Story by Eliza Benbow
Cover image courtesy of Rare Bird Farm
In an Asheville parking lot on an unusually warm February day, Timothy Kelley couldn’t help but pick a tune on his brand new banjo.
Kelley, who is a traveling banjo and fiddle player and shares songs on social media platforms, hadn’t had access to a banjo since his was water-damaged by rainfall from Hurricane Helene. His delight to have access to the instrument again came out in quick bursts of songs.
The instrument was delivered to him by Nicholas Edward Williams, a musician, podcast host and the founder of the nonprofit organization ReString Appalachia. Since late October, Williams and ReString have been connecting Appalachian musicians affected by the storm to instruments donated by artists across the country.
Kelley was the organization’s 334th delivery.
Williams’ music is based in the traditional old-time styles that originated in Southern Appalachia, and though he lives in Chattanooga, Tenn., he frequently performs and visits with friends in Asheville. While he was safe from the storm, he knew he wanted to do something to help artists who had lost access to creating music during a time where the creative act could help them process their experiences.
“Music transcends space,” Williams said. “It doesn’t require specific spaces or buildings to continue traditions—that’s the beauty of oral traditions.”
But not having instruments can hinder artists, he added, especially those who are part of the musical lineage keeping musical traditions alive. It’s not until the ability to create music is forcibly removed from someone’s life that they fully understand what the musical traditions they’re a part of do and how far they extend, he said.
And when the floodwaters rose in western N.C., it became apparent how far the tradition extended and how easily the material goods and cultural landmarks of the tradition could be washed away.
Many music venues and gathering spaces were temporarily shut down by the storm, including the Old Marshall Jail Hotel in Marshall, where the floodwaters nearly reached the second floor.
The storm put a stop to a two-year long tradition of ballad swapping, where local singers took turns singing generations-old songs from Appalachia. Over the past six months the group, who now call themselves the Nest of Singing Birds, have been traveling throughout the state and even to Charleston, South Carolina to swap ballads and raise awareness for the mountains.
“It was just strange to step out of the disaster normal and just be in normal normal,” William Ritter, a fiddler, vocalist and member of the group, said.
Throughout western N.C., Hurricane Helene forced traditional musicians to look beyond physical structures for community building, said Trevor McKenzie, a fiddler and the director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University.
“I think people are feeling the power of what these traditions can actually accomplish as far as being things that can bind together communities without a specific building where things happen,” he said.
Living history
A large portion of American music can be traced back to the Appalachian Mountains, whose musical traditions are a blend of African, Native American and European influences.
The mountains of what is now North Carolina were primarily inhabited by the Cherokee Indians until the 1770s, when European settlers of English, Scots-Irish and German descent began immigrating into what are now Buncombe, Henderson and Transylvania counties, pushing the Cherokee tribes further west.
The interactions between African American, Native American and Anglo-Saxon cultures coalesced to create the unique sounds and traditions of Appalachian music.
The music played by Africans and African Americans was a large influence on old-time music, a genre prevalent in Southern Appalachian music history, especially through the integration of musical instruments like the banjo and dancing traditions like clogging, flatfooting and square dancing.
Dances are usually community-wide events that involve a live band, a caller that prompts dance moves and people from all ages doing traditional choreography.
African American culture was an important part of the development of this dance culture, and the first dance callers were people of color, said Phil Jamison, a dance caller, old-time musician and flatfoot dancer who lives in Asheville.
Around the 20th century, Black communities began to move on to other kinds of music, Jamison said, creating a perception that the main influence on Appalachian dance is European culture.
“That’s an important part of the story: that this isn’t just White Anglo-Saxon culture and it has all these different influences,” he said. “Yes, there’s some influence from Scotland and Ireland, but there’s a huge amount of Black influence, there’s Native American influence and French influence, all kinds of other things in the mix.”
Cherokee influences on Appalachian musical traditions included vocal traditions and dancing, and European settlers brought ballad-singing to the mountains. Today, Madison County, where Marshall is located, is home to the country’s longest unbroken ballad tradition of at least nine generations.
Donna Ray Norton, the leader of the Nest of Singing Birds, is an eighth-generation ballad singer whose family was singing ballads as early as 1916, a history documented by folk music collector Cecil Sharp.
Early scholarship on Appalachian music began in the late 19th century as people like Sharp went hunting for ballads and songs that were New World variants on songs originating in the British Isles, according to the Library of Congress.
This movement, which lasted until the 1920s, resulted in some of the earliest documentation of Appalachian music culture, but it often focused on ballads influenced by British culture rather than recognizing the breadth of influences throughout the mountains.
Later scholarship by folklorists and activists documented songs telling the stories of non-white Appalachians and contemporary Appalachian communities, such as miners and railroad workers, through songs like the well-known ballad “John Henry.”
The history of old-time music is a fraught one to unpack, McKenzie said, because of the influence of painful aspects of American history like the Transatlantic slave trade, as well as political, social and economic factors.
