From old-timey musicians, Bob Fulcher discovers and records the music of our heritage
by Joe Tarr
Lou Wilson is fretting, pacing her house near Cumberland Gap, as Bob Fulcher sets up a reel-to-reel tape recorder on her living room floor. As he unwinds electrical chords, sets up microphones and fiddles with dials, Wilson protests that she doesn't know why in the world he'd want to make such a fuss over an old lady. But for Fulcher, who works for the Tennessee State Parks, this is heaven.
Once he gets his equipment ready, Fulcher has Wilson sit down and then plies her with questions about her life.
She was born in January 1930. When she was a little girl, her parents went to manage the Cumberland Hotel and guests would ask her to sing to them. She tells about wanting to play a guitar when she was a teenager to see if she could get good enough to sit in with the grown-ups, who would play together at her grandmother's house. She doubts her own memories. "Bobby, that was 68 years ago," she says. Fulcher's voice is soft, but his enthusiasm is hard to contain—he clutches at every detail, none of them seemingly mundane. What did people call things then? Which verses of "Cumberland Gap" does she remember?—the one about the fleas?
Finally, Fulcher coaxes Wilson to pick up her guitar. Her boney hands strum against the strings; no virtuoso, but her playing is nevertheless natural and good. With her niece accompanying her, she covers material several hundred years old ("Pretty Fair Maiden All Out in A Garden") and just a couple of decades young (J.J. Cale's "Call Me The Breeze").
But what particularly grabs Fulcher today is hearing Lou sing old a cappella ballads. For some of them, like "House Carpenter," she can only remember a verse or two, but the words come a little bit like an apparition, the last faint whispers of a culture no one remembers, but everyone recognizes.
Wilson first heard these songs not from records or song sheets or in school, but by listening to her grandmother sing, unaccompanied.
"I liked mournful old songs. We'd sit out on the porch 'cause it was too hot to sleep. We didn't have air conditioning. Granny would sing me these old songs," Wilson says.
Asked if she can remember why she started singing and playing music, Wilson is at a loss to explain. Why wouldn't you sing, she seems to be thinking, but she doesn't quite say it. "I just like to sing. From the time I can remember, I'd climb up on the piano and pick a tune. Everybody used to sing out in the field.... I don't know why, but everybody used to sing."
A musician, folklorist and park ranger, Fulcher's spent a good bit of the past 30 years traveling around Tennessee, Kentucky and other parts of the country, searching out people like Wilson. They're the last remnants of an oral culture that has all but vanished from America. He's made thousands of field recordings of performances and interviewed people about the music and their family history.
"Maybe it's a naïve or simplistic view of art, but I think these works of art have permanent value," Fulcher says. "They clearly have historical value. Compositions like that aren't being created now, maybe can't be or won't be. But I think there will always be beauty there accessible to some people; inaccessible to others. I think they are important to be held onto and listened to."
Old-time music has many different definitions. The definition used for this story is somewhat broad: It is the largely rural music that was being made up to and slightly after the recording music industry blossomed in the late '20s and early '30s. This includes blues, folk, ballad singing and gospel forms circulating at the time. These forms would become the basis, at least in part, for rock 'n' roll, modern blues, country and bluegrass.
Some of the songs in circulation then were hundreds of years old, ballads that were brought from Great Britain and altered over the years. Others were urban show tunes that circulated via sheet music. Many people wrote their own songs.
Recording technology and mass culture changed music in ways that may be impossible to fully understand. But, for much of the 20th century, you could catch glimpses of what the music was like, if you knew where to look.
Growing up in Texas and Florida, Fulcher was like most kids of the '60s and '70s, interested in rock 'n' roll and folk music. He moved to Knoxville in 1971 to attend the University of Tennessee. While here, he went to the Jubilee Center (now the Laurel Theatre) to get guitar lessons, and heard another student getting a banjo lesson. Soon afterward, he ordered a banjo and was taking lessons.
His vocation as a folklorist was born when a friend took him along to interview some old-time musicians from Cades Cove. "It really appealed to me, the romance of it, the idea of meeting people from a region that knew this wonderful music and could teach me tunes to play," Fulcher says. "You can go up to people you don't know if you're a musician and get them to play music for you. All the stuff you hear about people [from rural areas] being suspicious and mean just didn't apply to that situation."
Since then, he's recorded a number of amazing people. He's made recordings for both the Library of Congress archives and the State Library and Archives in Nashville.
Of the people that Fulcher brought attention to, a few stand out.
Two of them are Dee and Delta Hicks, whom Fulcher met in 1976. Fulcher approached their house with his banjo, thinking it would explain the nature of his visit.
The "angelic" Dee was more than happy to oblige and played him several songs. "I was just about to leave and his wife said, 'I'll sing you a song,'" Fulcher recalls. The song was an old style-English ballad, sung unaccompanied.
It was a revelation. The couple (Dee in particular), knew almost 400 old-style ballads. "That's more than anyone ever contributed to our knowledge of Anglo-American folk songs. Evidently, [Dee] was the last of the great, mighty singers who could walk around with hundreds of these songs in his head. Yet, he couldn't read or write.
"The style is similar to the way people sang 400 years ago, I imagine," Fulcher adds. "Dee would get on his wife because she would sing in a style I would date to about 1880. He'd say, 'She won't let it linger.' She sang on the beat like you would with accompaniment. In these songs, the space between the notes is crucial."
