American rivers often serve as major repositories for local music. There may be no better example than America’s oldest river, the New, that from its tiniest gurgle in the mountains of North Carolina to the loud, raging gorge it has dug in West Virginia, has transported home grown, Appalachian music throughout the South.
All music, but especially folk music, cannot be separated from its geographical, cultural and historical context and Southwest Virginia’s rivers, like the New River, have brought the sounds of fiddle and banjo music down from the peaks, out from the hollers, and into the lives and homes of Virginia’s mountaineers.
Old-time music is deeply intertwined with the creeks and streams of the New River Valley region and represents a swirling, joyful blending of the music that the earliest inhabitants brought down the river from their homes. Indigenous Native tribes shared rhythm and dance with white Europeans, and folks from Africa by way of Jamaica poured music into its strong currents as well as its lazy pools, helping to shape the music of the New.
Up near the highest peaks in Virginia, the New enters the state near the village of Mouth of Wilson carrying tunes from North Carolina. It flows north, unusual for a river in North America, and from its headwaters it is fed and nurtured by hundreds of creeks and streams, each contributing its own music to the deluge of sounds. For more than 150 years, the sounds of fiddles and banjos have mirrored the lives of the people who have made this wild, rollicking geography home.
In Fries, Virginia, in the early 1920s, a mill worker who was destined for greatness, Henry Whitter, would often sing for his fellow workers at breaks and after work. He learned one of his most famous songs from the Ward family who lived on Peach Bottom Creek, a small tributary in Independence. He sang “The New River Train” and accompanied himself on guitar and harmonica.
His recording garnered national admiration in the early days of radio. In 1923 and 1924 he travelled on his own to Okeh Records in New York City and became the nation’s first recorded country music singer. Among his recordings, tunes he learned on the banks of the New, were such timeless songs as “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and “The Lonesome Road Blues.” In 1927, after teaming up with fiddler G.B Grayson, Whitter would be immortalized at the infamous “Bristol Sessions” by audiophile Ralph Peer.
Up on Cabin Creek, a tiny mountain stream that flows into Helton Creek and eventually into the New in Grayson County, near the present day Grayson Highlands State Park, lived legendary fiddler and fiddle maker Albert Hash. In 1927, without any guidance, Albert built his first playable fiddle at the age of 10.
From a small subsistence farm near White Top Mountain, Albert was first noticed playing a homemade fiddle at the 1932 White Top Music Festival by Whitter, who promptly hired the 15 year old to play with him and to replace his musical partner, G.B. Grayson, who was tragically killed falling from a car near Damascus. Albert became an able stand in. His stint as Whitter’s fiddler let him to many opportunities including a job fiddling for the workers building the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Over the next fifty years, Albert became one of the regions most beloved fiddlers and luthiers.
He founded the White Top Mountain Band, recorded four albums with them, and built over 300 fiddles out of native Appalachian Spruce wood. He mentored and taught many young musicians and instrument builders in Southwest Virginia, maybe the most famous of which is guitar giant Wayne Henderson who still uses Albert’s knife to whittle the braces for his famous guitars. Albert likely wrote his popular song “Cripple Creek” about a small stream that flows through the mountains in Wythe County. Cripple Creek joins the New River near Ivanhoe.
On down the New in Carroll County, a wild stream called Big Reed Island Creek winds it way to join the New near Sylvatus. Along the banks of Big Reed lived another great fiddler by the name of Norman Edmonds, who was known to his admirers simply as “Uncle Norm.”
In 1927, Uncle Norm and his banjo playing companion, J.P. “Pres” Nester, traveled to Bristol at the invitation of Ralph Peer to record four tunes for Mr. Peer’s field recordings that would come to be known as the “Big Bang of Country Music,” the Bristol sessions.
The outing by auto was rare for Nester, who rarely left his home near Hillsville on Little Reed Island Creek the sister stream to Big Reed Island Creek. Peer, and soon listeners across the country, were enamored with the duo’s driving fiddle and banjo sound, a familiar pairing to Appalachians but new to many listeners elsewhere.
