Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond

"There's no part of the world where music is more a part of everyday life than it is in these mountains. It's not something you go to hear. It's something you do. It's the sound of being alive in a particular place." — Jean Ritchie, "Singing Family of the Cumberlands," 1955

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Trace the evolution of Appalachian music from Old World ballads through old-time string bands, bluegrass, commercial country, and contemporary forms, identifying the cultural forces that drove each transformation
2. Explain the African American origins of the banjo and assess how the erasure of Black contributions to mountain music shaped — and distorted — popular understanding of Appalachian culture
3. Analyze the Bristol Sessions of 1927 as a pivotal moment in American cultural history that transformed a living folk tradition into a commercial product
4. Evaluate the tension between music as a living community practice and music as a commercial commodity, and describe how Appalachian musicians have navigated that tension across generations

Introduction: The Sound of the Place

If you have ever driven the back roads of southern Appalachia on a summer evening — windows down, radio off, the road following some creek through a hollow where the ridges close in tight — you have heard it. Not on a radio. Not from a stage. From a porch. A banjo rolling through a tune that nobody wrote and everybody knows. A fiddle somewhere up the hollow, the notes drifting down through the trees like smoke. An old woman's voice, unaccompanied, singing a song about a murder that happened three hundred years ago in a country she has never seen, in a dialect she would not recognize, and yet the song is hers. It has been in her family longer than the farm. Longer than the county. Longer than the nation.

This is Appalachian music at its root — not a genre, not a brand, not a section in a record store, but the sound of a place and the people who have lived in it. The music of the Appalachian Mountains is one of the great cultural achievements of American civilization, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. It has been romanticized by folklorists, commodified by record labels, sanitized by Nashville, dismissed by cultural elites, and claimed by people who have never set foot in the mountains. Through it all, the music itself has persisted — absorbing, transforming, evolving, and refusing to stay still long enough to be turned into a museum exhibit.

To understand Appalachian music is to understand several things at once. It is to understand a process of cultural transmission that spans centuries and continents. It is to understand the collision between folk tradition and commercial industry. It is to understand the deliberate erasure of Black musical contributions from a tradition that could not have existed without them. And it is to understand what happens when a living art form — something people do on porches and at church and at funerals and at dances — gets picked up by microphones and sent out into the world, where it becomes something else entirely.

This chapter traces that story from the oldest ballads to the newest voices, and it insists on one thing throughout: the music was never just entertainment. It was how people remembered, how they mourned, how they celebrated, how they resisted, and how they told each other who they were. It still is.

The Old Songs: Ballads from Across the Water

The oldest layer of Appalachian music came across the Atlantic Ocean in the memories of people who could not read. The Scots-Irish, English, Welsh, and Scottish settlers who poured into the Appalachian backcountry in the eighteenth century — the migration described in Chapter 5 — carried almost nothing with them. They had tools, seeds, maybe a Bible. They did not have libraries. They did not have written music. What they had were songs, stored in the only place that could not be lost or broken: their minds.

These songs were ballads — narrative songs that told stories, usually of love, betrayal, murder, supernatural encounters, or historical events. Many of them were very old. The Scottish and English ballads that scholars would later classify had been circulating in the British Isles for centuries before any settler boarded a ship for the American colonies. They were part of an oral tradition so deep and so durable that songs composed in medieval England were still being sung, with remarkable fidelity, in the hollows of eastern Kentucky two hundred years after the first settlers arrived.

The American scholar Francis James Child spent the latter decades of the nineteenth century cataloguing these ballads in his monumental work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), identifying 305 distinct ballad types — now known universally as the Child ballads. Child himself was a Harvard professor who never visited Appalachia, but his catalogue became the framework through which later collectors understood what they found in the mountains. When the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp traveled through the southern Appalachians in 1916-1918 — accompanied by his collaborator Olive Dame Campbell, the wife of a social reformer who had been working in the mountains — he discovered something that astonished him. The mountains were full of Child ballads. Songs that had died out in England and Scotland were alive and thriving in the hollows of North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Sharp collected hundreds of songs on his Appalachian journeys, and his enthusiasm shaped a generation of scholarship. He described the mountain people as living repositories of English folk culture — "the finest collection of English folk songs in the world," as he put it. His book English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (published posthumously in 1932) became a foundational text in folk music studies.

But Sharp's enthusiasm came with distortions that would haunt Appalachian music for a century. He was looking for English songs, and that is what he found — or rather, that is what he chose to record. He had little interest in the songs the mountain people had composed themselves. He was not interested in the African American musical traditions that had been part of the mountain soundscape for as long as the European ones. He wanted to find a pure, preserved English folk culture, and he filtered everything he heard through that desire.

The reality was more complicated and more interesting. The ballads Sharp collected were not perfectly preserved artifacts. They had been changing for generations. Mountain singers altered words, melodies, and even entire storylines to suit their own circumstances. A ballad about a British lord became a ballad about a Kentucky farmer. A song about the Scottish borderlands acquired references to the Blue Ridge. The mountain people were not passive vessels holding someone else's culture. They were active artists, reshaping inherited material to express their own experience.

Consider "Barbara Allen" (Child 84), perhaps the most widely collected ballad in the Appalachian tradition. The song tells the story of a young man dying of love for the cruel Barbara Allen, who rejects him and then dies of remorse. Sharp collected multiple versions in Appalachia, and no two were identical. The melody varied from singer to singer. The number of verses changed. The ending shifted. Some versions had Barbara Allen weeping with genuine grief. Others had her stone-cold to the last. Each singer owned the song, and each telling was an act of creation, not mere repetition.

