Words, Music, and Magic
T he generations of isolation took their toll, but they also left us something to fill the empty places. This is another piece that must also be considered whatever the culture: we are a tribe of storytellers, musicians, and mythmakers. A simple occasion becomes an entertainment or an object lesson that is then retold by one—or all—of the participants.
I refer to myself as a spellcatcher because one of the things that piques my curiosity is the roots of folk magic in southern Appalachia. It is a riff on the songcatchers that I mentioned in an earlier chapter. Many of my friends are music makers and it is a tradition that I grew up with. I grew up with a piano and took lessons for several years. I was never brilliant but I enjoyed playing—something I would still enjoy if I took the time to have the piano tuned. I have been teaching myself to play the fiddle, which has been as successful as my self-taught Irish-Gaelic (Gaeilge) studies, both of which would be more successful if I practiced. When I tell people where I’m from, they usually ask if I play music. I confess to these kind strangers that I am a terrible fiddler who longs to be mediocre. And when asked what I can play, I respond: scales, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” “The Ashokan Farewell,” and “Bonny Portmore.”
Music plays such an important part in the lives of these mountains that it is hard to express how dear it is to us. It isn’t just bluegrass and old-time music, of course. There is music everywhere here, in churches, on porches, in kitchens, and in picking parlors. We like to teach each other songs and tunes, and most circles will welcome new folks and encourage them to play along.
Many of these tunes came with the early settlers, and some were mostly forgotten in the place they began, the British Isles and Ireland. Cecil Sharp was one of the collectors who rediscovered them alive and well (and little altered) in the southern highlands of the Appalachians. His collection included enough versions of “Barbry Allen” to fill sixteen pages of his important book, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians.10
These old songs and tunes are the roots of bluegrass and old-time music and still influence folk and country music down to this very day. They have been passed down in families and shared at festivals, each new generation adding its own flavor to this vital part of Appalachian culture. If you are ever fortunate enough to be asked to someone’s porch on a warm summer evening for “music,” you would do well to drop everything and get there. It will be a beautiful gift and something you’ll remember for years to come.
Women’s Work Songs as Incantation
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been most fortunate to visit the Alexander Carmichael Collection at the University of Edinburgh. Fortunate because I am beholden to Carmichael for his extensive notes and for the publication of his Carmina Gadelica. It is a storehouse of riches, waiting to be retrieved by folks like me. On the occasion of the presentation of my first academic paper to the Appalachian Studies Association conference, a colleague mentioned that the traditional churning song, often called “Come, Butter, Come,” was written up in Carmina Gadelica. The charm is common among the Deitsch communities in Pennsylvania and is well-known in Appalachia. It serves as both work song and magical working and is officially called “The Song of the Churn.”
It harkens back to an earlier era where this—and other homely jobs—were a necessary part of rural life. Work done by women, mostly, and work that often includes a chant or song that does more than ease the burden of tedious work—the song was also an incantation for successful completion of the job at hand. The workers responsible were plentiful when I was a young woman in a rural part of the county, and their ranks include women on both my mother’s side and my father’s side of the family. You’ve maybe seen them too—wiry little women with hair that seems set like hoarfrost. Their hands are veiny, their knuckles large and bothersome. These are mountain women, hill women of indeterminate stock, the blood in their veins holding shadows of Britain and Africa, Germany and Native America. These mothers and aunties and grandmothers had little control over their reproductive lives and, as a result, many buried half the children they bore. There is rarely a record of miscarriages, and often the stillbirths were wept over and prayed over, then carried to the family’s ridgetop burying ground and left to sleep, their final resting place marked only with a stack of pretty rocks, the only record of their non-lives seared on a weary mother’s heart.
These women worked from before the sun rose until after night had fallen. They turned a dab hand to all domestic things, and as homesteaders like me try in vain to relearn the skills of their lifetimes, we appreciate their tenacity and strength, from cooking the daily meals and both growing and preserving the food that would see the household through lean months to doctoring the ills and accidents of living in a rural setting and catching babies up and down the cove. A cove where they may have lived their whole lives, going from their mother’s house to the church house to their own little place with its plot of stony land.
These women, whom I am humbled to call my foremothers and elder cousins, have hearts like eagles, memories like elephants, and backs like oxen. They are scarce now as hen’s teeth, and I want to remember and honor them by learning and teaching the work songs that punctuated the labor of their long days, starting with that churning song. You may have heard it, if you are a fan of regional folk music. There’s so much old folklore connected with churning—how wicked spirits can steal the butter away from the cream and so forth—so this is a work song that is also a charm to ensure the arrival of sweet butter. It is rhythmic (as most work songs are) and keeps time with the up-and-down movement of the dasher in the churn.
This song, which I have tracked back to 1650, is interesting for a couple of reasons.11 First, it has a long life and has traveled to many places with a few variants, all of which follow the same rhythmic patterns, of course.
Here’s the most common version. It is simple and effective, repeated until the cream stiffens into butter:
Churn, butter, churn!
Come, butter, come!
A little good butter
Is better than none.
A local variation mentions the source of the cream:
Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Cows in the pasture
Churn a little faster!
Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
The other thing I especially appreciate about this work song is that it has internal variations depending on how long the churning will take. The words don’t simply repeat, though they can if the churner wants to lose herself in thought while going through the repetitive motion. But imagine a novice churner, a young girl who is now set to do this job.
Come, butter, come; come, butter, come.
Daddy’s standing at the gate
Waiting on his butter cake …
She can go on to everyone in the family (Granny, Georgie, Sissy), on to the neighbors (Missrus Ball, Preacher Dan), and from there to familiar Bible characters (Noah, Moses, Adam and Eve) to amuse herself until the job is done.
