Cecil Sharp on Appalachian Americans

I may have referred here to Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist who visited Virginia just over a century ago. He, along with his American assistant,  wanted to collect any folk songs of English origin that may still have been extant in that part of the country, and he found a great many old English ballads that were still preserved amongst the people of the Appalachians. Keep in mind that this is the part of the South that is said to have been settled mostly by Celtic  ‘Scots-Irish’ or Irish people, so this would seem an odd place to go looking for English folk songs and lore. Still, Sharp and his assistant were not disappointed in their quest, and Sharp wrote of the similarities between the rural Appalachian folk and their counterparts back in England.

This blog points out that Sharp’s descriptions stand in stark contrast to the stereotypes of people from that region that are popularly believed today. Here’s another site which is a good source of information about the subject.

As I love traditional music and all sorts of folklore I am fascinated by the story of Cecil Sharp and his mission to collect and help preserve the musical traditions of Appalachia. His work led to a cooperative effort between traditional music scholars and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, in order to keep these traditions alive.

The demographic changes that are being imposed on even the more remote areas of the Southern U.S. will no doubt contribute to a weakening and possible loss of the culture and heritage overall. It is just not true that a culture can be preserved by just anybody; a culture is the product of a specific people, an extended kin-group who are genetically from the same source.  If a culture is a disembodied thing that can be transferred to any random ‘recipient’ then it is a museum piece, no longer a living tradition.

I hate to make this political, but there’s just no way around it. A people must be preserved in order for their culture to survive and continue.

 

 

Christmas in the South

Christmas 2016 is just about over, but I thought it worth reposting a piece which I posted in the past, about Christmas customs in the old South, and their connection to our English heritage. So here it is:

The piece below is credited to Col. J.O. Bledsoe of Mableton, Georgia.

Christmas in the Early South

“Many in the tidewater region of the Southern colonies enjoyed enough wealth and leisure to celebrate the ancient holiday of Christmas in grandest fashion. Largely English, French, and German, often aristocratic, and usually unencumbered by the stern moral earnestness that afflicted their Puritan cousins in the North, these first Southerners thoroughly enjoyed Christmas when they could.

For centuries their European ancestors had observed the 14-day-long season of Christmas-tide, which began on Christmas eve and continued through January 6th, the “Twelfth Day” after Christmas called Epiphany. The Christmas spirit sailed across the Atlantic with them and even during the harsh early years, they often managed to celebrate the Yuletide in the New World with traditional English merrymaking: visiting, music, fireworks, cannon shooting, bonfires, feasting, parties, hunts, games, dances and weddings all before an enormous glowing and blazing Yule log. It had been carefully selected and lighting it on Christmas eve signaled the beginning of holiday merriment. “Carefully selected” in this case meant that servants found the largest, most water-soaked log available since tradition held that the merry season of leisure would last as long as the Yule log burned.

Another tradition was to save a small portion to kindle next year’s Christmas log.

In New England, the Puritan fathers looked with grim disdain on Christmas. To them, this holiday was a notorious occasion for celebrations in Catholic Europe, and they thus strictly forbade its observance. Work continued on this day unless it fell on Sunday. “Anybody,” so ran the enactment by the General Court of Massachusetts, “who is found observing by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, any such day as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offence five shillings.” Elders also found it necessary to “Forbid all traffic in plum puddings and the like.” For some reason the plum pudding was viewed as a symbol of the whole evil affair. The settlers of the middle colonies held somewhat less dreary views and were not so much bothered by feelings of religious guilt. Many of them enjoyed Christmas with the merriment of their “old country” traditions.

The wealth of our Christmas customs, however, came from the Southern colonies. As the years went by and colonists there increased in wealth, so did their celebrations increase in elaborateness. By the last half of the 18th century Christmas time had become the social as well as religious season for Southerners. Many Southern settlers during early colonial days considered Christmas primarily a religious festival; and although the religious meaning of the season was never neglected the observances leading up to “Twelfth Night” or Epiphany, which commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men to the Christ Child, were often the most popular and written-about times of the season, even outshining Christmas Day toward the end of that period all the traditional English merrymaking customs and revelry were widely and heartily observed.