This is the nature of oral tradition — a system of cultural transmission in which songs, stories, and knowledge pass from person to person and generation to generation through memory and performance rather than through writing. Oral tradition is not static. It is a living process in which every performance is both an act of preservation and an act of innovation. The mountain singers who carried these ballads across two centuries were not archivists. They were artists.

The Mountains as a Musical Conservatory

Why did these old songs survive in the Appalachian Mountains when they died out in the British Isles and in most of lowland America? The traditional explanation is geographic isolation — the mountains cut communities off from the broader currents of American culture, preserving older forms that evolved or disappeared elsewhere. There is truth in this. The steep ridges, narrow hollows, and sparse road networks of the central Appalachian highlands did slow the penetration of outside cultural influences. A family in a remote hollow of eastern Kentucky in 1900 might have been three hard days' travel from the nearest railroad. They were not hearing the latest popular songs from New York or Chicago. They were hearing what their grandparents had sung, and their great-grandparents before them.

But the isolation explanation is incomplete and, taken too far, becomes another form of the condescension that has plagued outsiders' understanding of Appalachia since the local color writers of the 1880s (see Chapter 14). Mountain communities were not sealed boxes. They traded with lowland towns. They traveled. Peddlers, circuit-riding preachers, and eventually mail-order catalogs brought outside influences into even the most remote hollows. The preservation of old ballads was not simply a consequence of being cut off from the world. It was also a consequence of the ballads being useful — of meeting real needs in a culture where music was woven into the fabric of daily life.

The ballads served as entertainment in communities where there was no theater, no cinema, no phonograph. They served as news — songs about murders, disasters, and scandals traveled faster than newspapers in a region where many people could not read. They served as moral instruction — the ballads are full of cautionary tales about the consequences of vanity, jealousy, infidelity, and greed. They served as communal memory — the songs that families and communities shared were part of what held them together, part of what made a hollow a community and not just a collection of houses.

And they served as art. The mountain people valued good singing. A person who could hold a room with a long, complex ballad — delivering the story with clarity and emotional power — was respected. The ability to sing was a social asset, and the songs themselves were cultural property, passed down through families with the same care and pride that attended the passing down of land or tools.

The Instrument from Africa: The Banjo and the Erasure of Black Mountain Music

No instrument is more closely associated with Appalachian music than the banjo. It is the sonic emblem of the mountains — the instrument that, in the popular imagination, defines the sound of Appalachian culture. And it came from Africa.

This fact — well established in the scholarly literature, thoroughly documented by musicologists and historians — remains one of the most consequential erasures in American cultural history. The banjo's journey from West Africa to the Appalachian Mountains is a story about slavery, cultural exchange, racial appropriation, and the systematic whitewashing of a tradition that was, from its very origins, interracial.

The banjo evolved from stringed instruments brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. Instruments with a gourd body, a skin head, and strings — generically called gourd banjos or banjar — appear in descriptions of enslaved people's music as early as the seventeenth century. The West African akonting (from the Jola people of Senegambia), the ngoni (from the Mande people of West Africa), and related instruments share the essential features of the banjo: a skin-covered gourd resonator, a stick neck, and strings played with a distinctive downstroke technique. Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the American South built and played these instruments, and the music they made on them was one of the foundational contributions to American musical culture.

For most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the banjo was understood as a Black instrument. Thomas Jefferson noted enslaved people playing the "banjar" at Monticello. Paintings and engravings from the colonial and antebellum periods depict Black musicians playing gourd banjos at dances and social gatherings. The instrument was associated with African American culture so strongly that white musicians were slow to adopt it.

The crossover came in the mid-nineteenth century, through both the minstrel stage and direct cross-racial musical exchange. Joel Walker Sweeney, a white Virginian from Appomattox County, is often credited (inaccurately) with "inventing" the five-string banjo in the 1830s and 1840s. What Sweeney actually did was popularize the banjo among white audiences through his minstrel performances and, possibly, add the short fifth string (the drone string) that became a defining feature of the five-string instrument. But the banjo itself — the concept, the construction, the playing technique — was African in origin, and Sweeney learned it from the enslaved Black musicians on his family's farm.

The minstrel stage — in which white performers in blackface caricatured African American music and culture — paradoxically spread the banjo across white America while severing it from its Black origins. By the late nineteenth century, the banjo was becoming associated with white rural culture, particularly in the Appalachian Mountains, and the African American origins of the instrument were being actively forgotten.

This forgetting was not accidental. It was part of a broader process by which Appalachian culture was constructed as exclusively white — a process driven by the folklorists and local color writers described in Chapter 14, who were looking for a "pure" Anglo-Saxon folk culture and had no interest in the multiracial reality of the mountains. When Cecil Sharp went to the Appalachians to collect ballads, he avoided Black singers. When the folk revival of the mid-twentieth century celebrated Appalachian music, it celebrated it as white music. The banjo, which had crossed the Atlantic in the hands of enslaved Africans, was rebranded as the quintessential instrument of white mountain folk.

The erasure was not total. Black banjo players persisted in the mountains and throughout the South, even as the mainstream narrative wrote them out of the story. Musicians like Dink Roberts of North Carolina, Odell Thompson of Virginia, and the Black string band tradition of the Piedmont region maintained African American banjo traditions through the twentieth century. The Carolina Chocolate Drops — a Black string band formed in 2005 by Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson — brought the African American roots of string band music back into public consciousness with Grammy-winning force.

