Letters from Home
Dear Doug,
The fireside chats, pub planning sessions, and transatlantic trips are behind us. Now at last we are ready to embark upon our voyage through Wayfaring Strangers. We do not travel light: our old, vintage-leather steamer trunks are chock-full of tales, verses, illustrations, maps, and memories. Years of precious encounters with musicians and raconteurs, all sharing what they have carried in their hearts, urge us onward. The wind is in our sails. Anchors aweigh!
When we began researching this book, I found myself thinking how explorers and wayfarers have, step by muddy step, charted our march through history. Odyssey and pilgrimage have propelled us, fired our imaginations. Yet travel, especially the transatlantic crossing, has surely lost its lustre. The golden age of flight, sixty years on, has given way to today’s “bus in the sky.” Intercontinental airlines, so recently the glamorous preserve of an elite few, now vacuum-pack their 747s with hordes of frequent flyers. What was once a great and fearsome frontier is now a high-traffic international corridor. We take off and land within six or seven hours, bridging a vast ocean we nickname “the pond.”1 Sealed away, we’re blissfully blinded to the dark, unfathomed sea 30,000 feet below us. We feel neither relief nor amazement upon safe arrival where the waves meet the shore. When this journey, just a few generations on, has become a grinding routine, how can we begin to grasp the dread of an Atlantic crossing to the unknown?
Early in our research phase, we traveled together to the Ulster American Folk Park near Omagh, Northern Ireland. The outdoor “living history” museum tells the story of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emigration to America. It was easier in that setting to disregard thoughts of today’s humdrum transatlantic crossings. Standing dockside with my tickets clipped and marked “one-way,” I could imagine tears clouding the moment I scanned my homeland’s horizon one final time and battened down the hatches against what lay ahead.
When I was born, waves from the last emigration ships still washed the shores of my hometown. I know you have visited Greenock, the “Tail o’ the Bank,” where the River Clyde cuts wide and flows out into the estuary. And you will fondly remember the late Tony Cuffe singing about his fellow Greenockian, Johnny Todd: “He’s ta’en a notion for to sail across the sea, / And he’s left his ain dear Jeannie, weepin’ on the Greenock quay.” The verses remind us that, to generations of emigrants, the town’s anchorage was their departure scene as they set sail for Ireland or North America. Gourock sits a little further west, at the river’s coastal point, and the town was the backdrop to my childhood’s dreamy setting. The Clyde was the West Coast’s thoroughfare with its flotilla of “Cally Mac” ferryboats, “Clyde puffers,” and paddle steamers. Like many Scottish seaside towns, Gourock’s pierhead groaned under a throng of day trippers, sailing “doon the watter” from Glasgow for a summer’s afternoon of sea bathing, ice cream, and variety shows. For thirty Cold War years, the Clyde resort town of Dunoon, across from us on the Cowal peninsula, provided the shore facilities for U.S. Navy Submarine Squadron 14, Atlantic Fleet. Off-duty American sailors crossed the river daily—disembarking at Gourock pier, clutching their white “Dixie cup” caps to their heads, running to catch the Glasgow train and spend their shore leave amid the city’s noise and energy. Tracing the wake of their motor launches, then scanning the horizon to the hills of Argyll, our youthful counterintelligence was one step ahead of them: we were convinced we could see directly across to the coast of America.
