Piedmont Blues . . .

Pictures of community dancing (from SC fieldwork)

2011-09-23T18:33:00.001-04:00

Christmas parade in a SC mill town

2011-09-16T23:08:00.000-04:00

Black gospel singers in the South Carolina Upcountry

2011-09-13T22:53:00.001-04:00

These are selected photos I took while doing fieldwork in Greenwood and McCormick Counties, SC.

Black gospel

Punch v. Judy

2011-06-30T23:52:00.000-04:00

John Styles (of London, England), a scholar and performer of the traditional Punch and Judy puppet show, at the National Folk Festival in Chattanooga, 10/09/1993.

Steppers at the National Folk Festival in Chattanooga, 1993.

2011-06-28T16:37:00.000-04:00

I am trying to identify this group, from a performance at the National Folk Festival in 1993 in Chattanooga. Video by Philip Luckey.

Jerry Brown, Potter

2011-06-28T09:45:00.001-04:00

National Heritage Fellow, Jerry Brown of Hamilton, Alabama, at the 55th National Folk Festival in Chattanooga, 1993. Video by Philip Luckey.

Dad

2011-06-17T00:00:00.004-04:00

The old man, posted on father's day, or thereabout.

http://www.englishrules.com/2004/douglas-day/

Big Joe Dossett and the Mighty Coachmen

2011-05-21T00:11:00.001-04:00

Big Joe Dossett and the Mighty Coachmen of Chattanooga, Tennessee

https://picasaweb.google.com/D.TurnerDay/NinthStreetRevivalChattanooga19911995#5205251840954827106

Ninth Street Revival

2011-05-21T00:03:00.000-04:00

This photo was taken by Reggie Day, no relation. Reggie was on the Artist Roster for school programs at Allied Arts, where I worked when we produced this series of events in Chattanooga in the early 1990s.

American crow folklore and folklife

2011-03-28T15:21:00.005-04:00

(not my photo)

I've been watching the play behavior of "gang" of young adult crows in my back yard.

At first I took it for aggressive behavior, that the crows were establishing status within the group, or vis a vis a potential mate.

The next time I saw them I realized that I'd watched these crows' parents doing the same flight maneuvers to harrass a large broadwing hawk ("my hawk" a few weeks ago, the one who shat on me.)

The young hawks were playing, like most young animals do. And, in playing, building a repertory of complex maneuvers with substantial survival benefit..

But what has been written by scholars about crow behavior? Not much, it turns out. (I am aware of human folklore about crows, but know nothing about the crow's repertory of behaviors, their adaptability, reported proto-language capability, even tool-making and use.)

Check this article out, though, a profile of one of the few animal behaviorists who do study crows in a methodologically sound, scientific way.

Telephone Company Unfair

2011-03-25T21:52:00.000-04:00

From Rip Payne's 1940s

Mid-spring in the Valley, 2001

2011-03-21T17:00:00.001-04:00

The lady of the house where we used to buy organic eggs, poultry and meat allowed me to take a picture of the family's aprons out to dry on one warm, breezy afternoon. The Yoders were (they've moved since, and another family of Brethren has taken over the farm) Beechy Amish Mennonites, one family of a community of Anabaptists around Stuart's Draft, Virginia. The Stuart's Draft Beechy Amish have ties with the Cold Springs, South Carolina community I worked with around the same time. I have more documentary photos of the that community.

Michael Bradley Jeter

2011-03-21T16:30:00.001-04:00

From south carolina fieldwork photos

This is a striking roadside memorial near Newberry, South Carolina in 1988. I photographed the angel during folklife fieldwork I was then doing in the "Up Country" for the South Carolina Arts Commission. From what I can tell, from, frankly, not a whole lot of research, Jeter was a local athlete who was killed in a car accident some years earlier. (There is a memorial fund set up in his name at Westview Behavioral Services in Newberry.)