Connie Swafford of Candler, North Carolina, descendant of Daniel Boone and a multigeneration Appalachian woman, said this about her time at the churn: “It was mostly old hymns but was always something with a bump and swing to it.” A bump and swing—some of the old hymns certainly have that. And the verses often hint at a hidden door to magic work.
I began to consider what sorts of chores were imposed and whether or not those could have some sort of rhythmic song attached to them. There is always plenty to do on a mountain smallholding and something for every size hand to do. Moving rocks out of the field and onto the edges was a child’s job. Sitting in a straight-backed and cane-bottomed chair, peeling apples in the afternoon sunshine, was a granny’s job. Whittling a toy for the babies was grandpa’s job. And in between there was an endless array of things that needed to get done, probably last week. Snapping beans, weaving, spinning, hoeing, wood chopping, water drawing, washing, corn shucking, sweeping, hanging clothes on the line, plowing, milking—so many excuses to sing as we worked and to bring magic to the task at hand.
The Move into Towns
Appalachian women weren’t only rural farm laborers. When many country people moved into the cities to find work, they stepped into the hellish world of Industrial Era mills. The villages that grew up around American mills had a sad similarity: small houses, larger ones for larger families, bathhouses, a clubhouse where unmarried men could hang out, and churches to get all those hardworking souls right with the Lord come Sunday. There were company stores, just like in mining towns. The mill owners paid as little as they could get away with, and whole families could be employed at the mill, from the age of six up. The work was dangerous, hard, and unrelenting, and a family could end up owing more to the company than could ever be paid off—in a tab to the store, the rent on their house, and any shortage in the pieces of work they were required to produce.
The work songs that have come out of these hard lives are rhythmic and sometimes poke fun at the bosses and other workers, sometimes express longing for the rural life they’d left behind. Like the farm songs, there were often many verses, and the rhythms varied according to the mill room in which the singers worked. Some of them included repetitious phrases designed to magically keep the singer and the other workers safe in a dangerous working environment, an example of which is a weave room song that features the repetitive phrase “I got the blues, I got the blues, I got them awful weave room blues.” 12
As more and more people move into the southern highlands, some are choosing to dive deeply into old and nearly lost ways of being in this old land, including the folkways and witchery. And time moves on, doesn’t it? Grannies churned the butter. Their granddaughters worked in the mills. And their granddaughters? Working women are found in places that would have been unlikely even two generations ago. Where will the new songs and new spells come from, the ones Appalachian women will sing from the deepest parts of their souls? “The Barista Girl’s Lament.” “Sorting the Brewery’s Hops.” “The Hard World of an Uber Driver.”
One thing is certain: Appalachian women are born singing. We have the same strong backs as our grandmaws did and put our hard times into a place where they can be dealt with, sooner or later, in ways earthy, practical, and magical.
Storytelling
Across the mountains from where I live is the little town of Jonesborough, Tennessee. Jonesborough is the home of the National Storytelling Festival that happens every year in October. It features new tellers as well as the big names on the storytelling circuit. It is a guaranteed delight every year and highlights our strong oral history tradition. It isn’t exclusive to here—you can check out your own town for storytelling events, if you like to be told tales. Many cities have stand-up storytelling nights for sharing spoken word performances. Tellers are some of the kindest and most generous people in the world.
Porches and kitchen tables are the first stages for storytellers. Before modern media (I’m talking about radio) and rural electrification, a visitor—whether family member from across the county line or traveling salesman-tinker—was a source of information and entertainment. The best tellers will spin a tale in the same way that wool roving is spun into yarn. A simple tale is hardly worth the telling and doesn’t do much for the listener either. Characters are writ large, dangers exaggerated, and outcomes larger than life.
When I began looking at the sorts of chores that might lend themselves to singing, I came up against a pleasure I remembered from my earliest childhood, that when women gather to do work, they are more apt to talk than they are to sing. My cousin was the possessor of our great-grandmother’s quilting frame, and her husband had rigged it with pulleys to move up and down over the long dining room table. Many a family story was told and repaired and retold around that old frame while little folks like me fetched the iced tea, which was always sweet, and emptied the ashtrays, which were always full. When I was old enough and skilled enough to help, the old quilting frames were only rarely used, and I was in school and only visited sometimes. These were the same stories that were told again and again on cool summer nights when the grown-ups were sitting on somebody’s porch and the kids were chasing lightning bugs and running with the dog. Sometimes a voice would rise up in song and coat the darkness in something sweeter than iced tea and far older. These were not working songs, however. They were expressions of longing and regret, of love and loss, and would end softly, everyone on the porch lost in their own thoughts, their own sad histories. We are born talking, stringing our cultural pieces like beads on a thread.
Some Witchery: Finding Something That’s Lost
Magic Hands for Finding will take some practice. I have always been a “finder” and am often employed to locate misplaced objects. Since my practice grows more intentional as I get older, I’ve devised a protocol for finding things and have given it the silly name Magic Hands.
Begin by grounding and centering, breathing deeply into your belly, and stilling yourself and your surroundings. Rub your hands together until they are pleasantly warm. Hold in your mind an image of the lost thing. Turn your hands palms-out in front of you and walk slowly through the area where the thing was last seen, if you know. Let your memory and intuition work together, especially if you are the one who lost the item. You may find your hands are tingling a bit. This technique is also useful when you can’t decide what to pack for a trip or what to make for supper or which present your mother would like best.
10. Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians (Windsor, CT: Loomis House Press, 2012).
11. Percy B. Green, “An Essex Charm for a Churn,” in A History of Nursery Rhymes (London: Greening Co., 1899), 134, https://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_Nursery_Rhymes.html?id=-USFcfPEBe4C.
12. Mike Paris, “The Dixons of South Carolina,” Old Time Music 10 (Fall 1973): 14.