The Clyde, by Norman Wilkinson. (Courtesy of the National Railway Museum/ Science and Society Picture Library)
Majestic mountains rise from the waterfront, as the Firth of Clyde grows wider still toward the ocean and the far Hebrides. Ten miles off the Ayrshire coast sits the rounded profile of Ailsa Craig, the granite plug of an extinct volcano. Granite is harvested periodically from the islet, nicknamed “Paddy’s Milestone,” to craft the world’s finest curling stones, but it is primarily a seabird sanctuary.2 From Scotland, we have crossed these notoriously rough seas together, where Rathlin Island and the Northern Irish coastline are but a curling stone’s throw away. Across the water, one of the world’s great shoreline journeys hems the Ulster seaboard. Lapped by the North Channel waves, the Antrim Coast Road peaks at the Giant’s Causeway. Tell your grandchildren this great legend surrounding its origin: the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill constructed a causeway between Ireland and Scotland to meet his challenger, the Scottish giant Benandonner. Show them a photograph, and they’ll ask you: “Why is there no magical bridge across the North Channel today?” You can tell them Benandonner destroyed it in fear, tricked into believing Fionn to be the mightier giant. The tale spinners of old clearly thought of Scotland and Ireland as connected, if only in legend. For centuries, people on both sides of this stretch of open water shared legends but also, in the physical world, coastlines and climate. They harvested the same sea and land; a scant twelve miles separates Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre and Ulster’s Country Antrim. My ancestors would have steered their bows toward these horizons, moving freely between their rugged, wavebattered landscapes. For the coastal folk on both sides of the channel, the sea was more bridge than barrier. The invisible borders and boundaries of our modern world would be meaningless to them.
You and I have often reminisced about my first Atlantic crossing in 1980. I embarked upon a study semester in North Carolina at UNC Charlotte, where you were a vice chancellor. I don’t recall our paths crossing then; my new friends were mostly students, who loved concocting and sending novel experiences my way, mostly food and drink based. They took me to all-night diners and drive-in movies, ball games and beach parties. But when several people suggested I take in the spectacle and carnival of the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in the High Country to the northwest, I was lukewarm. Why would a Scot go to a Highland Gathering on one of her final precious weekends overseas? Give me more swimming holes and tailgate parties! That said, I went, mostly to see North Carolina’s celebrated Great Smoky Mountains, and to take in the Highland Games too. I remember MacRae Meadows bursting into life the second weekend in July with the world’s largest gathering of Scottish clans. The pageantry of a traditional Highland Games, the athletic events and marching pipe bands, were faithfully observed. Like the “Tartan Army,” fans of the Scottish national football team, ticket holders at the games were wearing kilts of every color combination. Other adopted Highlanders bestowed American panache upon our national dress. I particularly remember some tartan trews that rightfully would have attracted a ban under the Dress Act of 1746.3 In contrast, there I stood in a UNC Charlotte “49ers” t-shirt and cutoff jeans, thousands of miles away from home and in the sort of heat and humidity that would have caused mass panic at the Braemar Gathering in Aberdeenshire, upon which the Grandfather Mountain Games was originally based.
It was all good fun, culturally confusing I must say, and a little overwhelming. Taking a break from the crowds, I climbed a wooded hillside to perch among the mountain laurel and view the scene below. The skirl of the bagpipes drifted up from the meadow as my attention switched to a family group, sitting in the shade of the trees. They were all dressed quite poorly; the lavish costumes on parade in the field below were clearly far beyond their means. The father hushed his four young children as he operated a battered cassette tape recorder, outstretched his arm and pointed a microphone toward the pipe bands. Tears filled his eyes, and his passion moved me over and above anything on display among the costumed pageantry in the field below. With his wife and four children, he had crossed the mountains from eastern Tennessee and clambered down the hillside to take a front-row seat amid the dogwoods and the critters. This was a family of “pilgrims,” the father proclaiming their heritage with great pride: “We’re Scotch-Irish.” It was one of the first times I had heard anyone claim this identity, except perhaps the odd student grappling with my accent and how it might relate to the distant ambiguities of his or her heritage.
So my travel year wound down, and I returned to Scotland to finish my studies. My many encounters had planted a seed, however, and it all began to affect my ear for music. I quickly became a forager (a trait we share), gathering albums from old-school record shops in Glasgow and Edinburgh to add to a growing eclectic vinyl collection. At the back of a secondhand album bin, the cover of Earthspan (Elektra) by the Incredible String Band jumped out at me. Visionary music, a heralded set at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and a famously counterculture lifestyle were hallmarks of these legendary psychedelic folkies. Here were the pioneers of World Music before such a genre had even been conceived. The standout track from Earthspan had the Incredible String Band romping through a hoedown arrangement of “Black Jack Davey.” I remember cranking up the volume in my dorm room. It seemed to capture the spirit of some of the places I’d recently visited in my American travels, but for all I knew then, it was simply an American song; I’d heard it sung by Bob Dylan after all.