October the 30th, 1800

2011-03-18T10:16:00.000-04:00

Another letter in my family's hidden trove: this from my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Guthrie in 1800 to his father-in-law, Bethaniah Hodgkinson of Burlington, New Jersey. Hodgkinson's father, my fifth-great-grandfather, was a clergyman from Dublin, Ireland named Peter Amis Hodgkinson.

Warrenton May 22, 1861

2011-03-15T21:29:00.003-04:00

This is one of the letters I found in my father's garage a few weeks after he shot himself. (In two boxes of letters, records, photographs, and genealogies of several branches of the family, assembled in the 1910s by a maiden great-aunt Annie Granger Day.) This is the letter by which I discovered that my great-great-grandfather was a Yankee.

The letter is to Dr. Douglas Day of Zanesville, Ohio from his younger sister Jennie, of Warrenton, Virginia.

I have broken the text into paragraphs not in the original, for ease of reading:

Warrenton May 22, 1861

My Dear Brother___

We were surprised and grieved to see by a paper which (sic) was received yesterday from John Douglas, the announcement of your appointment as surgeon in one of the Ohio regiments. ____

It cannot be that you are leagued (sic) with those miserable abolitionists who thirst for our blood & will never be satisfied unless they obtain it. You cannot willingly resign your native state __ the land that gave you birth & take up arms with as merciless a foe against us.

I know your situation is a trying one, but do you not think it best to come home & try for an appointment in the Southern Army.

The southerners are so exasperated with the treatment they have received from the North, that I think it almost impossible that any good feeling can exist between them.

When do you think (?) and I could come. I want to se Annie so much __ I will send her a little flag & you must put it on a little staff for her. I would do it myself, but am afraid those vigilant “Lincolnites” might examine the contents of my letter. Tell her it is the flag under which she must march.

Warrenton is full of strangers; persons who have run away from Washington & Alexandria have taken refuge here. Troops are constantly passing through, & companies are stationed here.

The people are all alive & are ready for action; if blood the Yankees must have, they will have to pay dearly for it.

Henry has been in the regular service six weeks__Alec is very anxious to join Cap’t. (Man, Marr’s ?) company, but Ma thinks he is rather young.

I cannot believe that report is correct that you intend to go in opposition to the wishes of your dearest friends, & fight hand in hand with your brothers. There is an alternative. You must choose one thing or the other. If you have joined the Northern Army you will never be able to come here again with any satisfaction. You will be our enemy ___ Why could you not remain neutral until Jennie is able to travel& then leave Ohio forever __

Write and give us a correct account, if the information about your acceptance of the appointment is incorrect. I would like to write more, but it is time for the mail to close.

With the hope of soon hearing from you I remain as ever,

Your devoted sister,

Jennie

God grant that you may chose the right side, which is ours, & (she must?) prevail.

Great-great-aunt Betty

2011-03-10T10:59:00.005-05:00

This is my great-great-grandmother Virginia Turner's far prettier little sister Betty, who married Robert Granger. The Grangers were Douglas and Virginia's closest friends in Zanesville, Ohio.

The Day's eldest daughter, born in Zanesville, was named Annie Granger Day. She seems to be the one who gathered all this stuff together and did a genealogy around the turn of the 20th century. I found all the letters and photos in a box in my dad's garage after his suicide.

Douglas courted and married Virginia in Zanesville in the 1850s. The Turners, originally from Fauquier County, Virginia, had moved to Zanesville in the '40s. Virginia's father, also a doctor, had a practice there. I have the lectures he gave at the University of Pennsylvania. Apparently, Douglas studied under him; though his degree is from U. Va., he earned additional certificates from Penn.

Granger became a general in the Union army.

Spring is coming soon.

2011-03-09T19:49:00.002-05:00

I took this picture in 2001, while working part-time as the Ag Section reporter for the local newspaper, the News Virginian. I learnt Photoshop and scanning from film negatives there. Also had a helluva good time getting to know all the local farmers and families. The standing joke was what kind of animal shit I would have on my boots when I came in to write my pieces. At least I could get away with wearing jeans and boots, long as I wore a tie. I later worked courts and police beats. Also very interesting, but I had to dress nicer.

