by Mike Bendzela
In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville’s effusive review of the Massachusetts writer’s collection of short tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, Melville utters, under a cloak of anonymity (“a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”) one the most homo-erotic bits of praise imaginable for another male writer: “[He] shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul”! Reclining in his Vermont “hay-mow” with Hawthorne’s volume, the smitten Virginian notes “how magically stole over me this Mossy Man!” Indeed! Melville knew of what he spoke — of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, that is, many of which have become classics, such as “The Birth-Mark” and “Young Goodman Brown.”
I mention all this not just because it’s awesome but because I want to pilfer Melville’s torrid statement to say this of Southern old time music:
“It shoots its strong Appalachian roots into the chilly soil of my Northern soul”!
I use Clifftop here as an avatar for this last essay excursion into how the culture of the American South has had a life-changing effect on me: Its myriad old time tunes have possessed me for about twenty-five years now. Clifftop, West Virginia is the location of Camp Washington-Carver, site of a yearly festival of old time fiddle and banjo music, the Appalachian String Band Music Festival. This festival is rustic, acoustic, genuine, low-tech, and — happily — takes place on top of an actual doggone 2500-foot hilltop, surrounded by dense deciduous forest. I’ve been to this mecca of old time only twice, the two trips twenty-two years apart, for a total of about seventy hours of non-stop jamming; but it’s effect on me has been profound, sort of like Saul of Tarsus seeing the Risen Christ, or something like that.
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Camp Washington-Carver sits in the belly of southern West Virginia, deep in the woods, not far from the New River Gorge and the George Washington & Jefferson National Forest. It has an architectural gem on site, the Great Chestnut Lodge, the largest log-cabin-style hall in the world. As if to symbolize the cobbling together of new art from obsolete forms, the building is constructed of actual chestnut trees that began to die off in the 1930s from an introduced fungal blight. The structure immortalizes the remains of a hardwoods forest composition that is long gone: Chestnut used to comprise one in every four hardwood trees in the Appalachian highlands. The place served for many years as a 4-H camp for African-American kids, hence its being named after two distinguished Blacks, George Washington Carver and native West Virginian Booker T. Washington. One wonders how many traditional Black fiddlers and banjo players filled the lodge with music before it was given over to the festival in 1990.
My first visit to Clifftop in 2002 was something of a fluke. I had driven from Maine down to Eastern Kentucky for a family reunion at my aunt and uncle’s place in the holler (the last time I was ever there), and I had brought my fiddle along with me (which I could barely play at that time). I sawed out a few tunes for relatives, and I went into the town of Olive Hill (home to country singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall) to sit in at a local Bluegrass jam at the local store, but I really couldn’t participate: Bluegrass is hard! Somehow, I had heard about this place called Clifftop in West Virginia and its annual festival that always takes place on the first weekend in August; and as it was just a few hours drive from Olive Hill, I decided to take a roundabout way back to Maine after the reunion and stop at the festival to see what it was all about.
You approach the site on Washington Carver Road, on what seem miles of winding, tarred-over cow path. As you steer the narrow curves you wonder how they manage to get all that equipment to the top of the hill. Once at camp you notice a long utility pole line that stretches uphill and bisects the entrance of the place; looking down-slope at the huge trees severely cut back from the power lines, you think you are gazing into a deep emerald canyon. After parking you have to schlep your instruments up a sharp rise; up into view comes the gable of Great Chestnut Lodge. You immediately realize it’s the largest log building you’ll ever see. Beyond the lodge is a big, grassy field surrounded by trees, on which stands a large covered stage. Judging by the music that buzzes in the air, the contests have already begun, and that buzzing won’t stop for several days. Suddenly, all the garbage of modern life — the abominations of politics, the glitz and glare of pop culture, the sewerage of the various media — floats away.
The interior of the lodge is cavernous. Across a wide expanse of shiny hardwood strip flooring sits a triangular stone fireplace. Enclosing the whole area are the log walls chinked with a mortar of lime and cement, which virtually screams “log cabin” at you. At one end of the floor sits a broad low stage hosting a string band — fiddler, banjo player, guitarist, upright bassist, mandolin player — and a dance caller with a microphone. While the caller shouts out the steps, the dancers whirl to the tune “Ragtime Annie” (a staple in a fiddler’s repertoire, not specifically an Appalachian tune but a Texas one). Overhead, at least a dozen wooden paddle ceiling fans spin away like propellers, dissipating the heat and the moisture from the dancers’ bodies. At the sight of so many fans the size of the hall really sinks in.
Beyond the lodge, past the big field with its stage, Washington Carver Road branches into several broad dirt pathways, down which lies the main action of the festival — the campground where the jammers hang out. After just a few minutes of wandering around in a daze, going from camp to camp, listening to these fiddlers and banjo players romping through their tunes, a personal truth became utterly palpable: I wanted to play old time, not Bluegrass.
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I wouldn’t have made my second trip to Clifftop last year if a fellow jammer in Maine hadn’t suggested we drive down together and share a cabin about ten minutes’ drive from the festival. I don’t travel well, and I hate driving, so having a young companion along for the trip made it doable for me. It helped that he had reserved the cabin for us; my old ass was not about to sleep on the ground in a tent for three nights.
