Image: The Bog Trotters Band, in Galax, Virginia, 1937. Autoharp, fiddlers, guitar.
Geologically, the Appalachians are a continuation of the ‘Caledonide Belt’ that connected Scotland with the east coast of what is now North America, when the world’s continents were linked as Pangaea a couple of hundred million years ago. It took a bit of time, but eventually a musical link was made in more modern times, when Scots and Irish emigrants arrived there. This beautifully illustrated book explores how and why the music of this mountainous area sounds and functions, helping to place the American tradition in the context of its British Isles roots.
The title of the book – Wayfaring Strangers – quotes a 19th century American gospel song that has been recorded by many ballading singers from Johnny Cash to Ed Sheeran. This places the book’s point of view with poor and marginal, linking travellers and crofters in Scotland with the European diasporic small-holders of rural America. It’s a lovely and lovingly put-together work, although a caveat might be that it views the process of transplantation through a nostalgic lens that leaves the interactions with other populations in these places less transparently or extensively explored. This isn’t exactly a post-colonial history, although it does document carefully the colonial processes. A more scholarly and wide-ranging account might need to read a bit further into research looking into the groups not represented in the narrative, particularly the distinct traditions of African Americans (see some suggestions in Further Reading).
However, this is a general interest book rather than a scholarly monograph, and its three-part structure does show some understanding of the academic debates about the role of Ireland as a ‘staging post’ for colonial settlement, which it communicates wearing its learning lightly.
The principal author, Fiona Ritchie, is a radio presenter with a long-running US National Public Radio show (“The Thistle and Shamrock”) dedicated to this repertoire. She writes the book now living in Perthshire, Scotland. Her co-author, Doug Orr, is based on North Carolina, and woks at the University of North Carolina’s Charlotte campus: “The Thistle and Shamrock” grew out of a campus visit by Ritchie. Their vision is to present the book as a series of short articles and inset encyclopaedic entries on the topics necessary to survey the repertoire, like a conversation around a hearth, or letters travelling across time and place.
The book is structured in three parts, which are intended, and do, take the reader on a journey across the Atlantic, using the metaphor of what in the words of Hamish Henderson is a “carrying stream” (p.3). The authors repeatedly welcome into their narrative short interviews and interactions from many other voices, contributing to the metaphor of history as a complex stream made of many tributaries. Or, if you like (and I’m sure the authors know this, but don’t push it at you unlike me, here), like Bakhtin’s famous idea of culture as dialogically constructed. In one section, Woody Guthrie is in implicit dialogue with Robert Burns, inspiring Bob Dylan and then Jean Redpath to begin their songs, for example (p.53-55).
The first section, “Beginnings”, provides a condensed history of the Scottish root traditions, with short insert comments and anecdotes from writers (e.g. John Purser) and performers (e.g. Jean Redpath) gathering in the historical strands connecting Scotland with wider traditions of balladry around Europe. As a potted history of Scotland, this is deftly written, acknowledging diverse “northern” cultural and political traditions that have contributed to the national repertoire, including vignettes on collectors and ethnomusicological investigations that have helped to define what the national repertoire might comprise.
The middle section, ‘Voyage’, tracks material joining the stream from Ulster, emigration stories, and Canadian as well as American landfalls. Scotland and Ireland have ancient ethnic connections, of course, but the authors are right – and build on post-colonial research of the last 50 years – in understanding that the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century transformed that relationship, making Ulster a staging post for further post-Atlantic colonial migration. An extended discussion of the harp in this section helps us to understand how this particular tradition was important to both Irish and Scottish music (pp.83-85); along with whisky, of course. This section also explores the experience of braving the Atlantic crossing to an unknown future, from Viking to modern times. Identities are never so keenly experienced as when they are away from home, and these newcomers to North America felt keenly their difference from other groups of European emigrants. Eventually labelled as ‘Scots-Irish’, they curated their music as a nostalgic link to their old homes.
The third, and most extensive, section, looks at the stories of these Scots-Irish people as they settled long-term in the Appalachians: new kinds of singing and dancing, and the voices of tradition-bearers and heirs such as folk singer and dulcimer player Jean Ritchie, the Seeger family, and Dolly Parton (who writes the introduction to the book). The geography of this beautiful part of the world is lovingly described, mapped and photographed. Songs helped to connect people as they formed new communities. We hear about the emergence of the dulcimer (p,163-6), modified from an older German instrument, the scheitholt, used now to play Scots-Irish tunes. A short inset covers the visit by English folk collector Cecil Sharp in 1916-18 in search of versions of ballads from Scotland and England (p.192-5), believing that the Appalachian oral tradition might have preserved these more accurately than in their countries of origin. The writers point out that if Sharp had thought to listen to travelling folk nearer home, he might have learned much more: that research needed the left-leaning Hamish Henderson to initiate, inspired by the work of the Appalachian Seegers. The Americans, as is well known, helped to kick-start the mid-20th century folk ‘revival’ back in Scotland. This section also has some discussion of the contribution made by African American music (pp.219-231), although this might benefit from more extended discussion – a book-length study in its own right. The arrival of radio and recording, and new performing artists, brings the story to a close.
Much of this narrative was broadly familiar to me, but I enjoyed the comprehensive memory-prompt; a semi-familiar story, elegantly retold with new twists, is surely a folk-tradition aesthetic. I learned for the first time, for example, about the Appalachian hymn tradition, a distinctive development from Presbyterian psalm singing and English Wesleyian revival hymns, which used ‘shape note singing’, a variant notation that combined conventional stave pitches with the notion of sol-fa (p.211). A section comparing ‘old time’ music with bluegrass (p.268-9) was also informative because, well, I just hadn’t thought about it before: bluegrass, if you want to know, has a solo instrument (like jazz) that leads, “with other instruments showcased in turn, performing break-out melody solos” while ‘old-time’ music was designed more for participative dancing than solo performance, and so has a whole-band ethos.
Appendices have lots of other nuggets – short biographies of important tradition bearers, a glossary of musical terms, a timeline, key resource centres, a discography, and short bibliography with notes. For folk who can still play such things, the book has an accompanying CD of illustrative music. I’ve had a very nice day playing it on my (pre-Windows 11) laptop.
But I do feel you might need something more on the folk who weren’t Scots-Irish to understand more accurately what is going on in the Appalachians. My thanks to Dr Catherine Shoupe, anthropologist and traditional dance teacher, who has sent me some suggestions for further reading. Emily Satterwhite’s article “That’s what they’re all singing about” also bears some inspection. Satterwhite looks at the reactions of visitors to a 2003 Smithsonian festival of Appalachian music, and ponders on why these seem more ready to engage with white-roots than black in this particular folk tradition.
Further Reading
- Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
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- Thomas G Burton (ed.), Tennessee Traditional Singers: Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981) – selecting singers who represent different strands of interacting tradition, including African American Bukka White.
- Phil Jamison, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolic: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance, in Music in American Life Series (University of Ilinois Press, 2015) – a book that examines the contributions made by African Americans and Native Americans as well as the European traditions: what emerges is therefore a hybrid practice with diverse ethnic roots.
- Phil Jamison’s webpage – a practitioner and teacher of Appalachian dance.
- R. Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Transatlantic Scots, ed. Ray (Tuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press, 2005)
- Emily Satterwhite, ‘”That’s What They’re All Singing About”: Appalachian Heritage, Celtic Pride and American Nationalism at the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival‘, in Appalachian Journal 32(3) (2005), 302-338