A Review: Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. By Loyal Jones.
by David E. Whisnant
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 99, No. 391 (Jan. - Mar., 1986), pp. 95-97
Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. By LoyalJones. (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 249, introduction, foreword, appendixes, illustrations. $10.95 soft cover)
They called him, somewhat romantically," the minstrel of the Appalachians. "He called himself, with that mixture of entrepreneurial hustle, marginally m iddle-class p ride, and mountaineer modesty that ever characterized him, "the squire of South Turkey Creek." And for nearly 50 years, the first weekend in August, "along about sundown" a lone fiddler would take the stage at Asheville's City Auditorium, wait for the signal from Bascom, and sail into "Grey Eagle," opening another year of the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. It was in many ways the best of the four major festivals started between 1928 and 1934 by Bascom, Sarah Gertrude Knott, Annabel Morris Buchanan, and Jean Thomas.
The growing public awareness of traditional culture in the 1930s was shaped to a considerable extent by Lunsford, Knott, Buchanan, and Thomas, whose festivals drew increasing national attention. Yet with the exception of Buchanan, no one of the four has previously been subjected to detailed investigation. Loyal Jones's book is a welcome contribution.
Lunsford was (and knew he was) a bridging figure, a culture broker. He was a product of the traditional culture of his corner of the Appalachian region in a way that Knott, Buchanan, and Thomas never were. And better than any of them (with the possible exception of Knott), he was able to interpret that culture to others in a way calculated to move them to revise-rather than in a curiously backhanded way simply to reaffirm-cherished assumptions about both elite and nonelite culture. That he was able to do so derived partly from his personal history (he was from South Turkey Creek, but his father was a school teacher and he himself was a graduate of Trinity College) and partly from the proximity of South Turkey Creek to Asheville, which had been one of the major centers of economic, social, and cultural change in the mountains since about the time of Bascom's own birth in 1882.
It is curious in a way that the popular press and the public at large assigned such a unitary, coherent identity to Bascom. The many magazine and newspaper stories about him generally spoke exclusively of that cultural "work as a citizen" (as he called it) which he inaugurated only when he was already nearly 50 years old. Coherent myths are more comforting than messy realities, certainly, but the truth is (asJones's book suggests indirectly) that there were several major conflicting dynamics in Bascom's life. He was the product of a turbulent period of change-a culturally dislocated mountaineer whose head (and gut) told him that things were culturally awry, and who was blessed with sufficient intelligence, insight, energy, and cantankerousness to push his way through to a new synthesis. As he did so, however, the tensions and contradictions of the culture itself revealed themselves in him. It was as if there were several Bascoms. One Bascom was the child of the Lunsfords, who were determined that their children would (as they say in the mountains) "amount to something" in the local community. So little Bascom became the diligent good boy who minded his grammar, memorized his poetry, became a professor and a lawyer, joined the Methodist church, married his grade-school sweetheart, and started a family in the shadow of Hanlon Mountain. But another Bascom was the dilatory, "no "count" banjo picker who never "worked steady," who rambled through the hills peddling fruit trees and honey while his farm and law practice went to pot and his wife raised his kids. Still another Bascom-playing the angles, tapping into the networks as best he could-dabbled in politics and speculated a bit in boom-times real estate.
But the "Squire of South Turkey Creek" was the synthesizer: the white-suited, buck-dancing country boy who used his scholar's skills, lawyer's cunning, and politician-entrepreneur's nose for the angles to defend and embolden his Buncombe, Madison, and Haywood County neighbors against the pantheon of bitch goddesses worshipped by the Asheville Chamber of Commerce; who in a more and more sensitive and effective way used the political and cultural learnings garnered during both his rambling and his wheeling and dealing; who, by insisting always upon wearing his suit and tie both when he was interviewed and when he went to learn songs from his neighbors, forced the hillbilly-fixated journalists and tourists (and even his too habitually self-deprecating neighbors themselves) to think again.
In Minstrel of the Appalachians, Loyal Jones chronicles Bascom's life much more completely than it has been chronicled before. His work is based upon both the major Lunsford archival materials and the extensive newspaper and magazine writing about him, and upon more than 40 interviews spread over a dozen years. The portrait of Lunsford that emerges-as child of an ambitious and respectable mountain family, as student, professor, editor, lawyer, husband and father, businessman, performer, collector, festival organizer, local culture hero, and ultimately as nationally and internationally known ambassador of traditional culture in the mountains-is rich and detailed enough to repay study by any serious student of culture and culture change.
Jones's rather brief (144 pages) text is buttressed by transcriptions (by John M. Forbes) of nearly 50 of Bascom's favorite ballads, songs, and fiddle tunes, and by several useful appendixes (lists of the Columbia University and Library of Congress recording projects of 1935 and 1949, a Lunsford discography by Norm Cohen, and a sampling of Lunsford's tales and anecdotes). Unfortunately the book is not indexed, and none of the appendix materials are annotated.
In the final chapter of the biography Jones addresses (albeit a bit gingerly) some of the thornier questions raised by Lunsford's public work: What about his having excluded black performers from his festival in Asheville (which itself has a large black population)? How idiosyncratic was his vision (and presentation) of local culture? Did he or did he not sometimes rig the contests in favor of his favorites (Sam Queen, Bill McElreath, Samantha Bumgarner, Obray Ramsey, Red Parham, George Pegram, and others)? To what extent was he both a conservor and a transformer of culture? As between Bascom and the Chamber of Commerce, who ultimately used whom more effectively? Why did he, knowledgeable as he was about the complex history reflected in traditional music, seasoned veteran though he was of his own political/cultural war, have such an antipathy to those who wished to enlist that music against McCarthyism in the 1950s, racism in the 1960s, or the Vietnam War later-as much of it had been used (indeed had been born) in many a declared and undeclared war before?
One of the encouraging historiographical (and therefore political and cultural) developments of the past decade or so is that much of the earlier romantic, condescending, broad-brush, slapdash writing about culture in the Appalachian region has been replaced by more thoughtful, critical, fine-grained analysis. Loyal Jones's Minstrel of the A ppalachians is a worthy contribution to that enterprise, which continues to engage the energy and passion of scholars working from a variety of perspectives.
University of Maryland Baltimore County
DAVID E. WHISNANT
Baltimore