I Have a Little Secret I Ain't Gonna Tell - Elizabeth Cotten Shake Sugaree

Shake Shoccoree

"I have a little secret I ain't gonna tell" - Elizabeth Cotten "Shake Sugaree"

Chapel Hillian Elizabeth 'Libba' Cotten is well known for her song "Freight Train." But in 1966 she released a song called "Shake Sugaree" that raises some interesting questions about her life and the history of this area. According to her, the song was playfully written by her grandchildren and composed around 1964-5. Her granddaughter claims Elizabeth Cotten wrote the chorus. The chorus "Shake Sugaree" contains a bit of mystery- it refers, I believe, to a Native American tribe that lived in this area but were considered extinct around 1720. "Shake" in that context could be the antiquated word used for ecstatic dance. How did this phrase pop up in a children's lullaby in 1965?

The Shoccoree (also spelled Shakory, Cacores among others) were an obscure Native American tribe that populated Orange County and other areas in the Piedmont. They were closely associated with the nearby Eno and Adshusheer Tribes. From the little we know about them, they lived an agricultural life complemented with buffalo hunting. They lived in round plaster houses and had a democratic though patriarchial government. It is thought that they were associated with the Siouan or Dakotan Tribes from the Southern Alleghanies. This claim is also supported by their language which is distinct from the Tuscarora (Algonquin) and Catawba tribes from the same region. European mention of them is brief but the major expeditions of Yardley (1654) , Lederer (1672) and Lawson (1701) contain references to them.

In the early 18th century, the Tuscarora War split the tribes of North Carolina. The southern faction of the Tuscaroras, led by Chief Hancock, joined with some of the other tribes against the colonists and the northern Tuscarora. The colonists were ultimately sucessful in pitting the tribes against each other and triumphed against Chief Hancock. The main battle at Neoheroka was where many tribes, including one relevant to this story, the Coree, were defeated.

After this battle, the history gets fuzzy. The Shokari/Shoccoree are not mentioned again as an existing tribe. Accounts differ as to how they disappeared but basically they were thought to have been reduced in numbers by wars with other tribes (Yamasee or Tuscarora War) and/or merged with the other tribes or sold into slavery.

However, a closer look at the history of the Shoccoree might reveal more of the story. While no one to my knowledge self-identifies as Shoccoree today, there are some who claim to be "Coree", part of the "Chicoran nation", a pan-Siouan Tribe of mixed heritage. Renegade scholar Alan Pate explains:

There is a group of people south of the Neuse River with whom my family has been associated for many generations, who identify themselves as Waccamaw, Coree or Saponi Indians. These are all Siouan people of the old Chicora nation, of the southwestern end of the Occaneechee Trail and the southern end of the old Coree, or Green's, Trading Path, which was historically obliterated Alan Pate's connection of the Coree with the Chicora (Shakori or Shoccoree) is hardly rock solid. But if he's confused, he's not the only one:

... initial contact with Europeans began much earlier through a series of Spanish slave raids along the Carolina coasts during the early 1500s which originated from Cuba and Puerto Rico. One of these, led by Pedro de Quejo and Francisco Gordillo and funded by Lucas Vasquez de Aylln, landed at Winyaw Bay SC in 1521 and captured 60 people. Because of sickness, only a few of these prisoners lived to reach Cuba, but they lasted long enough for the Spanish to learn that they called either themselves or their homeland Chicora. One young warrior did survive the capture and voyage south, and after an apparent conversion to Christianity, was renamed Francisco of Chicora. Francisco volunteered to serve the Spanish as a guide and interpreter, and in 1525 Aylln sent Quejo back to area with two ships and 60 men. Francisco accompanied the expedition, but the Spanish had no sooner hit the beach than he took to the woods.

According to current wisdom, the Coree were a coastal tribe (where the Spanish were trolling for slaves) and the "Chicora", if it is equivalent to the Shoccoree, were inland. Scholars debate which tribe Francisco belonged to- could it be both? Could the Coree and Chicora be federated, perhaps on linguistic lines?

But the story goes further- part of the speculation by contemporary Coree is that the Chicoran nation may have been composed of many races, including Europeans (particularly Welsh), Native Americans and Africans. This history relies on the phenomenon of Europeans "going native" and becoming Indians.

Just like Francisco prefered native life, the entire Jamestown colony famously went to "Croatan" in the 1580s. This phenomenon repeated itself often in Carolina for a variety of reasons. Lawson records "English men and other Europeans that have been accustom'd to the conversation of the savage women and their way of living have been so allur'd with that careless sort of life as to be constant to their Indian Wife and her relations so long as they liv'd without ever desiring to return again among the English; although they had very fair opportunities of Advantages amongst their Countrymen; of which I know several."

James Axtell's fascinating account of "White Indians of Colonial America" puts the count at hundreds if not thousands of Europeans who became Indian. According to one journal at the time, the White Indians "found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity". Two other white Indians are recorded as finding "the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us."

