Dale Neal

dneal@citizen-times.com

In the sweltering heat of the summer of 1916, a Madison County woman eight months pregnant with her 10th child sat on a porch and began to sing for a visiting Englishman and his assistant. Her voice rose like the surrounding ridges with the words of “My Dearest Dear,” a haunting ballad that had been carried across the ocean and passed down through generations.

Mary Sands was among 29 singers in Madison County who sang for Cecil Sharp, a musicologist collecting ballads and folk songs that had originated in the British Isles before taking root in the remote hollers of Appalachia. In Madison County, Sharp said he’d discovered “a nest of singing birds.”

On that same summer day, Aug. 5, 1916, Sands' niece was going into labor with her own child just a few miles away.

“That was my grandmother giving birth to my mother,” said Sheila Kay Adams, the Madison County balladeer who has kept the oral tradition alive into the 21st century.

In the Laurel Country, as Cecil called Madison, ballads run in the blood.

Adams learned the songs the old-fashioned way - “knee-to-knee” - with her great-aunt Dellie Chandler Norton in the Sodom Laurel community. She also learned lyrics from singers like Dillard Chandler and Doug Wallin and his family.

By the time Adams was into her teenage years in the 1960s, many of the songs that her great aunts and grandmothers had sang on front porches had been nearly forgotten, bypassed by the country music popularized on the radio. But the poignant a cappella songs of star-crossed lovers still spoke to her.

A century after Sharp recorded hundreds of ballads, Adams and other musicians still perform songs that are 400 years old. The haunting refrains ring out from stages at Bluff Mountain Festival in Hot Springs or the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Festival held each fall in Mars Hill, and the Swannanoa Gathering at Warren Wilson College.

“People are still attracted to those stories. The songs sound ancient and otherworldly. There’s a feeling you get in your soul. You heard the generations in those songs.”

For families in the remote Appalachians, forced to fend for themselves, singing was a daily entertainment, long before electricity, television or the internet. The poetry of the songs was a welcome relief from the region's poverty.

“They had lived the life of those ballads," Adams said.

“If you’re living in a 10-by-10 cabin with a dirt floor and a smoking chimney and seven children, who wouldn’t want to start singing about fair lords and ladies, fairies and sprites, knights and castles in far off distant lands,” Adams said.

Like Adams, Joe Penland grew up in the 1950s and '60s when Marshall and Madison County were still remote places. “We might get Channel 13 on the black and white TV, but that was it," Penland said. A strict Baptist upbringing frowned on the secular songs of the old-timers. “These were songs about illicit sex and violence and sword fights. My daddy called it hollering,” but Penland liked them better than the country music on the radio.

Penland soon gravitated to old-timers like Dellie Norton and Lee Wallin, singing the ballads out in Sodom Valley. Getting there was hard. Penland remembers not even a graded dirt road, but driving an old four-wheel truck up the creek bed to get to Norton’s house.

Penland has made recordings of the ballads he learned, and traveled to the Whitby Folk Festival in the north of England. He heard a Scottish traveler or gypsy sing the ballad "Matty Groves," often called "Shady Grove," in her thick brogue, and then Penland sang the same song. “My family hadn’t been to Scotland in 300 years, but the tune and the lyrics were just the same. It was spooky,” Penland said.

In the Laurel Country

Madison County was a remote destination in 1916 with few roads and the railroad up from Asheville. Service had just been restored after a historic flood had devastated the region that summer, claiming at least five lives in Marshall.

Sharp was steered to Madison by the research of Olive Dame Campbell, wife of John C. Campbell who founded a folk school with his name in Brasstown in Clay County. Olive Campbell’s work later inspired the movie “Songcatcher” about a musical collector in Appalachia.

Sharp wandered into remote corners of the county, coaxing locals to bring out their best ballads for him. Berzilla Wallin later said residents were initially wary of the Englishman, suspecting he was secretly surveying their land for a potential dam that would force their eviction. Others thought he was a German spy as World War I raged an ocean away.

