Song Hunting in the Appalachians with Karpeles and Cowell: In the Footsteps of Cecil Sharp, Part 2

The following is a guest post from Brian Peters with Catherine Hiebert Kerst. Cathy was a folklorist here at the American Folklife Center, and our resident expert on Sidney Robertson Cowell, until her retirement a few years ago. Brian is a prominent English folk musician and scholar, as well as our visiting expert on Cecil Sharp back in 2015. It is part of a series about the Maud Karpeles and Sidney Robertson Cowell Recording Project collection, AFC 1951/003. Their research is being published as:

Catherine Hiebert Kerst and Brian Peters. “Return to the Appalachian Mountains: Maud Karpeles and Sidney Robertson Cowell’s Song Collecting Expedition, 1950” in Folk Music Journal Volume 12, No. 4 (2024), 6–40.

A few days after recording Florence Puckett and her daughter Rossie Fitzgerald, as we recounted in our previous post, Sidney and Maud tracked down Florence’s brother-in-law Lloyd (Philander Fitzgerald’s son) in Waynesboro. He was prepared to sing to them, but Sidney was disturbed by Maud’s attitude towards him, which she believed reflected a determination that singers should reproduce as closely as possible what they had sung for Cecil Sharp: “MK wanted the songs recalled exactly as before and kept prompting and rehearsing him and he got confused.” Maud was apparently satisfied with the result: her exclamation, “That’s wonderful!” can be heard at the end of Lloyd’s “John of Hazelgreen” (Roud 250; Child 293), which — not surprisingly, given her prompting — resembles closely Sharp’s transcription.

Lloyd sang five further songs, with some attractive tunes and a barely-perceptible “yip” on the final word of some phrases – a vocal effect often seen as the true Appalachian style, although you won’t hear it in the singing of Dol Small, Florence Puckett, or several other singers recorded during the trip.

Next, a 50-mile drive took the duo to Buena Vista, where Maud remembered meeting a couple of exceptional singers 32 years previously. However, she described it as “a wash out”: Laurel Wheeler was far away in the mountains nursing a sick relative, while Ada Allen — known to Sharp as Ada Maddox — had moved a further 40 miles to Lynchburg, where she was tracked down. Like many other former singers they met, she had sung only religious songs for some years, and had abandoned what she and others called the “love songs” (i.e. the old ballads). So, out came Sharp’s book again and, after a while, Ada “managed gradually to get some together,” performing with a “sweet and musical voice.” Although Maud was slightly disappointed that a singer she had regarded highly had neglected her traditional repertoire, she did include a couple of transcriptions of her performances in the brief report to the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society that represented Maud’s only published account of the trip.

In his 1918 diary, Sharp had remarked on the “really beautiful tune” to which Ada had sung Lord Randal (Roud 10; Child 12), and although she managed to commit only two verses of the ballad to Sidney’s tape recorder, they are well worth hearing.

She was able to remember a much fuller version of The House Carpenter (Roud 14; Child 243), which represents an excellent example of the “standard” melody so often married in Appalachia to this ballad.

There was one more surprise from Mrs. Allen, as she performed a song accompanying herself on banjo. We haven’t identified it as yet – the title is “You’re Going to Miss Me When I’ve Gone,” but it’s not the Carter Family song of similar title and the modal tune resembles that of “Mole in the Ground.”

It’s clear that Maud was conflicted by her experiences of collecting in her old haunts. She had begun in a state of high excitement to be back, but felt increasingly disillusioned as singer after singer was found to have died or given up on the old ballads. “There were many disappointments,” she wrote, “and one has to realise that the tradition is fast disappearing.” Despite having recorded interesting material from Dol Small and Florence Puckett, Maud complained at the end of the first week that “we haven’t yet got an outstanding singer.”

Sidney, however, was more positive, remarking that she had liked Florence’s singing much more than Maud; she also made detailed notes in her diary of directions to singers’ homes, in the hope that she might one day revisit them. Maud, she felt, was always in too much of a hurry to move on, and was not realizing the full potential of the people they were meeting. Lloyd Fitzgerald, for instance, while ill-at-ease during recording thanks to Maud’s harrying, “should be a fine natural singer under better circumstances.” Sidney also took some trouble to describe the lifestyles of the people they met, regardless of their musical contributions, describing one woman living in a particularly primitive place, “with wash basin hanging on a nail next the door, laundry draped on the railings, unattractive scrawny animals, dogs and cats everywhere.” Most homes, she reported, were still using long drop outhouses, “two or three holers,” though one did at least boast the “elegant touch” of a roll of pink toilet paper on a string. She also described an elderly woman who kept a roadside produce stand near Crozet, complaining of the extreme austerity prescribed by her husband’s church, the United Brethren: “You couldn’t even wear a ten-cent store pin at your neck without it being sinful… why, Christ himself had his golden crowns, after all!”

It’s apparent from their diaries and letters that the two women possessed fundamentally different ideas about folk song. Throughout the trip Maud defined in uncompromising terms the kind of material that was admissible, whereas Sidney – who had been told by her mentor Charles Seeger to “collect everything” – was more flexible. Maud was in fact deeply suspicious of the direction of U.S. folk song scholarship: writing in a letter to a friend in England about a folklore conference she had attended in Indiana immediately before the Appalachian trip, she had written: “I find there is extraordinarily little conception of what folk music is. Absolutely no distinction is made between folk and popular, e.g. the awful hill-billy stuff.” Her policy was actually stricter than that of Cecil Sharp himself, who had admitted many American-made songs into his collection, including “Hicks’ Farewell” and “Bright Sunny South” from Dol Small.

There was also a difference of opinion about what Maud dismissed as the “psycho-analytical” approach to song collecting, a more ethnographic method favored in the US, by which fieldworkers were encouraged to enquire of singers what the songs meant to them. Maud dismissed this as “morbid,” but she was swimming against the tide of history as this practice soon spread to the UK.

It’s clear that the modus operandi of following up contacts made by Cecil Sharp was useful in some respects, but limiting in others. It undoubtedly gave the collectors a head start, but it compromised their attitude to the singers’ repertories and performances. Sidney believed that, for her companion, the prime purpose of the trip was to provide auditory confirmation of Sharp’s notations for use in lectures, and commented wryly in a letter to her fellow song collector Vance Randolph that “the ghost of Sharp travels with us.” Fortunately, Maud was eventually persuaded to look beyond “Sharp’s singers,” with fascinating results that we will explore in the next installment.