As a scholar and modern-day troubadour, Scottish multi-instrumentalist Robin Williamson knew exactly what he was doing with his Incredible String Band collaborator Mike Heron, taking a ballad that had started in Scotland and having fun with its American cousin. When we met years later in Charlotte for a radio interview, Robin told me he had played fiddle for Tom Paley of the New Lost City Ramblers on a 1963 tour across the northeastern United States. This was where he learned the “jug band and old-timey numbers” he brought into his repertoire. It was a while yet before I would appreciate the lineage of “Black Jack Davey” myself (CD tracks 7 and 8), but my ear was now attuned and my curiosity piqued during those seminal months in North Carolina.
After graduation in Scotland, I returned to live in the United States. Early on, in the summer of 1982, I embarked on a coast-to-coast camping expedition. Have I ever told you this story? On the meandering return leg eastward, with North Carolina and home a day’s drive away through the Smokies, I stopped with my fellow wayfarers to pitch our well-worn tent just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. The timbre of a fiddle, drifting on the breeze to the campground, lured us to an open-air stage in a meadow nearby. We sat on the grass to hear a duo, Bashful Brother Oswald and Cousin Charlie. The crowd had thrown blankets onto the ground, relaxing in the humid air, but the tunes had such a ring of familiarity to me that I felt more inclined to dance. With Oswald’s guitar, banjo, and dobro and the fiddle-mandolin mix of Charlie, the easy rhythms and pacing were the perfect accompaniment as the sun set on a warm southern evening. The melodies, however, recalled the Scottish country dance band sets that had jigged and reeled from an old valve radio in my mum’s kitchen. In the United States for over a year now and a little homesick, this authentic, joyful music went directly to my heart. As you well know, Doug, Scots abroad like to sing of home or at least exchange memories and uncover any connections. As their set drew to a close, I had to find out more and approached the pair as they packed away their instruments. I wanted to tell them that I “knew” their tunes, find out where they had learned them, and maybe reminisce over some trip they must have taken to Scotland. “Honey, this is old-timey music,” Brother Oswald told me warmly, “it’s from right around here although maybe some of these tunes did come from your country way back.” As we chatted on, something clicked into place for me that evening. Deep within me a switch was thrown, lighting up circuits of curiosity that burn brightly to this day. I’ve since learned that when one feels the impulse to run with an idea like this, there is no “off” switch.
By now, you will have worked out that Brother Oswald turned out to be Beecher Ray Kirby (19112002), a Tennessee native who grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains with his fiddle- and banjo-playing father. Kirby took up guitar and banjo, singing gospel music and playing for square dances. He popularized the resonator guitar and dobro in country music and played with Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys, along with Charlie Collins (1934-2012), whom I had also met on that warm Tennessee evening. In the months following my summer awakening to the Appalachian sound, I realized I was living in a musical heartland, surrounded by songs and tunes that had traveled many a mile, covering much the same ground as I had. But where my journey had unfolded over the past year or so, this musical migration saga spoke of centuries of displacement and detour. The more I looked, the more I found. I loved discovering later that the 1972 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album Will the Circle Be Unbroken featured Kirby as a session musician on the title track, popularized by the Carter Family.
