Excerpt: Blind from infancy, Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) was among the most acclaimed American roots musicians active during the second half of the 20th Century, and he remains influential and legendary in the 21st Century. A master of two acoustic guitar styles (flat-picking and finger-style) and highly skilled at playing old-time banjo and harmonica, Watson was also an expressive singer who possessed a resonant baritone voice and an extensive repertoire of traditional and contemporary songs.

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Book Summary: The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church near Stanley, Virginia, was a group of fundamental Christian believers broadly representative of southern Appalachian belief and practice. Jeff Todd Titon worked with this Baptist community for more than ten years in his attempt to determine the nature of language in the practice of their religion. He traces specialized vocabulary and its applications through the acts of being saved, praying, preaching, teaching, and in particular singing. Titon argues that religious language is performed and the context of its occurrence is crucial to our understanding and to a holistic view of not only religious practice but of folklife and ethnomusicology. Titon’s monumental study of The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church produced not only the first edition book but also an album and documentary film. In this second edition of Powerhouse for God, Titon revisits The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church nearly four decades later. Brother John Sherfey, the charismatic preacher steeped in Appalachian tradition has passed away and left his congregation to his son, Donnie, to lead. While Appalachian Virginia has changed markedly over the decades, the town of Stanley and the Fellowship Church have not. Titon relates this rarity in his new Afterword: a church founded on Biblical literalism and untouched by modern progressivism in an area of Appalachia that has seen an evolution in population, industry, and immigration. Titon’s unforgettable study of folklife, musicology, and Appalachian religion is available for a new generation of scholars to build upon.

KEEPING IT REAL IN THE HILLS: REPRESENTING APPALACHIA IN AMERICANA was led by leading author, journalist and media personality Craig Havighurst and panelists radio producer Kris Truelsen, artist Kathy Mattea, artist Amythyst Kiah, and music educator Ted Olson. The topic of discussion was the state of old-time and Appalachian folk music and its sounds today, and the making of Kathy Mattea’s album Calling Me Home.

Excerpt: The 2016 album On Top of Old Smoky: New Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music paid tribute to the 4,250 people from 700 families who gave—or, depending on one’s perspective, surrendered—their ancestral homes to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most ecologically diverse area in the Appalachian region and the most popular national park in the US. Its ecosystems having recovered from extensive early-twentieth-century logging, this park simultaneously possesses a reconstructed wilderness and preserves a compelling cultural heritage story; indeed, Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been declared an International Biosphere Reserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite such official acknowledgement of the park’s significance, one story has rarely been told: the true story of those who sacrificed the most to make the park possible.

Excerpt: Among the most enduring artifacts (along with certain lined-out hymns that are traceable back to sixteenth-century British churches) from the early days of European settlement in Appalachia, ballads are still in everyday use in some regional households and among certain performers, if largely outside the purview of the popular music industry. Even if reduced in range and frequency of performance from their heyday during the preindustrial and early industrial eras, ballads remain relevant today, as they are gems of compact storytelling that communicate thematically timeless narratives.

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At the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association conference, I propose to reassess the work of Appalachian-native W. C. Handy, an influential musician/composer/publisher. During his life (1873-1958), Handy was publicly revered as a successful African American entrepreneur and as a music pioneer—the “Father of the Blues” (a notion advanced by Handy himself through his myth-making autobiography). In recent years, his reputation declined, a situation likely resulting from his political conservatism, his accommodationist stance on racial matters, and a perception—particularly among younger African Americans—that he had co-opted and commodified his music from tradition (rather than innovatively renegotiating tradition). While other African American musicians from his generation have received scholarly and popular attention in recent years (Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly), Handy has been generally neglected. Today, few of his own recordings are in general release, while even his legendary compositions (“St. Louis Blues,” “Memphis Blues”) are seldom interpreted by contemporary musicians, probably because of a perspective that Handy’s blues compositions are generally considered as defined by and entrenched in an earlier soundscape. In my presentation, I will provide a biographical sketch of Handy, briefly discussing his upbringing in post-Civil War Florence, Alabama; his years as an itinerant teacher and musician in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Indiana; his creatively innovative years in Memphis, Tennessee, as a regionally and then nationally recognized musician and composer; and his years of increasing financial success as a publisher based in New York City. I will suggest that one of the reasons for neglect of Handy as a culture figure was because his artistic identity was complex—he worked in folk, popular, and elite realms simultaneously without obeisance to rigid aesthetic categorizations. As a businessman he was a pragmatist. He was organized and methodical in his interpretation of traditional materials in the pursuit of marketable cultural expressions of African American cultural values that ultimately appealed to Americans on both sides of the Jim Crow Era racial divide.