One of the most colorful of these white Indians in this state was James Adair, who lived with the Chickasaws for 35 years in the mid 1700s while composing his "History of the American Indians" which argued for a Jewish origin of Native Americans (pre- Columbian european contact with Native Americans is a fascinating and bizarre topic -see Al Pate's The Coree are Not Extinct for a discussion of possible early Welsh contact in the Cape Fear). In addition to individuals, entire groups defied easy categorization into nationalist or racial identities for a variety of reasons. So called "fugitive communities," like the pirate ports or the escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp or Henry Berry Lowry's Scuffletown in Robeson County, were scattered across North Carolina. Could the Chicoran Nation be another?

Despite attempts to separate people into black and white, the people of the current day Carolina Piedmont represent a wide spectrum of skin color, social customs and ethnic heritage. But perhaps the dogmatic insistence on those terms was used to counterattack a state of dangerous alliances across color lines. Research supports the idea that some Europeans voluntarily abandoned their own nationalist and racial identities to join with Native Americans and/or Africans. Such a notion of voluntary associations would challenge the idea that native life was somehow inferior in comparison with European culture and would have been an example to other Europeans that solidarity outside of nationalistic lines was possible.

This isn't to argue that Cotten was a Native American or wasn't (she did claim partial native ancestry in an interview with Alice Gerrard). It is to say that those categories, with their focus on either/or polarities and racial purity obscure part of the radical history of North Carolina. It is those imagined categories that, despite their inaccuracy, continue to affect the lives of North Carolinians. Here Elizabeth Cotten, the granddaughter of freed slaves, remembers an event from her youth in Chapel Hill:

When I was a little girl, my mother and father used to bury their meat. Rub it up and bury it in the ground and put dirt back over it like we didn't have no meat. [Otherwise] the white people would take it away from us. (US News and World Report, 1989)

It is hard to know what Elizabeth Cotten's relationship to the Shoccoree/Chicora/Sugaree was. Perhaps this lullaby about dejected poverty, with its references to tobacco (twice), a pipe, antiquated items like buggies and watch-chains and an obscure reference to an extinct tribe was spontaneously created by her great grandchildren (although her original statement that it was composed by her great grandchildren was contradicted by one of those grandchildren who said that Elizabeth Cotten injected the chorus.) Perhaps it could have been a local minstrel song or popular jingle that she adapted. Her amibguity on the subject could be intentional as "mixed race communities" are still an extremely touchy subject to speak openly about in the South, especially the Carolina piedmont.

Finally, consider this anecdote from 1701 that is eerily reminiscent of Elizabeth Cotten's gentle musical tone and this strange form of music, the lullaby. It is an account by John Lawson of an evening spent with the chief of the Shoccorees, Enoe Will after being guided by the Chief through the Carolinas:

Our Guide and Landlord Enoe-Will was of the best and most agreeable Temper that ever I met with in an Indian, being always ready to serve the English, not out of Gain, but real Affection; ... He brought some of his chief Men into his Cabin, and 2 of them having a Drum, and a Rattle, sung by us, as we lay in Bed, and struck up their Musick to serenade and welcome us to their Town. And tho' at last, we fell asleep, yet they continu’d their Concert till Morning

*the Sugaree were once identified as another tribe located near what is now Charlotte but it is not clear that they are distinct from the Shoccoree or Shakori. Writing on this is inconclusive and since both tribes vanished around 1720, historical accounts offer no conclusion. Given the closeness of the phonetics, I'm inclined to think we are dealing with the same word spelled differently by Europeans. A federated nation extending from the coastal areas of NC up to the headwaters of the Neuse would seem to bolster Al Pate's notion of the "old Chicora nation."

References:

Axtell, John, "White Indians of Colonial America" in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 55-88. Rights, Douglas, American Indian in North Carolina. Winston-Salem : J.F. Blair, c1988. Faircloth Sr., J.L. "Turtle", Red Rain: The Coree Indians. Atlantic, N.C. : The author, 2001. Fisher, Kirsten, Suspect Relations: Sex Race and resistance in Colonial North Carolina. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2002. Hawks, Francis, History of North Carolina. Fayetteville, N.C. : E.J. Hale & Son, 1859, c1856. Lawson, John, A New Voyage to Carolina http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/menu.html Lederer, John, The Discoveries of John Lederer. http://rla.unc.edu/archives/accounts/Lederer/LedererText.html Mooney, James, The Siouan tribes of the East. Washington : G.P.O., 1894. Pate, Alan, The Coree are not extinct : discussion of some Indian, White, and Black relationships in early America. Pikeville, N.C. (2420 Big Daddy's Rd., Pikeville 27863) : A.F. Pate, c1993 Sakolsky, Ron, James Koehnline Gone to Croatan : origins of North American dropout culture. Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia ; Edinburgh : AK Press, c1993. Seeger, Mike. Shake Sugaree (liner notes) http://media.smithsonianglobalsound.org/liner_notes/smithsonian_folkways/SFW40147.p df U.S. News and World Report Elizabeth Cotten. ('Ordinary Women of Grace': subjects of the 'I Dream a World' photography exhibit). February 13, 1989.