And so my appetite for authentic American music grew—rediscovering Doc Watson (already seen in Edinburgh), immersing myself in Charlotte’s lively local folk music scene, getting to know Jean Ritchie on her trips to the city, playing guitar and singing in the back-porch music sessions we both enjoyed. We were fortunate: old-time fiddle and banjo, Appalachian ballads, bluegrass, and early country music were always so plentiful in the city, a musical community for generations. Before Nashville rose to prominence as the home of country music, Charlotte had been an important center for the budding genre. By the late 1930s, the city was operating as a country recording hub, and WBT, one of the oldest radio stations in the South, transmitted hours of live country music every week. Public radio came to the airwaves much later, just as I returned to live over there in 1981, and that was how our paths first crossed. I was naturally drawn to the sound of WFAE-FM, the new NPR® affiliate you helped instigate. Starting there as a volunteer, I was soon hired to promote and raise funds for the fledgling station. I introduced The Thistle & Shamrock® on the local airwaves in 1981 and, with the enthusiastic support of you and the station manager, debuted to an unsuspecting national audience less than two years later on June 4, 1983. From that date, I was officially in the business of sharing music from what we loosely called “Celtic” roots to public radio audiences across the United States via Public Radio International (PRI) until 1990, and since then in partnership with NPR®. A desire to get great music out there infused the show with energy, while my youthful enthusiasm disguised the inelegance of someone who was learning on the job. Along the way, I greedily fed my own appetite for all the roots music surrounding me in the South. I quickly learned, despite the historical links, that people now understood little about the music of Scotland, the rest of the British Isles, and Ireland. Listeners often wrote to say it “struck a chord within them,” but the sense of how it may have contributed to an enduring cultural legacy in the United States seemed unheeded by most.
And yet what I found most tantalizing, coming from over here, was that very sense of connection. When we first heard Jean Ritchie singing “Shady Grove” at an early Charlotte Folk Society concert, she told us it was derived from the British Isles ballad “Little Matty Groves” or “Little Musgrave.” So some people who were involved with this music, like you and Jean, clearly did know a great deal about its lineage (which she always cheerily validated by calling me “cousin"). Through tradition bearers like Jean and many more who swung through Charlotte on their travels, my interest grew apace. As you remember, I often arranged concerts for the radio station to feed both the public radio fund-raising coffers and my own insatiable appetite for the music, a benefit in both senses. From Charlotte, I was well placed to visit other musical landscapes and communities and met some remarkable people, key tradition bearers who linked back to an era already fading in the collective memory. They included North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell (1901-85) and Kentucky coalminer balladeer Nimrod Workman (1895-1994). Before I could fully appreciate their renown, I was privileged to work with many legendary performers, both on radio and stage, and watch them enthrall their audiences. The more I heard, the more I came to feel the power of that Atlantic bridge, carrying a growing sense of the infinite richness of it all and the vibrancy of a living tradition.
Our friendship was surely forged in the realization that we were each exploring parallel pathways. Yours pulled you perennially in the opposite direction to mine, back to your ancestral home and the roots of the music you have always loved. It strikes me how much we have each maintained an immersion in this topic over many years, finding complementary ways to explore its possibilities. Notwithstanding my more recent infatuation for playing clawhammer banjo, my enduring outlet has been to create radio, both in the United States and back here in the United Kingdom. You devised and nurtured the Swannanoa Gathering. Participants from all over the world annually meet in the heart of the Appalachian summer, forging lifelong friendships in the sharing of their music. With Darcy, your wife and our Wayfaring Strangers art editor, you have shared a love of song making with an international cast of musicians and scholars who visit your North Carolina mountains each summer. Between the three of us, it was only a matter of time before a book began to materialize from our shared passion for the music that connects both our worlds.
“Connection”: how often we use this word. It holds the promise of tangled textures below the surface, of stories to be told, of discoveries to be made. As words go, none can better clarify my motivation for collaborating on this book. For as long as I can remember, I have felt an innate attachment to homegrown music from my own Scottish corner of the world. Making my personal discovery of how it must once have traveled, and how long ago, only strengthens my connection with the United States. So with me “over here” and you “over there,” it has been a pleasure to work together on Wayfaring Strangers. Sometimes, we seemed to have stumbled upon a half-forgotten old pathway, overgrown through the years yet needing just a little pruning to reveal its timeworn stepping-stones. Thank you, Doug, for helping to clear the trail and for trekking with me across these cherished ancestral landscapes.
