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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.

https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1194/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1193/thumbnail.jpg

Book Summary: The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

The Appalachian ballad tradition is alive among a new generation of singers, most of whom learned their songs directly from an oral tradition, either from older singers, or from recordings, or both. This two-disk album — a project in support of Great Smoky Mountains National Park — brings these powerful songs to people who might never have bought a recording or gone to a concert to hear these musicians. They will be delighted with the variety of music here, from the Old World as well as the New. Below is a list of a few of the tracks you can hear:Disc One"Barbry Allen" (Carol Elizabeth Jones), "Thomas the Rhymer" (Archie Fisher), "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender" (Sheila Kay Adams), "Eggs And Marrowbone" (Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin), "The Sheffield Apprentice" (Martin Simpson, Andy Cutting, and Nancy Kerr), , "The Bold Lieutenant" (Alice Gerrard), "Lord Bateman" (Carol Elizabeth Jones), "The Farmer’s Curst Wife" (Donna Ray Norton), "Mr. Frog Went a-Courtin'" (Bill and the Belles), "Barbara Allen" (Rosanne Cash) / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1159/thumbnail.jpg

The rural health physician narrative is one of the most understudied genres in non-fictional Appalachian literature. Physician narratives are significant in the historical, social, and political contexts of twentieth-century Appalachian representation. These accounts provide insight into the social contexts in which physicians lived as they wrote about healthcare and Appalachian communities. New Historicism is an analytical tool used to better understand the complexity surrounding Appalachian representation, particularly in terms of the politics of representation, gender, and race that influenced these narratives in the twentieth century. I engage in close readings of narratives written by or about rural health physicians who practiced in Appalachian communities during the early and mid-twentieth century. The physicians include Drs. Mary Martin Sloop, Gaine Cannon, A.W. Roberts, and Anne A. Wasson. I provide a nuanced discussion of the emergence and reiteration of Appalachian stereotypes in physician narratives and consider the lessons they provide for current physicians.

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.