When I first met Dellie Norton and her adopted son, Junior, Dellie
was seventy-six years old and had been widowed for about ten years.
Junior was in his early thirties and had lived with Dellie since he was
six. When Junior's father, who was Dellie's first cousin, died, and
Junior's mother couldn't care for all seven children, Dellie took him
in. Informal adoption was common in tight-knit mountain hamlets. In
addition to her own five children, Dellie raised her husband's three
daughters from a previous marriage, and had numerous other children stay
with her for varying amounts of time. Children provided her with
company, as well as with an extra pair of hands for the never-ending
work around the farm. Junior also received a monthly disability check
which was an important part of the family's cash income. So taking in
Junior, while clearly an act of kindness, was also a very practical
decision. Electricity and telephones didn't come to Madison County
until the 1950s, and there was little money in the community before the
federal programs of the 1960s. Throughout her life Dellie worked to fill
her family's most basic needs, raising food and canning, maintaining the
farmstead, cutting firewood, caring for animals, and planting tobacco to
earn money. She knew her land intimately: which field produced the best
beans, where to find a stand of locust trees that could be split into
fence posts, how to store food through the long winters without
electricity, what time of the year to collect specific herbs that were
used as medicines, where the springs were. She seemed proud of this
hard-earned knowledge, and her life. As far as I could tell, she
harbored no secret wish to live elsewhere or differently. I believe that
Dellie knew the land itself was her most valuable asset. Her ability to
survive and do well on her land provided her with real security; it was
her home place and promised the continuation of her family line.
Burley tobacco was the mainstay of the area, and for most of the
twentieth century Madison County was the leading producer of burley in
North Carolina. County residents kept cattle and sheep, cultivated
gardens and large fields of corn, and grew commercial tomatoes and
ornamentals, but tobacco paid the bills. Up until the mid-1980s, most
families with a tobacco allotment raised the crop themselves, often
trading work with their neighbors on the labor-intensive crop. Tobacco
has many problems: itıs hard on the soil, susceptible to disease, and
the end product is bad for people. Yet cultivating tobacco also promoted
a sense of community and a pride in making a living from the land; it
provided mountain people with the means to stay on their land and
assured the continuation of a rural, agrarian way of life.
While
tobacco was the money crop, most families also found other ways to earn
income. Some left for factory jobs elsewhere, as Dellie describes in her
stories, but many also found ways to come home and resume their farm
life, sometimes with new resources. Dellie and the other old-timers in
Madison County had maintained an almost self-sufficient way of life.
Dellie was not only self-reliant, she also was very strong from her
years of farming and maintaining a household. She didnıt get her first
electric washing machine until the late 1950s, and it was there on the
porch, with its old-fashioned wringer still in working order, when I
arrived on the scene.
By the 1970s, Dellie, like most of her
neighbors in the small community of Sodom Laurel, had become more firmly
connected to the world of modern conveniences, and committed to living
in it. She still raised a big garden, milked a cow, grew tobacco, and
hunted for ginseng, but she also loved her telephone and TV and the
polyester pantsuits she wore whenever she left home, which she did with
some frequency. She had oil heat and shelves of prescription medicine in
her bathroom. She paid bills, had insurance, and shopped for groceries
at the store. She also received disability and social security checks
and supplemental food and medical care. While Dellie remembered a time
when she had been more self-sufficient, she seemed to like the changes
in her life.
Dellie also sang ballads. Music was one of the few
available and affordable forms of entertainment, and most everyone in
Sodom Laurel, even the children, sang or played instruments. The
community had produced professional musicians with dreams of stardom,
but the majority of residents viewed music as part of their daily
routine. They sang in church. Dellie sang to pass the day, to keep from
feeling lonely. Singing made the hard work in the fields more tolerable
and front porch visits with neighbors and relatives more enjoyable.
Singing was something people just did. Dellie once told me she never
would have believed that she would become famous for her singing. I
donıt think it occurred to Dellie that she would leave any kind of
legacy to the wider world.
