Kentucky Country

Folk and Country Music of Kentucky

Charles K. Wolfe

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813108797, 9780813114682
• eBook ISBN: 9780813187495
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Kentucky Country is a lively tour of the state's indigenous music, from the days of string bands through hillbilly, western swing, gospel, bluegrass, and honkey-tonk to through the Nashville Sound and beyond. Through personal interviews with many of the living legends of Kentucky music, Charles K. Wolfe illuminates a fascinating and important area of American culture. The list of country music stars who hail from Kentucky is a long and glittering one. Red Foley, Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall, the Judds, Dwight Yaokum, Billy Ray Cyrus, Ricky Skaggs, John Michael Montgomery, and Keith Whitely—all these and many others have called Kentucky home. Kentucky Country is the story of these stars and dozens more. It is also the story of many Kentucky musicians whose contributions have been little known or appreciated, and of those collectors, promoters, and entrepreneurs who have worked behind the scenes to bring Kentucky music to national attention.

Echoes from a Lost World

One afternoon in 1975 a woman from Bowling Green, Kentucky, brought an unusual document into the office of Charles Guthrie, a folklorist at Western Kentucky University. It was an old piece of lined tablet paper, yellow and brittle with age, covered on one side with a beautiful, archaic handwriting, done in pencil and faded, hard to read even in the bright summer sunlight. The woman was a former student of Guthrie’s, Faye Scott Anderson, and the piece of paper had belonged to a relative of her husband’s, Ola Ashinhurst. Ola had been a lifelong resident of the hilly Pennyroyal region, near the Clinton-Cumberland County line in south-central Kentucky. For much of her life she had been unmarried, living a lonely life with her twin sister Viela, and one of her few pleasures had been to play on an old parlor organ that the family owned. When she died in 1963, the organ passed on to Mrs. Anderson’s husband and they moved it to Bowling Green. The drawers of the organ were full of little scraps of paper, old poems, and scattered songbooks. Some of the books contained little notations written by the sisters: “It snowed today” or “I wish someone would come to visit” or “I sang this on August 14, 1936.” In one of the books, a 1918 paperback songbook entitled Redemption Songs, in between pressed flowers half a century old, Mrs. Anderson found the sheet of tablet paper. Carrying it to the window, she could make out the faintly legible title: “A Song Ballad Pearl Bryant.” As she scanned the neat lines, she remembered what she had learned about old ballads in her college courses in folklore, and began to wonder about the song and about what had possessed Ola Ashinhurst to preserve it so carefully all those years. Had it been sung to her some long-ago evening by her best beau? Had it been sent to her by some long-lost friend? Had she sung it in her lonely farmhouse, accompanying herself on the old pump organ? Faye Anderson knew that some of the personal questions about what the song meant to Ola could never be answered, but she knew that details about the song itself might be found. Her old teacher Dr. Guthrie could help.

Together Guthrie and his former student looked over the text of the old song:

