why no flute in Appalachian music?

[mendipman]

I'm very sad that English music and dance is being ignored and suppressed in its very birthplace. I genuinely hope that it is able to make a comeback, since I truly believe the folk music world is better with it. Bigbpiper

Um, English music and dance is very much alive and well in England. There are many folk festivals all over the country. There are folk clubs where people sing and play English traditional music, all over the country. There are concerts and recordings. There are local newsletters, there is a nationwide magasine fRoots.

The suppression I refer to is the damage inflicted in the social maelstrom that was nineteenth century industrialisation and the destruction of intimate communities and displacement of population from village to the new anonymous urban context. Vernacular culture was denied in the same way so many other aspects of ordinary working people’s experience and identity was eroded and subject to the immense distortion of an entirely new economic reality. What we see today are the ripples from successive modern folk revivals. There is a revitalisation and motivated people searching for meaning and reclaiming substantive identity as a counter to global homogeneity and a disconnected alien commercialism. The vernacular in Somerset is resurgent; sessions, vibrant well-attended local festivals, a reconnection with regional culture. I sense the same resurgence elsewhere in England. The legacy of denial and disdain is that eventually people reassert who they really are.

[BigBpiper]

The suppression I refer to is the damage inflicted in the social maelstrom that was nineteenth century. The vernacular in Somerset is resurgent; sessions, vibrant well-attended local festivals, a reconnection with regional culture. I sense the same resurgence elsewhere in England. The legacy of denial and disdain is that eventually people reassert who they really are.

Alright, thanks for clarifying!

[Conical bore]

We might be overlooking something in this discussion that's hiding in plain sight. A very simple explanation for why flute is not a common instrument in Appalachian OldTime, Blues, Jazz, and Rock.

The flute is not an easy instrument to pick up and play!

I can hand a guitar, a banjo, or even a fiddle to someone who has never touched one before, and they can at least make some noise on it. It might sound awful, but it's the start of something they can work on. I can even show them some beginner tips they can immediately benefit from.

I've done the same thing by handing just the headjoint of my flute to someone, telling them to "pretend you're blowing across the top of a beer bottle." Many people either never get a tone at all, or just the bare hint of a sound. Only a rare few get a brief strong tone. And there's not much help I can give them, other than "Well, just keep working at it, you'll get it."

Those of us who have climbed that hill may be forgetting how difficult the initial stage of learning to play flute can be. Even more difficult if you have a poorly made, rustic flute.

This may have something to do with why flute remains an "outsider" instrument in so many genres of Americana music. It may just be that simple. Too many other instruments, especially fretted string instruments like guitar and banjo, are easier to pick up and play ab initio. There is a reason why the Jethro Tull band back in the day, didn't result in an explosion of Rock 'n Roll flute players. Everyone was playing guitar instead.

[mendipman]

Is it really justified to claim that the flute is more difficult to learn than, say, a fiddle?

The nature of both flute and fiddle in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was their ‘everyman’ occurrence. Both instruments were mainstays of the church musicians found in every English parish - the same musicians who played for dancers on a Saturday night and the following morning accompanied church choirs.

If the ‘difficulty’ theory was a significant factor in regard to uptake there would have been a scarcity of flutes in English parishes too. However, research indicates that was not the case.

[Conical bore]

When comparing the difficulty of learning flute vs. fiddle in the context of Appalachian music, I think one thing to take into account is all the various open tunings and cross tunings in that tradition. Sawmill, Dead Man's, Cross A, Calico, all the rest. It wasn't the only way the fiddle was played in the mountains, but it must have made it easier to play some of the more basic tunes.

Edit to add: Oh, I just thought of one more thing. There is a tradition of singing while you play in OldTime, including fiddlers! Listen to Tim O'Brien play fiddle while singing "Working on a Building" some time... it's haunting stuff. And of course you can sing and play banjo and guitar too. Kind of hard to do, on a flute.

