Medication is helping. Has not even been 24 hours. Like. What

This is a link to a 1979 performance of a folk song/hymn called Will The Circle Be Unbroken by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the LEGENDARY Mother Maybelle Carter. (Her name is underlined in red on my screen because it’s not common enough to be in the standard apple dictionary.)

(They also have a version with studio footage on YouTube, but I’m linking just the audio so y’all can focus on it!)

And this is a version of this song arranged by a more modern composer with different lyrics:

Please note that this is a high school choir and so they likely did not have time to get into best practices for performance, where the music came from etc.

Now for the shocker: my college choir did this song. Outside of the performance notes (and the fact that we took more time on best practices for folk music in general) I would have had no clue of its provenance had I, a music history major, not done a little digging in my second year doing the song off and on in the choir. (We didn’t perform it in concert except for on the street. My choir director was amazing btw, no shade to you if you’re reading this. You may be able to tell who I am if I tell you that I dropped out last year lol.) I found the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band/Mother Maybelle Carter version of the song and loved it, no thought beyond that except one of my friends (shout out if you’re reading this) told me Mother Maybelle Carter was a huge deal in the Appalachian and general folk scenes. (She helped popularize music that led directly to modern country.)

Now fast forward to Yesterday. I was in Appalachia and we saw the Museum of Appalachia advertised, decided to stop, and stretch our legs in the parking lot if admission was too high. It wasn’t the kind of museum we were expecting. Most of the exhibits are outdoors and were therefore inaccessible to me in this heat and humidity. (It’s worth stopping by btw if any of you are in the area.) However, the Main Draw was indoors; a collection of so many artifacts it is now boggling my mind how they all fit inside the two barn sized buildings we were able to access. All still had original hand made cards explaining their provenance and often a funny or endearing or bold story of what had happened around that artifact. (My favorite was a butter stealing pig who got into the butter cabinet/pie safe so many times that they had to put three locks on it and even that didn’t stop her. But I digress.) Often the language was clearly what had been respectful at the turn of the century or earlier. They were all made by hand. There were several pieces from before White folks had been in the mountains, a whole section dedicated to mountain instruments, and lots of quilts and other art projects like whittled pieces and firearms (almost every one was unique and they were often made by hand).

And right there in the gift shop/cafe, before we ventured out into the heat, they were playing my recording, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band one, of Will The Circle Be Unbroken.

So of course this primed me for the whole section dedicated to the Carter Family (which was mostly dedicated to Mother Maybelle Carter) and also to think about the context of even that polished version of the song.

At least based on my understanding, folk in the Appalachians were often very poor, and it is still one of the least “developed” parts of America. The museum really drove that home; a number of (if not most of) the artifacts were handmade and the cards made reference to the fact that a man’s best possession was often his knife. The instruments in particular showed ingenuity I’ve rarely seen in the modern day American imperial core; a full sized guitar made out of solely crisscrossed matchsticks for instance, or another instrument made of a hoe, a tobacco box, a bow and a single string. A dulcimer that doubles as a walking stick so the guy who made it wouldn’t have to carry dead weight to every jam session (as modern musicians call it, can’t think of the word right now).

Speaking of jam sessions, I played for the Folk Society in college (really a contra dance group with live music consisting of whatever instruments we could get to play that week with a book of tunes from the group Whiskey Before Breakfast) and we never really talked about where the bluegrass we played came from. White people have a lot of trouble with this I find. (I am White, I include myself.) I haven’t been to a bluegrass jam session in a while though not for lack of trying, I hope to make it to one soon.

Bluegrass and folk music are inherently political because their roots are often forgotten by those who seek to adapt them to a “modern” audience, or to one who is simply upper class or even middle class. Who decides what is palatable to upper and middle class people anyway? Who gets to decide that these original lyrics are too spiritual or too poor or too unrelatable to sell to modern choirs? Who decides? Ask yourself that question and then take a step into the “unpalatable”. Whatever that even means.

There's a big difference between the phrases "I said can I, not may I" and "I said may I, not can I".

The first one implies a certain taking back of autonomy; you didn't want or need their permission, just to know if it was possible. This is the sort of phrase that might get some of you in trouble with your parents.

The second one implies deference to someone the speaker respects. In this case, you knew the thing was possible (probably), you just wanted to know if they were okay with it.