A Place Called the South: Presented by Southern Cultures

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Pete Seeger has often compared himself to Johnny Appleseed. Few self-assessments are so accurate. Like the nineteenth-century nurseryman and mystic, Seeger is a missionary. His faith is folksong, and even now as he nears ninety years old, one finds him banjo in hand, chin upturned, evangelizing from the stage. It was southern mountain music that sparked Seeger's musical awakening during his teenage years, but the old folksinger's tuneful creed has proven to be nothing if not capacious. As he tells William Ferris and Michael K. Honey in the interview we have excerpted here, folksongs from Eastern Europe, French-Canada, and South Africa, among many other places, soon came to his attention and found their way into his repertoire. We have followed Seeger's lead, stocking our latest survey of southern music with everything from the Bahamian chantey Histe Up the John B. Sail (a song later made famous by both The Weavers and The Beach Boys) to the slow-motion gospel-funk of The Spiritualaires to the conjunto played these days on both sides of our southern border. Of course, the strains of Seeger's beloved old southern sound also echo here, whether in the bluegrass of Bill Monroe and Chatham County Line or the galloping banjo of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Such eclecticism reminds us that southern folksong replenishes itself, not simply--or even mainly--by earnest repetition, but by imaginative reconstitution. Such refashioning is, as Seeger says, an ancient process whereby musicians reconfigure traditions to respond to present times. The process reveals itself in the postmodern apocalypse of The Handsome Family's When That Helicopter Comes, a song that reads like a prophecy delivered by a homegrown cargo cult. One hears it, too, in the playing of James Davis, whose drumbeat music transposed the old fife-and-drum tradition to the electric guitar and the trap set. Or listen as Sharron Kraus, Meg Baird, and Helena Espval bring the dead back to life--and then bury them again--in their spectral rendition of Barbry Allen, an Anglo-American ballad with roots reaching back to the fifteenth century. Finally, consider Jack Rose, whose music seamlessly blends Indian raga with the finger-picking guitar style of his native Virginia. Many of these musicians would surely be surprised to hear themselves linked with Seeger, with each other, or with that mummified term, folksong. Such surprise would not be unwarranted. And yet, as Seeger's words and life illustrate, folksongs ought not to be thought of as museum pieces. They are, instead, evidence of a people's poetic urge, songs with deep roots, whose melodies and rhythms nevertheless speak to the here and now. Track List 1 A place called the South ... Pete Seeger All Pete Seeger tracks are from William R. Ferris and Michael K. Honey's 1989 San Francisco inter view, courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection #20367 in the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH 2 Barbry Ellen Leaves From Off The Tree (Kraus, Baird, Espval) From Leaves From Off The Tree; Bo' Weavil Recordings; www. …

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