[ecadre]

What informs my interest in replying to the OP on this thread, is that I'm intimately connected with American old time musicians and play both American old time and English regional music, including for our regional form of stepping from my local Mendip area in Somerset. A foot in both camps if you like. The importance of understanding and respecting regionality has been hard- taught into me first-hand, in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, by some of the finest and most respected contemporary American OT musicians, and those principles have inevitably fed and been 'reimported' to my home context and are now fundamental to my own approach to reengaging with, educating and sharing my regional music in our local communities. I'm truly grateful to those American friends for their kindness, generosity, knowledge, patience, inspiration and guidance. In my case I would refer to the effect of their teaching on my understanding and outlook as 'life-changing'. I'm also a busy researcher in specific fields of English vernacular music. So any assumption of ignorance is a little wide of it's mark. I don't think the replies of our US friends here are meant as rude. But I too am passionate about the way in which English vernacular has been 'written out' and repressed and to a large extent denied - predominantly by the social and economic mechanisms and the prejudice and disdain of our own establishment. We ordinary English folks have a vernacular culture; that fact does not disrespect or conflict with other vernacular cultures, instead it adds diversity and beauty.

I had some trepidations in tackling this subject on a public forum since it often ends in a row with someone or other coming up with simplistic nationalist arguments.

Thankyou, your comments are very interesting. I very much identify with this comment, "We ordinary English folks have a vernacular culture; that fact does not disrespect or conflict with other vernacular cultures, instead it adds diversity and beauty."

You bring up a very important point ... regionality. In most ways this is much more important than nationality. Folk tunes don't care about nationality. They can become whatever the player wants them to be (usually something to do with dance) and can and do move about and embed themselves successfully into other locations and traditions.

Take the popular Irish session tune known as "Father O'Flynn." Well, it got that name when it was used as the tune for a song called "Father O'Flynn" in the early years of the 20th century. It previously went by different names, but was known and published in England as "Yorkshire lasses" and has an earlier publication date than the Irish tune (towards the end of the 18th century). It's not clear whether the tune has English or Irish roots.

It also became the Morris tune "Bonny Green garters", and since I haven't looked it up, who knows where they got it from? My bet is that no-one does.

When playing the A part of "Yorkshire lasses" I found my myself noticing its similarity with the A part another English tune called "The seven stars."

"The rocky road to Dublin"? It's a 9/8 version of a country dance tune known and published in northern England and Scotland named "The key to the cellar", a 3/2 old style hornpipe that was also the tune used for the song "Come ye o'er by France."

I could go on ... "The Irish washerwonan" started out life as an English country dance, and "Speed the plough" was written by an Irishman living and working in London as a composer for the stage ... and on and on.

Regressive ethno-nationalism and popular culture seem to reject these connexions with notions of purity and exclusivity. The real histories of traditional music in Britain and Ireland are washed over with fantasy history and ignorance, often driven by commercial marketing.

This way of thinking, linked with that ignorance regularly leads to people assuming that I am an "Irish musician", that I'm playing "celtic music" (whatever that is meant to be), with the band I play with labelled as "celtic" or playing tunes with "celtic vibes". It also sometimes leads to people wearing checked shirts and cowboy hats to dances, but that is something else . Believe me, it's often quite difficult to get people to understand that we are English musicians playing English traditional music (the culturally mixed up thing that it is) in England.

Yes, there absolutely are local and regional traditions. There is such a distinctive thing as Irish traditional music. Of course there is, it would be stupid to even try to deny it and that is certainly not something I'd ever want to do. I mean, I met some of my Irish ancestors, our own identities are not single faceted.

Those connexions though, they are important to recognise. They're the reason English and Scottish tunes could never have been kept out of thesession.org, it's why there are many tunes played at English ceilidhs that may or may not have Scottish, Irish and Welsh origins. It's why English dancers could nick the word "ceilidh" from the Scots and apply it to traditional English social dancing, and why there is such a thing as Scottish country dancing.

Personally, I think we have travelled rather too far down the nationalist road, and we should be celebrating the connexions between our traditions as much as the distinctivess.

[ecadre]

To put it bluntly, if you can hear the influence of Irish traditions in Appalachian/Old time music song and dance and not that of English traditions, then it simply demonstrates your ignorance of English music, song and dance and the history of folk traditions in Britain and Ireland.