Lucretia Guthrie Day

2011-03-09T15:21:00.006-05:00

This is a photograph of my great-great-great-grandmother, Lucretia Guthrie Day.

Lucretia lost a son, Alexander, in the war. He was the baby of the family, and everybody'd always made over him.

At age 18 he died, as a soldier in the Confederacy, during the siege of Richmond. Lucretia never recovered from her grief.

Her older sons, Henry and Douglas, had both learned to be doctors at the University of Virginia. I've seen where their rooms were on campus. My dad showed me, some 35 or 50 years ago.

Henry was an officer's surgeon for the Army of Virginia.

My great-great-grandfather Douglas held the same commission, but for the Ohio 22nd, of the Union Army.

That part hurt Lucretia, too.

Bombardier-navigator, Lt. Barbee

2010-11-11T11:09:00.004-05:00

My late father-in-law, Bob Barbee (3rd from left), as a young bombardier-navigator at Barksdale. Later, he flew over Italy. His outfit had so many casualties that before he was 25, he was the "old man."

Me at 23, 1979, Brugieres's in Howardsville.

2010-10-30T22:08:00.000-04:00

American Folklore Society meets in Nashville

2010-10-13T21:34:00.002-04:00

Here's to all my colleagues at the annual American Folklore Society, in Nashville.

I was in Nashville the LAST time AFS met there ('82. 83?), when I was still a baby folklorist, at 30, a grad student at Chapel Hill.

Mary Anne McDonald introduced me to Nick Spitzer. A very pregnant Paddy Bowman took me and Roby Cogswell to see Rufus Thomas play (canary yellow hot pants with suspenders). I saw David Whisnant flatfoot at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

The big scandal was that Dan Patterson ( esteemed and very proper folksong scholar) had grown a moustache, was seen at Tootsie's wearing BLUE JEANS, and being awfully chummy with Beverly (his future wife).

I shared a room with, like seven other UNC-CH grad students (including Mike Casey, Joseph Sobel, maybe Jim Abrahms), and slept on the floor with stereo headphones on, playing AM radio static, trying to drown out the snoring.

Got thrown out of the lobby after a drunken early morning blues jam with David Evans and Barry Lee Pearson---Henry Glassie intervened with the concierge so we didn't get thrown out of the hotel altogether.

The best part was that we were sharing the hotel with a national convention of cattle inseminators (lots of jokes about the secret handshake).

Vagabonds, late '40s

2010-09-28T23:39:00.004-04:00

OK, name THESE Virginia Vagabonds. Note the electrically-amplified mandolin, piano, and drum kit. Hint: this photo ( by Rip Payne) is displayed at a prominent business on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall. Bonus points: What event was it that they were performing for?

Virginia Vagabonds

2010-09-27T10:38:00.002-04:00

Name the original Virginia Vagabonds.

Cap't. Larsen's garage

2010-09-26T00:57:00.004-04:00

Click to see slideshow of photos:

From New Album 9/26/10 12:30 AM

Daniel Womack, blind gospel singer, guitarist

2010-09-25T12:31:00.002-04:00

This is a photo I took at the Ferrum Folklife Festival in 1976 or 1977 of my friend and mentor, Daniel Womack. Womack was a blind gospel singer and "Piedmont-style" guitarist who lived near the Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia. When I met him, he had recently retired after working at the hotel as a dishwasher for many years. Kip Lornell introduced me to Daniel, and I spent many hours visiting him in his neat little apartment, listening to him play and sing and witness. I studied Daniel's repertoire and playing style, and wrote several undergrad papers on him. What a gentle gentleman he was! I still miss him. (For recordings of Daniel Womack, look up the Blue Ridge Institute's recordings of traditional music of Virginia.)

hey all

2010-08-04T17:52:00.002-04:00

I'm getting real tired of that particular picture of me on my blog reminding me that I haven't posted anything since May, except for the fact that now it's in the 100's, and I remember how cold it was that day. The summer Shenandoah Blues Fest at the Frontier Culture Museum (!) is coming up. I hope this one is more comfortable that the festival in May.