But the damage of the erasure runs deep. For generations, the standard story of Appalachian music began with English ballads and proceeded through white musicians to Nashville — a story in which Black people simply did not appear. This was a lie. The music of the Appalachian Mountains was always a product of cultural exchange between European and African traditions, between white and Black musicians who lived in proximity, heard each other play, borrowed from each other, and created something that belonged to neither tradition alone but to the mountains themselves.

Old-Time String Bands: The Sound Before Bluegrass

Before there was bluegrass — before there were recording studios and radio stations and record labels — there was old-time music. This is the term scholars and musicians use for the acoustic string band tradition that flourished in the Appalachian Mountains from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth — the music that people actually played on porches, at dances, at corn shuckings, at church socials, and at the informal gatherings that were the social life of rural mountain communities.

Old-time music was built on two foundational instruments: the fiddle and the banjo. The fiddle — the same instrument as the violin, but with a different name, a different repertoire, and a different social role — had been central to rural American music since the colonial era. Scots-Irish settlers brought fiddle traditions from Ulster and the Scottish Lowlands. The fiddle was the essential dance instrument, the sound that got people on their feet, and a good fiddler was the most valued musician in any community. The banjo, as we have seen, came from a different direction entirely — from Africa through the South — and its merger with the fiddle was one of the defining creative acts of American music.

The fiddle-banjo combination was the core of the old-time sound. The fiddle carried the melody — the tune — while the banjo provided rhythmic drive and harmonic texture. To this core, musicians added the guitar (which became widely available in rural areas through mail-order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck in the 1890s and 1900s) and, less commonly, the mandolin, the autoharp, and the string bass. The resulting ensemble — the string band — was the standard musical unit of rural Appalachian life.

Old-time string band music had several distinctive characteristics that set it apart from what would later develop into bluegrass and commercial country. The rhythms were steady and repetitive, designed for dancing rather than listening. The tunes were often played in a cyclical fashion — the same melody repeated over and over, with subtle variations, for as long as the dancers needed music. The singing, when there was singing, was often rough, nasal, and pitched high — a vocal style that reflected British Isles folk traditions and that sounded harsh to ears accustomed to the smoother sounds of popular music.

The musicians were almost entirely amateurs. They played for their communities, not for audiences. They learned from family members, neighbors, and itinerant musicians who passed through. There was no formal instruction, no written music, no theory. A young person learned to play by sitting next to an older player and listening — absorbing the tunes through repetition, picking up the technique by imitation. This process of transmission was slow, intimate, and deeply social, and it produced musicians who were rooted in their local traditions in ways that conservatory-trained musicians rarely are.

Every community had its own repertoire, its own style, its own favorite tunes. The music of southwestern Virginia sounded different from the music of eastern Kentucky, which sounded different from the music of western North Carolina. These regional variations were part of the richness of the tradition. When folklorists and record companies began documenting Appalachian music in the twentieth century, they found not a single uniform tradition but a tapestry of local styles, each one shaped by the particular geography, history, and personalities of its community.

Shape-Note Singing and the Sacred Harp

Alongside the secular tradition of ballads and string bands, Appalachian communities sustained one of the most remarkable sacred music traditions in the world. Shape-note singing — a system of musical notation in which the shape of each note indicates its pitch within the scale — was developed in New England in the late eighteenth century as a way to teach music to people who could not read standard notation. It used four syllable names — fa, sol, la, and mi — mapped to four distinctive note shapes: triangle, circle, square, and diamond. A singer could look at a shape-note hymnal and know which syllable to sing by the shape of the note, without needing to read the lines and spaces of the standard musical staff.

Shape-note singing flourished briefly in New England before being displaced by more "refined" musical traditions that looked down on the old-fashioned fa-sol-la system. But it traveled south — carried by singing school teachers, itinerant musicians, and the hymnals themselves — and took root in the rural communities of the Appalachian Mountains and the Deep South with a tenacity that would sustain it for more than two centuries.

The foundational text of the tradition is The Sacred Harp, a shape-note tunebook first published in 1844 by Benjamin Franklin White and E.J. King in Hamilton, Georgia. The book — which has been revised and republished continuously ever since — contains hundreds of hymns, anthems, and fuging tunes set in four-part harmony using the four-shape notation system. It is not a hymnal in the conventional church sense. It is a community songbook, designed for group singing, and the tradition it represents — Sacred Harp singing — is one of the oldest continuously practiced participatory musical traditions in America.

A Sacred Harp singing is not a concert. There is no audience. Everyone sings. The singers sit in a hollow square — trebles on one side, altos on another, tenors on a third, basses on a fourth — facing a leader who stands in the center. The leader selects a song, calls out the page number, and beats time. The singers first sing the song using the shape-note syllables (fa, sol, la, mi) — a practice called "singing the shapes" — and then sing it again with the words. The sound is raw, powerful, and unlike anything else in American music: four-part harmony sung at full volume by untrained voices, without accompaniment, the harmonies often dissonant to modern ears, the rhythms driven by the shared pulse of the community rather than by a conductor's baton.

Sacred Harp singings took place — and still take place — in churches, community centers, and courthouses throughout the Appalachian region. They are deeply communal events. A singing is followed by a communal meal ("dinner on the grounds"), and the gathering serves social as well as musical functions. For many mountain communities, the annual singing was one of the most important social events of the year — a time when far-flung families and communities came together, renewed bonds, and affirmed their shared identity through shared song.

