Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance (Music in American Life) - Softcover

Jamison, Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252080815 ISBN 13: 9780252080814

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2015

Synopsis

In Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, old-time musician and flatfoot dancer Philip Jamison journeys into the past and surveys the present to tell the story behind the square dances, step dances, reels, and other forms of dance practiced in southern Appalachia.
 
These distinctive folk dances, Jamison argues, are not the unaltered jigs and reels brought by early British settlers, but hybrids that developed over time by adopting and incorporating elements from other popular forms. He traces the forms from their European, African American, and Native American roots to the modern day. On the way he explores the powerful influence of black culture, showing how practices such as calling dances as well as specific kinds of steps combined with white European forms to create distinctly "American" dances.
 
From cakewalks to clogging, and from the Shoo-fly Swing to the Virginia Reel, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics reinterprets an essential aspect of Appalachian culture.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Jamison is a nationally-known old-time musician, flatfoot dancer, and square dance caller, who teaches Appalachian music and dance, as well as mathematics, at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He writes on Appalachian music and dance at www. philjamison.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics

Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance

By Phil Jamison

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08081-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi, 
Preface, xv, 
Introduction. Appalachia and Appalachian Dance, 1, 
1. Diversity and Cultural Transmission in the Southern Mountains, 9, 
2. The Southern Square Dance, 20, 
3. Square Roots, 24, 
4. Transforming Tradition, 44, 
5. Cecil Sharp and the Kentucky Running Set, 60, 
6. Sharp's Legacy, 75, 
7. "Barn Dances with Calls" (1924–1933), 82, 
8. The Virginia Reel, 91, 
9. Religion and Dancing, 102, 
10. Couple Dances, 112, 
11. The Cakewalk, 122, 
12. Appalachian Step Dance, 129, 
13. Clogging: Appalachian Step Dance on Stage, 150, 
14. Community Dance in Appalachia, 167, 
15. The American Square Dance, 177, 
Appendix. "Barn Dances with Calls" (1924–1933), 193, 
Glossary of Dance Terms, Figures, and Steps, 201, 
Notes, 209, 
Bibliography, 241, 
Index, 265, 

CHAPTER 1

Diversity and Cultural Transmission in the Southern Mountains

"A Mixed Multitude of All Classes and Complexions"

Since the late nineteenth century, when local-color writers first popularized many of the common stereotypes now associated with the southern mountains, Appalachia has been perceived as an isolated and backward place that retained old-fashioned customs and lagged behind mainstream America. In 1899, however, Berea College president William Goodell Frost portrayed the southern mountains more favorably, as "one of God's grand divisions." In an appeal to Northern donors and philanthropists, he described the "highland stock" of eastern Kentucky as predominantly English and Scottish, but also "Scotch-Irish." Frost characterized these "mountain whites" as patriotic "Sons and Daughters of the Revolution" who had been isolated for generations in a "Rip Van Winkle sleep." Unlike the flood of immigrants who were arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe at that time, these supposedly racially pure, "native born" "mountain Americans" had preserved the Anglo-Saxon heritage of "our pioneer ancestors." In his mind, they were conservators of true "American" culture, and they clearly deserved an education at Berea College.

Echoing Frost, American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, in 1901, likewise portrayed the people who lived in "isolated communities" in the mountains of eastern Kentucky as "the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States." She described these "chiefly English and Scotch-Irish" people as "direct descendants of the early Virginia and North Carolina immigrants ... kept free from the tide of foreign immigrants which has been pouring in recent years into the United States."

This characterization of the southern mountaineers as a homogeneous population of racially pure Anglo-Saxons, however, is a myth. The population of the Southern backcountry, in fact, was a diverse mix of Europeans, African Americans, and indigenous Native Americans. Charles Woodmason, an itinerant Anglican preacher based in the Piedmont of South Carolina between 1766 and 1772, characterized it as a "mixed Multitude of all Classes and Complexions." Neither ethnically, racially, economically, nor culturally homogeneous, the region was home to wealthy landowners, poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, well-to-do merchants, and isolated subsistence farmers, as well as enslaved African Americans.

In addition to the English and Scots-Irish, those of European descent included Germans and smaller numbers of Scots, Welsh, and French Huguenots. Some were recent arrivals; others were second- or third-generation European Americans. The Scots-Irish (and not the English), however, made up the single largest group among the early settlers. These people, also known as Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scots, were primarily Presbyterians from northern Ireland whose ancestors had come from the lowlands of Scotland and northern England in the 1600s. Charles Woodmason encountered many of these "Northern Scotch Irish" settlers in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Venturing as far west as the Cherokee towns beyond the Saluda River, he noted their fondness for fiddling and "frolicking": "If You want to hire a fellow to Work, You'l not raise one for Money — But make a Dance, or a Frolic — and You'l see an hundred turn out." On one occasion, he wrote: "Married a Couple, who imprudently (or impudently) left the Service and staid not to Sermon, carrying with them ½ the Congregation to frolic and dance." Woodmason was appalled by the "Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring" of these "poor wretches" and "licentious wenches," whom he dismissed as "ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, and the Refuse of Mankind."

