Love, Murder and Mystery: Talking about Appalachian Ballads

Soon after returning from Florida I was presenting a program for West Virginia University on the Appalachian ballads. Ballads as you probably know are really storytelling in song, so it's easy to see why I was attracted to them. I had heard ballads re-done in the 60's and 70's during the "folk revival," by people like Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and others but it didn't click with me then that these were actually very old songs with a very different sound than what the rock musicians gave them.

So in 2000 when I actually heard a field recording of a traditional ballad singer, I was blown away by the simplicity of his style and the subject matter of the songs. These were stories! A man who leaves his love to go to war, and she dresses like a man and goes out to the battlefields to find him, a sinking ship and a crew driven to cannibalism in their lifeboat, a girl who commit suicide because her love has left her, jealousy and murder between two sisters, someone boiled in lead, pregnant girls murdered by the boyfriends...my word! It was like a heavy dose of TV news--but beautifully phrased and with haunting melodies.

For the past 15 years I have been studying the ballads that traveled from Britain to the Appalachians, along with some homegrown ballads and some that were never collected here by those great songcatchers of the early 20th century.

with Jason Burns, who organized the program

My repertoire has grown slowly and yet I had plenty to fill two hours of presentation at WVU, and with some to spare. It's a rare pleasure for me to talk about ballads and to sing them for those who appreciate this old music. I sing in the traditional style, unaccompanied by any instrumentation. Singing this way allows me to set the pace I want, to stress certain notes and so the timing is not what is needed when an instrument is playing along. Just as in speaking we have no set rhythm but go faster or slower, louder or softer, pause, etc to suit whatever we are saying, so it is with traditional ballad singing.

One of the high points of the WVU program was when I asked the audience if anyone sang ballads. A young man raised his hand and said he knew a version of The Two Sisters. I persuaded him to come onstage and share it with us. What delight to find there are young people into these old songs! Two young women in the audience also sing ballads, more encouragement that the old songs will not soon die out.

Click on the orange arrow to hear me singing Pretty Saro, the first ballad I learned, and still my favorite.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

November Weekend: Saturday

What a wild weekend.

Outside the Mountainlair at WVU

Friday night we packed the car for storytelling on Saturday--a puppet stories program for WVU Mountaineer Week's Family Fun Day in Morgantown, WV, and ghost stories in the evening. This is the third year in a row I've done the puppet program at this event, and it's always fun.

It was a good day for a road trip too--rainy, temperatures beginning to drop and light snow predicted later in the day. If we'd been home, we'd have been stuck in the house. As it was, we had a blast.

After setting up for my program I had plenty of time to browse the big arts and crafts fair. My favorite jeweler, Robert Riffe, was there. Last year I bought a pair of prenite earrings that were absolutely gorgeous. I lost them at my family reunion and have been sad about it ever since. I made myself feel better yesterday by buying three pairs of Robert's earrings. What can I say? I love his work, and I like knowing that by buying from him I'm supporting a very good artist.

This friendly fellow shared my program space. Do you know who he is?

I also bought a few stained glass ornaments from my friend, stained glass master artist David Hauser. His work is stunning; I can't afford his bigger pieces but the ornaments are whimsical and as perfect as all his work.

Handmade note cards and a little leather pouch for my business cards rounded out my shopping. I go to very few craft shows so I planned to shop at this one.

The storytelling was wonderful. A girl who was in one of the classes I told stories to at Westwood Middle School a few weeks ago was there with her family. She told me several times how that was the best 7th period class ever. I value that praise--it was obvious she meant it. She was one of the kids who helped with the first story and did a great job. The highlight of the storytelling, though, was a young boy who, when I told him his part was over and he could go back to his mother, took off at a tear out into the craft fair! His mother was sitting in the audience, but evidently he thought she was somewhere else. She chased him down and we all got such a laugh out of it.

I don't have any photos to share of the storytelling, unfortunately because I forgot to give Larry the camera. But after the storytelling, he snapped this one of me with the WVU Mascot, the Mountaineer. (Can you tell I was pretty warm after the active storytelling with lots of little ones?)

My friend, blogger Jason Burns was also there to do a presentation on the ghosts of WVU. He had a good crowd; the strangest of his stories was the one about the ghost cow. For real--a ghost cow in one of the WVU buildings.

We left for a little while to have dinner with our youngest son Tommy who lives in Morgantown. Then it was back to the Lair for the evening Tellabration storytelling event with WV Storytelling Guild members. The theme was ghost stories; when we started there were perhaps 20 people in the Hatfield's restaurant where the event was held. But the room quickly filled and we had an excellent turnout for the event.

Tellabration, I should explain, is an international event that celebrates storytelling. Guilds and storytelling groups all over the world host events, usually on Thanksgiving weekend (we had ours earlier because so many tellers were going to be at WVU on Saturday anyway). The event was the brainchild of J.G. Pinkerton, a well-known storyteller from New Hampshire who passed away this month. His wry humor will be missed.

We left Morgantown around 8pm for the drive home. It was a lively trip because storytelling friend Donna Wilson rode with us on this trip; two storytellers in one car means little quiet time!

We got home just before midnight, got the fires going, and sat up talking until 2:00 am. Why? Why not? The next day was Sunday, and we planned to sleep in.

And that was exactly what we did!

Why there was no post yesterday

We spent the day in Morgantown and Fairmont yesterday. Our youngest sone plans to attend WV University in the Fall, so we went up to start the admission process, look at the campus and find out about rentals. I was glad to have a few friends on the campus who could advise us about financial aid, housing, and the student fitness complex (Tommy is a huge fitness buff).

It was a cold, rainy blustery day, but what fun to see the students walking everywhere! Morgantown is very hilly (think San Francisco and except for scale you'd have a good idea) but the kids were walking everywhere and I didn't see many with a weight problem. This chubby ol' granny was huffing and puffing by the end of the day and flat out refused to walk up three floors to view and apartment (sciatica and asthma, along with extra pounds, do take their toll).

In the end, we completed the admission forms, found a really nice apartment complex, and at the urging of our friend in the financial aid office, managed to complete Tommy's FAFSA before the end of the day--March 1 being the magical cutoff date to get good funding.

(Tired Aaron rests on the couch after our busy day in Morgantown. His help as a graduate of WVU was a big, big help).

We also got to spend a little time with Aaron, Jaime, James and Michaela at their home in Fairmont. They're in the middle of a kitchen remodel, and Jaime seemed completely unruffled by wall cabinets on the floor and all the confusion a torn-apart kitchen can cause. Yoga must be good stuff.

James and Michaela wave goodbye as we depart into the night. Although the weather called for snow, we were lucky enough to encounter only rain on the 3-hour trip home.

We were glad to get home, too--something we ate in Morgantown apparently didn't agree with us and we visited a LOT of places on the way home, checking out the restroom facilities! Whatever it was passed on (pun intended) by this morning, thank goodness.

And that's why there was no post yesterday.