<< Back 6/5/02 No devil at Fiddler’s Grove this year By Ted Coyle For Memorial Day Weekend, I went with my family to the 78th annual Old-Time Fiddler’s and Bluegrass Festival at Fiddler’s Grove Campground in Union Grove. Having just read Wayne Erbsen’s lively little book called Log Cabin Pioneers: Stories, Songs and Sayings (Native Ground Music Inc., Asheville, 2001), I looked forward to asking some of the fiddlers if they still placed a rattlesnake’s rattle inside their fiddle or had heard that “the devil rides the fiddle bow” (pg. 58). However, it quickly became apparent that today’s old-time fiddler is no longer the eerie trickster of the past. Rather, he is a church-going Christian. How did it happen? We arrived on Friday afternoon and were fortunate to find a shady campsite near the pond. Even more fortunately, we happened to pull in next to a group of professional musicians, an upbeat and “in-your-face” (as their banjo player, Dean Watson, put it) old-time band from Brevard named the Weasel Creek String Band (www.weaselcreek.com). They worked on a series of beautiful old tunes as we drifted off to sleep; it was probably the highlight of the festival for me. The next morning I asked their fiddle player, Marion Boatwright, about the devil. A folklorist himself (with a graduate degree in Appalachian Studies from Berea College), he was familiar with old stories of the devil and fiddle music, but told me that I was missing a better question: “A better question,” he said, “is why the crowd at this festival is essentially 100-percent white, but the music we are playing is black.” Now some might argue that today’s old-time music owes as much to the Scots-Irish as it does to Africans, but the contributions of black musicians to contemporary mountain music cannot be denied. Certainly Doc Watson and Bill Monroe would agree with Marion Boatwright that the music I heard at Fiddler’s Grove has deep roots in African-American musical traditions (see, for example, the video titled “High Lonesome,” where Monroe discusses this issue). So it did seem depressing to me in that history-of-rock-music way when the excellent and soulful country blues duo of Wicker and Jones that I heard through the trees (sounding very much like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee) turned out to be White. Or when the subsequent group playing swampy old Muddy Waters tunes, a kind of music that their leader Hal Beaver calls “Blackgrass,” was also White. As if to help me understand this issue, I ran into an historian named Tom Hanchett who I had earlier met at Charlotte’s Museum of the New South, where he works as a curator. Tom is also the author of a fascinating book called Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). It demonstrates that 20th-century segregation between blacks and whites in Charlotte is not a hold-over from slavery days, when in fact black and white people lived next to each other. Rather, today’s segregation in that city is a result of two historical trends. The first is the regimentation of newly industrialized workers into distinct neighborhoods in the late 1800s, and the second is post-WWII suburbanization. The result is today’s racially segregated Charlotte. Suddenly Fiddler’s Grove, which advertises itself as a haven “in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains,” seemed like a distant suburb of that New South City one hour’s drive down Interstate 77. Which is not to say that the festival felt oppressively racist. It didn’t. In fact, my (White) family had a great time at Fiddler’s Grove; we even learned to play a fiddle tune, an experience that we will treasure for a long time to come, which may (in a backward way) be just the point. It made me think about a paper I once heard read at an anthropology conference. This paper, written by David W. Samuels of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, argued that as dominant groups move subordinate peoples off of their lands, the dominant sometimes “cannibalize” the cultures of the dominated. This plays out as a kind of slow-motion ethnic cleansing in which the winners do not simply steal the loser’s culture (like moving into a suddenly vacant house in Bosnia), but also claim their energetic force or power (like claiming the prestige of the former owner of the house). Samuels used Globe, Ariz., as his case study. This is a town where all manner of “Apache” imagery is sold for tourist consumption, but where the Apache people that once owned the land upon which Globe now sits are not welcome. Thus, their culture has been “cannibalized” for the benefit of others. Perhaps such a stark formula does not work for Fiddler’s Grove, but I think it may help to explain the appeal of today’s avowedly Christian fiddler (this year, the Cockman Family — who served as musical hosts for the event as a whole — and Waynesville’s own Trantham Family both put out moving Christian messages). I will be blunt: As in the days of old, in popular mountain culture today the devil is a Black man. Thus, the now “joyful noise” of Fiddler’s Grove’s fiddle music also provides a reassuringly simplified regional history. It’s a history of White mountaineers (never mind the now mostly untended Black cemeteries scattered throughout these mountains) playing Scots-Irish music (never mind the banjo or the blues). Would that the real evils of our actual history were so easily cleansed. (Philip E. “Ted” Coyle teaches anthropology at Western Carolina University.)