Look up Cecil Sharpe's and Maude Karpeles' work in collecting songs in the Appalachians. Note the similarity of Appalachian styles of step dancing to English styles of stepping (flat-footing). Note that the tune you mentioned in your opening post was well known across Scotland and England. Note that large numbers of English settlers arrived in Appalachia and they did take their music, songs and dances with them.

English folk and traditional music is routinely ignored even in our own media. When mentioned on popular TV programmes it's usually to disparage it and laugh at it. English songs, dances and tunes are routinely attributed to other countries and the close historical links between English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh folk music covered up with ethno-nationalist claptrap ... and now it seems it's being written out of North American musical history too.

Did you notice the title of thread and the specific question" Thanks for the intelligence that English music had an influence of music in the US, Captain Obvious.

So obvious that you failed to consider its existence as a part of your original premise, mentioning Scots-Irish as the only influence on a tune that existed commonly elsewhere, and then later specifically denying an influence from English traditional music upon Old Time/Appalachian music.

Poor England! Sadly ignored while screwing ireland over for centuries. Agreed, it's never a good idea to ignore the history of violent colonial oppression.

Oh dear, this is where we get to? At what point do you think that traditional English folk music violently oppressed Ireland? Were the poor English people who went to live in Appalachia the winners in the colonial system? Do you think?

There's a curious twist you make when you write of "the English", because in reality there is no such thing as a single English identity or class of people and there never has been. You want to talk of the colonial oppression of Ireland? Of course, I have no personal problem there (though this is a music forum!), but a retrospective fit of bile against poor English working class people who were also oppressed by the very same ruling class is not where I'd head.

btw. For much of the colonial oppression, you'd need to include "the Welsh" and "the Scots", but that doesn't seem yo fit into your seemingly ethno-nationalist viewpoint.

This is how cultural imperialism works. I'm asking about Irish immigrants to Appalachia, and you're specifically telling me that the really important thing I need to know is about clog dancing in who gives a sh*t.

No, really, it isn't how it works. Accepting the actual existence these English immigrants and the culture that they brought with them into Appalachia is not "cultural imperialism." For some reason you seem to be angry that they existed. Why?

Your question was why there is no flute commonly played in modern day Old Time/Appalachian music. That's not a question just about Irish music or specifically about Irish immigrants, but about all the different cultural strands that came together in the Appalachians.

Dancing is also extremely important. For the most part we're talking about dance music and the dances have an enormous impact upon the music. Dance and music are symbiotic in the history of the traditions we're looking at here.

And, yes, I do have experience of cultural imperialism, it happens all around me every day. I play English traditional music (and quite a bit of Irish, Scottish etc tunes) in Britain in the twenty-first century and I have an American accusing me of "cultural imperialism." I find that a bit ironic.

Let me be clear: the fact that English folk culture exerted a large influence of folk culture in the US is indeed Very well known. In the early 20th century, it's closely connected to racial anglo saxonism: for example, John Powell and the White Top Folk Festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Powell_(musician) For what it's worth, This very same John Powell, advocate of English folk music, declared my great great grandfather a black man, making me legally a black man in the state in which I now reside. It was part of his effort to preserve the purity and primacy of anglo saxon culture.

http://theaporetic.com/?p=54



But let's make sure to not let the focus slip off England.

Again, this influence was something that you specifically denied in Appalachia, in another post, and you seem to be dismissing here as well.

I'm slightly perplexed as to why you are bringing up this stuff, in this way, in this context. You're trying to paint me as some kind of anglo-saxon supremicist? That I believe in the "purity and primacy of anglo saxon culture"?

The idea is utterly offensive in every way.

The mixture of people who came together and created Old Time music was diverse. English, Scottish, Welsh, Scots-Irish, Irish, and of course the Cherokee who were already there. I understand that there were German communities and black people who made up a very significant percentage of the population (I can't remember the figure, I'd have to look it up).

In any honest estimation of why some instruments are popularly played in Appalachia and not others, deliberately excluding one very important group and denying their influence for spurious reasons is not a good way to go. In fact your comments seem to be denying the importance of every group other than one specific one. Why?

