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Whered’ya
Come From, Whered’ya Go? A documentary film
(in progress) by Kim Bistrong and
Romy Achituv In the early and mid-1970s, a group of young,
urban, middle class men and women from the Northeast began frequenting
the heartland of Appalachia. Coming
of age on the heels of an era marked by socio-political activism and
ideals of personal freedom expressed through the social body, this demographic
sought alternatives to the new consumerism offered by mainstream America.
This community found itself standing at an unpaved socio-cultural
cross-road; a moment in American history when the prevailing social
conditions offered certain groups the freedom to live outside the confines
of restricted social institutions. Whered’ya Come From, Whered’ya
Go? Appalachian Mountain Music in the Northern Urban Tradition traces
the evolution of a community that grew out of a shared need to travel
the untainted trails of rural America; what each voyager found, at its
end, was the traditional musical heritage of the southern Appalachian
Mountains. “Old Time Music” was borne in the Appalachian heartland
of a unique marriage between African rhythms and Celtic melodies. Its
lyrics are a composite of murder, love, liquor and labor prose reflecting
the southern social experience, and traditional Celtic ballads echoing
cries from distant lands
Folklorists and ethnographers initiated
the material preservation of this music in the 1920s. Three decades later,
the field recordings anthologized by Harry Smith, Alan Lomax and Archie Green
would carry the untainted sounds from the hollows of West Virginia and the
porches of the Carolinas into the coffeehouses of the northern cities. The post-war generation identified the “old-time”
tradition with the poverty and grief of their ancestors. Now able to
purchase guitars through mail-order catalogs, the young southerners
were seeking to create a new form of music. The raw sound of the open-backed
percussive banjo was abandoned in favor of the sleek sound of the newly
designed banjo. The “Bluegrass” banjo, equipped with a resonator
to stifle the staccato quality of the open-backed banjo, encouraged
a louder, faster, melodic sound and a flashy performance style. Concurrent with the waning of old-time music
in the mountains was a thriving “back-to- land” movement in
the cities. The quest to be out of the range of the “electric”
industrial currents, flooding the urban landscape, was satisfied by
the rustic, communal way of life which the “back-to-landers”
were eager to adopt. The aesthetic of “acoustic” music, rooted
in the oral-folk tradition, complemented the life style. Through recordings,
friends, local dances, festivals and visits to the last of the older
fiddle and banjo players, the “outsiders” learned what was
then the untranscribed music of the Southern Appalachian region. Out of the selection of students, bohemians,
poets, and musicians who encountered this music at its source, emerged
a community that has, since, inherited and revived the Appalachian mountain,
old-timey sound. Once prolific at adapting this unfamiliar style of
music to their untrained ears, the musicians could play together and
teach each other. This “band of outsiders” began to dominate
the southern music scene. The documentary begins at this juncture. Through
personal interviews, archives, tabloids, and jam sessions, issues of
“authenticity,” “proprietary,” “cultural evolution”
and “American identity,” are explored. The documentary traces
the impact that folklorists, academics, and indigenous southern musicians
have had upon the developments of this music and the northern musicians
responsible for its revival. * The footage for this documentary was shot between 1993-1996, primarily at film festivals in North Carolina and West Virginia, and in the homes of the interviewees. The documentary continues to be in post-production today. Pending finishing funds, we expect to complete the film by Winter, 2005.
Additional camera and editing by Tirtza Even.
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