In my post of April 20,
Deep Geographic Memory, Bagpipes, and Electronic Music, I mentioned New York Times bestselling author
Sharyn McCrumb. It is my pleasure to share with you, courtesy of Sharyn, a piece that she wrote on the topic of how the early American settlers brought with them, as they journeyed west into the Appalachians, music and stories from England, Scotland, and Ireland. That culture, once transplanted, acquired small differences, but it reflected--and still reflects--the "old country", even as the Appalachians reflect the landscape of the hills and valleys that these settlers would've called their original home.
I thank Sharyn for giving me permission to reprint this! Please see her bio at the bottom of this post. You can learn more about her and her work at www.SharynMcCrumb.com and www.facebook.com/SharynMcCrumbAuthor.
Wayfaring
Strangers
By Sharyn McCrumb
from the 2017 Mountains of Music Magazine
for The Crooked Road, Virginia's Musical Heritage Trail
Copyright 2017 Sharyn McCrumb
My
home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
My
home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
My
home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
And
I never expect to see you anymore.
They must have felt that
way once—more than a century before that song was written—when the settlers
rolled down the Great Wagon Road that followed the valleys between the wall of
mountains that stretched on forever. When the settlers reached the middle of
Virginia—about where Roanoke is today—some of them headed west on the
Wilderness Road, ending up on the 18th century frontier, in
southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and western North
Carolina.
They, or their recent
forebears, had already made one perilous journey in a lifetime, across the
Atlantic from Scotland or Ireland or England, to settle in the New World, but
the eastern seaboard was already getting crowded by the late eighteenth
century, mostly full of the people they left Britain to get away from. (Besides:
you could see the neighbors.) So they ventured deeper into the mountains,
looking for a place that felt like home. They never knew how close they were to
being back home; nearly two more centuries would pass before geologists put
together the ancient puzzle of earth’s Triassic period to discover that
millions of years ago the Appalachians had been part of those same mountains in
Britain from which many of the settlers themselves had come.
The new people brought
what they could from home—not material things, because the ships were small, so
you had to pack light—but they carried with them everything they could fit into
their heads, because memories were all they had left of the places they’d come
from, and they treasured them. They handed down these memories to their
children and grandchildren, which is why in 1914 musicologist Cecil Sharpe
found the traditional folksongs he was looking for, not in Britain where they
had originated, but in the southern Appalachians, where they were cherished remnants
of the past.
Things changed a bit in
the new world. If you came over with an unusual name—Rhys (Welsh) or
O’Laoghaire (Irish) or McDiarmuid (Scots)—sooner or later some census taker
would standardize you to “Reese,” “O’Leary,” and “McDermott.” The songs and
stories got naturalized, too. The Wexford Girl became The Knoxville
Girl, and Lady Margaret of the Child Ballad was demoted to Little
Margaret over here, but the plots of the songs stayed the same, and the
tunes were still recognizable. When The Lily of the West was composed,
back in Ireland, the “West” was the coast of Ireland: Galway or Connemara. Many
years later when people sang the song in America, the “West” they pictured was
Kentucky (“When first I came to Louisville, some pleasure there to find…”)
You never know when the
family resemblance is going to peek out at you. Years ago, I took a
newly-arrived Scottish professor to an Appalachian storytelling festival. The
speaker began a tale about an old farmer who was fishing in a mountain stream
and caught a big old trout. As the story wound on to the part where the farmer
found a gold ring in the belly of the fish, the Scottish professor began to
nudge me with his elbow. Finally when the story ended, I asked him what he had
wanted so urgently to tell me. “Right,” he said. “About that story the fellow
told. First of all, it wasn’t an old farmer; it was St. Mungo of Glasgow; and
it wasn’t a mountain stream; it was the Firth of Clyde. And it wasn’t a trout;
it was a salmon. – But the rest of the story is correct.”
They brought their
fiddle tunes from Scotland, their knowledge of whisky-making from Ireland, and
their quilt patterns from a time before history began. (The Hangman’s Beautiful
Daughter.) But
just as English timothy hay became Kentucky bluegrass in the New World, sooner
or later almost everything that the settlers brought with them got a North
American spin. We were a long way from where we started, but if you look
closely, you can see where we hailed from.
Sharyn McCrumb
Sharyn
McCrumb, an award-winning Southern writer, is best known for her Appalachian
“Ballad” novels, including the New York Times best sellers The
Ballad of Tom Dooley, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, and The
Songcatcher. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman
Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the
national Audie Award for Best Recorded Book..
Sharyn McCrumb, named a Virginia Woman
of History by the Library of Virginia and a Woman of the Arts
by the national Daughters of the American Revolution, was given a merit award
for literature by the West Virginia Library Association (2017) and the Mary
Hobson Prize for Arts & Letters (2014). Her books have been named New
York Times and Los Angeles Times Notable Books, and have been
translated into eleven languages.