The tradition persists today. Sacred Harp singings take place across the southeastern United States and, in recent decades, have experienced a revival that has spread them to cities far from the mountains. The music's raw power, its radical democracy (everyone sings, no one performs), and its deep roots in American history have attracted new participants who find in it something that polished, professional music cannot offer: the experience of making music together, as equals, without the barrier between performer and audience.

The Bristol Sessions: The Big Bang

On a sweltering day in late July 1927, a recording engineer from New York set up equipment in a hat warehouse on State Street in Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia — a city that straddles the state line. His name was Ralph Peer, and he worked for the Victor Talking Machine Company. He had come to the mountains because he had heard that there were musicians here who might sell records — not to the national market, but to the regional audience of rural southerners who were beginning to buy phonographs and who wanted to hear music that sounded like their own lives.

What happened over the next two weeks would change American music forever.

The Bristol Sessions — the recordings made by Ralph Peer in Bristol between July 25 and August 5, 1927 — are often called "the Big Bang of country music." The phrase is not an exaggeration. In those two weeks, Peer recorded two acts that would become foundational: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Between them, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers created the two great streams of commercial country music — one rooted in family harmony, acoustic instrumentation, and the old songs of the mountains; the other rooted in the individual voice, the lonesome wanderer, and the emotional intensity of the blues.

The Carter Family — A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter — came from Maces Spring, Virginia, a tiny community in the Clinch Mountain region of southwestern Virginia. A.P. was a collector of songs — he traveled through the mountains gathering tunes from neighbors, relatives, and anyone who would sing for him. Sara had a voice of extraordinary clarity and emotional directness. Maybelle, who was only eighteen when the Bristol Sessions took place, played the guitar with a revolutionary technique — the Carter scratch or Carter Family picking — in which the thumb played the melody on the bass strings while the fingers brushed the treble strings for rhythm. This technique, simple to describe and devastatingly effective in practice, became the foundation of country guitar playing.

At Bristol, the Carters recorded six songs, including "Bury Me Beneath the Willow," "The Poor Orphan Child," "Single Girl, Married Girl," and "The Wandering Boy." The recordings sold well enough that Peer brought them back for more sessions, and over the next fifteen years, the Carter Family recorded more than three hundred songs that became the bedrock of the country music repertoire: "Wildwood Flower," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Wabash Cannonball," and dozens of others. These songs were not all original compositions. Many were traditional songs that A.P. Carter had collected from mountain communities — songs that had been sung on porches and in churches for generations, now fixed on wax and sent out into the world.

Jimmie Rodgers was a different kind of artist. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, he was a railroad man and a drifter who had absorbed the blues traditions of the Black South and combined them with the yodeling and hillbilly styles of white rural music. His recordings at Bristol — particularly "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" — launched a career that, though cut short by tuberculosis in 1933, established the archetype of the country music star: the rambling man, the charismatic individual, the voice that expressed loneliness, loss, and the desire for freedom.

The Bristol Sessions were not the first recordings of southern rural music. Fiddlin' John Carson had recorded for OKeh Records in Atlanta in 1923, and other labels had been cautiously exploring the "hillbilly" market. But Bristol was the moment when the scale of the commercial potential became clear. Peer saw that there was a market — a large, underserved market — for recordings that reflected the musical traditions of the rural South. The record industry's interest in Appalachian music was born not from cultural appreciation but from commercial calculation.

And here was the tension that would define the next century of Appalachian music: the living tradition and the commercial product were not the same thing. The songs that the Carter Family recorded had been communal property — songs that belonged to no one and everyone, passed down through generations of anonymous singers. When A.P. Carter copyrighted them and Victor pressed them onto records, they became commodities. The people who had sung these songs for free, for themselves, for their communities, now heard them coming back through the radio, owned by someone else.

Bill Monroe and the Invention of Bluegrass

If the Bristol Sessions were the Big Bang, then bluegrass was the supernova that followed — a musical explosion that took the raw materials of old-time Appalachian music and forged them into something new, something that had never existed before, something that was both deeply traditional and radically innovative.

The man who created it was Bill Monroe, born in 1911 in Rosine, Kentucky, a small town on the western edge of the Appalachian cultural region. Monroe was the youngest of eight children in a musical family — his mother played fiddle and accordion, his uncle Pendleton Vandiver (the "Uncle Pen" of Monroe's famous song) was a renowned fiddler, and the African American blues guitarist Arnold Shultz was a local musician whose influence Monroe would acknowledge for the rest of his life. Monroe absorbed all of these influences — the old-time fiddle tradition, the British Isles ballads, the African American blues — and channeled them through the mandolin, an instrument that had been a relatively minor presence in Appalachian music before Monroe made it the driving force of a new genre.

Monroe's genius was not invention from nothing. It was synthesis — the fusion of existing elements into a combination so powerful and distinctive that it constituted something genuinely new. He took the repertoire of old-time music — the fiddle tunes, the ballads, the gospel songs — and accelerated them. He pushed the tempo faster than old-time musicians played. He pushed the emotional intensity higher. He featured virtuosic instrumental solos — each musician taking a turn in the spotlight — in a way that old-time music, with its emphasis on collective, repetitive playing, did not. He sang in a high, keening tenor that evoked both the old ballad singing of the mountains and the cry of the blues.