But traditional music is also a vessel to keep the history of Appalachia alive. The mountains, which have stood steadily through all of history, are “a filter through which the American story went through,” McKenzie said.
A function of community
At Haw Creek Commons in Asheville, friends and strangers of all ages link arms and swing each other around in the dance hall that was once a church sanctuary. Stained glass windows depicting stories from the Bible are cracked open to facilitate airflow, and the sound of a fiddle tune, the slap of feet against wooden floors, and Jamison’s melodic dance calling drift out into the night.
It’s the first Saturday of the month, so the Asheville Community Square Dance is in full swing.
Alice Kexel, who co-organizes the dances with Jamison, said that she’s seen more music and dance events pop up following the hurricane.
These monthly dances are a way to build community and get people back together again, Jamison said, as they did once before after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Square dances are a function of a community, he said, and they build community throughout the night as strangers become more familiar with each other as they dance.
Music, particularly music with roots in the mountains, has been a powerful way to bring people together in western N.C., McKenzie said.
Modern-day musicians have been seeking social connections that Appalachian music inherently provides, he said, and working together to clean up their communities has only solidified people’s desires to gather with their neighbors.
A few weeks after the storm, just as the tops of the trees in Spring Creek, North Carolina were beginning to turn the warm colors of fall, community members arrived at Rare Bird Farm with blankets, camping chairs and covered dishes for a potluck and night of fellowship and free music.
The 98-acre farm, which is also a cultural arts space, is in a holler in Madison County that sustained few damages from the storm, especially compared to the nearby towns of Marshall and Hot Springs. Co-owner and Business Development Director Mitchell Davis said the farm wanted to share the normalcy they felt on their land with the surrounding community.
“There were a lot of people who came to that Straight to Love show that—that was one of the first times they had been away from helping with recovery,” he said.
Rare Bird also helped organize the ballad swap tour, which took place monthly in places like Floyd, Asheville, Carrboro and Charleston.
Sarah Elizabeth “Songbird” Burkey, another member of the Nest of Singing Birds, said that connection to her musical community has provided a sense of stability and security. When they’re all together singing, she said, “things make sense.”
“Whenever we’re singing these songs or whenever we’re sitting and listening to the person next to us sing—you can’t be anywhere else in your mind,” she said. “It just puts you right there in the moment.”
For Ritter, ballad singing in the months since Helene has allowed him to connect to generations of trauma expressed through the song’s stories about people experiencing hardships.
Shortly after the storm, Ritter was recorded by Parkway Sessions singing “The Flood of 1916” in the Old Marshall Jail as it was being repaired, a ballad inspired by the Great Flood of 1916 that affected the North Carolina mountains over a century ago.
“The most terrible storm that ever was seen made its way from the ocean wide and it struck with force on the mountainside,” he sings.
McKenzie said that ballads from the past provide a collective memory of community history that is unique in western culture. He’s also sung versions of “The Flood of 1916,” and said that the flooding in September gave the song a new context.
“It brought home that this is something these mountains have experienced before and they recovered from it,” he said. “And at the same time people still committed it to memory in this music and there’s a reason why it was shared in that way and handed down to us.”
Carrying the tune
As much as the floodwaters damaged and destroyed the land, they couldn’t wipe out the traditions.
The storm demonstrated how fragile places and communities are, McKenzie said, but having a mass of people who care about and share traditional Appalachian music helps to keep the stories they tell—and the communities they represent—alive.
Even seeing newer generations of artists experiment with incorporating elements of traditional music into new work is a way to re-release the storytelling properties of the music, he said.
For Norton, whose family has stewarded ballad singing for over a century, it doesn’t matter where people come from or how they learn about ballads, as long as they care about them and continue to uphold the tradition.
Without people carrying on the practice, it’s going to die out, she said.
On May 14, the ballad swap will return to the Old Marshall Jail after seven months away.
Ritter said that he ultimately would love to see ballads back where they belong: in the community. And he’s been a part of that process—from the Old Marshall Jail to venues in Charleston, he’s been bringing Appalachian music to people who may have never otherwise heard it.
“That’s my hope, is that they can be reintegrated into the fabric of life and not just be something that’s on a stage,” he said. “Because it’s really life music and it’s community music and that’s what I would love to see.”
At Rare Bird, festivals, like their yearly Dogwood Gap Tiny Music and Heritage Festival on May 2-3, featuring traditional and old-time artists are keeping music in the fold.
Williams is making the drive from Tennessee to perform at the festival on May 3, continuing to participate in the musical tradition and community that stretch a century before him.
And after ReString fulfills all the instrument requests it’s gotten since October, Williams plans to continue to use its resources to support artists affected by natural disasters throughout the country and to contribute instrument to non-profit groups.
Sharing stories through music connects generations, Williams said, and using the songs passed down to connect with younger generations helps keep it in the fold.
“[Music culture] doesn’t continue to happen and it doesn’t continue to stay in the fold without each generation doing their part,” Williams said.