The wider world has been aware of the
music of the southern mountains for almost a century. The noted British
ethnomusicologist Cecil Sharp and his assistant, Maud Karpeles,
collected more songs in Madison County in 1916 than in any other single
place for their classic volume, English Folk Songs from the Southern
Appalachians. One of their singers was Dellie's aunt Zipporah Rice,
and although Dellie herself never sang for him, she had a clear memory
from her teenage years of the man from "across the water" who collected
ballads in the community. Sharp recognized the southern mountains, and
Madison County in particular, as being the storehouse of the
BritishAmerican music tradition. The ballads he collected had made
their way across the ocean to America, endured over many generations,
through untold hardships and relocations, and ended up in Sodom Laurel,
North Carolina, where they were being sung the same way they had been in
the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Sharp
said, "I discovered that I could get what I wanted from pretty nearly
everyone I met, young and old. In fact I found myself for the first time
in my life in a community in which singing was as common and almost as
universal as speaking."
In the mid-1960s, there was a national
revival of folk music. Main stream musicians like the Kingston Trio and
Peter, Paul, and Mary were doing popular renditions of songs that had
been in the Sodom Laurel community for centuries. There was also a
growing curiosity about the sources of this music. Soon Dellie, her
sister Berzilla, Dillard Chandler, Cas Wallin, Doug Wallin, and a number
of others were "discovered" by folk music scholars and collectors. By
the time I arrived, this group of mostly elderly community members was
traveling regularly to folk festivals. There was also a steady stream of
students, musicians, photographers, collectors, and culture tourists
flowing in and out of the community.
This attention provided the
singers with an opportunity to meet new people and see places they had
only heard about or seen on TV. Being among the first in their community
to fly in a jet, or see Washington, D.C., or receive awards from the
state, added to their celebrity in the community, which they relished.
The money singers received was often needed and always appreciated, and
that educated people would record their songs and pay them to talk about
their lives assured them a place in the world that went far beyond their
histories in Sodom Laurel. The oldtimers were not fixed in a
remote and isolated place, were not living in the past. They were busily
making the connections that some of us young people found so hard to
see.
Yet there were downsides to the attention as well. There were
misunderstandings about money the expectation of royalty checks
that never arrived, the hope of contracts that didn't materialize.
Twentyfive years after Alan Lomax recorded her, Dellie continued
to complain about him never sending her any money. Doug Wallin even took
a swing at the filmmaker John Cohen, claiming that Cohen "had kept all
the money" though, as Cohen told him, the record he'd made had sold very
few copies. The promise of paying jobs also produced a competitiveness
among the singers for those jobs, and there was jealousy if one person
was included in a festival or album and the others weren't. A subtle,
but friendly, rivalry over whose was the correct version of a particular
ballad had always existed, but with money and an audience involved, that
rivalry became more spiteful. Whatever preconceptions I came with about
romantic mountaineers were beginning to crumble, faced with real people
and places.
Other incidents began to alter my understanding. Life in
Sodom was uncertain. The local way of speaking was so different that I
feared unknowingly offending someone with a wrong phrase or oVhand
remark. There was also a lot of drinking which often led to fights,
shootings, thefts, and other acts of violence and mayhem. Most everyone,
Dellie included, carried a gun. Her life seemed punctuated by troubling
incidents when someone settled an old grudge or took the law into his
own hands. Did it make sense? Here in Sodom, twenty-two miles from
Marshall and the sheriffıs office, people solved their own problems and
were quick to defend themselves and their land. And while everyone was
proud of their generational links to the land, and their love of it,
there was also, what seemed to me, much abuse of that land. Many home
places were littered with trash piles and junked cars, and had outhouses
built over creeks.
There were also countless acts of kindness and
moments of serenity. Dellie and her friends telling stories and singing
on the porch. Impromptu meals at someone's house. Visits to friends in
the hospital, vigils by a kin's sickbed. Gifts of chicken and eggs.
