f44 “I


t was there that I heard Sheila Kay Adams of Madi- son County, North Carolina. Sheila Kay learned ballads from her relatives and


neighbours. Her songs and stories, and they way she sang unaccompanied, made a big impact on me. Her delivery was always really strong, definite. And after I had heard her, I got the chance to look up recordings of some of the people she learned from, like Doug Wallin, Berzilla Wallin, Dellie Norton, Dillard Chandler. There’s a cool style that I associate from her area of North Carolina, with lots of volume and lots of ornaments, the ‘breaks and sighs’ as Sheila Kay has called them.”


And so, as a teenager of 14 or 15, with the allure of love songs and ballads having sunk its hook deep into Elizabeth’s skin, she started singing for wider audi- ences. “Folks were surprised that a young person was singing the old songs. Sur- prised and excited! I was feeling a demand to learn more, not just because I liked that music, but because people wanted to hear it from me.”


Elizabeth’s dad began to “prowl the internet for field recordings, finding incred- ible music, sometimes from right near our home. It was invaluable.” Although she herself just wanted to belt songs out rather than engage with research at this point, she was open to the ‘try this one’ encourage- ment of her dad in playing her various scratchy recordings. “I had crunchy beauti- ful material to work with!”


And she clearly turned a few heads with it. As a 16-year-old, Elizabeth was presented with an award from the Henry Reed Fund for Folk Artists from the Library


of Congress, aimed at providing support for folk artists drawing upon tradition. From this, she went on to study a self- designed major in Southern Appalachian Traditional Performance at college, taking a semester off to go on a tour of the West Coast as part of the National Council for Traditional Arts’ Crooked Road Project.


“I chose the college partly because they encouraged a more ‘liberal arts’ approach in the first couple years of under grad, so I got to explore a lot of the different things I had always wanted to: theatre, literature, history, ethnomusicology, drawing, all the artsy-fartsy stuff!”


Despite this artistic freedom, Eliza- beth found that she couldn’t escape from the music. “Whatever I was doing, I was relating it in my head to ballads and old- time music. I allowed whatever I absorbed to inform my ideas about mountain music. In some ways the aca- demic approach didn’t sit well with me. I have a very personal connection to the music I wanted to learn about, and I felt extremely bogged down in the jargon.”


Not feeling she was destined to become ‘Professor LaPrelle’, Elizabeth graduated back home, to sing on more familiar turf. “I had ideas about the music, and I wanted to explore them. Living in the mountains, in the country, was the only thing that made sense. It may sound corny but I wanted to be back on the family farm. And music is always close at hand.”


Home is clearly an inspiration in many ways for Elizabeth and a place for which she campaigns, raising awareness about mountain top removal as well as having become an ambassador for the songs that come out of them. “I live in the mountains


H


of Virginia and, yeah, I like to wander the windswept hills singing my heart out, and I do like to listen to the song of the creek and all of that… I even think that it informs my singing. However, I think the strongest connection is the connection between people. I feel more rooted to where I live now that I have learned songs from recordings of people who once lived in that area. And that grew exponentially once I sought out or encountered their descendants; suddenly the link to the art of the past became a living thing. I also have a nostalgic sensibility. I am pretty into the past for its own sake.”


er own wide-eyed research into local source material and singers, visiting archives and old musicians, has developed since her college days. I wonder


who she cites as major inspirations?


“Texas Gladden is one. She grew up in same county as me, although she was gone by the time I came around. She brought up nine children, and sang many lullabies and old ballads very beautifully. Alan Lomax recorded several hours of interview with her and her brother, Hobart Smith (a fiddler, banjo and guitar player). She says a lot of incredible things about being a singer. She describes hav- ing a perfect ‘mental picture’ of the bal- lads and talks about how her friends as teenagers would always want to hear a sad love song if they had fallen out with their boyfriend.”


“Jean Ritchie is, of course, an enor- mous inspiration: a Fulbright scholar, a wonderful singer, and a brilliant writer. Her book, Singing Family Of The Cumber- lands, puts down really simply all these


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