page_title: Appalachian music
section_title: Fieldwork
hierarchical_section_title: Appalachian music / Collecting and recording / Fieldwork
caption_attribution_description: English: Map showing some of the locations in Southern and Central Appalachia visited by British folklorist Cecil Sharp in the summers of 1916 (blue), 1917 (green), and 1918 (red). Sharp was looking for "old world" English and Scottish ballads that had been passed down to the region's inhabitants from their European ancestors. He collected hundreds of such ballads, the most lucrative areas being the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky.
context_page_description: Appalachian music is the music of the region of Appalachia in the Eastern United States. It is derived from various European and African influences, including English ballads, Irish and Scottish traditional music, hymns, and African-American blues. First recorded in the 1920s, Appalachian musicians were a key influence on the early development of Old-time music, country music, and bluegrass, and were an important part of the American folk music revival of the 1960s. Instruments typically used to perform Appalachian music include the banjo, American fiddle, fretted dulcimer, and guitar.
  Early recorded Appalachian musicians include Fiddlin' John Carson, G. B. Grayson & Henry Whitter, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, Clarence Ashley, and Dock Boggs, all of whom were initially recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Several Appalachian musicians obtained renown during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including Jean Ritchie, Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford, Hedy West and Doc Watson.
context_section_description: Around the turn of the 20th century, a broad movement developed to record the rich musical heritage, particularly of folksong, that had been preserved and developed by the people of the Appalachians. This music was unwritten; songs were handed down, often within families, from generation to generation by oral transmission. Fieldwork to record Appalachian music (first in musical notation, later on with recording equipment) was undertaken by a variety of scholars.
  One of the earliest collectors of Appalachian ballads was Kentucky native John Jacob Niles (1892–1980), who began noting ballads as early as 1907 as he learned them in the course of family, social life, and work.  Due to fears of plagiarism and imitation of other collectors active in the region at the time, Niles waited until 1960 to publish his first 110 in The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles.  The area covered by Niles in his collecting days, according to the map in the Ballad Book, was bounded roughly by Tazewell, Virginia; south to Boone and Saluda, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina; west to Chickamauga, Georgia; north through Chattanooga and Dayton, Tennessee to Somerset, Kentucky; northwest to Bardstown, Frankfort, and Lexington, Kentucky; east to the West Virginia border, and back down to Tazewell, thus covering areas of the Smokies, the Cumberland Plateau, Upper Tennessee Valley, and the Lookout Mountain region.
  In May 1916, the soprano Loraine Wyman and her pianist colleague Howard Brockway visited the Appalachians in eastern Kentucky, in a 300-mile walking trek to gather folk songs. They took their harvest back to New York, where they continued, with great success, their ongoing efforts in performing traditional folk songs to urban audiences.
  Starting only about a month after Wyman and Brockway, the British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles toured the Southern Appalachian region, visiting places like Hot Springs in North Carolina, Flag Pond in Tennessee, Harlan in Kentucky, and Greenbrier County in West Virginia, as well as schools such as Berea College and the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky and the Pi Beta Phi settlement school in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They persisted for three summers in all (1916-1918), collecting over 200 "Old World" ballads in the region, many of which had varied only slightly from their British Isles counterparts. After their first study in Appalachia, Sharp and Karpeles published English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.
  Among the ballads Sharp and Karpeles found in Appalachia were medieval-themed songs such as "The Elfin Knight" and "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor", and seafaring and adventure songs such as "In Seaport Town" and "Young Beichan". They transcribed 16 versions of "Barbara Allen" and 22 versions of "The Daemon Lover" (often called "House Carpenter" in Appalachia). The work of Sharp and Karpeles confirmed what many folklorists had suspected— the remote valleys and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains were a vast repository of older forms of music.
caption: Map showing various locations in Central and Southern Appalachia where British folklorist Cecil Sharp collected "old world" ballads, 1916–1918
exif: {}