Coins and dollar bills given freely to a neighbor's kids. People would
invite me to spend the night and mean it, not taking no for an answer,
and I sensed that people not only watched out for me but accepted me
into the community.
Dellie loved to "run about" and my ability to
find my way around "them foreign places," as she referred to Asheville
and other cities, was a skill she definitely valued. Dellie often told
me about her earlier life, about bad roads and little money, when it
wasn't possible to see new places and meet new people. She wanted to
make up for it now. For a few years I was her chauffeur of choice. For
me, our trips were fun, a way to feel useful; it was also a valuable
introduction to her family and friends. Short trips to the bypass for
groceries, to the doctor in Greenville, Tennessee, over to a relative's
house for a visit, or to someone else's place to get apples were
numerous and routine. Longer trips to festivals, where she and Berzilla
performed with other ballad singers, or out to Fort Leonard Wood,
Missouri, to visit her granddaughter Sue, were true adventures. Missouri
was the farthest any of them had been from home, and for much of the
seventeenhour drive, Dellie regularly moaned, "Weıre surely lost
now. We'll never find Sue and Vince. We'll never see Sodom again." When
we finally pulled up in front of Sue and Vince's, Dellie's face beamed
with surprise and relief.
When I moved to Madison County, the
population was threetiered: the oldtimers, rooted in
traditional ways; their children and grandchildren born into the
mountain culture, but many moving away, finding new kinds of work; and
the newcomers, often yearning for a traditional way of life and an
escape from the modern American suburb. Today, as the population born
outside Madison County approaches 50 percent, that earlier world is
gone. The oldtimers have mostly died, taking their way of life
with them. I see fewer gardens and no milk cows. People rarely visit in
person, choosing instead to telephone or send e-mail. Better roads have
provided easy access to town, and most everyone works away from their
farms. Tobacco is no longer the secure income or proud crop it used to
be. The younger generation of locals, descendants of ScotchIrish
settlers, see their land, culture, and heritage being slowly consumed by
the mainstream, and often don't fight the trend. The latest wave of
newcomers no longer have people like Dellie to share her stories of a
more integrated and hardscrabble life close to the land. Many newcomers
homeschool their children and seem more interested in insulating
themselves from the local culture. The land is more a hobby, or a
financial asset, than the sustainer of families it once was. The grocery
store that opened just prior to my arrival has expanded to a superstore,
and the county now has its first fastfood restaurant and chain
motel.
Dellie belonged to an oral tradition. She rarely wrote down
songs or stories, repeating them the way she had heard them. At her
core, Dellie was a teacher, and she understood the importance of passing
on those ballads, family histories, and knowledge of the land to new
generations. Family, friends, and audiences were drawn to her, and would
heed her words. While Dellie's life gave expression to a particular time
and place, her inner strength and understanding of the complexity of
life were qualities that crossed all boundaries. Her ability to live
mostly off her land was a reminder of a more selfsufficient and
connected way of life most of us can only read about or imagine. Organic
food, herbal medicines, simplified needs, and neighborhood workdays are
notions that resonate clearly with many of us, but they were part of her
daily routine. For Dellie, hers was not an "alternative" lifestyle; she
was a pragmatist and a survivor. She used her surroundings to provide a
life for her family in a place where you could easily get lost or die if
you didn't know how to work and do.
The totality of Dellie's life
experience was not one I, or her grandchildren I suspect, would choose
to repeat. The thought of living off the land, without a car, computer,
chainsaw, health care, and the other "necessities" of life, is a scary
and sobering thought. But everyone who knew Dellie, or someone like her,
has kept something of her and her way of life. A story or a song. A love
of gardening. A quilt she made. A certain way of doing a task. An
understanding and acceptance of the strength and resilience it takes to
live. A memory that makes you laugh, or cry. In those ways, Dellie's
legacy is of a culture that has not so much vanished as continued to
evolve in new and unexpected ways.