But they began to sing on their porches. Sharp made musical notations while his assistant Maud Karpeles took down the lyrics. The Englishman was electrified by what he heard - songs hundreds of years old that had been passed down unchanged through the generations from ancestors that hailed from the highlands of Scotland, from England and the green fields of Ireland. Sharp would return again the following year and in 1918, eager to document the ballads.

“North Carolina is amazingly rich in folks songs, and I must say without exaggeration that in these sections I heard some of the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life,” Sharp told the Asheville Pen & Plate Club as reported in the Asheville Citizen on June 13, 1917.

Back in London, Sharp would gather his musical notes into a book “English Folks Songs: Some Conclusions.”

Sharp predicted the tradition would likely die out by 1950, and it nearly did. He had seen the industrialization already taking root in the rest of Appalachia as coal mining changed the hollers and mountain communities in Kentucky and West Virginia.

After Sharp’s death in 1924, Karpeles continued to edit his work in several volumes. And in the 1950s, Karpeles revisited Madison County and many of the singing families she had heard decades before.

Other collectors followed, including John Cohen and Alan Lomax in the 1960s and 1980s, tapping into the treasure trove of Madison’s musical heritage.

“Popular music comes and goes,” said Doug Orr, founder of the Swannanoa Gathering and co-author of the book “Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Journey from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia” about the ballad and fiddle tradition. “These ballads are the music that America comes home to.”

The ballads with the multiple verses weren’t just performances, but were sung almost as work songs out in the field or on the porch as women shelled beans, observed David Holt, a musician who started collecting many of the ballads starting in 1969.

The tradition of learning knee-to-knee may have died out with the old-timers. Now Adams’ proteges are more likely to learn the words from her CDs as they drive around the county.

Adams gets 30 students enrolling in her ballad-singing classes at the Swannanoa Gathering, now in its 25th year at Warren Wilson College.

But without Sharp’s interest 100 years ago, the ballads could very well have disappeared as they did in many mountain communities.

“The ballads have a richness and a reality that still exists 400 years later, played by people like Sheila Kay and Joe in a direct line from the those folks who brought them over,” Holt said.

Circling back home

At the Bluff Mountain Festival held in June in Hot Springs, Adams took the stage with her 23-year-old protege Branson Raines to sing old ballads. “Branson gets it. He’s an old soul, that these songs are part of his people, of this place," she said.

From the audience gathered under the shade of the trees, Kriss Sands stepped out onto the plywood dance floor laid before the stage. Sands is a fixture at local festivals with his flat dance, the choreographed shuffle of shiny oxford shoes to the old-time tunes that had their roots.

Mary Sands was his grandmother, who died when he was 10. Raised in Asheville, Sands spent his career in California. Retiring to Madison County, he began exploring his own family roots in the music, including his grandmother’s legacy.

"I wish I had heard her sing,” Sands said.

In 1993, Adams made a trek to Sharp’s house, now a folk music library and archive on Regent’s Park Road in London. Her husband, Jim Taylor, asked the curator, “You know of anyone who’s keeping the ballad tradition alive these days?”

The curator said he’d heard of a woman named Sheila Kay Adams in Madison County, North Carolina, who could still sing the old songs.

“That would be her right there,” Taylor grinned and pointed at his wife.

A curator took down one of the leather bound volumes from the glass case. She flipped through the pages and found Sharp’s notes to Aug. 5, 1969. There, she saw the words that her great-great aunt Mary Sands had sang, the same day that her grandmother went into labor with her own mother. The ballad was “My Dearest Dear.”

My dearest dear, the time draws near when I and you must part

And no one knows the inner grief of my poor aching heart

Or what I suffer for your sake, for the one I love so dear

I wish that I could go with you or you could tarry here

“I just started bawling,” Adams said.

Madison County tales linger even as era ends