Hank Williams, So Lonesome/Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford/Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Goodson, Steve

Hank Williams, So Lonesome. By Bill Koon. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xiii 172 pp. $18.00 paper.

Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. By Loyal Jones. 1984. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. xvi, 249 $25.00 paper.

Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes. By Jeff Todd Titon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. xviii 245 pp. $45.00.

Each of these books takes as its general topic what is lately labeled southern "roots" music. All focus on white artists and expression, but within these confines each explores a different area of the South's rich musical heritage.

In his attractive volume, Jeff Todd Titon looks at fiddle tunes in a state with a reputation for producing fine string music. Aiming his book at "listeners, players, and researchers," Titon emphasizes songs rooted in the nineteenth century and performed by a cohort of musicians born for the most part between 1880 and 1910. He argues that restricting the study to this one state is justified because such an approach allows focus and enables him to highlight some rare tunes that might be lost in a region-wide study, because of the high quality and diversity of Kentucky's old-time fiddle tunes, and because of the "affecting power that Kentucky has exerted in America's public imagination . . . "(xvi). After providing a lucid introduction to the genre, Titon gets to the heart of the book: his own transcriptions of 170 fiddle tunes. He includes extensive notes on the history and performance of each song, and points the reader to available commercial recordings of the tunes. In a later section of the book Titon provides capsule biographies and photographs of the "source" musicians upon whom he relied for the project, and he ends the book with a thorough bibiliography and discography. Finally, the book comes with a compact disk featuring twenty-six recordings of songs transcribed in the book. Though its audience will by necessity be a limited one, Titon has produced a solid piece of scholarship that should help to preserve the musical legacy that he reveres.

Similarly appreciative of vernacular music traditions was Bascam Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), whom Loyal Jones profiles in a biography originally published in 1984. Lunsford devoted a long lifetime to exploring, documenting, and publicizing the folk traditions of the Appalachian region, particularly those of his native corner of western North Carolina. Though he held an astonishing variety of jobs as a young adult, Lunsford always felt a "calling" to spread "the gospel of folk music"(9). A "walking library of Appalachian arts"(1), he memorized and recorded over three hundred songs himself and worked passionately, beginning with his first music festival in 1928, to "present what he considered to be the best of mountain performers to a public that was growing away from the old folk traditions" (1). Lunsford became well known far beyond his own local haunts: in 1939 he was invited to Washington to present Appalachian music and dance before King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and President and Mrs. Roosevelt.

The result was "Undoubtedly the high point of Lunsford's career"(71) and "one of his most cherished memories" (73). The 57-year-old Lunsford could not have asked for a more exalted endorsement of his ceaseless efforts to banish negative stereotypes about mountain people through promotion of their culture. Lunsford continued for more than three decades after this command performance to pursue his passion for and vision of the music and traditions of his native region. In the new introduction to the biography, Jones reiterates that Lunsford's work was "of profound importance," and that there remains a need to carry it on, "because the old stereotypes about Appalachia, often easier to deal with than meticulous research, never really die"(xiv). Jones concludes the book with one hundred pages of supplemental information, including various discographies, "A Sampling of Lunsford's Tales, Anecdotes, Etc."(183), and the lyrics and melodies to a generous number of "ballads, hymns, and songs . . . taken from Lunsford's 'Memory Collection'"(191).

Though he only recorded from 1946 until 1952, dying at 29 just months after his final recording session, Hank Williams is the most revered, the most mythologized, and the most written-about figure in the history of country music. Bill Koon's Hank Williams, So Lonesome-a revised version of a book published in 1983 under a different title-is one of five full-length biographies that have appeared on the troubled Alabamian since the first was published in 1970. Koon divides his brief volume into three sections. The first traces Williams's life: his largely fatherless, hardscrabble childhood; his sudden explosive fame; the sad disintegration of his personal life; and his lonely death. Koon breaks little new ground here, but does a fine job of showing step by step how Williams rose and how he fell, enriching the story with occasional well-grounded bits of speculation and persuasive insights. The second section of the book considers Williams the songwriter, in what Koon states is "the first extended essay of its kind"(xii). Some of the arguments here are rather shaky (in his overly literal-minded discussion of Williams's contributions to rock 'n' roll, for example, Koon seems to miss the true nature of the singer's influence on the genre), and this section would benefit from some sense of the larger country music context in which Williams plied his trade, but again many of Koon's observations are solid. The final section reviews the resources that are available for those wishing to pursue further research on Williams. Infrequent missteps aside, this brief work provides a useful introduction to the life and work of a man who should "be respected not just for his defining of country music, but for his contributions to American culture in general" (xiii).