Although Frost portrayed the Appalachian people as "mountain whites," and Semple claimed that the region "excluded the negroes," there have been people of African descent in the southern mountains since the time of the earliest explorers and settlers. African slaves accompanied Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto when he passed through western North Carolina in search of gold in 1540, and during the 1700s slaves and indentured servants arrived with the early white settlers. By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, there were many thousands of slaves as well as free blacks in the southern mountains. In 1800, at the new settlement of Asheville in western North Carolina, one-third of the population was black — twenty-five free persons and thirteen slaves.

The Appalachian backcountry was a fertile "cultural contact zone" that fostered interaction and cultural exchange between Native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans. Thomas Ashe, an Englishman who traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1806, experienced this blending of traditions one evening while staying at an inn in Wheeling, [West] Virginia: "I entered the ball-room, which was filled with persons at cards, drinking, smoaking, dancing, &c. The 'music' consisted of two banjies, played by negroes nearly in a state of nudity, and a [flute], through which a Chickesaw breathed with much occasional exertion and violent gesticulations. The dancing accorded with the harmony of these instruments." Ashe was appalled by this crude "music" [Ashe's quotes] and dancing, which he characterized as "a violent vulgar uproar." This raucous frolic, which was accompanied by African-derived banjos and a Native American flute, was no doubt quite different from the sophisticated, genteel music and dances of the European ballrooms with which he was familiar.

Though not as pervasive in the mountains as in the Deep South, slavery played a significant role in the development of the region, and it was important to the Appalachian antebellum economy. Prior to the Civil War, approximately 10 percent of white Appalachian households owned slaves (though typically fewer than five per household). Slave labor was used to clear timber and for agricultural work; slaves were also crucial to the efficient transportation of goods (as livestock drovers and riverboat laborers), in gold mining and lumbering, in the ironworks, saltworks, brickyards, in carpentry as well as in travel and tourism, where slaves worked as stage drivers and hotel workers. Anne Royall, who traveled throughout the southern mountains in the early 1820s, observed blacks hard at work in all of these various occupations. At that time, African Americans (mostly slaves) accounted for close to 12 percent of the total population of Appalachia. They were, however, not uniformly distributed; black populations in some counties exceeded 30 percent, while elsewhere the proportion was less than 1 percent. By 1860 more than 175,000 free and enslaved blacks lived in Appalachia, and slavery existed in every county, even on the Cherokee-owned plantations of East Tennessee, northeast Alabama, and north Georgia.

Close to half of the households in the southern mountains were made up of poor white tenant farmers and sharecroppers who worked alongside slaves at corn huskings and other work parties. Daniel Hundley, who grew up in a slaveholding family in northern Alabama, wrote in 1860 of the music that was shared by these "industrious poor whites" and slaves who worked side by side: "And when the long winter evenings have come, you will see blacks and whites sing, and shout, and husk in company, to the music of Ole Virginny reels played on a greasy fiddle by some aged Uncle Edward, whose frosty pow proclaims that he is no longer fit for any more active duty, and whose long skinny fingers are only useful now to put life and mettle into the fingers of the younger huskers, by the help of de fiddle and de bow." Such racially integrated labor forces no doubt provided opportunities for interaction between mountain blacks and the white majority.

Following the Civil War, the African American population of Appalachia became more concentrated in the urban centers and less apparent in rural communities, so that even though their numbers exceeded 274,000 by the end of the 1800s — many had come to the coalfields from the Deep South — the proportion of blacks in the overall population had declined. By the start of the twentieth century, blacks made up less than 3 percent of the population of the mountain counties of eastern Kentucky — down from a high of 7 percent in 1850 — and this may have led Semple to believe that "our Kentucky mountaineers" had had "no intimate knowledge of the negro." From the time of the earliest settlers, however, the population of Appalachia was a "mixed Multitude of all Classes and Complexions," and the shared southern mountain culture that developed was a blend of the European, African, and Native American traditions.