A Song Ballad Pearl Bryant

Deep Deep in yondrous valley

Where the flowers fade and Bloom

There sleeps my own Pearl Bryant

In a Cold and Silent Tomb

She died not Broken Hearted

Nor lingering Sickning Spell

But fore and instant Parted

From the Home She loved so well

One Knight the moon shonn Brightly

The stars was shining Too

When to Here cottag window

Here Jealous lover Drew

Come Pearl lets take a ramble

Through the meadow Soft and gaye

Where none can ever Disturbus

We will name our wedding Day

Retrace your Steps no never

There is sleep for every roam

For in these woods I have you

Pearl Bryant you must Die

What have I done you Scott Jackson

That you should take my Life

You Know I have always loved you

And would have Been your wife

Down on Here Knees befor Him

She Pleaded for Her Life

When deep in to Her Bosom

He plunged the fatle Knife

I’ll forgive you Walling

was Here last and Dieing Breath

Here Heart had seased it Beeting

Here Eyes were closed in Death

Fare well Dear loving Parents

I’ll greate you nevermore

For in these woods they have me

Fore nevermore to Roam

As Mrs. Anderson learned, her hand-written ballad was only the tip of an iceberg. For some twenty years students and teachers at Western Kentucky University had been collecting old songs like this and filing them in a cozy room on the third floor of the Cravens Library. Over the years they had gathered several dozen copies of the song about Pearl Bryan, some taken from old written sources, others directly from the singing of people who had learned them as children. The library also had printed collections of songs from other parts of the country with still more variations of the song, some published as early as 1913. In fact, folklorists had identified six distinct songs about Pearl Bryan that had circulated among people of Kentucky and the mid-South over the previous seventy-five years, songs still being sung and passed on today.

Though many of the people singing the ballad of Pearl Bryan did not know it, the song was an echo from one of the most sensational murders of the 1890s. It all began on a cold February day in 1896, when a farm boy near Fort Thomas, Kentucky, made a grisly discovery. Cutting across a field on his way to work, he came across the decapitated body of a woman. For several days police searched the field but found no trace of the victim’s head; in spite of this, she was finally identified as one Pearl Bryan, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Greencastle, Indiana, farmer. Police were soon led to Scott Jackson, a young dental student living across the river in Cincinnati; he and his roommate, Alonzo Walling, were soon arrested and charged with Pearl’s murder. In later months the prosecutors charged that Jackson had had an affair with Pearl and had agreed to arrange for an abortion after she announced that she was pregnant. For some reason he and Walling attempted to perform the abortion themselves. Either Pearl died or they thought she had died, and they took her across the river and beheaded her to prevent identification. The two men were convicted, and on March 20, 1897, still protesting their innocence, they were hanged at Newport, Kentucky.

For months newspapers in the mid-South carried details of the murder and the trial: the event was the sensation of the year. Even before the execution, songwriters were busy transmuting the events into song. In 1896 two different Cincinnati sheet music publishers issued “Pearl Bryan’s Fate, Waltz Song and Chorus” by one Charles Kennedy, and “Pearl Bryan’s Fate; or The Crime of the Century” by one “Add. J. Ressequie,” and other poems appeared in local newspapers. These songs quickly lapsed into obscurity, though; the ones that survived were made by the less formal composers and were sung in parlors, on porches, and on street corners throughout Kentucky and Tennessee. Within ten years of the execution of Walling and Jackson, folk ballads about Pearl Bryan were being circulated by rural Kentuckians who were fascinated with the age-old theme of the jealous lover and the newer theme of the country girl done in by the evils of the big city.

Nobody in nineteenth-century Kentucky ever referred to “Pearl Bryan” as a folk song, as a country song, or even as a popular song. It was, in truth, a little of all three, but music in the 1800s was much less a victim of categories and genres than it is today. Certainly there were “old” songs and “new” songs, but if people liked the sentiment or the melody of a song they didn’t worry too much about its source. Some songs that were written in New York, published in sheet music, and introduced on the vaudeville stage were learned by ear and passed on to another generation by word of mouth, in the manner of folk songs. Other songs, originally circulating among the people as folk songs, made a reverse journey when some tunesmith decided to write them down, “arrange” them, and publish them.

If a person of today could somehow miraculously be transported back into the Kentucky of 1850, he would find people across the state enjoying a wide variety of music, from square-dance fiddle tunes to hymns. Most of the people would be making the music themselves, not passively listening to it on a radio or record player, generally much more involved in it than most music fans today. Since there were few professional musicians and many amateur ones, the music might lack the polish or technical expertise of today’s music. Many of the instruments—especially the fiddles and the banjos—were homemade, and little of the singing or playing style was learned from books of the time. It was, in a very real sense, a people’s music, and for many it was, next to their religion, their only means for reflecting about their values, ideals, or aspirations.