Many of the songs related to the Hicks family history, or how they saw their place in the world. Songs dealt with death and love and hunting, the family trade. One song that Dee sang, "Jim and Nancy," was 20 minutes long. "When he sang, 'Old Bangum,' the words flowing out of his mouth are hundreds of years old and Dee couldn't even write his name," he says. "When Dee sang about somebody dying you really could imagine that this is the way of reacting to someone dying. There was just a quietness about it."
Dee died in 1982; Delta in 1988.
Fulcher has also worked with many instrumental musicians, who played banjo, fiddle, and guitar in styles that aren't quite as old as Dee's.
There are many things that make this music stand out. One of them is the reliance on the spoken word. Another is the way people learned to play the music.
"In learning traditional arts in the Southern mountains, it's different from the apprentice system or folk school that exists in other cultures. There's rarely any methodology. The expectation is the student will watch and learn. Without rote learning, you don't get exact replication. Whereas our schools praise innovation but often teach by rote. Innovation wasn't always praised [in Appalachian traditions], but always occurred...because they weren't learning by precise repetition. So everything emerges in wonderful variations that flower and bloom."
As much as Fulcher has documented the music of a by-gone era, he's also documented the culture. Retta and Oren Spradlin, a brother and sister that lived in Bell Farm, Ky., lived in a house without electricity or water. "They didn't want to be better than their parents," Fulcher says. Retta played banjo and sang in a high-pitched, mournful voice that many people would cringe at; but to others it's sheer beauty.
"Hearing her sing is like getting hooked up to some electrical device....you'd get goose bumps from head to foot," says Fulcher.
Virgil Anderson, a banjo player, was heavily influenced by African-American musicians. He played extensively with Cuge Bertram, an eminent black fiddle player. Anderson's playing is wildly improvisational, speeding up and slowing down, going off on tangents here and there. Some musicians consider his playing second only to Doc Boggs in the blues style. "He played an entirely unique banjo style, where he has licks no one else was using. His devotion to the blues was just genius," Fulcher says.
Bertram himself was believed to be dead, but Fulcher tracked him down in the early '80s living in Indianapolis. He could no longer play, but his memory was sharp. "Like meeting so many of these other folks, so often you're surprised at that generation's skill in delivering memories, their skill in communicating, their artfulness in speaking. It was obviously a generation where verbal skills were equal with literacy."
Fulcher is wary of the way some romanticize Appalachia as an isolated region where people led quaint "backward" lives. The Hicks' experience—being unable to read or write, memorizing hundreds of songs—is not typical of 20th century Appalachia. But the region allowed some to live similar to how their ancestors had in the 19th century. Still, even those people were far from backwards. "Dee, he could go outside and show you more than a dozen constellations. He knew his world. He knew the names of everything around him—insects, animals, flowers," Fulcher says.
Fulcher's relationship with the musicians is a little different than those of other folklorists. He's ended up touring with many of them, taking them to New York City, Washington D.C., folk festivals, as well as Knoxville.
Other musicians he's worked with include the Troxell brothers; Bob Douglas (the 101-year-old fiddler from Chattanooga who died last year); Clyde Davenport (a fiddler who is still living and performing—"His repertoire of these solo fiddle tunes, 19th century style, is very unusual for a man of his age"); and Blind Richard Burnett (famous for penning "Man of Constant Sorrow"). Fulcher has also helped collect a series of old fiddle records made by the influential Fiddlin' John Sharp—"He played with enormous energy, explosive energy, which was not that common among Southern folk; it's more common for Irish fiddlers. But out of these bow triplets would come these sweeping notes."
Of course, Fulcher doesn't have any illusion that this music will ever be widely distributed or popular. Most of what he's recorded he says probably will interest only a few thousand people in the world.
"This music stands on its own. It's beautiful apart from all that [historical significance]. There will always be people who recognize the beauty in it. I know that because I wasn't connected to it myself, and I hear the beauty in it."
It's after dark on a Monday night in Pikeville and Fulcher has lost the directions to the home of a man named Earl Bridgeman. But he thinks he can find his house without them. Stop and ask if you can't find it, Bridgeman had told him, everyone knows who I am. The house, it turns out, is easy to find.
Bridgeman is well known in these parts, but he probably isn't as well known as his father was. Called "Shorty" Bridgeman, his father was a notable fiddler in his day, an African American who played old-time string music. He was born in 1908 and died in 1968. Earl Bridgeman says he still gets people asking if he's Shorty's son. He tells Fulcher that, when he was a boy, musicians would come over and play with his dad. They'd have fish fries, sit on the porch, drink and make music. Fulcher asks him what songs his dad used to play. He'll sing a line of one—"Smoke Behind the Clouds," Stormy Monday," "Old Black Joe"—and suddenly Bridgeman's mind will jog, and he'll continue the song.
Bridgeman didn't care much for the fiddle when he was a kid, but he liked the harmonica and guitar. It wasn't long before he was playing them on his own, favoring the blues over his father's music.
After reminiscing for several hours, Bridgeman plays a couple of songs on his electric guitar, including a bluesy version of George Gershwin's "Summertime."
Bridgeman clearly reveres his father. His house sits next to his parent's old one, where his mother planted trees and his father used to sit and play the fiddle. "People used to come to the house and ask him to play. He'd get that fiddle and tune up. They always said 'Shorty's the best.'
"Just before he passed, I came home and my little brother said, 'Man, you ought to hear daddy play 'St. Louis Blues,''" Bridgeman says. "It was the sweetest thing I ever heard."
December 4, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 49
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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