I haven't been writing much, and not playing out at all since shortly after this May gig.

I have for several months been primary caregiver for my wife's mom--who is about 8 years into Alzheimer's chéz Day--we have had "issues" with trying to find suitable hired help, just to give me--and Sally and Emily--some well-needed respite.

Anybody who's done this knows what the job entails, so I won't be posting blow-by-blow accounts. But it should be on that TV show about crappy jobs. On the other hand, it is often just as funny. It is what it is.

Sally will be traveling all over the world this fall (South and Central America, West Africa, Asia), so I'll be holding the fort alot.

I resolve to record more music to share on this blog, for my own sanity's sake!

Chant for me, baby!

Bo Carter's Policy Man

2010-05-11T22:14:00.001-04:00

Bad Luck Blues

2010-05-11T22:04:00.003-04:00

Shenandoah Blues Fest

2010-05-08T11:50:00.002-04:00

Hey. I'm playing a 7:20 slot today, in theory, give or take an hour. Come see. It'll be new for me, too. I've never actually BEEN to a blues festival before. What to wear?

The weather is fantastic. I am celebrating cutting down a locust that was destroying an early 19th century brick wall. I have also begun stripping the wall of ivy and some other noxious, invasive, non-native vines and weeds. Great exercise.

Poor Boy/Boogie Woogie Dance/Dark is the Night

2010-05-05T22:56:00.001-04:00

Bad Luck Blues/Blue Sky Avenue

2010-05-05T22:51:00.002-04:00

Blind Lemon Jefferson's Bad Luck Blues, followed by Blue Sky Avenue.

Country Blues medley in G tuning (John Hurt's Casey, John Henry, Gen. Lee's Surrender)

2010-05-05T22:45:00.002-04:00

key of F

2010-03-09T20:36:00.002-05:00

Just a note about upcoming gigs. Finally hired a decent "grammy-sitter" and have a little more freedom. Have set up a little studio here on the Stuart Hall campus, and am recording some songs. Teaching a few lessons. I'll be posting here more often, prolly.

Been working on a bunch of stuff in the key of F: Big Bill Broonzy's "I'm a Southern Man"; the 19th century Irish ballad, "Bold Robert Emmett," which has a local Virginian historical connection; and a medley of other instrumentals---including 18th century Scottish lute piece, "I Wish I Were Where Sweet Helen Lies." There's great story in that ballad, involving jealousy, a botched murder, and revenge, but it goes on WAY too long to sing.

THIS FRIDAY, Mar. 12 at 8-ish at the Darjeeling Cafe in Staunton. Two full sets.

Friday, Mar. 26, 8-ish at the Mudhouse in Crozet. Two full sets.

Friday, April 9th, 7-ish at the Stone Soup in Waynesboro. Two full sets.

Still negotiating for the Batesville Store in April. Outdoor gigs! Yahoo!

The New Me

2009-10-08T10:37:00.002-04:00

Since I've taken to sleeping with a CPAP attached to my face (a breathing apparatus to cure apnea), I expect to have a complete personality make-over.

I have 40-some years of sleep deficit to make up for. This should clear up my snoring, lower my blood pressure, banish depression, unfog foggy thinking, unleash creativity, etc.

Or not. I slept 10 hours last night. We'll see.

Archie Green, RIP

2009-03-30T10:42:00.006-04:00

Click the title of this post to read the NYT obit for Archie's obit.

Archie was the guiding light for the creation of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in 1976.

Please join us in the word of mouth effort to create, in Archie's honor, a new Federal Writer's Project to document the experiences and viewpoints of everyday Americans during the current upheaval.

News: We've moved!

2009-01-22T13:22:00.003-05:00

Here's the latest. As of the first of the year, my old website and email address are no more. My family and I have moved to Staunton, where my wife works, and now a lot of stuff on this blog is out of date.

