The mountains of the Appalachian South received technological innovation much slower than most of the country. The tradition of string bands playing for play parties (read dances) and on back porches survived much longer there. The southern highlands, therefore, contain even today a vast repository of ballads and breakdowns that represent a culture once common to all of us.

The music played there, however, comes not from an isolated, untainted environment. Appalachian music mixes influences from older pop music, swing, Afro-American, jazz, blues, and string band music, even Celtic and eastern European music. As tunes faded from popularity elsewhere, Appalachian pickers were just learning them.

When the major record labels first sold recordings of string band musicians from the Southeast during the 1920s, they marketed the records as old time tunes, music only one generation removed from the mainstream. These string bands employed the fiddle and banjo, which had reached the mountains during the nineteenth century, and relative newcomers such as guitar, mandolin, and autoharp. The sounds these folks created on those so-called mountain instruments is the basis of country music, but mountain music contains an amazing variety of sounds and styles as pickers have tried to satisfy their listeners’ requests.

By the 1950s it seemed that Appalachian music lived on only among a few old pickers and in bluegrass music, a high-speed commercial variant of the string band sound invented during the mid-1940s. During the 1960s, however, a whole new generation discovered mountain music and its variety of expressive, and often danceable, music.

These younger musicians work to ensure Appalachian music’s survival by playing, recording, and teaching the instruments, songs, and styles. Many of the revivalists are urban people. Jeff, however, learned his mountain music the old fashioned way, at home in the mountains of Virginia. He thus combines the revivalism and scholarliness of the new generation with the oral tradition and good-time approach of the music’s natural practitioners.

	Fiddle

The fiddle is our friend the violin played mountain, bluegrass, country, or Celtic style. The essential differences are that the fiddle plays dance music, and traditionally, the fiddler held the instrument to his chest instead of tucking it securely under his chin. That permitted the fiddler to sing or call square dances, but prevented his left hand from leaving the first position.

The fiddle is the most basic of mountain instruments. It is light, small, and thus easily carried about by travelers. It provides a wonderful dance beat, is fairly loud, and is readily retuned to allow the fiddler access to a large variety of music. Until the banjo made its way into the hills, the fiddle was the instrument of mountain music.

In order to produce mountain dance music the fiddler uses short, choppy bow strokes emphasizing rhythm. As the banjo and guitar came to Appalachia, string bands developed. The fiddler served prominently in early country music, but lost popularity with the evolution of the Nashville sound. It remains an essential element of old time music and an important, but not mandatory, bluegrass instrument.

The fiddle has four strings, is played with a bow, although it can be picked by hand for rhythm, and is made of light wood. Many a mountain musician built his own fiddle.

	Banjo

The banjo is the most American of musical instruments. It developed from African roots, and achieved popularity with white performers during the nineteenth century. Whites brought the banjo to its modern forms and adapted the instrument and playing styles to fit music with Celtic and European roots.

The banjo thrived on southern plantations and thus became a hallmark of the blackface minstrel bands of the mid-1800s. After the Civil War a banjo craze flourished in the major cities leading to banjo orchestras. The tenor (four string) banjo was a feature of Dixieland and other early jazz.

Minstrels on boat shows that followed rivers into the southeastern hinterlands also exposed mountain musicians to the five string banjo during the mid-1800s. These people began playing their music on “the five.” The banjo played a prominent role in early string band music, but had fallen by the wayside until Earl Scruggs. New generations have again opened up the instrument’s potential, exploring jazz and avant garde music.

An examination of Jeff’s banjos shows that it is essentially a drum with strings stretched across the head. Although bluegrass banjos are quite elaborate technologically, the mountain instrument has stayed closer to the roots. They are often fretless, and some still employ animal skin heads. Jeff will explain that a banjo can be built of such simple materials as a cookie tin, wood, and wire. The distinctive frailing style of mountain banjo picking preserves its role as a dance instrument and gives old time music its bouncy, danceable feel.

Appalachian Dulcimer

You know the lap or Appalachian dulcimer. It’s that gracefully hour-glass shaped wooden instrument that hangs on the wall, and you’ve never seen anyone play. The dulcimer developed in America from Middle European antecedents. Many claim that it, like the banjo, is a truly American instrument.

The basic idea of the lap dulcimer is a fingerboard on top of, rather than extending from, the soundboard and body. Thus the dulcimer has no neck. Marvelously unstandardized, the dulcimer always has been, and continues to be, a folk instrument. It contains anywhere from three to six strings, strung in myriad ways. The player, more often than not untrained, can flatpick, strum, pluck, or fingerpick the dulcimer.

