You may have heard that A. P. Carter could play the fiddle, but refused to do so on record because it was “the devil’s box.” And just about everyone knows Charlie Daniel’s 1979 hit song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” about a demonic fiddling contest. But here’s the question: Out of all the instruments, why is the devil so taken with the fiddle? Why not the accordion? The saxophone? I mean, surely the kazoo was born from hellfire, right?
Where there is fiddle music, though, there is often dancing, and where there is dancing, the devil is surely at play. I have stories of this in my own family – my grandmother’s Uncle Willard was very musical, but Grandma and her sisters would only dance to his music when their very religious Aunt Eugie wasn’t around to see them. The link between dancing and the devil is an old one in fact. Way back in the 4th century, St. John Chrysotom said that “where dance is, there is the devil.” Countless preachers over the centuries have espoused the same.
While the fiddle and its link to dancing was seen by many as the devil at play, the devil’s prowess with a fiddle and bow also brought inspiration. In the early 18th century, the Italian composer and violinist Giuseppe Tartini claimed that his most famous work, the “Devil’s Trill Sonata,” was delivered to him by the devil in a dream. This, of course, led to some imaginative depictions of what that might have looked like…
Illustration of the legend behind Guiseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons
Scotland’s favorite poet, Robert Burns, wrote “The Deil’s Awa Wi’ The Excise Man” a few decades later, in which the devil fiddles into town and dances off with the tax collector. The townsfolk react thusly:
In case your Scots dialect is a bit rusty…basically everyone extends their grateful thanks to the devil, for with the tax man gone, they can booze it up all they want and have a big time!
With that rollicking party in mind, here are a handful of the most devilish tunes I know:
“The Devil’s Dream”
“The Devil’s Dream” is a standard Appalachian fiddle tune. Laura Ingalls Wilder remembers hearing this tune as a child in the 1870s, so it’s probably safe to assume that it was also a familiar one to fiddlers in our region at the time of the Bristol Sessions. It originated in Scotland as “The De’l Among the Tailors,” and it was also noted in an English folk tale from the early 1800s. It is played here by the Whitetop Mountain Band (featuring Radio Bristol DJ Martha Spencer and family).
Laura Ingalls Wilder remembers her Pa playing “The Devil’s Dream” in Little House in the Big Woods. Photograph courtesy of Emily Robinson
“Did You Ever See the Devil, Uncle Joe?”
“Did You Ever See the Devil, Uncle Joe?” is another good fiddle tune. Fiddlin’ Cowan Powers and his family, who play it here, were the first family string band to record commercially…three years before the 1927 Bristol Sessions! I learned this tune as “Hop High Ladies,” and some may know it as “Miss MacLeod’s reel” – another import from the British Isles. Click on this link for an extra treat: Pipe Major Willie Ross playing both of these tunes in the early 20th century!
“Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand”
Speaking of the 1927 Bristol Sessions, here’s another devil-fueled tune recorded a decade later by Bristol Sessions artists The Carter Family: “Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand” – which just seems like good all-round advice! Spoiler alert, however: the devil DOES get the upper hand of the young man in this song and convinces him to murder his lover. This story might sound familiar if you’ve ever heard the old murder ballad “Knoxville Girl.” It’s basically the same tale, though the latter adds a lot more gruesome detail.
“The Old Lady & the Devil”
In contrast, a woman gets the upper hand of Old Scratch – and her husband! – in “The Old Lady & the Devil,” recorded by Johnson City Sessions artists Bill & Bell Reed. In this tune, a farmer happily lets the devil carry off his wife, but she raises so much hell in Hell that the devil brings her back home again. Dave Rawlings included a fantastic version of this song on his 2017 album Poor David’s Almanack… though he shortens the chorus and leaves out the bit where the woman whacks her husband with the dasher from the butter churn.
That gives you just a few of the devilish tunes out there, but I hope the music and the links between the devil and the much-loved fiddle get you in the mood for a very Happy Halloween!
I believe in the power of collaboration, a constant factor in the long process of bringing the Birthplace of Country Music Museum to life and to its grand opening in 2014.
Recently a segment I heard on an NPR program caught my attention and got me thinking again about collaboration. I must have been listening “out of one ear,” because I can’t remember the topic of the segment. What I do recall is the parable the speaker employed to illustrate his topic. It involves a group of men describing an elephant by touch in a dark room, although even here my memory is muddled. So I have turned to Google (as one does) for help. It turns out that there are many versions of the parable, but a poem by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, scholar, and mystic is closest to the story paraphrased on NPR.
Here is Rumi’s poem, as translated by Coleman Barks:
Elephant in the Dark
Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.
One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk.
“A water pipe kind of creature.”
Another, the ear. “A very strong, always moving
Back and forth, fan-animal.”
