Ballad Keepers and the Arrival of the Fiddle

The panel will explore the history of mountain music from unaccompanied ballads to Old Time, Early Country, Bluegrass and Irish. This history helps us understand our identity. Before Italians like Amati standardized the Cremona fiddle that arrived in England about 1650, there was an earlier genre of unaccompanied ballads--our first sung poetry in English. The singers called them “Old Love Songs” even though they were often brutal and jealous: As in Matty Groves: With his sword, he cut off her head and kicked against the wall! These narrative songs were dramatic and filled with dialogue. I will compare contemporary sung NC versions to specific old Scots and English songs to understand how changing values and fears reveal the identity of often overlooked singers and ordinary people. Western NC includes two of the first communities in Appalachia; settled about the time of the American Revolution, Beach Mountain was the first, and Madison County became the second. Both remain the strongholds of unaccompanied ballads recognized by collectors Child, Cecil Sharp, Bronson, Roud, and the NEA life time Heritage award to Sheila Kay Adams of Madison Co as recently as 2013. After the Revolution when the fiddle arrived in the 1700s, these areas honored their favored tradition by adding the fiddle only in subtle ways that continued to emphasize unaccompanied ballad singing. Ninth generation descendent of the first two families on Beach Mountain, Rick Ward sings an early ballad The Jobal Hunter (Child #18 Sir Lionel). In one of the earliest ballad variants, Folger’s Sir Egrabell [or Sir Eglamore] fights not the NC wild boars but a dragon. In American ballads, the persistence of the supernatural as a “witch-wife” is almost as infrequent as a dragon