It can produce delicate melodies, be chorded to accompany folksingers, or in the hands of modern innovators, be used to provide driving rhythms or to play mountain fiddle tunes at high speed.

Easy to learn, lacking in musical dogma, and relatively inexpensive, the lap dulcimer is an excellent first mountain instrument.

	Guitar

Everybody knows the guitar, and most folks associate the hollow-bodied, wooden, acoustic version with folk music. Most don’t realize that the Spanish instrument did not enter the mountain music until early in this century, and had very little popularity in American music until after World War 1.

Bulky, not particularly loud, and relatively difficult to build, the guitar was virtually unknown in Appalachia until mail order catalogs made the instrument available cheaply at the turn of the century. It gradually joined the fiddle and banjo as part of the string bands that played for dances and play parties. Although solo singers, most prominently Jimmie Rodgers, accompanied themselves on guitar in imitation of the black bluesmen, it served mostly as a rhythm instrument. As such it entered bluegrass music.

During the 1930s Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family introduced lead guitar playing to country music. Lead picking in the mountain tradition owes its greatest debt to Deep Gap, NC’s Doc Watson, a stalwart of the folk scene for the past quarter century.

Save for frets, inlay, and strings, the acoustic guitar is entirely wooden. It has six strings. The musician can pick with his fingers (à la Merle Travis) or with a flatpick as does Watson.

Autoharp

Autoharp is a copywritten name of the Ascar Schmidt Company for chorded harp or zither. If your school is anything like mine, your kids have already been exposed to the autoharp. That’s because the autoharp, as the name implies, is quite easy to play. If one presses the button marked C-Major, only the strings making the C-Major chord will sound as it is strummed.

Charles Zimmerman of Philadelphia invented the chorded harp in 1881. Simple to play and transport, the instrument soon entered Appalachia, probably via mail order. By the time country music began to be recorded in the 1920s, the autoharp had several practitioners in Jeff’s southwestern Virginia home. Pop Stoneman, Kilby Snow, and most importantly, Sara and Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family played the autoharp on radio and record in those days.

Although essentially a chordal instrument to accompany singing, recent players, most notably Bryan Bowers, have discovered that finger picking allows almost any kind of music to be produced on the autoharp.

The autoharp has 36 strings which cover a range of about three octaves.

The Crawdad Song

Well into the twentieth century black and white string band musicians swapped songs and playing styles. “The Crawdad Song” originated with Afro-American pickers but soon became one of the best known mountain songs. Jeff plays guitar on this tune.

You get a line and I’ll get a pole, honey.
You get a line and I’ll get a pole, babe.
You get a line and I’ll get a pole,
I’ll meet you down at the crawdad hole,
Honey, babe mine.

Yonder comes a man with a sack on his back, honey.
Yonder comes a man with a sack on his back, babe.
Yonder comes a man with a sack on his back,
Got all the crawdads he can pack,
Honey, babe mine.

What you gonna do when the well runs dry, honey?
What you gonna do when the well runs dry, babe?
What you gonna do when the well runs dry,
Sit on the corner and have a good cry,
Honey, babe mine.

Mole In The Ground

Jeff learned this tune from the repertoire of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973). An Asheville lawyer, among many professions, Lunsford spent most of his life collecting and performing mountain music. He founded the Asheville Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the grandaddy of all folk festivals.

“Mole in the Ground” is an example of what is called a zipper song. That means it’s easy for the singer to make up new words to fit the tune. This can be a great followup activity to Jeff’s visit. Let each pupil in turn make up his own verse.

Jeff accompanies himself on banjo.

I wish I was a mole in the ground.
Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground.

If I’s a mole in the ground,
I’d root that mountain down,
And I wish I was a mole in the ground.

I wish I was a lizard in the spring.
Yes, I wish I was a lizard in the spring.
If I’s a lizard in the spring I could hear my darlin’ sing
I wish I was a lizard in the spring.

Selected Mountain Music Bibliography

Jones, Loyal. Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Boone: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1984.
Erbsen, Wayne. Backpocket Old Time Songbook. New York: Pembroke Music Co., 1981.
Rasof, Harry. The Folk, Country, & Bluegrass Musician’s Catalogue. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
Rorrer, Kinney. Rambling Blues: The Life & Songs of Charlie Poole. London: Old Time Music, 1982.
Malone, Bill C. Country Music USA: A 50 Year History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.
Morthland, John. The Best of Country Music. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1984.
Wolfe, Charles K. Tennessee Strings. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.
Wolfe, Charles K. Kentucky Country. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982.