BB&T BLUE SKIES AND GOLDEN SANDS TOUR - PROGRAM NOTES

Blue Skies and Golden Sands continues a musical journey that embarked at the start of the North Carolina Symphony’s 75th anniversary season in September 2006. A special pops concert called Blue Skies and Red Earth brought the orchestra together with some of North Carolina’s finest folk musicians for a grand celebration of our state’s musical heritage.

Blue Skies and Red Earth thrilled audiences with the sheer depth and breadth of homegrown musical traditions that have evolved over centuries. From haunting Cherokee flute music to the propulsive sounds of the fiddle and banjo, from stately spirituals to ecstatic gospel, from earthy blues to sophisticated jazz, the anniversary program showed the Tar Heel state to be a wellspring of musical treasures.

Despite having enlisted dozens of guest artists who performed ten or more styles of music, Blue Skies and Red Earth by no means exhausted North Carolina’s musical resources. A few months after the final performance, planning commenced on a follow-up concert to highlight music oriented more to the state’s eastern shores than the rolling hills and mountains to the west. It began with what seemed like a casual question: “What about beach music?"

As most Carolinians know, beach music refers to a body of popular songs that provides just the right mood and rhythms for a popular style of swing dancing called the Carolina Shag. Once heavily associated with beach clubs and dance pavilions from Wilmington, North Carolina to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, shag dancing is performed all over the Southeast nowadays, and many commercial radio stations present the classic beach playlist over the air waves. It’s even become the official dance of both North and South Carolina.

Blue Skies and Golden Sands celebrates beach music as we know it today, but also its roots, and as you will see and experience, our program dives deep--very deep--into the history of coastal Carolina music.

Just as in Blue Skies and Red Earth, we begin with a tribute to the first music makers and dancers of eastern North Carolina, the many Native American tribes who inhabited the region long before the English first made landfall on the Outer Banks in the late 1500s. The rich cultural life of coastal Indians was first depicted by the brilliant English artist John White, who became Governor of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated Roanoke Island colony. Among the many invaluable scenes he rendered in exquisite detail is a ritual dance ceremony that “shows men and women dancing, singing, and shaking rattles, arrows, and small leafy branches.”*

Nearly 425 years later, native peoples of the coastal plains, including members of the Lumbee, Haliwa-Saponi, and Tuscarora tribes, continue to perform diverse styles of music and dance at powwows and festivals, inspired by their own traditions and those associated with other Indian tribes throughout America.

With the arrival of the English in 1584 and the rapid colonization of the eastern seaboard, North Carolina’s cultural diversity developed dramatically. At first music and dance traditions were simply transplanted by immigrants from the British Isles and Europe, but with the arrival of African slaves there began an ongoing and exhilarating blending of musical skills and sensibilities among Americans of every background. Blue Skies and Golden Sands takes us back to the early days of immigration and maritime commerce, and reminds us of the allure that America held to those who yearned for greater freedoms and economic opportunity.

Come all you bold Britons wherever you be I would have you draw near and listen to me The times they get harder in England every day It is much better living in North Amerricay**

Transatlantic voyages were long, tedious and often dangerous for sailors and passengers. Music and dance helped passed the time and ease the way. Singing and step-dancing—the Sailor’s Hornpipe is a well-known example—might be accompanied by concertina, fiddle, tin whistle and drum. Age-old British ballads, hymns and love songs made the passage too. Many of these songs were documented and recorded by folksong collectors along the barrier islands well into the 20th century, and some are still performed in the mountains of North Carolina.

Early maritime history has also been the source of inspiration for contemporary composers. We are pleased to feature a beautiful song from the new stage musical Bloody Blackbeard, based on the life and legend of the notorious pirate, Edward Teach, who met his end near Ocracoke Island. And we honor a traditional song The Sloop John B that poet (and former North Carolina resident) Carl Sandburg included in his 1927 collection The American Songbag. It tells of an old sponger boat that wrecked in the Bahamas around the turn of the 20th century, and thanks to popular recordings made by The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, and The Beach Boys, the song is ranked number 271 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

You may be familiar with the term sea chantey or sea shanty. It refers to a worksong performed to synchronize the hoisting and hauling of lines and sail. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. in Two Years Before the Mast, wrote “A song is as necessary to sailors as the drum and fife to a soldier. They must pull together as soldiers must step in time, and they can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it.”

More recently, sea chanteys were sung by commercial Menhaden fishing crews based in Beaufort, North Carolina and the Northern Neck of Virginia to coordinate the pulling in of the net after the catch had been surrounded. The largely African American crews drew upon spirituals, gospel and blues music to sing their way through the daunting physical challenge of raising huge quantities of silvery fish. The tradition died abruptly in the late 1950s when power winches supplanted muscles and brawn, but older Beaufort residents nostalgically recall the beautiful voices of the Menhaden Chanteymen rolling across the water in the early morning light. In 1989 folklorist Mike Luster gathered a group of veteran fishermen and singers to record as many Menhaden chanteys that could be recalled before they were lost for all time.

Of course, powerful and purposeful singing was not confined to Menhaden fishing boats. Most of the crew members sang in church and at social gatherings. In the years between the two world wars, eastern North Carolina and Tidewater Virginia produced some of the country’s most exciting and influential jubilee-style gospel groups, including The Golden Gate Quartet, the greatest of them all. The Mitchell Christian Singers, a group from Kinston, North Carolina, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1939 as part of the now legendary concert series From Spirituals to Swing.

While the African American community made glorious noise in church houses on Sunday morning, the music swung fiercely on Saturday nights. Kinston, Wilson, Rocky Mount and other eastern North Carolina tobacco towns were hotbeds of jazz and swing music. Rocky Mount’s annual June German dance attracted the best bands in the land, led by the likes of Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, but there was plenty of outstanding local talent on display as well.

After the war, big-band jazz and swing orchestras gave way to leaner, more economical combos. This development produced the high-voltage sounds and vocal power of jump blues and rhythm and blues, a fusion of jazz and blues with gospel music. Durham’s Clyde McPhatter and Winston-Salem’s Five Royales, along with Ray Charles, led the way in secularizing the gospel sound, and changed popular music forever.

In the early 1950s, the clear-channel radio station WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee began broadcasting African American R&B to listeners throughout the South and Midwest and across the racial divide, providing combustible fuel for rock and roll, and most importantly for our purposes, the foundation of beach music.

The jitterbug, Lindy Hop and other popular swing-dance styles of the 1930s and ‘40s also took new forms in the Cold War era. As young people in the Carolinas opened up to the energy and passion of rhythm and blues, and later to southern soul and Motown, they latched on to their own style of swing dancing--the shag--a term some say was coined at Carolina Beach, North Carolina. They also developed an informal canon of revered songs and lent support to favorite live bands and performers.

Carolina beach music may strike some as an unusual choice of focus for the North Carolina Symphony. Yet we have seen that a close examination of its history and roots reveals much about the American experience. Beach music will always be associated with good times and a carefree spirit, but below the surface its currents run deep. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the many voices of America coming together as one, and a power to promote social harmony that should not be regarded lightly.

*Quote from Simon Newman in his review of the exhibition ANew World: England's First View of America, which was shown at the North Carolina Museum of History in 2007.

**From the British song “An Invitation to North Carolina America.”