The Three Doc(k)s: White Blues in Appalachia

Abstract

In his 1961 discussion the Carter Family's recording Coal Miner's Blues, folklorist Archie Green (1961, 231) asked an important question: How did [the blues] penetrate the Southern Highlands and sink into the consciousness white singers grown up with traditional musical patterning their own, centuries old? After noting that white mountain singers had incorporated blues into their repertoires since the beginning hillbilly recording in 1923, Green pointed out that the puzzling story the musical borrowing and interaction race and hillbilly singers has yet to be demonstrated (231). Over forty years later, the puzzle is still incomplete, but several pieces have been suitably placed. We know, for example, that white Appalachian musicians admired African-American folk music immensely and readily included it in their performances, borrowing not only blues but also ragtime tunes, religious pieces, breakdowns, reels, and other types songs, as well as both vocal and instrumental techniques. And while white mountain musicians assimilated rags and religious music well enough, their adaptations the blues displayed a rather dim understanding the form, with only certain elements--structure, harmonic patterns, lyrical content, and tonality--weathering the transition; Appalachian pickers have indeed rarely performed in the so-called primary blues tradition. This process can be documented quite clearly in the music three representative white Appalachian performers--Dock Boggs (1920s), Carter and his family (1930s), and Doc Watson (1940s on). An exploration the influence African-American blues on Appalachian white blues should begin with solid definitions that establish bases for comparison. The jury is still out on the nature white (1) but there have been many attempts at defining black blues. (2) The problem with defining blues precisely lies in the fact that several diffused and dispersed subgenres have developed from the original form over the past hundred years, making it difficult to focus on a single definition. Some these subtypes include, for example, jump/up-tempo rhythm and hokum barrelhouse blues reels/breakdowns, blues rags, comic risque gut-bucket blues ballads, boogie-woogie and on and on. Most blues scholars would probably agree, however, that a kind core blues served as the paradigm for all these other forms. For example, the folklorist Norm Cohen (1996, 273) characterizes the album Mister Charlie's Blues (1926-1938)--white musicians playing black music--as presenting some the most heavily African-American-influenced ... the hillbilly white blues artists their day ... [and] may offer the most listenable introduction to the genre for blues aficionados. The implication here is that there is something impure about white blues that distinguishes it from black blues. We may assume, too, that blues are to be distinguished from the qualified kinds blues listed above. One the earliest authorities on the the white scholar Abbe Niles, a perceptive critic who wrote the introduction and song notes to Wo C. Handy's Blues: An Anthology (1926), also perceived a difference between pure blues and other forms: Many verses in the folklore are in the blues spirit, yet are excluded from the blues form, ... [which is] the singers' own distinction. In this usage, it was only the verses that could be fitted to the three-cornered [three-line] tunes like Joe Turner [perhaps the archetypical blues song] that came to be called blues, and, conversely, they would say a new melody to which they could not sing one their three-line verses: That ain't no blues! (Niles 1972, 17) For purposes comparison, then, it seems useful to put forth a description what can be thought as core or primary blues: basic, fundamental, being the first in order time and development, of first importance (Webster's 1966). …

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