I reckon most of the links to Picasa slide shows and YouTube videos still work. But I've had to move the my mp3s and personal stuff to a new Google website. Here's the link.

Come see me play on the first Fridays at the Stone Soup Bookstore in Waynesboro, VA. I like the grown-up suppertime gigs! Home when my wife's still awake, and I don't smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke like in the old days.

As I can get the time, I'll update all the old, dead links on this page. In the meantime, visit the new website.

Slim Eppinger, Fats Hardy, Thomas Bumpas, et al

2008-06-03T17:21:00.005-04:00

Here is another video snippette from fieldwork and documentary projects I've conducted over the past 30 years or so. It's on YouTube here.

This is part of the Ninth Street Revival project in Chattanooga in 1994 (see earlier post).

I'll put a link to (a fully-mixed and professionally recorded) mp3 of the concert later. Check out Slim Eppinger, an important blues and R&B and soul guitarist in Chattanooga.

You can also go to my website and find a pdf file of a semi-scholarly/general-reader magazine article I wrote, "Doing Fine on Big Nine," from ETSU's Now and Then Magazine.

One big connection with Virginia and all this Black music from Chattanooga is that many of these guys played in Virginia, at clubs and frat parties, during their bands' heyday. They played colleges all up and down the mid-Atlantic. Easter's Weekend at U.Va. would not have been the same without the Coachmen or the Inclines in the 1960s, or later groups into the '70s. Clyde Stubblefield played drums for James Brown in University Hall back in the day.

Ninth Street Revival Chattanooga

2008-05-27T18:53:00.012-04:00

View Album

Get your own

From around the turn of the 20th Century until roughly 1970, old Ninth Street in Chattanooga (now Martin Luther King Boulevard) was a hot bed of Black musical innovation and small business entrepreneurship. From the days when young Bessie Smith sang and danced on the street in the 1890s, until the 1960s, when a national policy of "urban renewal meant Negro removal," as the folk saying goes, old Ninth Street was an oasis of African American culture in the region. (The "urban renewal" movement in southern cities during mid-century thus takes its place alongside the Trail of Tears and the removal of farmers for the TVA lakes as another devastating social and cultural upheaval in the name of "progress.")

In the early 1990s, a small group of local non-profits and African American musicians participated in a fieldwork, documentary and performance project called "The Ninth Street Revival." Local musicians remembered and told stories about "Big Nine," and about the community of Black musicians whose classical, blues, jazz, jump, swing, big-band and combo, soul and funk music embodied and defined a folk cultural milieu for thousands of Southern colored people, Negroes, Blacks and African Americans, through the eras of Jim Crow and the Black Power movement.

The Ninth Street Revival project was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. My salary was paid for by Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga. Partners included the Chattanooga African American Museum and the Mary Walker Foundation.

Just some of the musicians: Willie "Poppa" Stubbs, "Dog" Davis, "Slim" Eppinger, Marvin and Lenell Glass, Vivian Lee, Johnny Starr, Gene Covington, Clyde Stubblefield, the Gospel Inspirers, Skin Deep, the Gospel Songbirds, and many others.

I'm going to start uploading scores of photos and music samples from this project to this blog, and to my website over the next few weeks. (the first picture I uploaded is me on the left, next to guitarist Slim Eppinger, soul singer Johnny Starr, and band leader and trombonist Willie "Poppa" Stubbs, and was taken by the late Reggie Days, a gifted amateur photographer from Chattanooga.)

In the meantime, read the article, "Doin' Fine on Big Nine," in Now and Then, The Appalachian Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 2, published by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, East Tennessee State University, Summer, 1995.

Hellfire and banjoes

2008-03-26T14:34:00.012-04:00

The last two clips from my fieldwork videos from 1988-91:

Excerpt #14: Taped at a revival meeting at the Boiling Springs Baptist Church, Cherokee County. Unidentified preacher. I have many times used this clip as an illustration of oral narrative and what folklorists call "formulaic composition" in traditional southern mountain sermon style. Like African American sermon style, traditional Appalachian "shouted" sermonizing is often misread by the uninitiated as "angry." This style of preaching goes back, in both Black and Anglo traditions, at least to the Second Great Awakening.