Monroe formed his band, the Blue Grass Boys — named for his home state of Kentucky, the Bluegrass State — in 1938, and they became a fixture on the Grand Ole Opry, the Nashville radio show that was already the most important platform for country music. The band's lineup changed frequently, but the classic formation that crystallized the bluegrass sound came together in 1945, when Monroe assembled a group that included Lester Flatt on guitar and lead vocals, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Cedric Rainwater on bass.

It was Scruggs who added the element that made bluegrass unmistakable. Earl Scruggs, from Flint Hill, North Carolina, played the banjo with a three-finger picking style — using thumb, index, and middle fingers fitted with metal picks to produce a rapid, rolling cascade of notes — that was unlike anything audiences had heard. The Scruggs style (also called three-finger picking) transformed the banjo from a rhythmic accompanying instrument into a virtuosic lead instrument capable of dazzling speed and intricate melodic lines. It was electrifying. When Scruggs debuted with the Blue Grass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry in December 1945, the audience demanded encores — an almost unheard-of response on the Opry stage.

The sound of Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in this period — breakneck tempos, high lonesome singing, virtuosic instrumental solos traded between mandolin, banjo, fiddle, and guitar, all played on acoustic instruments with no amplification — became the template for bluegrass music. The name itself was an accident of history. Other musicians began imitating the Blue Grass Boys' style, and people started referring to the music as "bluegrass." Monroe resisted the term at first — he considered the music to be his personal creation, not a genre — but the name stuck, and it became the label for an entire tradition.

Flatt and Scruggs left Monroe's band in 1948 to form their own group, the Foggy Mountain Boys, and their departure both wounded Monroe and spread the bluegrass sound across the country music landscape. Other bands formed in the bluegrass mold: the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and dozens more. By the 1950s, bluegrass was a recognized genre with its own festivals, its own audience, and its own identity — distinct from both old-time music (which was slower, rougher, and more communal) and from the increasingly slick Nashville country sound.

Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers: The High Lonesome Sound

If Bill Monroe invented bluegrass, Ralph Stanley gave it its soul. Stanley — born in 1927 in Stratton, in the mountain country of Dickenson County, Virginia — and his older brother Carter Stanley formed the Stanley Brothers in 1946, and their music became the purest expression of what people call the high lonesome sound: a vocal style characterized by a high, nasal, emotionally intense tenor that sounds like someone singing from a place of deep solitude and deep feeling.

The Stanley Brothers' music was rooted in the oldest traditions of the mountains. Their repertoire drew heavily on the ballads, hymns, and old-time tunes that they had grown up hearing in Dickenson County. Their harmonies were stark and powerful — Carter singing lead in a warm baritone, Ralph harmonizing above in that piercing, unmistakable tenor. Their instrumentation was spare: guitar, banjo, fiddle, bass. There was nothing ornamental about their sound. Every note was necessary.

Ralph Stanley's banjo playing was the other pole of the bluegrass banjo tradition from Earl Scruggs. Where Scruggs was smooth, fast, and technically dazzling, Stanley played in a style rooted in the older clawhammer or frailing technique — an overhand, downstroke approach that was closer to the African American banjo traditions from which the instrument descended. Stanley eventually developed his own three-finger picking approach, but it always retained a rawer, more angular quality than the Scruggs style — a sound that felt closer to the mountains.

Carter Stanley died in 1966, and Ralph continued as a solo artist and bandleader for nearly fifty more years — becoming, in the process, the living embodiment of the mountain music tradition. His unaccompanied rendition of "O Death" — a chilling a cappella performance that reached millions through the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — introduced a new generation to the raw power of Appalachian vocal music. Stanley received a Grammy for the performance and, in 2002, was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor the United States government bestows on traditional artists.

Ralph Stanley died in 2016, at eighty-nine, and his passing felt like the closing of a direct connection to something very old. He had learned songs from his mother, who had learned them from her mother, who had learned them from hers. The chain of transmission stretched back beyond documentation, beyond memory, into the deep past of the mountains. When Stanley sang, you heard not just one man's voice but the accumulated musical inheritance of generations.

Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, and the Folk Revival

The Appalachian folk revival of the mid-twentieth century brought mountain music to national and international audiences — but it also created tensions between the living tradition and its representation that persist to this day.

Jean Ritchie was born in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, the youngest of fourteen children in a family that had been singing the old ballads in the Cumberland Mountains for generations. The Ritchie family's repertoire was extraordinary — hundreds of songs, many of them Child ballads and their American variants, transmitted through an unbroken chain of family singing that Jean documented in her memoir Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955). Ritchie graduated from the University of Kentucky, moved to New York City, and became one of the central figures of the folk revival — performing in concerts and coffeehouses, recording for major labels, and introducing urban audiences to the Appalachian dulcimer, a fretted stringed instrument with a long, narrow body and a sweet, droning sound that became synonymous with mountain music.

Ritchie's contribution was not merely musical. She was a bridge — a person who could speak the language of the mountains and the language of the city, who could present Appalachian music to outside audiences without diluting it, and who insisted, always, that the music belonged to the people who had made it. She was also an activist: her song "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore" (about the Louisville & Nashville Railroad abandoning mountain communities as the coal economy declined) became an anthem of economic protest, and her "Black Waters" (about strip mining's devastation of mountain streams) was one of the earliest environmental protest songs in the Appalachian tradition.

Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson — born in 1923 in Deep Gap, North Carolina, blind from infancy — was perhaps the single most influential guitarist in the folk and country tradition. Watson grew up in a musical family in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learned to play from family and neighbors, and developed a flatpicking guitar style — using a flat pick to play rapid, intricate single-note melodies on the guitar — that revolutionized acoustic guitar playing. Before Watson, the guitar in Appalachian music was primarily a rhythm instrument. Watson made it a lead instrument, capable of playing fiddle tunes at fiddle speed with a clarity and power that astonished musicians and audiences alike.

Watson's career, like Ritchie's, was shaped by the folk revival. He was "discovered" by the folklorist Ralph Rinzler in 1960 and brought to the folk festival circuit, where his virtuosity and his vast repertoire — spanning old-time, bluegrass, country, blues, gospel, and popular songs — made him a sensation. He won seven Grammy Awards over his career. His annual festival, MerleFest (named for his son Merle Watson, a gifted guitarist who died in a tractor accident in 1985), became one of the most important acoustic music festivals in the country.

But the folk revival that elevated Ritchie and Watson also commodified and sometimes distorted the music they represented. The urban folk audience of the 1950s and 1960s — college students, intellectuals, political activists — had its own ideas about what mountain music was and what it meant. They wanted authenticity, but their definition of authenticity was often a projection of their own romanticized ideas about rural life. They wanted the music to be ancient, pure, and untouched by commercialism — a mirror of their own rejection of postwar consumer culture. The actual mountain musicians — who played what they liked, borrowed freely from the radio and from each other, and had no particular commitment to preserving "authentic" tradition for outsiders' benefit — did not always fit the folk revival's expectations.

Music as Resistance: Florence Reece and Hazel Dickens

The music of the Appalachian Mountains has never been only about beauty, tradition, or entertainment. It has also been about power. Some of the most important songs to come out of the mountains were songs of resistance — songs written by people who were fighting for their lives and their communities, and who used music as a weapon.

Florence Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the bloody labor conflicts of the 1930s that earned the region the nickname "Bloody Harlan" (see Chapter 17). In 1931, during a period when coal company gun thugs were terrorizing union families, sheriff's deputies raided the Reece home looking for Sam. They ransacked the house while Florence and her children huddled inside. That night, shaking with rage and fear, Florence Reece tore a page from a wall calendar and wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?"

Don't scab for the bosses, Don't listen to their lies. Us poor folks haven't got a chance Unless we organize.

The song — set to the melody of the Baptist hymn "Lay the Lily Low" — became one of the most enduring protest songs in American history, adopted by labor movements, civil rights movements, and social justice movements far beyond Appalachia. Its power lies in its simplicity and its refusal to allow neutrality. You are on one side or the other. There is no middle ground. This was not a philosophical position for Florence Reece. It was a description of life in Harlan County in 1931, where the battle lines between the coal operators and the miners were drawn in blood.

Hazel Dickens carried the tradition of resistance music into the second half of the twentieth century with a ferocity and a talent that made her one of the most important voices in American folk music. Born in 1935 in Mercer County, West Virginia, the eighth of eleven children in a coal mining family, Dickens migrated to Baltimore as a young woman — part of the great Appalachian out-migration described in Chapter 20 — and found her way into the folk music scene. She began performing with Alice Gerrard, and the two women made groundbreaking recordings that combined Appalachian traditional music with original songs of uncommon emotional power.

Dickens's songs were about the things she knew: coal mining, poverty, the exploitation of working people, the courage of women who held families together in impossible circumstances. "Black Lung" was a devastating indictment of the coal industry's destruction of miners' bodies. "They'll Never Keep Us Down" was a battle hymn of labor resistance. "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There" was a feminist statement decades ahead of its time — an accusation leveled at the men who used women and then condemned them. Her voice — high, sharp, and fierce, with none of the smoothness that Nashville demanded of its women singers — was the voice of a woman who had lived what she sang about and who refused to make it pretty.

Dickens performed at union rallies, at coalfield protests, and at the funeral of disabled miners. She was featured in the documentary Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning film about the Brookside Mine strike (see Chapter 17). She was not a polished performer. She was a weapon — a woman from the coalfields who could stand on a stage and make you feel the weight of what the mountains had endured.

The Nashville Machine: Commodification and Sanitization

The distance between a porch in Dickenson County, Virginia, and the recording studios of Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee, is about four hundred miles. Culturally, it might as well be four thousand. The transformation of Appalachian music into the commercial product known as "country music" is one of the great case studies in cultural commodification — the process by which a living tradition is packaged, marketed, and sold back to the people who made it, often in a form they barely recognize.

The process began with the Bristol Sessions and accelerated through the 1930s and 1940s as the recording industry and radio broadcasting — particularly the Grand Ole Opry, which began broadcasting from Nashville in 1925 — created a national market for rural southern music. The music that reached this market was already filtered: record companies selected which musicians to record and which songs to release, favoring material that was accessible to a broad audience over material that was too raw, too regional, or too challenging.

By the 1950s, Nashville had become the center of the country music industry, and a conscious effort was underway to smooth the rough edges of the mountain sound. The Nashville Sound — developed by producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley in the late 1950s and early 1960s — replaced the fiddles and banjos of traditional country with string sections, background vocals, and polished production values. The goal was to make country music palatable to a broader audience — to cross over from the rural market to the pop market — and it worked commercially. But it also severed the music from its roots.

The Nashville machine did not just change the sound of the music. It changed who the music was for. Traditional Appalachian music was participatory — it was music that people made together, in their homes and communities, for their own purposes. Commercial country music was consumable — it was music that people bought and listened to, made by professional performers for passive audiences. The shift from participation to consumption was not unique to Appalachian music (it happened across American culture in the twentieth century), but the loss was particularly acute in a region where music had been so central to community life.

