23-25 May 2008
A group of musicians from Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina, USA are visiting Kilcar this weekend. There will be a concert in the Parish Hall on Saturday, 24 May and sessions in the pubs featuring the visitors and local musicians over the weekend.
Appalachian folk music is a distinctive genre of folk music.
Appalachian music is believed to have developed from traditional Scottish, English and Irish music brought to the United States by immigrants from those countries, and in turn it influenced country music and old-time music.
Most roots of early Appalachian folk music can be traced to ballads sung in the British Isles brought over and preserved by immigrants who moved into these western regions due to land opportunities made possible by land grants.
As a result of the terrain of the region, the societies and cultures were fairly isolated from outside intervention. In 1916 Cecil Sharp arrived in Appalachia and began recording the folk songs on the Mountains. Sharp, an authority on British ballads was able to identify 1,600 versions of 500 songs from 281 singers, almost all had their origins in the English/Scottish Child Ballads. After his first study in Appalachia, he published, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Some examples of songs preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and recorded by Sharp include, “The Hangman Song”, “Barbara Allen”, etc.
A Scottish fiddler named Neil Gow is usually credited with developing (during the 1740s) the short bow sawstroke technique that defines Appalachian fiddling. This technique was altered during the next century, with European waltzes and polkas being most influential.
While in the year 2000 African Americans made up only eight percent of the Appalachian population, their numbers were greater in the 19th and early 20th centuries, due not only to the presence of slaves but also free blacks working in timber, coal mining, and other industries. Their considerable influence on Appalachian music can be seen in instrumentation: the banjo was adopted from African Americans by white musicians following the Civil War. Even into the early 20th century, it was common for young white musicians to have learned the banjo or other instruments from older African American musicians living in their area. Their influence can also be felt in the ornamentation of old-time music which includes the third and seventh blue notes, and sliding tones. Sliding tones are not found in British Isles folk music outside of certain styles of Irish music, whose influence on Appalachian music is considered minimal (this may be indicative of parallel evolution since the early Appalachian settlers were generally not of Irish extraction).
Appalachian folk became a major influence on styles like country music and bluegrass. It is one of the few regional styles of old-time music that, since World War II, has been learned and widely practiced in all areas of the United States (as well as in Canada, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere). In some cases (as in the Midwest and Northeast), its popularity has eclipsed the indigenous old-time traditions of these regions. There is a particularly high concentration of performers playing Appalachian folk music on the East and West Coasts (especially in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Pacific Northwest). A number of American classical composers, in particular Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland, have composed works that merge the idioms of Appalachian folk music with the Old World–based classical tradition.
Appalachian old-time music is itself made up of regional traditions. Some of the most prominent traditions include those of Mount Airy, North Carolina (specifically the Round Peak style of Tommy Jarrell) and Grayson County/Galax, Virginia (Wade Ward and Albert Hash), West Virginia (the Hammons Family), East Kentucky (J. P. Fraley and Lee Sexton), and East Tennessee (Roan Mountain Hilltoppers).
The banjo player and fiddler Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a native of the North Carolina mountains, collected much traditional music during his lifetime, also founding the old-time music festival in Asheville, North Carolina. Notable North Carolina traditional banjo players and makers include Frank Proffitt, Frank Proffitt, Jr. and Stanley Hicks, who all learned to make and play fretless mountain banjos from a family tradition. These players, among others, learned their art primarily from family and show fewer traces of influence from commercial hillbilly recordings. The Proffitts and Hicks were heirs to a centuries-old folk tradition, and through the middle to late 20th century and they continued to perform in a style older than the stringbands often associated with old time music. Their style has been recently emulated by contemporary musician Tim Eriksen.
Old-time music has also been adopted by a few Native American musicians; the eminent Walker Calhoun of Big Cove, in the Qualla Boundary (home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in western North Carolina) plays three-finger-style banjo, to which he sings in the Cherokee language.