The oldest songs in this nineteenth-century heritage were those that had been brought with the first settlers from England and Ireland and Scotland. Some had been old in England when the settlers left for the New World and trekked into “the Great Meadow” in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Many of the songs were thought of as a family heritage passed from parents to children. “Pap didn’t have much to leave us,” commented one old singer, “but he did leave us some fine songs, and I learned a lot of ’em.” As far as we know, nobody tried systematically to collect or write down these songs in the nineteenth century, so there is no way of telling exactly what songs were favorites, or exactly what they meant to the people who made them favorites, or even how they were sung. All we can say is that a large number of these old English songs survived into the twentieth century, and we can infer that they were current in earlier days, as well.

Kentucky was by no means unique as a repository for the old British ballads (story songs) or lyrics (songs expressing emotions). These were found in other states, from Missouri to Maine. But Kentucky and the other Appalachian states had a special appeal; the mountains and highlands, it was thought, acted as a giant cultural deep freeze, preserving these old songs and singing methods better than in other parts of the country. The first generation of ballad hunters had a romantic image of mountain folk as noble survivors of Elizabethan England, uncontaminated by the evils of the modern world. Kentucky mountaineers fit this image better than Missouri farmers or Maine fishermen. While the sheer number of old ballads found in Kentucky may not have constituted a major influence on the later development of country music in the state, the amount of attention paid to ballad hunting in Kentucky certainly had an impact. Going into the age of mass media and commercialization in the 1920s, Kentucky had a popular reputation as the premier hunting ground for old ballads. No other state had as much national attention lavished on its folk music, and this attention had the effect of encouraging later commercial country music in Kentucky.

Popular interest in ballad study in America began in 1898 when a Harvard University professor named Francis James Child published the last volume of his massive five-volume study, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. This was a collection of “case histories” of 305 ballads found in England and Scotland, and while it contained little about American ballads, students of the collection began to find that many of the songs were also still being sung in America. The American Folklore Society, formed in 1888, also began to stir interest in finding American versions of the old songs, and by the first decade of the twentieth century numerous local collectors around the country were starting to write down songs they were hearing. In 1907 Katherine Pettit, then a teacher at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, published “Ballads and Rhymes from Kentucky” in the Journal of American Folklore—the first real attempt to publish some of the old songs Kentuckians had been singing for over a hundred years. The collection includes seventeen songs and a handful of children’s songs and rhymes, all but five of them with British pedigrees, that Katherine Pettit or her students had collected from the hills of southeastern Kentucky. In 1908 and 1909 James Watt Raine and Katherine Jackson, working out of Berea College, began to collect songs from people in that part of the state, initiating Berea’s long and continued involvement in folk song study and collection. Two years later, in 1911, appeared the first book of Kentucky folk songs, A Syllabus of Kentucky Folksongs, including some 333 items from eastern and central Kentucky. The work was the result of research by Dr. Hubert G. Shearin, then a professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, and his precocious pupil, Josiah H. Combs, a native of Hazard who had trudged barefoot to the Hindman Settlement School, where he studied under Katherine Pettit. The book was published by Transylvania University, and was circulated well to area universities if not to the general public.

More popular with a general audience were books like Lonesome Tunes (1916), edited by Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockaway after an “expedition” into “the Kentucky wilds” of the southeastern hills. Brought out by a New York publisher, this book contained genuine songs and music, though edited and “touched up” by the collectors. The book was successful enough that the team worked up a sequel, Twenty Mountain Songs, for a Boston publisher four years later. Another music-and-words book was Josephine McGill’s Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains, published in New York in 1917. It too was the result of an “expedition,” this one also based at the Hindman Settlement School. By the time the famous English collector Cecil Sharp made his first collecting trips in Kentucky in 1916, the state had already generated a thriving local interest in folk songs. The Hindman and Pine Mountain settlement schools, Berea College, and Transylvania University were all serving as centers for collection and study of mountain ballads, and Sharp found numerous local collectors willing to help him in his quest for ballads. Sharp’s international reputation meant that his published collections would call even more public attention to the Appalachian singing tradition. In his forty-six weeks in the mountains, from 1916 to 1918, he gathered over 500 songs from Kentucky—almost a third of his total collection. In less than a week at Hindman he was able to write down sixty-one songs, an indication of just how strong the ballad singing tradition was on the eve of World War I. There is evidence that Sharp was casual about writing down the entire text of some songs, but Oxford University’s publication in 1932 of his massive English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians fixed for generations to come the image of eastern Kentucky as a land of balladry and song.

