Valuing and De-Valuing Appalachian Music

Abstract

RESPONSE Valuing and De-Valuing Appalachian Music Jeff Todd Titon Bill Malone's paper offers a historian's view of the Appalachian myth as expressed in music that is taken and sometimes mistaken for Appalachian music. In so writing he is following a tradition in American intellectual history usually termed the "myth-symbol school." It goes back at least to 1950 and Virgin Land, in which Henry Nash Smith contrasted the 19th-century mythic idea of the western United States with the reality; and it shows up prominently in Appalachian studies in Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind. Bill's conclusion, that the reality of Appalachian music will be, when discovered by the historian, far more interesting than the myth, is the outcome of this rhetorical strategy. Yet the reality of Appalachian music is not news to those of us who know it through experience. Loyal Jones has known that reality all his life. As I see it, Loyal Jones's work in Appalachian music is important for at least three reasons. First, whereas most people are interested in Appalachian music for reasons of its beauty and antiquity, Loyal insists that there is such a thing as an Appalachian culture and that Appalachian music be understood as an expression of cultural values. Second, while most people interested in Appalachian music have, as Bill Malone eloquently showed in his talk, been captivated by a romantic myth that elevated the old songs and devalued the newer commercial Jeff Todd Titon teaches at Brown University where he directs the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology. In 1990 he was Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Currently he is collaborating with John Wallhausser, professor of religion and philosophy at Berea College, and with Elwood Cornett, moderator of the Indian Bottom Association, Old Regular Baptists, on a documentary recording of Old Regular Baptist singing. 81 music, commodification does not prevent Loyal from appreciating and supporting all kinds of Appalachian music, for he understands the profound truth that Appalachian music is music made by Appalachian people, and that musicians have the same right to make money as anyone else. That has meant that he has supported the artists as well as the amateur researchers and the scholars and the whole enterprise of musicmaking in Appalachia. Third, in the Appalachian Center Sound Archive he has built an important collection of Appalachian music of all kinds. This collection is moving to the Weatherford-Hammond Collection at the Hutchins Library here at Berea College where it will be well cared for, and certainly it deserves to be, for many of its holdings, particularly in the areas of Old Baptist hymnody and in old-time fiddle tunes, constitute the finest field recording collections of their kind in Kentucky. I want to speak for the rest of my allotted time about Loyal's ideas of music and cultural values. How does music express values? When people make music they both express and construct ways of being in the world or, in other words, cultural values, in two ways. First, the sung word, and even the sung melody, distills cultural wisdom and enacts lived experience—values—what we have gone through, what we expect, what we think the world is like, how we act and how we ought to act, what we need and how we treat others and how we want to be treated, what and whom we love and, above all, our ecstasies within this great mysterious, spiritual experience we call human life. And second, the ways people come together to make music in any culture tell us a great deal about our lives as social beings. When an Old Regular Baptist tells me she prefers singing, in church with the rest, the old songs of Zion to attending a symphony concert, I think about how democratic Old Regular singing is compared to the hierarchy of the symphony, and I understand her statement not only because I agree with it, but because I know it expresses a preference for egalitarian and participatory values—to say nothing of the value of worship. Music, then, expresses values by distilling and representing lived experience, and in so doing it constructs...