Another, the leg. “I find it still,
like a column on a temple.”
Another touches the curved back.
“A leathery throne.”
Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk.
“A rounded sword made of porcelain.”
He’s proud of his description.
Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are
how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.
If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together,
we could see it.
A 17th-century Persian manuscript illustrating Townspeople, Who Have Never Seen an Elephant, Examine Its Appearance in the Dark. Source: Walters Art Museum, acquired by Henry Walters
The elephant identification story predates Rumi by millennia, and occurs in many variations, cultures, and religions, but the moral is similar in all versions. According to Wikipedia, “at various times the parable has provided insight into the relativism, opaqueness, or inexpressible nature of truth, the behavior of experts in fields where there is a deficit or inaccessibility of information, the need for communication, and respect for different perspectives.”
In my decades as an architect, I have valued the principles of open-mindedness, good communication, and the certainty that there are more ways than one to solve a problem. These principles are the essence of collaboration.
My firm had the privilege of working with a remarkable “brain trust” assembled by the Birthplace of Country Music to help bring the museum to fruition. A plaque in the museum lobby recognizes these creative individuals and firms, each contributing in their own way to the whole. In addition to an exhibit content team of musicologists, academics, and musicians, the group included exhibit designers and museum planners, lighting and acoustical consultants, media producers, and the construction manager. Each of these was on a mission to make their particular area of influence the best it could be, and each knew that the realities of budget, scheduling, space limitations, historic preservation, and other constraints would require concessions and cooperation. These interactions were the norm, not the exception. We spent a lot of time talking and planning, debating different points, sometimes disagreeing, but always finding the best path together.
The signage in the museum listing the collaborators on the museum’s content and construction teams. Courtesy of Toni Doman
A few of those collaborative efforts, visible now to our visitors and central to their experience, come to mind. For instance, in an early design concept, the area outside of the Orientation Theater in the upstairs atrium was conceived as a front porch in a rural setting. However, as the content team developed the “story” to be told by the museum, the romantic notion of a hillbilly strumming a guitar on a cabin porch gave way to something more related to 1920s Bristol: a train station setting. We gave exhibit architect Joe Nicholson of studioMUSarx a tour of the Bristol Train Station, which was built in 1902 and in use in the 1920s, and worked with his design team to style the space as a passenger waiting room, with references to the materials and details found in our local landmark. This space illustrates the mode of travel for some of those who participated in the 1927 Bristol Sessions, but it also acts as a marker to tell the wider context of the recording sessions that came before those held in Bristol.
Another great example is the wood that was used in various areas in the museum. Several years before we began our detailed design work, a local purveyor of curly maple used in solid body guitars (Gibson guitars, in fact!) offered a gift of “seconds” of this wood for use in the museum. Fortunately, his offer was still on the table when we began to specify finish materials, and there was enough material for flooring in The Museum Store. Architect Michael Haslam, my former associate, developed a scheme to use curly maple and other “tone woods” – species used in the creation of musical instruments such as walnut or ash – for flooring and other finishes throughout the museum. While on the outside this design may just look attractive, the connection to woods used for musical instruments means that these details have deeper meaning, and our visitors are always interested to hear about these elements in the museum design.
The chapel setting in the permanent exhibits was originally conceived as a trompe l’oeil interior where a video projection created the illusion of a larger interior space showing congregants seated in rows facing a group of shape-note singers. A single pew would provide limited seating for museum visitors at the back of the setting. Two elements of the chapel design changed as the content conversations developed: the film and the setting. The creation of the film didn’t just involve filming the groups performing gospel and sacred music – the artists also shared their thoughts about how this music expresses and celebrates their belief in God, an important parallel to the sacred songs of the 1927 Bristol Sessions. Some of the artists, such as the New Harvest Brothers, also sat in on meetings once filming had ended to help us shape the film and its focus – a true collaborative effort. We wanted to share the voices of the musicians who are performing in this gospel tradition today in a respectful way and give them the opportunity to tell the story of their faith and music.
The chapel setting also changed. First, it evolved from a virtual space to a “real” one. The church that comes to mind for most people when they think about traditional sacred music is a small, white clapboard church with a steeple. There are many wonderful churches of this type in Appalachia. But this is not the only type of church architecture found in this area, and when we looked at some of the churches associated with different Bristol Sessions artists, we found a brick model that worked well for our exhibit. The Tennessee Mountaineers, a group made up of a church congregation, didn’t have their own home church at the time of the Sessions, but they later built a small brick church in Erwin, Tennessee, patterned after a brick church seen in Bristol, and it is that church that inspired the design of the museum’s small chapel exhibit. A serendipitous find by a member of the exhibit design team also resulted in the donation of antique church pews. One round trip to Philadelphia later, the pews were in Bristol ready for refurbishing, and once finished, the acoustic designer placed speakers under the pew seats to provide a physical as well as aural sensation from the soundtrack on the video.