We wandered through the campground with our instruments — he with his banjo, me with my fiddle — finding groups to jam along with and meeting other friends from Maine who had come down to the festival. It was a tour through all the traditional old time keys. We spent a few hours at the camper of a fiddler we know from Virginia who spends summers in Maine. He offered us perhaps the best plate of pork and beans I’ve ever had because it was followed by about two straight hours of playing D tunes. That night, I met up with another friend from Maine, a Clifftop regular, and he took me up to an area informally known as Geezer Hill, where older players park their campers and RVs. One player had set up an awning and was pouring drinks for other players who joined in. There, we went through a whole set of G tunes. The next day, we found a guy hanging out at a big tree playing a compelling A tune I learned on the spot, “Creek’s All Muddy and the Pond’s All Dry.” So we hung around with him until we had about wrung the key of A dry.
Later that day, my driving companion pointed out some fretless banjos at an instrument vendor’s tent. I had vowed that if I was going to make the drive all the way to West Virginia, I was coming home with a fretless banjo, and there it was. Patrick Sawyer of Pisgah Banjos had named this particular instrument “The Roscoe” (after a popular G tune). Made of native Appalachian hardwoods, it immediately struck me as Shaker in its stark simplicity. This purchase made my trip complete, and I looked forward to long winter hours in Maine making enough noise to drive the cats away.
The best moments in any trip are the ones you can’t plan for: In 2002 it was meeting an Asian-American IT worker and fiddler from California, who turned me on to Bruce Greene, a collector of Kentucky fiddle tunes; I was able to find his CD Five Miles of Ellum Wood in a vendor’s tent. It was this meeting that opened my eyes to how widespread the interest in old time music had become: How ironic to learn from someone a thousand miles away about fiddle tunes from my aunt and uncle’s backyard in Kentucky. In 2024, that moment was probably falling in with a 19-year-old banjo player (mostly three-finger style) and composer from Morgantown. We hung out in a tent with him and his friends as he played us some tunes he had written. He demonstrated for me the West Virginian’s impromptu map of the state: You hold your right hand in front of you, palm-up; you make a fist, then you extend your middle finger and your thumb, duplicating the state’s peculiar outline. Morgantown lies at the knuckle of the first finger, between the extended middle finger and thumb.
To the west of Clifftop flow two rivers that mark the boundary with Kentucky, Big Sandy and Tug Fork. They form the outline of the left side of the palm of the hand map. (The Ohio River forms the top of the folded third and fourth fingers.) Here be fiddle tunes. Lucky for us fiddlers — for the world, really — intrepid traditional scholars from Alan Lomax to Bruce Greene have for about a century scoured the hills and hollers of the state, picking up and playing, and/or recording, the tunes of the old-timers. Their collected accomplishments are remarkable and still make up the vast repertoires of the players at Clifftop. Perhaps the most striking feature of these old fiddlers’ biographies is the humble and even distressing conditions under which they grew up.
Perhaps the most widely-known of these old Kentucky fiddlers is William Hamilton Stepp (1875-1957), recorded by Lomax in 1937. His original version of the old tune “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” played with the violin strings tuned down to DDAD, was pinched by Aaron Copland in the 1940s and incorporated into his ballet, Rodeo. My feelings about this are intensely mixed: Copland has basically filched the Lomax recording and produced a wad of cornball that gags me a little; but what do I know? Copland has at least given Stepp wider currency. An excellent video about the story of this tune recently came out by Sean Dietrich. Stepp is reputed to have been initially raised in a cave by a single mother who supported herself through prostitution.
It seems everyone I know in the old time world likes Clyde Davenport of Monticello, KY (1921-2020), recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship. Some tunes we play in our Maine group go back to versions of his, including my favorite, “Five Miles from Town.” Raised on a farm on the Cumberland Plateau, he put together home-made fiddles and banjos as a boy. Luckily, his work is well documented. He is a hoot; he can be seen in old videos posted on YouTube, where he is captured playing tunes in his house and spitting tobacco into a bowl between tunes.
The story of Buddy Thomas (1935-1974) of Grayson, KY, just a few miles from my relatives in Olive Hill, sticks with me for both its pathos and triumph. In spite of physical disabilities his old time playing was stellar, and he branched off to become an accomplished Bluegrass player. I struggle to duplicate his G tune, “Portsmouth Airs,” which I, a native Ohioan, wanted to learn as I thought it was an Ohio tune (the town of Portsmouth is on the Ohio River). He said, “We growed up real poor, so poor that even the poor folks said we were poor.” Shortly after recording a classic album, Kitty Puss: Old Time Fiddle Music from Kentucky, he died in 1974 at just 39 years old.
Innumerable tunes from hundreds of fiddlers throughout the Appalachian regions have been preserved, and they continue to be carried on by amateur and professional players literally world-wide. The tunes are so captivating that thousands of musicians make the yearly pilgrimage to Clifftop to share in this tradition. There is something fundamentally mysterious about the persistence of old time music. It’s hard to put into words what it is about these tunes that makes them stick in your throat, like the remembrance of lost friends and family. They are not like Celtic tunes, or Bluegrass tunes, or Quebecois tunes. They are something else. Old time is its own thing: Pulsating, mesmerizing, funky, rough-hewn, squirrelly, eternal. Instead of trying to puzzle out the mystery of old time fiddling, I’ll let Buddy Thomas have the last words:
“I don’t care a bit about something so long as I know what it means.”
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Previous articles in the series, The American South And Me: Kentucky, Faulkner, Maine . . . ?
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Images
Photographs by the author.
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