Well, our wayfarer’s tale at last comes to life throughout the following pages of narrative, voices of tradition, and images. It has been a long, winding journey, for them and for us. I have often felt as if we were their fellow sojourners over past centuries and far-flung places—their seventeenth-century North Channel voyage from Scotland to Ulster; settling into a new agrarian existence across the Ulster landscape; a perilous Atlantic crossing to the port of Philadelphia and other landfalls; pushing into the Pennsylvania frontier and then down the Great Wagon Road through the Shenandoah valley and into the southern Appalachians. At each step of the way, their roving ways were sustained by music’s refrains—the resinging of old ballads, the fiddle tunes that fired up the dance, and the retelling of endless stories. It has been exhilarating to be in their midst.
The seeds for our chronicle of the wayfarer’s musical migration were planted long ago throughout our respective journeys. Their music legacy especially springs to life for me during each summer’s Swannanoa Gathering, the traditional music workshops on the Warren Wilson College campus. It is a gathering you know well, having served often as an instructor and concert emcee during Traditional Song Week. The images are so implanted in my memory bank that they reappear throughout the year, especially when I stroll past those mountain campus settings where the summer music magic unfolds. The gathering reoccurs day and night for five music theme weeks but never grows old: a cacophony of music floats through the soft mountain air; a July moon silhouettes the surrounding mountains and provides a glow to the tightly bunched circles of musicians as they share fiddle tunes and give living voice to the ghost of old ballads, interspersed with a banter of conversation. It reminds me of a favorite quote from Irish poet and novelist Brendan Kenneally: “All songs are living ghosts that long for a living voice.”1 Meanwhile, a dance band plays in the nearby hall as dancers glide over the floor in contra, ceili, or square-dance configurations, while the caller oversees the colorful flow. The evening music sessions carry on your Scottish tradition of the ceilidh, the “coming together” of friends and musical kindred spirits to share music, dance, conversation, and stories. I imagine that such music gatherings likely began in the recesses of ancient history. And it reminds me that our Wayfaring Strangers story extends back to the cottage hearth and the ceilidh sessions of Scotland, Ulster in the north of Ireland, and subsequently the log cabin firesides and front porches of the Appalachian coves. As told in the pages that follow, there was a tradition of inclusiveness for all comers in a spirit of community transcending social, economic, and cultural divides.
As I absorb the images before me through the Swannanoa Gathering’s nightfall, sometimes joining one of the little groups of instrumental jam sessions or song circles, I often reflect upon my early vision for this gathering over two decades before and the fond hope for the perpetuation of the traditional music in our corner of the southern Appalachians. I’m sure you have observed a certain magic in the air as folks pull up scattered chairs or perch on the winding stone walls and form or reform the music circles. Some simply lean forward to listen. Over the years, I began to realize that there was much more going on than initially meets the eye; participants from all over the world have slipped away from the unceasing demands of their professional lives for full immersion in the workshops, concerts, and music sessions extending into these moonlit nights. Many are reconnecting with a musical soul gone dormant for years, buttressed by a spirit of egalitarianism too often lacking in other walks of life, and in the end connecting to something beyond themselves. As the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals once said, “Music must serve a purpose, it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity.”2 In witnessing the scenes unfold over the five summer weeks, I am gratified to be a part of it all. It is an old and cherished tradition that never gets old, as gathering around the music feeds the soul. A bard of 400 years ago said as much: “If music be the food of love, play on, give me the excess of it.”3 This gift of music is especially relevant today, as we are relentlessly within arm’s reach of some form of electronic gadget that short-circuits face-to-face contact and community. I hear this concern repeatedly from participants, with a wistful longing that if only the week’s experience could be their “real world.”