Excerpt #15: Banjo player Hobby Whitener, with gospel piano player Ruby Russell. The two are neighbors in Marble, North Carolina. I'm on the far left on guitar, and local tree surgeon Scott Ferguson, on my left, plays fiddle. This is a program we put together for public school teachers from Chattanooga.

When Suzy Was a Baby; 100 year old quilts

2008-03-25T12:02:00.008-04:00

JCCFS fieldwork excerpt #4. (See other video posts below for more information).

Segment #11: Martin's Creek Elementary School third-graders demonstrate children's folk rhyming game "When Suzy was a Baby."

Segment #12: I visited 94-year-old master quilter Blanche Conley Young, her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter in Maryville, Tennessee. Mrs. Young was originally from Peachtree, North Carolina.

Mountain looms; shaped notes; split-oak baskets; bluegrass

2008-03-24T17:54:00.010-04:00

Installment #3 of fieldwork from a three-year residency as a folklorist at the Campbell Folk School.

Excerpt #8: Wilma Hatchett McNabb, at age 94 the winner of the 1990 North Carolina Folk Heritage Award. Mrs. McNabb had learned to weave as a small girl on the old mountain loom of her mother's, but became a serious weaver in the early years of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and the craft revival of the 1920s-30s.

Excerpt #9: The Tuesday Night Singing at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Hanging Dog, North Carolina. The group was a remnant of the Cherokee County Singing Convention, which disbanded in 1948, and included several veteran shaped-note gospel song leaders.

Excerpt #10: Bill and Bonnie Barker of Upper Peachtree, North Carolina. Bill was the last traditional maker of split-oak baskets in Cherokee County, having learned from his mother and his father-in-law.

Excerpt #11: The Mashburn Brothers bluegrass band, of Union County, Georgia, at a benefit concert at the Hanging Dog Community Center. With banjoist Don Fox of Hiawassee, Georgia, and fiddler Red Roberts, originally of Owl Creek, North Carolina.

Woodcarvers; left-handed fiddler; metal men; banjo-playing women

2008-03-23T15:48:00.007-04:00

More video excerpts from fieldwork in western North Carolina, east-central Tennessee and north Georgia, 1988-91, while I was working on grants from the NEA and the NC Arts Council:

Segment #5: Ray Mann, one of the original Brasstown Carvers, and one of the last of his generation of Carvers, at his home in Warne. NC.

Segment #6: Ross Brown, old-time north Georgia fiddler, at his home in Hiawassee, Georgia. The tune is "Sweet Marie."

Segment #7: Adam Ledford, of Jack Rabbit, NC. Folk artist, metal sculptor, and shade tree mechanic. Ledford's elaborate and fanciful scrap-metal men and animals were displayed at the Knoxville World's Fair.

Segment #8: Roberta Voyles, banjo, and John Debty, guitar, Marble, NC. Roberta and John, brother and sister, learned to play from their father and his friends, who had an old-time string band that played dances throughout Cherokee County and beyond (though Roberta, being a good girl, was not allowed to attend).

long-bow fiddler; culture worker; Leatherwood singers

2008-03-22T07:55:00.008-04:00

This is the first of several video clips I'll be posting, excerpts from fieldwork I did while folklorist-in-residence at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina. All the original documentary materials from those years are archived at the Folk School, which is right on the North Carolina-Georgia-Tennessee border in what used to be called "the Southern Highlands" of Appalachia. I'll gradually add more detailed commentary about each clip.

Segment #1: Ben Entrekin, fiddle, with Sam White, guitar. Ben was a champion fiddler at the Knoxville World's Fair, and was the son-in-law of the legendary Cherokee fiddler, Manco Sneed.