Accusing someone of "cultural imperialsm" and "anglo-saxon supremicism" for pointing out that error; ie. someone stating that English settlers would and did have a major influence on the answer to the original question is not a good look. It's still not a good look even if it is also one found in popular culture, popular ignorance or personal prejudice.

[ecadre]

When comparing the difficulty of learning flute vs. fiddle in the context of Appalachian music, I think one thing to take into account is all the various open tunings and cross tunings in that tradition. Sawmill, Dead Man's, Cross A, Calico, all the rest. It wasn't the only way the fiddle was played in the mountains, but it must have made it easier to play some of the more basic tunes.

Edit to add: Oh, I just thought of one more thing. There is a tradition of singing while you play in OldTime, including fiddlers! Listen to Tim O'Brien play fiddle while singing "Working on a Building" some time... it's haunting stuff. And of course you can sing and play banjo and guitar too. Kind of hard to do, on a flute.

Ah, Tim O'Brien, he's made some fantastic music (I love his "Fiddlers Green" CD), I'll have to make a note and look that up.

[Nanohedron]

Personally, I think we have travelled rather too far down the nationalist road, and we should be celebrating the connexions between our traditions as much as the distinctivess.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

I really don't want to have to say this, folks, but I'm finding I have little choice but to belabor Board policy in front of you. It's been a very interesting discussion - at times actually enlightening, and I'm always particularly grateful for that - but let's everyone call an overdue truce now and leave off with the politics. That road is not only unnecessary to the original topic, it is injurious to Board health. The mods haven't had to lock a topic in a long time, and believe it or not, we actually kinda like it that way.

'Nuff said?

[paddler]

There have been so many interesting sub-threads that it is hard to keep up, but fascinating nonetheless. Let me just pick up on this one
from conical bore:

There may have been a degree of cultural rejection as well. Maybe flutes were considered fancy instruments from the city? Maybe associated with Classical music? I don't know.

I was recently reading a fascinating article by Simon Waters on "Charles Nicholson and the London Flute Market in the Early Nineteenth Century"

The following quote from that article may speak to this issue, assuming that the role of the flute was similar among early
North American settlers.

"The flute clearly has significance for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social and economic life which differs from other instruments.
It is distinguished by price, availability, popularity and valued by owners beyond other musical items. It can be a signifier of gentility and position,
'flute by Potter' being a frequent occurrence in property sales alongside individually itemized paintings and furniture. It achieves a consolidation in
culture only equalled (later in the century) by the piano ..."

I read this as saying that flutes probably were regarded as "fancy instruments from the city" and hence may have been subject to a degree of cultural
rejection in Appalachian music.

I also think your comments about ornamentation and flutes being introduced late to ITM and then emulating pipes, are significant. In the absence of
a pipes tradition to emulate in OT, I wonder if an appropriate role for a flute might be emulating voice, kind of like the use of flutes for slow airs in
ITM. Just a thought ... and maybe way off the mark.

[mendipman]

Though not exactly representative of true American vernacular it is notable that the flute was not uncommon among the commercial American minstrel groups that toured the British Isles in the 1840's and 1850's. That presence would also seem to undermine the idea that song was a determining factor.

Again, we need to be aware how the OP's question relates to, or tends to be answered by reference to, the modern context that we are familiar with. And that modern context, even in the US, is significantly shaped by the folk revival of the 1950's and 1960's. The modern culture of social public sessions and small fiddle conventions scaling up to OT festivals such as Clifftop bears little resemblance to the behaviours in the nineteenth century context or before. That modern 'shaping' is itself, by definition a filter and a 'reinterpreting' of behaviours that went before and asserts it's own influence and identity.

[PB+J]

Sometimes there are technological reasons for why instruments come and go. An obvious example is the electric bass in pop music. It's easier to play and it solves the volume problem that plagued bass players for decades. Yes the upright bass is still played--I gig with it multiple times a month--but electric bass is far more common and in turn, electric bass reshaped rhythm sections. Same with guitar. The earliest jazz guitarists, like Eddie Lang, for example, struggled with volume all the time. Electric guitars solved that technological problem. Or pianos--innovation in manufacture made pianos more affordable.

