As Old as the Hills

I saw a story in the New York Times yesterday about an old-time music festival in North Carolina that's been going on for 85 years, and my mind started wandering, as it often does. I looked up bluegrass music, and discovered it's not really folk music—it draws on folk idioms, but it was created in the middle of the last century by professional musicians. Well, fair enough. So I got to thinking about the banjo style that's the real folk deal—called "frailing" or perhaps more commonly "clawhammer." Something happens to me when I hear this music—it triggers a cultural memory in me, perhaps, which is curious because I don't belong to the culture that produced it. It could be a more prosaic thing—that we've all seen large numbers of movies in which mist enshrouds the distant hills as this music plays to signal that we're in Appalachia. But the fact is it takes me back, back, back, back to the hills of Wales, and Ireland, and Scotland, because that's where these folks came from originally. They came to the States to get out from under their Engllish landlords. They were tough, as ready as Afghans to fight and never much inclined to let themselves be pushed around, and they went up into the hills and farmed and made music in their spare time. And they were a big part of the American Revolution—they wanted to be left the hell alone, and kicking out the British came naturally to them.

So anyway, yesterday I'm wondering if I might want to buy some of this clawhammer music, so I'm looking around for its truest exemplars, you know, and I settle on this fellow Wade Ward. He was a celebrated clawhammer player, but made his living as a farmer. And I noted with interest that he was born, lived, and died in a small town in Virginia called Independence. I liked that, today being a certain holiday and so forth. I like beer and barbecued food and fireworks, but I may add old-time music to the things I make a point of enjoying on this particular day. Just seems right, somehow.