As collectors and enthusiasts continued to harvest Kentucky’s English ballad heritage, certain songs began to appear over and over in collections and lists. None of them were unique to Kentucky—all were found in other parts of the country as well—but certain ones were collected more frequently in Kentucky than in other states. One was “Little Matty Groves,” a ballad about adultery and discovery that Professor Child dated back to the time of Shakespeare; another was “The Cherry Tree Carol,” a religious ballad which describes the child Jesus performing his first miracle by bidding the tall cherry tree to bend down so Mary can get its fruit. “Lord Thomas” describes the eternal triangle, where a man must choose between a poor but beautiful woman and a rich but ugly one—a theme still found in modern country music. Next to “Barbara Allen,” with its familiar account of the “hard-hearted” woman who refuses her love to Sweet William, “Lord Thomas” has proven the most popular of the old ballads still sung in the United States. Two other Kentucky favorites deal with Anglo-Turkish conflicts, probably dating from the sixteenth century and the Ottoman Empire—though few of the singers worried about such details. These songs were “Golden Willow Tree,” about a young Englishman who single-handedly sinks a Turkish ship, and “Lord Bateman,” about an Englishman who gets out of a Turkish prison by promising to wed a Turkish lady.

The most popular British-derived murder ballad seems to have been “Pretty Polly,” a version of a 1750 English song entitled “The Gosport Tragedy.” In the original song we learn of a young ship’s carpenter who seduces the daughter of a mason; when she finds herself pregnant the carpenter leads her to a grave he has dug in the night and, in spite of her pleas for mercy, stabs her. His ship leaves the next day, but Polly’s ghost follows him on board and eventually extracts a cruel revenge. The version collected by Katherine Pettit before 1907 shows how Kentucky singers changed it: the song is made shorter and much more direct. This “Pretty Polly” omits entirely the courtship, seduction, and pregnancy, and focuses primarily on the murder itself; the supernatural elements have been played down and no ghost appears to demand vengeance. The death is presented with none of the effusive Victorian sentiment so common in popular literature and songs of the late nineteenth century; no golden-haired damsel here goes to her reward, nor do angels take her away. A few gritty details tell it all: “He threw a little dust over her, / And turned to go home, / Left nothing behind / But the small birds to mourn.”

Using such songs as models, Kentuckians were soon making up their own songs about events that had special meaning to them. In this way dozens of native American ballads originated in Kentucky and were carried to other parts of the South and Midwest. Again, Kentucky was hardly unique in this: such local ballads sprang up in other states and were popular in Kentucky as well. But a look at some of the songs originated in the state suggests some of the concerns and events that were deemed vital enough to be preserved through several generations of song. The songs give us a hint of the image early working-class Kentuckians held of themselves, and of the events in social history they thought memorable.

There were a number of songs that, like “Pearl Bryan,” told of the murder of a pregnant girlfriend by an angry suitor. “Stella Kinny” told of such a case in Fleming County in 1915, and “Lula Vower,” in whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Echoes from a Lost World
• 2. The New Minstrels
• 3. The Radio Kids
• 4. Take Me Back to Renfro Valley
• 5. Bluegrass Picking
• 6. Queens and Ramblers
• 7. Kentucky Music, American Country
• Afterword, 1980–1996
• Sources and Further Reading
• Selected Discography
• Index