The Christmas tree was soon borrowed from German Moravian and Lutheran colonists; but from the beginning Southerners gathered evergreens such as holly, smilax, pine, cedar, laurels, magnolia, and mistletoe to “deck the halls.” Wreaths were woven and mantelpieces and pictures festooned. Tidewater Christmases were rarely white, but always green. Juniper or incense might have been burned to protect the household from harm. Another aroma of the season came from the kitchen where Christmas cakes and cookies were baked from long-standing “recipes” passed down from mother to daughter. Gifts were exchanged and carols sung; and specially made huge “Christmas candles” illuminated the whole house.

At the center of all the celebrating was “Father Christmas,” from earliest times called “The Lord of Christmas.” In tidewater Carolina, his flowing hair and beard were made of Spanish moss. In one hand he carried mistletoe, in the other a black wand or staff with a silver crook at its top, and with which he delivered his gifts to all. Southerners did not take readily to what they called “the dapper little Manhattan goblin called Santa Claus.” Father Christmas was large and regal, with features bold and expressive, yet gentle. He was, all in all, the emblematic representative of the classic Jupiter, rather than the quick, merry, and elfish figure Santa Claus has come to be.

Christmas tippling was widespread. Servants’ employment contracts stipulated a bonus for Christmas drinking. Slaves had leisure time for dancing and singing around holiday-long bonfires. Usually, new clothes and extra food were furnished them during this season. “Christmas gift” was a cry heard on every plantation as servants claimed their yearly tip. The old English “Boxing Day” custom of bringing “Christmas boxes” to the master to collect gifts had been transplanted to the South and it thrived even though gifts here were less often money than was usual in England.

The main event on Christmas day, of course, was Christmas dinner. It was a board as festive as could be managed, set before a roaring fire. On this much-anticipated, once-a-year occasion, Southern cooking reached the heights of early American quality and quantity.

Traditions in Christmas fare varied from house to house, but a large colonial plantation Christmas feast that required days or weeks to assemble and prepare might include: eggnog, oysters on the half shell, scalloped oysters, clear soup, roast stuffed goose with sauce, baked country ham with mustard sauce, lamb, roast wild turkey with cornbread stuffing, venison, and several other wild game dishes, including, perhaps a grand “Christmas pie.” The recipe for this special treat called for a turkey stuffed with goose and chicken and pigeon and seasonings, with rabbit and quail set around, all inside a heavy crust. There were brown and white breads, Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, turnips and greens, baked sweet potatoes and apples, beans and peas, Mary Randolph’s salad, fig and plum puddings, orange tarts, bourbon pecan cake, fresh fruit, walnuts and pecans, cider, Port wine, and syllabub.

Christmas was also celebrated with the Wassail bowl, another English tradition familiar to all of us because of the popular verses in the old carol “Here We Come A Wassailing.” Wassail, or wes hael (be whole) in Anglo-Saxon, was a toast or greeting which is associated with celebrations of Christmas and New Years from the earliest days. According to tradition, the head of the household invited his family to gather around the bowl of hot spiced ale with roasted apples floating on it. After drinking to their health and prosperity in the coming year, the bowl was passed around to each member of the family who returned toasts to joy and happiness for all. Gradually, this ale became known as wassail; and the Wassail bowl, usually decorated with garlands of greenery, particularly holly, was a popular custom in America from the beginning. Eggnog was widely substituted for spiced ale in the colonies by the time of the Revolution.

There was much drinking of these and other cheering and warming potions at the homes of friends and neighbors over the holidays.

Our observances of Christmas represent a rich mosaic of customs based on the winter festivals of many ancient cultures merged with Christian tradition. The lion’s share of the credit for preserving and enhancing
this universal holiday in America, like so many of the other good things in our unique cultural inheritance belongs to the traditional Old South.”

Christmas customs

The kindling of the ‘Christmas brand’ was a custom in certain areas of England in centuries past. It’s described here as practiced in 18th century England.

Christmas Eve the bells greet “Old Father Christmas” with a merry peal, the children parade the streets with drums, trumpets, bells, or perhaps, in their absence, with the poker and shovel, taken from their humble cottage fire; the yule candle is lighted, and–

“High on the cheerful fire Is blazing seen th’ enormous Christmas brand.”

Supper is served, of which one dish, from the lordly mansion to the humblest shed, is invariably furmety; yule cake, one of which is always made for each individual in the family, and other more substantial viands are also added.”

