In 1963, musicologists John Cohen and Peter Gott went down to Sodom, a small, isolated mountain village in North Carolina. There they found and recorded examples of a form of unaccompanied singing specific to that region.
Smithsonian Folkways has re-issued those recordings, capturing raw performances from master singers, together with "The End of An Old Song," a short documentary by Cohen and extensive liner notes. The package is an exhaustive document of a community.
The CD, titled "Dark Holler," features the talents of Dellie Norton, Cass Lee, Berzilla Wallin, Lisha Shelton, George Landers and Dillard Chandler. Most of the recordings were made on front porches or living rooms, and that atmosphere can be felt.
"There ain't no rhythm to the music I do," said Dillard Chandler, as quoted in the liner notes of the CD. "I've always heard it called a love song, just a natural love song. Ain't nothin' to it, no rhythm, nothing to dance through. It's just an old-timey love song."
People have been singing these songs for centuries. British folklorist and ballad collector Cecil Sharp discovered this folk style in 1916, while looking for traces of British folk music in America, according to Cohen in the liner notes of "Dark Holler." Indeed, the stories and melodies owe much to British folk music, but these songs sound as ancient as the mountains Chandler and company inhabit. There's an intrinsic, timeless quality to the songs.
Sodom is and was a destitute area of the country. Few of the singers on the album had steady jobs, and those who did scraped by on the profits of small tobacco farms or the like. The pain of that hard life is thrust to the fore in the tone and timbre of the songs.
The songs deal in themes like love, murder, deception, adultery, rape, despair, drunkenness and joy. Nothing is off limits in these traditional ballads, which were passed down orally. For example, in "Cold Rain and Snow," Chandler sings a story of a man and his wife: "I shot her through the head/And I laid her on the bed/And I trembled to my knees with cold fear."
Chandler, like many of his fellow Sodom residents, was illiterate. The songs were passed on from parents and grandparents, and thanks to the isolation of the mountain towns, have more or less remained the same as the originals. But, sadly, the music is dying out.
As Wallin told Cohen in 1963, "Well I'm getting pretty old. I'll soon be 74, and I see the old time all a-dying away and all the old songs, which makes me sad. I'd like to see them go on, and the young rising generation pick 'em up so they wouldn't die out." "The End of an Old Song" concentrates on Dillard Chandler, following him through a normal day. Chandler does odd jobs, Chandler drinks a beer, Chandler dances with a woman at the juke box at a beer joint. There's a great sequence at Chandler's spare log cabin in which he kills a hornet buzzing around his window.
Chandler left the mountains once in his life, to sing at a folk festival in Chicago in the '60s. In the field of folk music, with so much caricature and hyperbole, this collection of songs does what the truest folk music strives to do - depict honest life, as empty or alive that may be.