The Myth of Appalachian Isolation

The local-color writers of the nineteenth century portrayed Appalachia as a remote and isolated place, and Frost and Semple, who suggested that the retention of eighteenth-century British culture in the mountains was due to the lack of contact with the modern world, perpetuated this idea. Semple claimed (in 1901) that the southern mountaineers' "speech and ideas" reveal their ancestry "as plainly as if they had disembarked from their eighteenth-century vessel but yesterday." While some parts of Appalachia are certainly remote and relatively isolated, the region as a whole has never been completely cut off from the outside world. By the early 1700s, the southern backcountry was tied to the world economy through the fur trade with Europe. In the early 1800s, drovers routinely herded thousands of hogs, cattle, turkeys, and other livestock along the early roads that led from the mountains of western North Carolina to markets in Charleston and Savannah, and ginseng was shipped all the way to China by way of Philadelphia. In her description of the "western country," Anne Royall listed some of the commodities that were exported from East Tennessee, including flour, corn, potatoes, whiskey, bacon, cider, apples, hemp, tobacco, beef, butter, cheese, beeswax, lard, feathers, onions, lumber, and timber. These goods were sent down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, where they were exchanged for cotton in New Orleans. Cotton was in turn exchanged for merchandise that was hauled down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia in heavily loaded wagons. Royall encountered a number of these wagons every day in her travels. The United States Mail also arrived three times each week. Lamenting the effects of consumerism in western Virginia in 1823, Royall wrote, "[The] taste they have for dress, foreign manufactures, coffee, tea, &c. will prove their ruin. I passed through this country about thirty years since, when the people hardly knew what coffee or tea was; in fact many of them did not; and now there is no family but what uses coffee and tea. ... At that time nothing but domestic cloth was worn, and now every one in one hundred men ... which I counted to-day at preaching, were clothed in foreign manufactures."

Other commodities supplied to the nation by Appalachia included gold, salt, and iron, and with the coming of the railroad in the 1870s and 1880s, the region was opened up for the extraction of coal. Black laborers, who built the railroads, introduced new musical styles — the blues in particular — to the southern mountains, and the railroads brought in manufactured goods from the outside, including mail-order guitars and other musical instruments. In her autobiography, Singing Family of the Cumberlands, ballad singer Jean Ritchie (b. 1922) relates the story of her father and uncle making an eighty-mile round trip on foot from their home in eastern Kentucky to purchase a "talking machine" around 1905. As a result, Jean and her siblings in an "isolated" holler of eastern Kentucky grew up listening to cylinder recordings of minstrel songs, including "Whistlin' Rufus" and "Little Lizy Jane." By the early twentieth century these and other popular nineteenth-century songs, as well as blues, had become part of the Appalachian musical tradition, taking their place alongside the older British and American ballads and folk songs.

The Back Door to Appalachia

The majority of the early settlers who came to the southern mountains (the "Western Country") followed the Great Wagon Road (what is now more or less Interstate 81) from Pennsylvania southwest through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. This was the main route for trade and transportation, providing a link between the southern mountains and the northeastern states. Other settlers arrived from the East — from Tidewater Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina.

Beyond the Eastern Continental Divide, however, the Ohio River provided a crucial conduit to the outside world. Flowing past West Virginia and Kentucky and eventually joining the Mississippi River, the Ohio River facilitated transportation and commerce all the way from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. As many as fifty Appalachian counties (in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee) were accessible by the navigable tributaries of the Ohio River, and every year countless flatboats (some more than one hundred feet long), keelboats, and barges loaded with goods descended these rivers.

The Ohio and other rivers that flowed into the Mississippi River were heavily traveled trade routes — the superhighways of their time. In 1787 The Pittsburgh Gazette reported more than 120 boats passing by Pittsburgh, bound for Kentucky, during a single week. On board a thirty-six-foot-long flatboat that departed from Pittsburgh on the Ohio River in November 1796 were a young Englishman named Francis Baily and a French army general, who played the fiddle "exceedingly well." The first night out they stayed at a farmhouse: "The general ... struck up a tune ... and a dance was soon commenced, not much in the style either of Bath or Paris, but sufficiently pleasing to drive away the gloom inspired by the surrounding wilderness, and to banish all idea of separation from civilized society." Several months later, Baily and his companion eventually reached New Orleans. Baily had hoped to find passage to New York by boat, but none was available. So instead, like many others who descended these rivers, he returned to the mountains by foot, following the Natchez Trace, a 450-mile path through the wilderness from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, and arriving in Knoxville in two months' time.

Francis Baily was just one of the many who arrived in New Orleans from the various tributaries of the Mississippi River. In 1806 a flatboatman noted as many as one hundred boats lining the banks of the Kentucky River at Frankfort, Kentucky, and the following year more than eighteen hundred boats landed in New Orleans. The crews of these boats typically included a fiddler hired to provide entertainment over the many days it took to float down the river. A New Englander who traveled with his family down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on a keelboat in 1815 recalled the sound of "fiddles scraping continuously" on the flatboats and of the boatmen "dancing to the violin on the deck of their boat."

One of these many flatboat musicians was Thomas C. Collins (1832–1907), a fiddler and dance caller of Scots-Irish and German descent who worked on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers in the 1850s. Collins grew up along the Ohio River in Little Hocking, Ohio (across the river from West Virginia), and in his autobiography he wrote of playing the fiddle for dancers on the deck of the flatboat during the many weeks it took to float downriver to New Orleans.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics by Phil Jamison. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252080815
• ISBN 13: 9780252080814
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304