use. In many ways it was just like what I had done before with Louisville is for Lovers. Most of the recordings range throughout the last 60 years from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama and cover all sorts of musical genres from traditional ballads to modern country, shape note and lined-out hymnodies to gospel and from blues to bluegrass.  Honestly before I came to Berea I didn’t know much about Appalachian music, I assumed it was mostly Bluegrass and Square Dance music because that is what the Kentucky old time music radio hour in Louisville played. I was amazed to hear all these different genres, and many times all mixed together. I even heard a recording from 1973 of a man named Andy Merritt at a traditional music festival in Carter County, KY, who liked to sing british ballads that were hundreds of years old but mimicking the voice of Elvis Presley.  

Over the 3 years I have worked in the archives I have become enthralled in Appalachian musical history and chose to also study it when offered. My GSTR 210 class let us choose a topic related to Appalachian history to write our research paper on so I choose music. My topic was on family musical traditions and the recurring claim  over the last 100 years that a changing world would disrupt and possibly end the tradition of playing and passing down music and musical skills. Many of these claims began when music was first able to be recorded, most famously by John Philip Sousa, the world famous marching band leader who published an article titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music.”Tthe article warned the reader that “sweeping across the country with the speed of a transparent fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul”

 I focused on traditional music families that had played together and passed down songs to younger generations for at least 50 years. Several of the families were well known in the traditional music world such as Grandpa and Ramona Jones, who had played for 50 years on the grand Ole Opry until he died, now in her 90s, she continues to play still, and also includes her children. One couple I wrote about was lesser known husband and wife team Carl and Buzzy Leming who had played the berea College Celebration of Traditional Music back in the 1980s. I was able to find them and even though they were in their mid-nineties they came to Berea to talk to me. they talked to me about how they began playing together when they married after WWII and still play today, along with their kids. But they both had issues with the Traditional Music industry, they felt the institutions were too rigid on what constituted ‘traditional’ and so much was overlooked. They said they had been recording musicians and musical events for decades but couldn’t find an institution that wanted the recordings. They felt that in the future these songs would be seen as important ‘traditional’ recordings but it might be too late and many of the songs would be lost by then.

When I took APS 224 Appalachian Music I learned that the fight of what constituted Appalachian music has been going on ever since the first musicologists began studying Appalachian music.  Indeed, in the pursuit of preserving a culture many institutions began putting limitations on what has constituted ‘culture.’  Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says “Cultural purity is an oxymoron.” Regardless, appalachian music is being packaged and presented in a very rigid format even though it’s history is lauded for being multi-cultural.  

This year I asked the Berea college Celebration of Traditional music Board  if I could recommend some acts for this year’s festival. I had a list of several artists that are continuing the tradition. I was told that none of the artists fit the criteria. All of my artists were under the age of 50, and although all of them played traditional instruments and songs they also played their own arrangements. And one artist specialized in ragtime and blues guitar. I was told that they looked for artists over the age of fifty that only played traditional ‘Appalachian’ songs that they learned from family or members of their community. Of the many issues with this rigid criteria, is that it is ignoring the history of the culture they are trying to preserve. in the last couple hundred years in Appalachia was it only people over fifty that played the music? was the music played only old british ballads? was the music only discovered from family members? Absolutely not. immigrants constantly pouring in from around the world to work the coal mines brought the songs and instruments that comprise of Appalachian music. Song books, radio, and drifters brought in music from everywhere, and took it out too.

In fact every musician I saw at the 2013 Celebration of Traditional Music mentioned that idea of ‘Traditional’ was troublesome and without new musicians and songwriters the genre would stagnate. The other day I was listening to a recording in our archives from the early 1970s from a traditional music festival in Kentucky and an artist said “Every folk song was written by somebody, and here is mine..”

The first person to shine the light on Appalachian music was Cecil Sharp, and english musicologist, but Sharp had an agenda. He wasn’t in Appalachia to collec ‘Appalachain’ music, he was collecting specifically English ballads that has survived in the mountains. So he excluded anything else. This is where the idea of Appalachian music being a pure form of ancient anglo ballads. Modern study of Sharp’s  Appalachian research finds Sharp to despise everything about the Appalachian people that didn’t pertain to  Ancestry. Sharp saw the Appalachian people as a “Lower race” filled with “tobacco, molasses, and niggers.”

The exclusionary process of looking at Appalachian music continued when radio and record companies took notice of Appalachia.  The book we used in GSTR 210 was a great source for me, The United States of Appalachia by Jeff Biggers. Biggers looks into all the types of music played in Appalachia throughout history including Jazz and Blues, and some of the musicians from Appalachia including Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and W.C. Handy, and how they embodied the spirit of Appalachian ingenuity but are largely left out of Appalachian music history.   “So, why do critics and historians consider [Bill] Monroe’s modern Bluegrass, and not Handy’s traditional blues, part of the “real” Appalachia?” Asks Biggers; “the simple answer is marketing: Since it’s inception in the early twentieth century, the recording industry and it’s radio and tv counterparts have always appealed to their customers through a tidy division of the races.  Hillbilly, country, folk, and then bluegrass records were placed in the white slots; “Race” or “Black” music such as the blues or jazz, filled the other.”

I tried to pay special attention to the musicologists and “Song Collectors” that helped shaped the way we see Appalachian music as well as manipulate it such as Cecil Sharp and Jean Thomas,  as well as show examples of what all was being played and by whom before they were divided into groups like “hillbilly” “race” and “Jazz”.

It was also important to show many different aspects of Appalachian music and how it really is Cosmopolitan, pulling sounds and instruments from all over the world, and not the lock box it is seen as, with very little changing overtime.   

The truth is I have come to love the wide array of music Appalachia has produced over the 

centuries, and how it was really on the forefront of many musical genres, and it’s really sad 

to see it still being stifled by  those who have the opportunity  to show it’s unique and 

complex range.