So it seem like we know that flutes were common in the music played by settlers of the United States, and so we'd assume that they carried flutes with them into the mountains. Was there a piping tradition in America folk music? I'm not sure. It seems to me that in Ireland at least the pipes are more of a 19th century thing, then they fade in popularity, then are revived.

At one point flutes become "girly" instruments. I'm not sure when this happens but it's still pronounced today. Players of the Boehm flute are disproportionately women. But oddly in school bands in the US violin players tend to be girls as well, probably to a lesser extent. In O'Neill's books the cops are playing flutes all over the place, so no one seems to think flutes are "girly." I doubt they were gendered female in the Kentucky hills.

The people who established "folk music" as a thing were very interested in nationalism and they tended to be, as was common, drawn to racial theorizing. O'Neill will talk about the "musical genius of the Celtic race," that kind of thing. Lots of folklorist went into Appalachia looking for premodern England, and for example in the early decades of the twentieth century it was often claimed that the English of Shakespeare lived on in the hollers of Tennessee (or sometimes among the watermen of the Chesapeake bay). It's possible folklorists edited what they found or only recorded/documented what conformed to what they were looking for, and it's possible they edited out flutes, because maybe by 1900 they were too associated with "Irish," and Irish is not what they were looking for?

The fife persisted in mountain music and there is even a genre of fife and drum blues, but at some point the fife got de-emphasized as well

[Conical bore]

It's possible folklorists edited what they found or only recorded/documented what conformed to what they were looking for, and it's possible they edited out flutes, because maybe by 1900 they were too associated with "Irish," and Irish is not what they were looking for?

It's a good theory, but the folklorists weren't just recording or transcribing audio, they were also taking photographs. Take a look at the first screen or two of images that come up with a Google image search on "Appalachian music history." Mostly historical photos in the first sets of images. See any flutes here?

https://www.google.com/search?q=appalac ... gD#imgrc=_

The fife persisted in mountain music and there is even a genre of fife and drum blues, but at some point the fife got de-emphasized as well

As far as I can tell, fifes were restricted to traditional fife and drum bands, playing different repertoire than what we'd consider "mountain music" or OldTime tunes.

Here's the link I was looking for earlier: it's a series of audio interview clips with James Pilson, a fife player from West Virginia on the Digital Library of Appalachia site. I believe the dates referred to here would be his fife playing some time around WW1.

https://dla.acaweb.org/digital/search/searchterm/fife

I didn't listen to every interview (he's a slow talker), but on the link for "Picnics and music" the interviewer asks if his band played the same music as the local fiddle and banjo players, and he said no. He was also asked if people danced to his fife band, and he said no, they marched around. Sounds like a completely separate style of music from what we'd call "Appalachian" music in the OldTime sense. This is just one example, but since we don't see fifes in those old photos either, I think it's safe to say the fife bands were not an influence on OldTime music, the way they were on Blues in the Mississippi region.

[PB+J]

It's possible folklorists edited what they found or only recorded/documented what conformed to what they were looking for, and it's possible they edited out flutes, because maybe by 1900 they were too associated with "Irish," and Irish is not what they were looking for?

It's a good theory, but the folklorists weren't just recording or transcribing audio, they were also taking photographs. Take a look at the first screen or two of images that come up with a Google image search on "Appalachian music history." Mostly historical photos in the first sets of images. See any flutes here?

https://www.google.com/search?q=appalac ... gD#imgrc=_

/quote]

That's good and thank you. But just as I wonder if they might have been selective about what they recorded, I wonder if they were selective about what they photographed.

There are all sorts of accounts of folklorists--John Lomax was notorious for this--rejecting things he thought were not legit and making especially African Americans play the songs he taught he should be playing, even when they didn't want to. A good book on this is Karl Miller, Segregating Sounds, or Ben Filene, Romancing the Folk.

I believe they didn't play flutes, just not sure why!

[Nanohedron]

But just as I wonder if they might have been selective about what they recorded, I wonder if they were selective about what they photographed.

Not necessarily. When I looked at your link, I found this:



...but it might also be graphically indicative of the broader local opinion.