Jam session at the Swannanoa Gathering. (Courtesy of R. L. Geyer)
As you well know by now, the Swannanoa Gathering is one of the musical ingredients that stirred my interest in telling the story of this musical family tree. But for me, the musical journey goes back a lifetime: to a mother who placed in my hands a mail-order Sears and Roebuck Silvertone guitar; to a father who loved to express his Scottish ancestry by singing the songs of Robert Burns as well as the old Appalachian ballads. Like many others, I was profoundly impacted by the music of the 1960s, witnessing firsthand the role music played in the cause of social justice through its many musical forms and performers. An indelible childhood experience was seeing a nineteen-year-old unknown named Elvis Presley perform a revolutionary blend of music that transcended ethnic boundaries—black gospel, spirituals, country, and rhythm and blues. It was a reminder of the age-old message of the ceilidh and jam session: music can rise above the walls of prejudice. (I learned from you years later that Elvis’s ancestry goes back to the cradle of Scottish balladry—Aberdeenshire and the hamlet of Lonmay—and that ancestor Andrew Presley immigrated to America in 1745.) Finally, here was a music that we teenagers could relate to with its tapestry of influences and that would impact the civil rights movement during its embryonic days.
In absorbing and playing the folk music of the 1960s, I grew curious as to the music’s roots, of what old-timers in the Appalachians would describe as “way back yonder music.” Well, where exactly was way back yonder? And over what migration path? What was meant by those Child Ballads from song mistresses Joan Baez and Judy Collins? And where did those fiddle tunes with eclectic names come from? These questions lingered through college and graduate school. As you know, I wound up as a university professor and administrator at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In 1981 I had the opportunity to make my first crossing to Scotland to attend an international professional meeting with a faculty colleague. I eagerly anticipated the visit to my ancestral land. While we attended conferences and meetings by day, I dragged my friend to every traditional music venue, concert, and pub we could find to soak in the music of my family tree. It was like uncovering musical buried treasure. Plus, the entire ambience of Scotland filled my senses: the iconic profile of old Edinburgh; the bloomin’ heather that graced the highlands and glens; the special quality of light and maritime air; the soft blending of land, sea, sky, and wind; and yes, the glow and conviviality of the music pubs. Through a dozen return visits the same sensations engulf me at my home away from home.
Little did I know at the time that you made your initial crossing the year prior but from the opposite direction, and by coincidence landed at my university as a visiting student. Then you returned the following year as a volunteer at WFAE-FM, the new university public radio station I helped launch, and in short order were elevated to the position of director of development. You requested and we encouraged your production of a local program of Celtic music titled The Thistle & Shamrock®. (I smile in recalling one supportive staff member who nevertheless commented, “Good luck Fiona, but with that accent you’ll never make it in public radio!”) Despite a lack of radio experience, you were a natural from the outset with a graceful on-the-air presence, lilting Scottish accent and impeccable ear for the music. That Scottish lilt led some listeners later to write, “Fiona, why don’t you just talk for an hour, we love your voice.” Two years later, we launched the program’s first national broadcast and the listenership steadily expanded over the next thirty years. Many of us are proud that The Thistle & Shamrock® has been a resounding success story as one of the longest-running and most popular music programs in public radio history, recipient of numerous awards and accolades. I believe you would agree that the timing of the program’s beginning was fortuitous, as the Celtic music renaissance was under way with a plethora of talented groups from Scotland and Ireland: Battlefield Band, the Tannahill Weavers, the Chieftains, the Bothy Band, Planxty, Boys of the Lough, and many others. Public radio was in its infancy in those euphoric days, and we were learning as we went, but it was expanding rapidly through affiliate stations and listenership. There also was a renewed interest in exploring family and ethnic roots of whatever background, a universal sentiment that persists. Folk clubs and festivals were growing on both sides of the Atlantic.
While I had a professional stake in the birth and success of your Thistle & Shamrock®, it was of personal interest as well. Through your efforts, I was gaining a deeper understanding of the music from the Celtic lands and the ties that bind to our Appalachians Mountains. You remember that it led several of us to begin attending a weekly folk music jam class at the local community college, and we became involved with the recently launched Charlotte Folk Music Society. It was a helpful entry into the local folk music scene and the many kindred musical spirits. A number of bands evolved out of those weekly sessions. One of our early musical forays together was a band we humorously called Highland Brew, a name we judiciously chose to revise when performing in elementary schools. Later I helped launch the band Maggie’s Fancy, which featured a repertoire connecting the music of the Appalachians to Scotland and Ireland. Our eventual CD, Glen to Grove, emphasized the relationship with songs of shady groves and glenside tunes, and our band would sometimes travel to the mountains of southwestern Virginia to rehearse at a rustic old mountain cabin owned by my family. The legacy of the place was appropriate for our music. It was built in the early nineteenth century by the MacGrady family, Scots-Irish who had immigrated to the area. The single-room cabin and loft were home to a family of twelve, and the tombstones in a small family cemetery plot nearby gave testament to their rugged and often abbreviated lives.
