Crooked Road CD Series [Back]

Gin Burris: Wind & Rain

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Among the songs that were passed on to Gin by her family are several ballads that are traceable back to the British Isles of the 1600s and 1700s.  The collection and study of these ballads, and their continuation and appropriation by the peoples of Southern Appalachia in particular, has long captivated students of folklore.  Of particular interest to folklorists and collectors was evidence of American survivals of ballads referenced in the collection of Harvard Professor Francis J. Child (1825-1896).  Child’s massive five-volume work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads was so seminal that scholars to this day refer to any of the 305 songs that he transcribed and catalogued as "Child Ballads,” differentiated by the numbers (1-305) that he ascribed to each song in his canon.  For many students, musicians, and aficionados alike, these songs are nothing less than the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American folk music.  Four of the songs that Gin sings on this recording are variants of Child Ballads that were passed on to her by her kin.  Fully five more are found in the collection of G. Malcolm Laws, one of the pioneers of the study of balladry in America.  The remaining songs on this recording are three of American origin, familiar to music lovers everywhere, all passed on to Gin by her family.

These songs have been performed for generations and have traversed the globe, providing both the foundation for some of the first recordings of American vernacular music, as well as the basic texts of the American and English folk music revival of the early 1960s. To find these songs at the dawn of the twenty-first century, performed by someone to whom they were given in an unbroken lineage that pre-dates sound recording and modern media, is almost unheard of.  That they comprise as full and varied a collection as this, is historically significant. That they are the possession of a singer as powerful as Gin Burris is simply priceless.

Gin learned some songs from her grandmother on her father's side, but the majority of them were learned from her mother and her mother's family:

A lot of them I had heard her sing back when I was small, and some of them – my Grandma Burcham used to babysit me when I was little – and a lot of them she would sing at home. At the time, you know, I didn't know what they were. I just thought they were pretty songs. I didn't know that they were really, really old songs.

Gin's first performances took place when she was a child at Shiloh Methodist Church and at Spraker's, a small community store:

Horace and Pearl Spraker ran the store when I was 5, 6 and 7 years old.  I can remember them setting me up on the pop cooler and getting me to sing. My payment was a popsicle, a bottle of pop, or a candy bar. I didn't realize how much this helped me overcome my shyness. My mom said I used to twist my fingers in my dress tail and hang my head when I sung, so I guess those popsicles and double colas did the trick.

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