The machine also determined who got to be heard and who did not. Nashville's country music industry was, for most of its history, overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Black musicians — whose contributions to the foundations of country music were enormous — were systematically excluded. Women were admitted on limited terms: they could be sweethearts, they could be heartbroken, but they could rarely be angry, political, or too independent. A voice like Hazel Dickens's — raw, fierce, and explicitly political — had no place on Nashville's radio stations.

And the lyrical content shifted. The old mountain songs had been about specific places, specific communities, specific experiences. They were rooted in particular hollows and particular lives. Nashville country music increasingly traded in generalities — a vaguely rural landscape, a pickup truck, a cold beer, a pretty girl. The specificity that had given mountain music its power — the sense that this song was about this hollow, this family, this disaster — was replaced by a commercial blandness designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Loretta Lynn, who grew up in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and whose autobiography Coal Miner's Daughter (1976) became one of the defining narratives of Appalachian experience, navigated this terrain with extraordinary skill. She brought the reality of mountain life — poverty, hard work, domestic conflict, the strength and suffering of women — into the heart of Nashville's commercial machine, and she did it without losing the essential honesty that made her voice matter. But Lynn was exceptional. For every Loretta Lynn who broke through with authentic mountain content, there were dozens of Appalachian musicians who were told to sand down their accents, soften their stories, and give the audience what it expected.

The Gap Between the Porch and the Stage

Here is what is essential to understand about Appalachian music, and what the commercial music industry has never been able to capture: the music was never primarily about performance. It was about community.

On any given evening in the mountains — in the decades before television and in many communities long after — people gathered to make music together. Not to perform. Not to be heard by an audience. But to do something together that felt good and that held them together as a community. A neighbor would come by with a fiddle. Someone would pick up a banjo. A grandmother would start singing. Children would listen from the other room, absorbing tunes and rhythms that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. This was participatory music — music made by everyone present, for no one outside the room.

The gap between this participatory tradition and the commercial product that the music industry sold under the name "country music" or "bluegrass" or "folk music" was vast. The commercial product had stars. The participatory tradition had neighbors. The commercial product had audiences. The participatory tradition had participants. The commercial product existed on records, on radio, on stages. The participatory tradition existed in living rooms, on porches, in churches, at funerals, and at the informal gatherings where community was enacted through shared sound.

This gap has never fully closed, and it never will. But the participatory tradition has never died. Even as Nashville grew into a multibillion-dollar industry, people in the mountains kept playing on their porches. They kept gathering for old-time jams and gospel singings and shape-note conventions. They kept teaching their children the old tunes — not from records, but from the living voice and the living hand. The tradition survived not because it was preserved by archivists or promoted by the music industry, but because it met a human need that commercial music could not: the need to make something beautiful together, in the company of people you know, in a place that is yours.

Contemporary Appalachian Music: The Tradition Lives

The Appalachian musical tradition did not end with Bill Monroe or Ralph Stanley or the folk revival. It continues — transforming, absorbing, and refusing to be confined to any single genre or generation.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new generation of musicians has drawn on the deep well of Appalachian tradition while pushing it in directions that the old masters could not have predicted. Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings created a sound that is soaked in the Appalachian tradition — duet singing, acoustic instruments, songs about loss and longing and hard times — while being entirely contemporary in its sensibility. Their album Time (The Revelator) (2001) is one of the great American albums, a work that sounds like it could have been recorded in 1935 or in 2035.

Tyler Childers, from Lawrence County, Kentucky, emerged in the 2010s as perhaps the most important new voice in Appalachian music — a singer-songwriter whose work is rooted in the eastern Kentucky experience (coal country, poverty, faith, the beauty of the land) and who combines the rawness of old-time singing with the storytelling power of the best country songwriters. His album Purgatory (2017) was a revelation — a record that sounded like the mountains, that was about the mountains, and that reached audiences far beyond the mountains without compromising a syllable of its authenticity.

Sturgill Simpson, from Jackson, Kentucky, pushed Appalachian country music into psychedelic territory with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014) — an album that combined traditional country instrumentation with lyrics about consciousness, mortality, and the nature of reality. Simpson's work demonstrated that the Appalachian tradition was capacious enough to accommodate radical experimentation without losing its essential character.

Old Crow Medicine Show, originally formed in Ithaca, New York, but deeply rooted in the old-time string band tradition, brought old-time music to a young, energetic audience through touring, festival performances, and songs like "Wagon Wheel" — a tune built on a fragment of a Bob Dylan demo — that became one of the most popular songs in contemporary Americana.

And Rhiannon Giddens — MacArthur Fellow, Grammy winner, cofounder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops — has done more than any other contemporary musician to recover and celebrate the African American roots of Appalachian and southern music. Giddens's solo work, her collaborative projects, and her public advocacy have forced the American music world to confront the erasure that this chapter has described: the systematic whitewashing of a tradition that was, from its beginnings, interracial. Her album Freedom Highway (2017) and her opera Omar (2022), about an enslaved African Muslim scholar, are works of art and works of historical justice simultaneously.

The Music and the Place

There is a temptation, when writing about Appalachian music, to write about it in the past tense — as if the tradition were complete, finished, ready to be filed away in a cultural archive. This temptation must be resisted.