Significantly, Darcy, a dulcimer-playing fellow band member, would become my wife. Once again, the music was weaving its magic in unforeseen ways. The year of our marriage, we journeyed to Nova Scotia, where the Celtic music thrives, and made an autumn 1987 visit to Scotland as part of your Thistle & Shamrock Tour. Although this was Darcy’s first Scotland journey, she experienced a sensation that I also had felt during my initial visit six years earlier: “Somehow, I have been here before.” I have heard others express feeling similarly.
Fiona, as we reflect upon those who preceded us and through their migrations “brought us here,” there is a shared sense of getting in touch with our ancestral underpinnings. Perhaps that is one reason why traditional folk music is called the root of all our music. There is an abiding authenticity that resonates. As folklorist and musician Ron Pen is quoted later in our book: “It is the music that America comes home to.”4 It is the taproot to our family tree of songs, stories, and people. It encompasses several qualities that sustain our lives and are significant elements in weaving our Wayfaring Strangers tale: the music’s capacity for expressing deep feelings of community, healing, sense of place, and wanderlust.
Each of these interweaving strands has been at work within traditional music’s long journey from earliest origins, through Scotland and Ulster, into the southern Appalachians, and to the current day. And your and my individual journeys coalesced with the vision of this book that would chronicle the carrying stream of the music’s migration. You had moved back to Scotland. There, you produced The Thistle & Shamrock® from a studio above the little shops in a Perthshire village on the banks of the River Tay and presented BBC programs on American roots music. Yet we continued to communicate, and there were periodic visitations across the water as the book idea persisted. I recall that the project began to crystallize during the summer of 2003 at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Each year, musical traditions of several regions or nations of the world are featured. That summer included Scotland and the Appalachians. Your consultancy with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival involved emceeing several of the Scottish performances, which were recorded by NPR®. Darcy and I represented the Swannanoa Gathering and some of its instructors who would be performing. Perhaps it was that combination of music traditions, highlighted in the nation’s capital, that inspired our book conversations to move forward. Under the shade trees of the National Mall on a very warm summer’s day, we began in earnest to discuss our vision for a book that would relate the music’s migration journey. Voices of tradition from both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom were performing that day on the National Mall, would tell the story. Much work lay ahead in the way of research, collecting, travel, interviews, transatlantic communications, and writing. It was to be a long and circuitous winding road to our final destina- tion—this book we now hold—but sharing the story of the meandering path that transported these musical traditions, and of voices that steadily recede from our presence, has been worth all the effort. And thank goodness our indomitable, wayfaring ancestors never ceased in their roving ways, as our mutual friend and Scottish balladeer Brian McNeill expresses in the “Rovin’ Dies Hard”:
I’ve tuned up my fiddle and I’ve rosined my bow
And I’ve sung of the clans and the clear crystal fountains
I can tell you the road and the miles frae Dundee
To the back of Appalachia’s wild mountains.
And when my traveling days they are over
And the next of the rovers has come
He’ll take all my songs and he’ll sing them again
To the beat of a different drum.
And if ever I’m asked why the Scots are beguiled
I’ll lift up my glass in a health, and I’ll smile.
And I’ll tell them that fortune’s dealt Scotland the wildest of cards
For the rovin’ dies hard.5
We would be a much poorer culture had those wayfarers not persisted in gazing beyond the next horizon. So here’s to their rovin’ and their abiding tale, carried along the wings of a song and a tune. It has been a privilege for us to be able to share in their unfolding story.
Pete Seeger with authors Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr. (Courtesy of Darcy Orr)