Although Peer recorded four Uncle Norm and Pres tunes, including “Train on the Island” and “Black Eyed Susie,” that were released to the public, two others were reportedly lost in transit from Bristol to Peer’s office in New York. Peer, impressed by the response to the duo’s recordings, offered to pay the two men to come to New York and record an entire album. Pres, who was fearful of the gasoline engine and, consequently, all automobiles, adamantly refused. He was quite content with continuing to walk the eleven miles from Hillsville where he was the switchboard operator to the Edmonds home twice a week to play music with Uncle Norm. Although his banjo playing received many accolades, Pres never allowed his photo to be taken.
Their Bristol recordings received much notoriety and lots of airplay on the new medium of broadcast radio, but sadly, the two never recorded together again. Uncle Norm, who had grown up in a musical family and raised his own sons to play music, became a local radio celebrity with his band “The Oldtimers” consisting of his sons and friends. The tunes he played such as “Ship in the Clouds,” “Sweet Little Julie,” and “Uncle Norm’s Tune” are still part of the local repertoire and continue to flow up and down the creek banks and riversides of Southwest Virginia. “Train on the Island” is now a folk music standard.
Shelor, Jesse Shelor, Clarice Blackard Shelor, and Joe
Blackard. c. 1927
In Patrick County, the Dan River is fed by snowfall and springs in the high mountains and meanders its way down through rolling grazing meadows and deep forests. There, the music found a home with the Shelor and Blackard families who also travelled down the New to record at the 1927 Bristol Sessions. After an arduous river crossing and tiring journey, Ralph Peer informed them that the band had to have a name besides “The Shelor Family.” Joe Blackard immediately retorted “We’re ‘Dad Blackard’s Moonshiners!’” That is how they were known on the infamous recordings.
In August 1927, with Jesse and Clarice’s seven-year-old son holding the sheet music and loudly tapping his foot, they recorded four sides for Peer that helped start the country music craze across the country: Sandy River Belle, “Big Ben Gal,” “Suzanna Gal,” and “Billy Grimes the Rover.” These songs quickly found their way into homes across the nation. The original Shelor Family played professionally and casually together, spreading the tunes of Patrick County across Virginia, but never recorded again.
In 2009, field recorder Ray Alden captured descendants of Jesse and Clarice playing much of the family’s large repertoire of tunes. Today, through the music of banjoist Sammy Shelor (The Lonesome River Band), Dane and Cassidy Shelor (The Shelors), and other family members the music along the Dan continues to bubble up.
Maybe one of the most well know of Virginia’s river bank fiddlers was Henry Reed of the New River town of Glen Lyn, as the New barrels northwards into West Virginia. Henry learned to fiddle from his father and other New River fiddlers both in Virginia and West Virginia. Never a professional fiddler, Reed’s vast repertoire of tunes wasn’t really known until a young graduate student came to Henry’s home in 1966 to become his fiddling apprentice.
Alan Jabbour, a folklore student and fiddler, began to learn, collect, and catalogue Henry’s tunes for the Smithsonian, while at the same time spreading Henry’s tunes through the recordings and performances of the “Hollow Rock String Band.” As the public became aware of the depth of Henry’s collection of tunes, his popularity spread during his last two years of life when he was in his mid 80s.
There isn’t an old time fiddler in Virginia today who doesn’t know at least a couple of Henry’s tunes, many of which date to before the Civil War, passed down to Henry from relatives and neighbors. “Over the Waterfall” is a tune Reed remembered hearing played on a steam driven calliope when he was only five or six, and was reportedly a popular song on early river boats. The tune is also found in several British ballads.
From the high peaks of Grayson County to the oft raging waters of Giles County, across the breadth and depth of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia, tunes continue to flow from springs to rolling waters to fill our Appalachian souls with the music of the peaks and valleys that we so dearly cherish. There really appears to be no music quite like it.
Dr. Malcolm Smith is a recovering college professor who lives and plays clawhammer banjo in Laurel Fork, VA. He is the author of “Appalachian Fiddler Albert Hash: The Last Leaf on the Tree” for McFarland Books and writes about Old Time Music for many publications.
