Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott

Journal of Southern History, August, 2008 by Michael T. Bertrand

Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott. By Michael Ann Williams. Music in American Life. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2006. Pp. [xvi], 221. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-25207344-1 cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03102-1.)

Folklorist Michael Ann Williams has set herself a daunting task. She tackles not one, but two individuals whom she happily (at least at times) never had to engage in person. As she discloses, John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott "could be self-obsessed, overbearing, and some times downright delusional" (p. xi). Nevertheless, Williams's goal was to write a dual biography that resuscitated two largely forgotten persons who were very instrumental in popularizing traditional music before the post--World War II folk revival. In doing so, Williams also hopes to contribute to a larger conversation concerning authenticity in folk and country music.

Although both Lair and Knott were from Kentucky and involved in the presentation of vernacular music, the two only occasionally crossed paths. Williams, however, successfully weaves together their lives in a well-balanced narrative. She does so by emphasizing the lifelong passion of each to fashion and "stage" an image of music that corresponded to personal visions molded by late-nineteenth-century rural America.

Knott's constructions reached the public by way of the National Folk Festival, a yearly (for the most part) pageant she founded in 1934. Seemingly akin to the spectacle of earlier Wild West shows, Knott's festivals were multicultural affairs that attempted to teach audiences about a variety of folk groups frozen in snapshot. The festival continued under her direction until 1970, when the board forced her to retire. She died in 1984.

Lair transmitted his nostalgic productions through radio, first in the early 1930s on the very popular WLS National Barn Dance and then on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, originally broadcast from the powerful Cincinnati radio station WLW. The latter program was set in an imagined "community" that he finally constructed in the late 1930s as a tourist complex just south of Berea, Kentucky. The show and theme park both emphasized the rustic Anglo-Saxon "hillbilly" heritage of American culture, even to the point of compelling performers to adopt stereotypical stage names, garb, and personae. Due to negative financial circumstances that accelerated in the postwar era, the enterprise navigated an erratic course into the 1970s. Renfro Valley was sold in 1989, four years after Lair's death.

By the time they died, Knott and Lair were no longer relevant in their chosen fields and actually had not been so for quite some time. The folk music revival of the 1960s had made obsolete their notions of musical and cultural integrity. Unfortunately, many also were quick to forget the two "overbearing" iconoclasts. Yet, as Williams concludes, Knott and Lair played pivotal roles not only in popularizing traditional forms of musical expression but also in showing that the divide between authenticity and commercialism may not have been as wide as academics have long contended. Using an abundance of archival primary sources located at Berea College, Western Kentucky University, and the Library of Congress, Williams, with an admirable eye for detail, has made a fine contribution to these long-standing debates. Now, if only she could have inspired us to care as much about her subjects as she does.

MICHAEL T. BERTRAND

Tennessee State University