The narrative of Miss Alfreda M. Peel is full of color. It is a series of four sketches of the ballad trail, each representing a season of the year. The first is spring.
One day early in the spring of 1911 [she writes], I was riding over a mountain road in southwest Virginia. I did not know then about the ballad quest nor had I ever heard a ballad sung. It was May Day, and the little spring winds were shaking down the Judas bloom and rippling the snowy dogwood below us in a many a deep ravine. Where the forest ends and the orchards begin stood a little log cabin and in the doorway a woman was sitting:
“’Twuz in thuh lovely month of May
When all the buds wuz swellin’,
Sweet William on his death bed lay
Fer the love o’ Barbara Allen.”
She sang loudly and in a melancholy minor. When she saw the wagon she stopped suddenly and looked with the silent interest that lonely people have for a chance passer-by.
“She’s a powerful singer,” said our driver solemnly.
“What is it she’s singing? I never heard a song like that before.”
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“Hit’s song ballets, awful lonesome tunes. She learned ’em from her mammy who was right smart of a hand to sing ’em too. They allus make me feel kinder lonesome an’ sad. I’d a heap rather hear a dance tune, said the wagoner.
Two days later, sitting in the doorway of that cabin, I heard her sing two ancient ballads in her melancholy nasal minor. She seemed to be quite glad to let me write them down. And thus began my ballad quest.
Miss Peel’s method of collecting was more adventurous, less sedentary, than that employed in Rockingham and Campbell Counties.
The best method I have found to hunt ballads [she says] is to board at a farm house in some lonely mountainous county and on horseback and on foot visit every single person within the neighborhood who “makes music” on any instrument or sings songs of any description. By carefully explaining your mission, and with much tact, you will soon receive much kindness and cooperation.
A good illustration of this tact and its results is the summer adventure of Miss Peel and her friend, Miss Caroline Melbard, of Salem, Virginia. The narrative is vivid, and well charged with almost photographic description:
“Hit’s eight miles to the lumber camp, an’ you better be mighty keerful o’ rattlesnakes,” said the saw-mill hand, looking in astonishment at the strange town women who, mounted on two rough farm horses, had lost their way on the wilderness road. … And eight miles back. Heavens! And on these horses!
The day was hot — midsummer. It was a blessing that the road wound through dense woods where rhododendron and laurel overhung the path and the spruce pine grew darkly over the rocky brown streams. Where the trees parted a little we could see the green mountain spurs over which hung thunder heads, seeming motionless in the heat, and from which issued a low growl of warning.
Again we plunged into a rocky stream, and our horses struggled up a steep road scraped by logging teams to the little shanties that clung to the edge of a rocky gorge. An old woman with a pet owl on her shoulder stood in the doorway of one of the shanties. She was the saw-mill cook whom we knew for a “singing woman.”
“May we wait here till the storm is over?” we asked, as the thunder rolled over our heads ominously.
“Come right in. Me an’ Bill git yer saddles off.”
Inside the shanty were long oil-cloth covered tables piled with soiled dishes. We told her of our quest and asked her to sing for us.
“I declare, I ain’t got no time, fer I got to git my dishes washed.”
My friend volunteered to wash them, so after many excuses the old woman finally consented.
“We better set in the porch. I killed a right big rattler in the room yestidy. It was lyin’ in the bunk, so it makes me kinder nervous to set in thar.”
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So, accompanied by the owl which made strange noises, we sat in the porch while the rain dripped from the eaves and the storm rolled away among the mountains. Ballad after ballad she sang in her cracked and quavering voice, but still they were all familiar.
“Do you know the one about the devil?” I asked hopefully.
“I kin sing one about ‘The Devil an’ the Nine Questions’:
“’Ef you don’t answer me questions nine,
Sing ninety-nine and ninety,
I’ll take you off to hell alive,
And you’re the weaver’s bonny.’”
This was the ancient ballad of “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” recorded here for the first time in the New World in this remote corner of the Southern Appalachians.
Autumn, too, has its appropriate vignette.
A muddy road in late November stretching away from the three-room school at the cross-roads is also a ballad trail. It leads to a little house beside the creek where Mabel, the pupil who has asked me home to supper, lives. It is a great occasion for us both.
“Git a lamp and play fer yer teacher, Mabel,” says the mother, after the usual formalities. “Mabel is a powerful hand ter sing ‘song ballets’ when she takes a notion.”
An organ decorated with Christmas tree trimmings stands in the corner. Mabel opens a box full of folded scraps of paper on which songs are scribbled. The organ begins to wheeze and groan, and Mabel sings:
“Ge-e-orge Collins rode out one cold winter ni-ight,
Ge-e-orgie Col-lins rode home so fi-ine…”
“Please let me see your song collection,” I ask eagerly.
“You can’t read none of ’em, they’re wrote so bad.”
They certainly are a badly spelt, poorly written jumble, and among a mixture of hymns and sentimental songs I find two ballad treasures, “The Seven King’s Daughters,” and “George Collins.”
Many times since I have examined similar collections of songs such as these, and hardly ever have I failed to find either a fragment or a full ballad among them.
Winter rounds out the ballad hunter’s calendar.
Blep-blep goes the woodchopper’s axe. He has walked a long way from his cabin in the hollow along a road swept by an icy wind. The sky is gray and the hoary mountains look bleak and sharply ridged. Inside the kitchen of the farm-house it is warm and cosy.
“Get the poor old fellow to come in and warm. He must be nearly frozen out there,” says the farmer’s wife kindly.
He comes tottering across the yard and into the kitchen. He is a very old man, tall and thin, with a ruddy face and sparse chin-whiskers. No one gives him credit for knowing much. He warms his knotted hands before the fire and wipes his rheumy eyes on a bandanna handkerchief. Somehow you wonder if in his dim memory there may not be some ancient fragment of song.
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“Wall,” he says, after your careful questioning, “I heered one one time from my grandmammy.” He brightened visibly. “Hit certainly wuz a fine ballet. Hit showed what punishment comes ter sinful people. Wicked folks got what was coming to them in them days.” He shook his head mournfully over the present day ideas of justice.
“Won’t you try and sing it?”
“I ain’t got no voice and I can’t think of none of it now. Looks like sence I had that spell last winter I’m so fergitful.”
At last, after much persuasion, and with great embarrassment, he began to repeat a ballad of the shameful love of “Lady Bernard and Little Musgrave.” And the swift retribution which followed in its wake. Many of the lines were imperfect and its phrases changed to common diction but the substance was unchanged, and the version, an excellent one, was thus rescued from oblivion.
In spite of these illustrations, Miss Peel makes it clear that the ballad singers are not confined to any one class.
All sorts of people have sung me ballads [she writes]. An old lady whose home was once one of the famous houses on the James River sang me the fragment of a ballad her grandmother had sung to her. Another whose ancestors fought with the Stuarts repeated the three verses of “Mary Hamilton,” which I believe are all that have been found in this country. A grave-digger, a bootlegger, a night watchman, a scrubwoman in an insane asylum, and an old woman whose chief duty seemed to be “to set up with the dead” have all contributed their quota of song.