Another great detail, again pulled together after much discussion amongst the team, is the coordinated color scheme used throughout the museum. Developed by the exhibit designers for graphics, panels, and other exhibit components, the color scheme used for walls and other architectural elements was inspired by the ideas of home and comfort, an important facet of the lives of the 1927 musicians and their audience. The designer turned to reference images on American quilt making, seeing many quilts with amazing colors made from the fabrics related to the clothes, blankets, and meals (flour sacks with labels, etc.) of these quilt makers. From these connections to the past, she was able to create a color palette for use in the museum that addressed the needs of the architectural spaces in harmony with the exhibits. The Bristol TN/VA Chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America also successfully employed the colors for the thread and fabrics in the beautifully crafted quilt that graces the main stairway, again tying the small details together.
There are many more examples of fortuitous collaboration that helped create the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, and we are grateful to hear from our visitors every day that this hard work produced an amazing experience for the eyes, ears and heart. And we are grateful for the experience of working together as a team on such an interesting project. As Joe Nicholson said: “We really ended up with a seamless integration of the building with the exhibits and full owner participation throughout. I wish I could do one of these projects every year!” I couldn’t agree more.
“Instrument Interview” posts are a chance to sit down with the instruments of traditional, country, bluegrass, and roots music – from different types of instruments to specific ones related to artists, luthiers, and songwriters – and learn more about them. Ten questions are posed, and the instruments answer! Today we talk with the Creole bania.
What ARE you?
I’m a banjo! I know I don’t exactly look like the banjos you think of today, but I’m actually the earliest known banjo that still exists. I was made sometime before 1777, and at that time, banjos were made of gourds and calabashes.
Since you’re so different from the banjos we know today, describe yourself to us.
My body is a calabash, and my drumhead is made of animal skin held on with wooden pins. I have two S-shaped sound holes (kind of like a fiddle). I also have three long strings and one short string and a very nicely carved peghead. My neck is thinner than banjos today, and it is made of wood.
The image to the left is a picture of me, where you can see the details I describe above. To the right is a picture of a calabash, a type of fruit that grows on trees; banias are also made from gourds, which grow on vines on the ground. Left: Creative Commons, https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11840/609575; Right: Photograph courtesy of Kristina Gaddy
Where did you come from?
I came from the country that is known as Suriname. Located on the northern coast of South America, Suriname is actually a part of the Caribbean, even though it’s not an island. In the 1770s, Suriname was a Dutch colony, known for the brutal conditions that enslaved Africans and people of African descent faced working on sugar and coffee plantations.
Wait! I think of banjos as a North American instrument, but you say you’re from South America?
Actually, we’re not just found in North America. Banjos were observed all over the Caribbean, too. In fact, the first record of a banjo is from about 1687 in Jamaica! Instruments similar to me had lots of different names, including bania, banya, banjo, banger, banza, and panja, and were observed in New York, the Carolinas, New Orleans, Cuba, Haiti, St. Vincent, and Barbados, among other places. If you want to know more, you should check out Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. Yours truly is mentioned, but she has accounts of my relatives from all over.
Check out this video of Seth Swingle playing a reproduction of the Haitian banza, a banjo collected in Haiti around 1840. Pete Ross studied the original and now makes reproductions for players and museums.
Who made you?
Almost 300,000 people were forcibly taken from Africa and enslaved in Suriname, and I was made by one of those enslaved people, who based my design on the instruments he or she had in Africa. I wish I could tell you more about the person who made me, but the man who collected me, John Gabriel Stedman, didn’t tell anyone more than that.
Tell me more about this Stedman guy.
Captain John Gabriel Stedman arrived in Suriname to fight formerly enslaved people who had escaped to live in the jungle. Stedman was there to stop two tribes – the Saamaka and Njuka – from attacking plantations. Stedman kept a diary while he was in Suriname, which eventually became a very popular book, and he even drew a picture of me in it! That was when he named me “Creole Bania.”
Left: The entrance to a Saamaka village in Suriname; right: Detail of a carving on a home in a Saamaka village. Photographs courtesy of Kristina Gaddy
Where are you now?
I live at Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands. For many years I was in the storerooms, but I’ve recently been put on permanent display in an exhibit about slavery in the Dutch colonies, including Suriname.
Ok, so you’re the oldest banjo, but are there any other banjos like you?
Yes! I have a friend from Suriname who lives at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Germany. That banjo is known as the panja (pronounced pan-ya), and it was collected sometime before 1850. We are very similar in construction, and this panja has a really beautiful peghead.