The music is alive. It is being played right now, as you read this, in a hollow somewhere in the mountains. Someone is picking a banjo on a porch in Wise County, Virginia. Someone is singing a hymn in a church in McDowell County, West Virginia. Someone is tuning a fiddle in a kitchen in Madison County, North Carolina. Someone is writing a song about the opioid crisis, or the pipeline that cut through their family's land, or the beauty of the morning fog in the valley. The tradition absorbs, transforms, and continues.

What the tradition carries — what it has always carried — is the experience of living in a particular place under particular conditions. The music of the Appalachian Mountains is the sound of people who loved their land and were often robbed of its wealth. It is the sound of people who worked brutally hard and were often denied the fruits of their labor. It is the sound of people who were stereotyped and condescended to and who responded not with silence but with song. It is the sound of joy and grief and resistance and faith and love and loss, and it is the sound of a place — these mountains, these hollows, these ridges — that has shaped every note.

The music does not belong to Nashville. It does not belong to the folk revival. It does not belong to the record industry. It belongs to the mountains, and to the people — Black and white, old and young, rooted and restless — who have made their lives among them.

Primary Source Excerpt: Cecil Sharp's Diary, 1916

"I am amazed at the richness of what I have found here. In the space of a single week, I have collected more genuine English folk songs than I could find in years of searching in England itself. The people sing freely and without self-consciousness — it is a part of their daily life, as natural as breathing. The women especially are remarkable singers. I heard a woman of perhaps sixty years sing 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender' with all thirty-two verses, and she sang it as though she were telling me something that had happened to her own family, in her own valley, last year."

— Cecil Sharp, personal diary entry, August 1916, Madison County, North Carolina. Reproduced in Maud Karpeles, ed., Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk Songs (1974).

Primary Source Excerpt: Florence Reece's Account

"They came to our house — the gun thugs, J.H. Blair's deputies — looking for Sam. Sam wasn't there, he'd got word they were coming, and he'd slipped out through the back. They tore up the house looking for him. Turned over the furniture, pulled out the drawers, scared the children half to death. After they left, I was so mad I couldn't see. I pulled the calendar off the wall and I wrote that song on the back of it. I wrote it in one sitting. The words just came. I already had the tune in my head — it was an old Baptist hymn my mama used to sing. I just put my words to it. 'Which side are you on? Which side are you on?' It wasn't a hard question to answer. Not in Harlan County. Not in 1931."

— Florence Reece, oral history interview, Appalachian Oral History Project, Emory & Henry College, 1972.

Primary Source Excerpt: Ralph Peer's Letter to Victor Talking Machine Company, 1927

"The sessions in Bristol have exceeded my expectations. The talent here is abundant, and the public interest is strong — people have traveled from miles around at their own expense to audition. I have found two acts of particular promise: a family group from Virginia called the Carter Family, whose harmony singing and repertoire of old songs are of the highest quality, and a yodeler from Mississippi named Jimmie Rodgers, who has a most engaging personality and a distinctive style. I believe both have commercial potential."

— Ralph Peer, letter to Victor executives, August 1927. Reproduced in Charles K. Wolfe, "The Bristol Sessions," in The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music (2005).

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Chapter 27 Portfolio Component: Musical Heritage of Your County

For your selected Appalachian county, research and document the musical traditions that have shaped the community:

1. Historical Musical Traditions: What kinds of music have been practiced in your county? Were there ballad singers, string bands, gospel groups, shape-note singings? What instruments were most common? Who were the notable local musicians — the ones remembered by name?

2. Recording and Documentation: Were any musicians from your county recorded by folklorists, record companies, or documentary filmmakers? Are there archived recordings in the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, or university collections?

3. Musical Venues and Events: Were there (or are there) regular musical gatherings — fiddlers' conventions, gospel singings, dances, festivals? Where did people gather to make music? Were there local radio stations that featured mountain music?

4. The Commercial/Traditional Divide: How did the commercialization of country music affect musical life in your county? Did local musicians try to enter the commercial market? Did the radio and phonograph change how people made and heard music?

5. Contemporary Musical Life: What is the musical life of your county today? Are traditional styles still practiced? Have new musical forms emerged? Are there musicians from your county who are active in the broader Appalachian or national music scene?

Write a 600-800 word musical portrait of your county, connecting the local musical tradition to the broader patterns described in this chapter. Consider: whose musical traditions have been documented, and whose have been overlooked?

Chapter Summary

The music of the Appalachian Mountains is one of the richest and most complex musical traditions in the world — a tradition built from the convergence of British Isles ballads, African American instrumental and rhythmic innovations, sacred singing traditions, and the creative genius of generations of mountain musicians. From the oldest Child ballads preserved in the isolation of the hollows, through the old-time string bands, the Sacred Harp singings, the Bristol Sessions, the invention of bluegrass, and the contemporary renaissance of Appalachian roots music, the tradition has never stopped evolving.

The story of Appalachian music is also a story of erasure and recovery. The African American roots of the banjo — and of mountain music more broadly — were systematically whitewashed by folklorists, the recording industry, and the cultural narratives that constructed Appalachia as exclusively white. The recovery of these roots, led by scholars and musicians like Rhiannon Giddens, is one of the most important projects in contemporary American cultural history.

And the story of Appalachian music is a story of commodification and resistance — of a living tradition that was captured by the commercial music industry, smoothed and packaged and sold, while the actual music-making of mountain communities continued on porches and in churches and at kitchen tables, as vital and as necessary as it had ever been. The music belongs to the mountains. It always has.