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As a performer, teacher, and scholar, I have interpreted Appalachian music in a range of venues (classrooms, festivals, restaurants, and National Park Service campgrounds) and via a variety of media (books and periodicals, websites, films, and documentary recordings). In my presentation, I'll discuss how my efforts to interpret the music (and other aspects of culture) of Appalachia in multiple roles over twenty-five years evolved into my recent work as a producer and album notes writer on several historical albums containing neglected archival recordings or forgotten commercial records of Appalachian music. What compelled me to begin to work on such documentary releases of recordings was my sense that Appalachia's music has been stigmatized or romanticized over the years because it has not been effectively listened to or deeply understood (that is, interpreted in sufficiently informed contexts). I felt that if no one else was releasing the sort of illuminating, contextualized compilations of Appalachian music that I yearned to hear, then I could help create such releases. And, happily, the releases I've worked on thus far have had an impact both within and outside the classroom, both within and outside Appalachia.

Book Summary: Perhaps no instrument better represents the music of Appalachia than the fretted dulcimer. The instrument was no longer confined to back porches and local music halls when Jean Ritchie so melodically thrust herself and her dulcimer into the national limelight during the folk revival of the 1950s. But where did the dulcimer, known to exist in no other folk culture in the world, come from? In The Story of the Dulcimer, Ralph Lee Smith traces the dulcimer's beginnings back to European immigration to America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania and Appalachia, they brought with them scheitholts, a type of northern European fretted zither. As German immigrants intermingled with English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, the scheitholt, which was customarily played to a slower tempo in German cultural music, began to be musically integrated into the faster tempos of English and Scotch-Irish ballads and folk songs. As Appalachia absorbed an increasing flow of English and Scotch-Irish immigrants and the musical traditions they brought with them, the scheitholt steadily evolved into an instrument that reflected this folk music amalgamation, and the modern dulcimer was born. In this second edition, Smith brings the dulcimer's history into the twenty-first century with a new preface and updates to the original edition. Copiously illustrated with images of both antique scheitholts and contemporary dulcimers, The Story of the Dulcimer is a testament to the enduring musical heritage of Appalachia and solves one of the region's musical mysteries.

Excerpt: Visitors fortunate enough to hear the John Doyle Trio during the Mountains of Music Homecoming will be reminded of the old but not forgotten bonds between Appalachia and the British Isles.

Excerpt: The guitar, brought by the Spanish to the New World in the seventeenth century, was not common in the Blue Ridge through the dawn of the twentieth century.

Excerpt: An unpublished song by Blind Alfred Reed, transcribed by Reed’s granddaughter Delores Crawford.

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Traditional, participatory music is a powerful medium through which people express and shape their ideas about identity, mobility, social relations, and belonging, and through which people are in turn shaped. The everyday cultural practices of playing, sharing, and dancing to traditional music, as well as discussions about the nature of traditional music and production of events involving traditional music, all work to construct the region called Appalachia. Through this dissertation, I seek to answer some simple questions that have complicated answers involving place, identity, power, and social relations, with economic, social, and emotional ramifications: Who gets to be an Appalachian musician? How is this accomplished? Who gets to decide? Using a social constructionist theoretical base and drawing on such literatures as cultural geography, music geography, musicology and ethnomusicology, Appalachian studies, and critical regionalism, I employ ethnographic techniques, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis to understand the workings of old time music and the self-understanding of musicians that play and sing traditional music in eastern Kentucky, a core area of Appalachia. This dissertation shows that vernacular roots music in eastern Kentucky is both an inclusive and a contested phenomenon. In describing and analyzing the spaces for music in Appalachia, the old-time community in eastern Kentucky, the dynamics of festival hiring negotiations, and interviews with white and African American musicians, both male and female, I show how Appalachian space is produced simultaneously on many different scales. This construction is a dialectical process, articulating between the power expressed on a micro scale between individuals and the power used by individuals and institutions to define the region through representation. This dissertation demonstrates two main processes: how Appalachian space is negotiated and produced through interactions at jam sessions and other events, and how the musicians perform community in these interstitial moments. Contributions of this dissertation include attention to micro scale interactions and embodiment as a key component of spatial production, participant observation as a research method in music geography, and increased understanding of the performance of race and gender in cultural and spatial production.

This research seeks to compare and contrast fictional Appalachian writings by Lee Smith and Mildred Haun to contemporary historical sources in an attempt to trace the development of Appalachian music between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. The thesis examines two novels by Lee Smith (The Devil’s Dream and Oral History) and the collection The Hawk’s Done Gone by Mildred Haun, which includes a short novel and several short stories. Contemporary primary sources and scholarly secondary sources were used to compare the fictional works’ depictions of Appalachian music to their historical counterparts. Also included within the thesis is a discussion of Smith and Haun’s personal and research backgrounds and their connections to Appalachian music. Overall, the study found Smith and Haun’s works accurate and based in historical fact, in part due to both writers’ use of historical research and interviews to inform their fiction.

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