The peghead of the panja at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Germany. Photograph courtesy of Kristina Gaddy
Do we know any more about the panja?
No. In fact, for many years, U.S. banjo scholars didn’t know about the panja at all! It was rediscovered by a banjo researcher named Schlomo Pestcoe, and now a couple of people have even been by to visit it.
What type of music did you and the panja play?
Alas, something else we don’t remember! No one wrote down the music that was played on banjos in Suriname, but a note about the panja does give a bit of a clue. The collection note says: “Panja, 4-stringed strummed instrument, particular to death celebrations and to the song Ananhitori.” Recent research suggests that the banjo was a central part of a spiritual/cultural ritual across the Americas. I hear if you want to find out more about this, you should come to this year’s Banjo Gathering at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in November!
Each year on September 6, bookworms across America celebrate National Read A Book Day. Though this is a fine thing to celebrate, reading is, of course, important and pleasurable every day of the year. If one wants to learn more about country music history, what better place to start than with a book? While you can find all of the selections below through online sellers, these and other fine selections can also be found at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in our museum store – so stop on by and pick one up. Here are just a few of my favorites to get you started!
Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost by Tony Russell
If you want to learn more about the important players in the world of country music, Tony Russell’s Country Music Originals is a great place to start. World-renowned scholar Russell presents biographies of figures in country music from the earliest days of recordings until the late 1940s. Highlighting superstars such as Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family and celebrating obscure figures such as Bernard “Slim” Smith and John Dilleshaw, Russell provides articles that are short enough to be approachable for the casual reader, but also in depth enough to spark interest for further reading. It’s a great place to start your country music reading journey!
Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler: My Life with Jimmy Martin, the King of Bluegrass by Barbara Martin Stephens
While bluegrass music is widely regarded as having been born in late 1945, one could argue that the music did not achieve the “high lonesome” sound until a young guitar player and singer from Sneedville, Tennessee, joined Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in late 1949. Jimmy Martin is widely regarded as “The King of Bluegrass” and is one of most charismatic and controversial figures in bluegrass. Don’t Give Your Heart To A Rambler was written by Barbara Martin Stephens, Martin’s longtime partner and the driving force behind his rise to success in the music business. Barbara spares her readers no gritty details as she gives an inside look into life with the King. Through all the abuse and hardship she suffered in her personal life, Barbara was still able to become the first female booking agent on music row. Nothing short of inspiring, this book is a must-read for all bluegrass fans and those interested in women in country music.
Dixie Dewdrop: The Uncle Dave Macon Story by Michael D. Doubler
Uncle Dave Macon is one of the most iconic figures of early country music, and his style of banjo playing and showmanship has inspired countless musicians – and so Dixie Dewdrop tells the story of one of country music’s first stars. Michael Doubler, the great-grandson of Uncle Dave, spins a narrative that ties together Uncle Dave’s personal life and the music and culture of the world in which Uncle Dave lived, giving readers a glimpse into a different side of this legendary performer. If you’re curious about this book and Uncle Dave Macon, you can join Doubler at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum at 1pm on Sunday, November 4 for a special talk and book-signing.
In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers and the Roots of American Music by Ben Wynne
Before record companies began marketing music to specific audiences, music flowed across cultural lines, and the line between traditional African American and white rural music was blurred. With the wonderfully informative In Tune, Ben Wynne compares and contrasts these two giants of roots music within that context. Both men were born in Mississippi around the same time, and both passed away much too early in their musical careers and their lives, dying within a year of each other. Though from separate sides of a deeply segregated society, these men lived hard lives and had experiences that were remarkably similar. This book provides commentary on the social dynamics that shaped country music, and it gives readers a detailed look into the lives and legacies of these two important figures.
Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South by Patrick Huber
Geography and country music go hand-in-hand, and regionalisms are part of what makes early country music so diverse. Bristol with its significant music history is heralded as the “Birthplace of Country Music,” but in reality, American roots music was shaped all across the nation. Patrick Huber explores the impact of textile mills in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas in Linthead Stomp. With a high population of displaced rural southerners seeking work in the mills, a new market for early country music entertainment was opened. Rural music moving to town also changed the music, and the changes that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s in the Piedmont set the stage for country music as we know it. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the commercialization of country music.
And finally a “special mention”: Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 by Tony Russell
All of the books previously mentioned are easily digestible reads for the casual country music fan. However, if you find yourself hungering for all the facts about early county music records, this is the book for you. Roughly the size of your local phone book and twice as dense with information, this book contains the dates, locations, and personnel of every commercial country record recorded before 1942. A must have for any diehard country music fan and connoisseur of fine shellac.
So…I’ve given you my favorites. Now tell us: what are your favorite music reads?!
