Living Stories : An Investigation of the Perpetuation and Importance of Folk Ballads in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Andy Alex Martinez August, 2018 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………..iii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………v I. INTRODUCTION……...………………………………………………………...1 THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS.....…………………………………………5 METHODS……………………………………………………………………....8 LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………………..9 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS……………………………………………...15 II. STORYTELLING AND OLD TIME…………………………………………...18 OLD TIME MUSIC……………………………………………………………..20 STORYTELLING………………………………………………………………25 III. FRANKIE SILVER……………………………………………………………..30 PRESENT DAY..………………………………………………………………34 FRANKIE SILVER IN POPULAR CULTURE……………………………….40 FUNCTION……………………………………………………………………..41 IV. TOM DOOLEY…………………………………………………………………46 PRESENT DAY………………………………………………………………..48 THE CASE……………………………………………………………………..50 INFLUENCE……………………………………………………………………53 TOM DOOLEY IN POPULAR CULTURE…………………………………...56 V. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………62 VI. REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………64 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Map of the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains………………………………19 Figure 2. Recreation of Frankie Silver’s Cabin……………………………………………..36 Figure 3. Tom Dula in Confederate Uniform………………………………………………..50 Figure 4. Dr. Carter’s medical bag…………………………………………………………...54 Figure 5. Tom Dooley Posters………………………………………………………………..57 Figure 6. Playbill for “Tom Dooley: A Wilkes County Legend”……………………………58 iv I owe a great many people a great debt for making this paper possible. First and foremost, my aunt and uncle, Donna and Benny Lail, without whom I could not have done the fieldwork required to explore this topic. My best friend Tricia, my roommate Alary, my sister Ashley, and my parents Tony and Maria have had to listen to me talk about this endlessly for years, and I thank them for their support and patience and for frequently acting as a sounding board. I thank Margaret Martine of Whippoorwill Academy and Village for her enthusiasm and her work in keeping history alive in Happy Valley. I thank Jeff Stepp, of the Caldwell County Historical Museum, for his support and his excitement about this project, which he unfortunately did not live to see completed. And of course my utmost thanks go to my committee, Dr. Richard Feinberg and Dr. Jennifer Johnstone, without whom this would not have happened at all and my thesis chair, Dr. Evgenia Fotiou, who guided me through this entire process. v Introduction Music is an important part of life – or at least a relatively omnipresent one – for most of us. We have radios and CD players, even things like Sirius and Pandora, in our cars. Most stores and restaurants play music. Our television shows have opening and closing theme songs and background music throughout; even the commercials often have jingles and background music. When we go out or have a party, we usually have music. We celebrate important events – birthdays, weddings, graduations, and many religious festivals – with music. And there are certain songs we expect people to know, and to know the place of, because they are so omnipresent in our culture. This is also true of regional styles of music. There are certain songs that people in certain areas and subcultures place significance on and expect one another will know. There are sounds we associate with these groups as well. The Appalachian Mountains have a distinctly American sound. Their music is the result of the mix of different cultures that have come together over time. This brought instruments, melodies, and musical elements that shaped the sound of the mountains. Music is a critical part of the culture in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. It helps to define the local cultural identity. It is, and has been for generations, a form of entertainment and sociality. It also provides a way for 1 people to relate to each other and to the history of the area. The melodies, instrumentation, and lyrics of the music performed there can all be traced back through the region’s history to reveal the diverse origins of the area’s distinctive culture. Growing up, I spent part of my summers in Western North Carolina, in the Brushy Mountains. The Brushy Mountains are a small, low spur of the larger Blue Ridge, which is in turn part of the Appalachian Mountain Range that stretched from New York to Georgia. They are separated from the rest of the Blue Ridge by the Yadkin River. Most residents will refer to the Brushy Mountains as “the foothills” rather than as actual mountains, despite the abundance of named peaks. The area is still relatively isolated, although not to the same extent as deeper parts of the range. The Brushy Mountains are almost like a gateway from the mountains to the lowland. Although I grew up in the North, my family has lived in Western North Carolina for centuries. Because of that history and these trips, I was raised in part around this unique culture and its music. I have fond memories of relatives singing ballads, of an uncle playing the banjo on my grandmother’s front porch. That porch was the center of community life in the tiny town my mother’s family comes from. My grandmother’s house was an old farmhouse, more than a century old and built by relatives on a plot that has been in the family for over 300 years. As was common in farmhouses of the era in which it was built, it had a long, L-shaped, covered porch out front. That was where people in town would gather in the evenings and for special events. We would sing, cook, and tell stories. I was always aware that the sorts of stories and songs I heard there on that porch were something my friends up North were not familiar with. They were not 2 something I heard at home in the Ohio suburb where I was raised. I never placed any importance on that when I was young. It was not until I got older that I recognized the uniqueness of the area’s culture and of the songs and stories I grew up with. The town has grown since then. It has taken traveling there on my own to realize that perhaps the place I remember does not quite exist anymore, at least not the way I remember it. Things have changed quite a bit since the early 1990s. But one thing that has not changed is the importance of music and storytelling. Those things are still a thriving and critical part of the fabric of the region. This connection is what led me to research the importance of music in the local culture of the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. It has also leant me a significant advantage in making connections, as very often the people I was speaking with were able to pick out some way in which we were kin to one another. When examining the music, I chose two journalistic murder ballads from Western North Carolina: Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley and The Ballad of Frankie Silver. I chose these two ballads because they are based on relatively well documented true events and because their stories occurred only thirty-five years and one county apart. Because these are based on true events, it is possible to find the families connected to them, most of them still living in the same places where the stories occurred. And people are aware of their connections to these stories. These are not just local legends; they are embedded in family histories. When I first started this project, I had an idea that I was going to be able to examine and compare the role of gender in the way that these ballads are constructed and perpetuated. That, however, proved impossible. In part this was because of the 3 huge popularity of “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley,” the Kingston Trio’s recording of which catapulted it into the international spotlight in the late 1950s (Cohen and Donaldson 2014, 94-5, 118). With the ballad having this sort of notoriety, there was no way to determine what in its transmission had to do with gender and what had to do with its place in the larger popular culture. A better ballad would have been “Omie Wise,” which recounts the 1808 murder of Naomi Wise by John Lewis. Although the ballad had a fair amount of success during the folk boom, it did not achieve the same ubiquity as “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” (Underwood 2016, 19). As this ballad has had a history with popular culture that more closely resembles that of “The Ballad of Frankie Silver,” it would have made for a much more accurate comparison. Another reason this was not possible was because of the vastly different histories of the two ballads. Thirty-five years does not sound like much in the larger scheme of history, but in the South at that time it was a sufficient span to allow for a massive upheaval of the cultural and legal landscape. Frankie Silver’s story occurred before the Civil War and before the breakdown of coverture laws, which essentially made women wards of their fathers or husbands, began (Seigel 2002). Thomas Dula’s story, on the other hand, was largely shaped by the end of the Civil War. So, realizing that I would not be able to pursue my original line of inquiry at this time, I turned my focus instead to the importance of these events and their stories in local culture. This I have been much more successful with. There are many ways in which the local people have kept these stories alive. They have appeared in all sorts of media, from song to film to written word. All of this speaks to a deep devotion to these stories.