Blacks, whites and Southern old-time music

When Sparky and Rhonda Rucker played a Prairie Grapevine concert recently at Springfield's Unitarian Universalist church, they combined southern Appalachian and African American musical traditions. But they were following in a tradition that's literally as old as the hills. Well, at least the people from outside who came to the hills, black and white alike, and displaced the Cherokee people who had been living there originally. We think of Appalachian culture as being Scots-Irish, the source of modern "redneck" America, but it's more complex than that.

"Unfortunately, when people think of Southern Appalachian music, they often neglect to recognize that there have been plenty of African Americans in Southern Appalachia since the 1600s, and that these eople have made their own contribution to what we think of as Southern Appalachian culture today," Rhonda Rucker wrote in the liner notes to their 2007 CD The Mountains Above and the Valleys Below. "Without these 'Affricalachians,' we would be without such gems as 'John Henry,' 'John Hardy,' and all the Brer Rabbit tales. And where would Southern Appalachian music be without the banjo, which of course has its origins in West Africa."

Sacred music, of course, was influenced heavily by the camp meetings of the 1800s, which were attended by blacks and whites alike. is especially But we also find the African American influence in songs like "C.C. Rider" and "Reuben's Train." Sparky and Rhonda say "C.C. Rider" originally stood for "Country Circuit Rider," by the way. I've been hearing "C.C. Rider" since Chuck Willis' version was on the R&B charts in 1957, and I never knew that. Rhonda said the heritage is mixed more often than not.

"There are some instances in which a particular song has a predominantly white or predominantly black origin, but in many cases, the two traditions are often inextricable," she writes. "For example, in researching a song that people often associated with the 'white tradition,' we would find numerous sources that told how African Americans had been singing the song for so long that it was unclear who first sang the song (and vice versa)."



According to Alan Jabbour, old-time southern Appalachian fiddle virtuoso and former director of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, the influence runs deep. Here's how he explained it in a lecture on "Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier" at Indiana State University in 2001. He said as he collected fiddle tunes from the upper South, especially Virginia and Maryland, he noticed they were different from Scotland, Ireland and the northern U.S.:

Many of them used bowing patterns in which were imbedded elaborate forms of syncopation. Now it should be stipulated that syncopation has many forms. Any performance that establishes one rhythmic pattern, then superimposes a different pattern in contradistinction to the original pattern, is using syncopation. But the syncopated bowing patterns of my fiddling mentors were precisely what we all think of as “American syncopation,” appearing in jazz and popular music and commonly presumed to be an African American contribution to our musical heritage.

I think Jabbour argues convincingly, both at Indiana State and elsewhere, that: (1) the influence is African American; and (2) it runs deep. Very deep. He cites his mentor in old-time fiddling, Henry Reed of West Virginia

He used this syncopated pattern constantly – so much that it can be described as imbedded in his fundamental style. It is not an added feature or an ornament, but a basic feature of his playing. One could say that he couldn’t avoid using it. One can find the same identical pattern in the playing of older fiddlers from Virginia to Texas whose style took shape before the advent of recordings and radio. Such a broad distribution among fiddlers who learned their art before the turn of the century can best be accounted for by supposing that the pattern spread with the settlement of the trans-Alleghany West during the 19th century.

While Jabbour doesn't find the same pattern of syncopation in British and northern American fiddle playing, he does find it in all kinds of African, Arabic and South Asian music. Here's his hypothesis:

Casting our net even wider, we may encounter the same precise syncopated pattern from Africa and the Mediterranean to musical styles as far away as India. But it seems clear that it came into the fiddling of the Upper South through African American influence. If one examines the historical record from the Upper South more closely, it becomes clear that the fiddle in places like Virginia was the favorite instrument of Black as well as White instrumentalists in the later 18th and early 19th century. One comparative study of runaway slave posters by banjo scholar Robert Winans notes that the instrument mentioned far more often than any other instrument in describing the capabilities of runaway slaves was the fiddle. (The Africa-derived banjo and the flute are tied for a distant second.) Fiddle and banjo continued to be central to the African American tradition of the Upper South till the end of the 19th century, when piano and guitar began to replace fiddle and banjo as the most favored instruments.

So we know that Whites and Blacks were all playing the fiddle in the Upper South during the Early Republic period. In fact, they were playing it in roughly equal numbers, and we also know from historical accounts that they were often playing it together or in each other’s presence. It was a revolutionary period, and the evidence seems to me compelling that African-American fiddlers simply added this signature syncopation to the bowing patterns on the fiddle. White fiddlers quickly embraced it, and it quickly moved from being an ethnic innovation to being a regional standard. The pattern could have been present as an abstract pattern in African tradition, and also (though quite recessively) in European tradition.
Once it had become a regional hallmark, shared by Black and White fiddlers, it spread in three ways. First, it spread directly through western migration – to a degree by Blacks but, more importantly, by Whites who had incorporated the syncopated bowing patterns into their own playing and cultural values. Second, it spread into wider popular consciousness through the minstrel stage of the 19th century. And third, African American musicians transferred the same patterns to other instruments, like guitar and piano, thus reintroducing the patterns in all the successive waves of folk-rooted popular music, including ragtime, blues, and jazz in the 20th century. By the mid-20th century it had become a general American pattern of syncopation, and by later part of the 20th century all the world would recognize the pattern as a stylistic hallmark of American music.