In case you are wondering what ‘furmety’ is, (and I had to look it up myself):

Grains, usually hulled cracked wheat (as ‘Bulgar’ wheat), or occasionally barley, boiled in milk (for a sweet desert dish) or stock (for a savoury accompaniment to meat) with seasonings. Sometimes elaborately flavoured with saffron, spices etc. and sometimes thickened with egg.

[…]‘Furmity’ served with fruit and a slug of rum, plays a major role in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge‘.

“A dish once prominent at Christmas was ‘frumenty’ or ‘furmety’ (variously spelt, and derived from the Latin frumentum, corn). It was made of hulled wheat boiled in milk and seasoned with cinnamon, sugar, &c. … In Yorkshire it was the first thing eaten on Christmas morning, just as ale posset was the last thing drunk on Christmas Eve.” – ‘Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan‘ by Clement A. Miles, 1912

Honey sweet,
Curds to eat,
Cream and frumenty,
Shells and beads,
Poppy seeds,
You shall have plenty
– ‘Sleepyhead’ by Walter de la Mare, c1902

A biographer of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson says that the US general; “fancied that he had some mysterious internal malady, and would eat nothing but frumenty, a preparation of wheat.”

It’s interesting that ‘Stonewall’ Jackson ate this; apparently the dish was brought to the Southern colonies by our English ancestors, though I don’t know of it being eaten in recent generations in the South.

Some of the English Christmas customs and foods did cross the Atlantic with our forefathers, though, a reminder that our American culture has considerable roots in Britain, especially England.

WASP problem

The above was found on a Tumblr blog, though I can’t cite the exact source. I saved it  for my own files a while back,  just because it was so true.

Some years ago on my other blog I was haughtily informed by a commenter who said she was in Europe — Italy, I think — that Americans in general had ‘no race and no culture.’ In a sense that is true now, because the very meaning of the name ”American” has been purposely stripped of all meaning, and our culture has been so muddled by ”multiculturalism” and the forced, artificial introduction of alien ways and customs that it really has very little content anymore.

But despite that sad fact, it is not true that English-descended Americans or ‘WASPs’, which term I don’t really like, have no culture or traditions. Everything that used to be considered quintessentially American was for the most part based in the original culture of the colonists — who were English. Our culinary customs, our language, our childhood games and nursery rhymes, the old-time dances and ‘traditional’ songs, most had roots in England, or to a lesser extent, in Scotland.

For instance, my mother, who had New England colonial roots, always cooked roast beef dinners on Sundays. The games she taught us when we were children were games that have a long tradition in England: ”I spy with my little eye…” or ”Heavy, heavy hangs over thy head”. And with my Southron family, a lot of their idioms and quaint phrases — so often ridiculed by Northerners who thought them to be just ignorance, did in fact come from various English dialects. Maybe that will be the subject of a future post or two, as I especially love language in general, and our English language particularly.

I do mean to make a case that we do have a particular culture and a set of traditions here and that it’s part of a concerted propaganda effort to make Anglo-Saxon Americans feel alienated and to believe there is no Anglo-American culture.

The Telegraph asks: When is St. George’s Day?

No, today isn’t St. George’s Day in England, but the UK Telegraph has a piece here explaining about St. George and the history (and myth) which centers on him.

I remember being taught in school about St. George and the dragon, though it’s very unlikely that schoolchildren today are taught anything of that. They are more likely to hear about Cinco de Mayo or Diwali or Eidh or any number of other things which are not part of the heritage of most of the people of the United States.

 

St. George and the Plantagenet Earl of Lancaster

But the Telegraph Article seems to be written either for children or possibly for immigrants with a basic command of the English language. Maybe it’s aimed at encouraging immigrants to ‘assimilate’ to English or British culture. It does address the controversy over the alleged ‘racism’ of the Cross of St. George, unfortunately with a hint of the standard liberal insinuation — ”some say” the flag is ‘racist.’ Even phrasing things in the ‘some say’ tone is introducing the idea that the flag may be ‘racist’ and thus keeps the controversy in the public consciousness.

Still, I give the writer of the article credit — and surprisingly , the writer has an English-sounding name, a rare thing to be found on a newspaper byline today — for taking a less shrill tone than most of the articles on ‘touchy’ subjects like English traditions.