Segment #2: An interview with Margaret Campbell at her home in Gatlinburg, TN. Ms. Campbell was instrumental in the craft revival of the 1930s, helping to start the Brasstown Carvers. Here she shows two carvings in her personal collection, by Tom Brown of Pleasant Hill, Tennessee. These carvings are featured in the Allen Eaton's 1937 survey, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, which was funded and published by the Russell Sage Foundation. The book also included the iconic photography of Doris Ulmann.

Segment #3: The Leatherwood Singers of Peachtree, North Carolina. This clip includes three generations of the gospel-singing family.

Singing and Praying Band in Kent Co., MD

2008-03-12T22:32:00.010-04:00

From the Maryland Eastern Shore: photos from fieldwork on the Delmarva Peninsula in 2001: Mt. Olive AME Church, Kent County. The event was a reunion during revival week, and a visit from another Maryland church.

This particular event was a special song service, a revival of an old practice that had died out on the Shore in living memory, but has continued in a few congregations in Maryland on the western side of the Chesapeake: the "singing and praying band." It is a special worship service that includes ceremonial aspects that are surprisingly similar to the well-documented "ring shout" of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands.

Many Black congregations and communities on the Eastern Shore are among the oldest continuous Black communities in the United States. This service took place only a few miles from the plantation where Harriett Tubman came of age as a slave.

There are also families on the Shore who trace their ancestry to colonial free Black communities. Some in the Virginia counties claim descent from Black families who had never been enslaved, but were, back in the 17th Century, formerly-indentured servants who themselves owned slaves.

I was hired to document the event by the Kent County Arts Council. I also have digital and analog audio, and video footage. For more information see my website.

Fieldwork Photography from SC, 2000-2002

2008-03-11T07:36:00.002-04:00

Here is a Picasa slideshow of photos from fieldwork I did over the course of a couple of years before I started working in Charlottesville in 2002. At the time, I was doing a lot of contract fieldwork, mostly for the South Carolina Arts Commission. I 've also done similar work for the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Federation, and other such-like organizations.

For more on the SC projects, visit my original website. There's a pdf of a published report on my folk cultural survey of Edgefield, Abbeville, Greenwood and McCormick Counties. Other photos are from Columbia, and Lexington County. (Originals all on file in Columbia.)

decent Xtian songs for kids?

2008-03-09T09:03:00.000-04:00

I'm about to go do one of my favorite things, which is taking my guitar to St. John's Episcopal Church to play and sing for the little guys' Sunday School class. The 4-7 year olds are a great audience, though their attention span is, like, 3 seconds.

I find the repertoire for kids rather limited, though. I cannot abide any of the insipid Jesus music written in recent decades, but prefer all the old folk songs and spirituals, and the occasional English hymn.

Any suggestions? I'm desperate, since my own attention span is only marginally better than the kids'.

Good morning, central Virginia!

2008-03-07T08:00:00.003-05:00

Hey all:

All of a sudden with a lot of time on my hands . . .

I will be spending a lot of time in coming weeks getting my own archival files and folklore collections in order. In particular, I'm going to begin digitizing all my old Hi-8 video footage from fieldwork in Tennessee and Maryland's Eastern Shore. Also, some VHS footage from North Carolina and Georgia. Then I'm going to start posting highpoints of the video on YouTube, and embed mp4s on my website, formerly the site of the Southern Council for Folk Culture.

And playing guitar.

That picture of me playing the old 12-string dobro is, by the way, from last year's Spirit Walk in Charlottesville. I'm in character as 1920s cowboy singer Billy Vest, who hailed from Afton, Virginia, and recorded on Columbia Records back in the day. He had an amazing story. He met and played with Jimmie Rodgers; the Carter Family; Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett and the Skillet Likkers; Darby and Tarleton, and was even in the movies with Gene Autry and played in his band.

Normally I wear my boots inside my pants. And that 1970s leather pimp jacket from Mexico I'll never wear ever again, I promise. Mostly because it got rained on and shrank, which didn't improve its looks any.