Between 1718 and 1775 over 275,000 people from the English and Scottish borderlands and the Presbyterian counties of Ulster left home to go to the American colonies .  At the same time the British Empire was shipping hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to labour in the plantations and workshops of the same American colonies.  It was the fusion of the music of these two civilisations, perhaps with Native American influences, which created bluegrass and old time in the mixing pot of South Appalachia.  Much has been written recently to claim back the rich heritage of African forbears in forming this music, and justifiably so, having been ignored and written from history for many years.  But this is the story of those northern Britons who were allowed to claim the land of the rolling hills and mountains of South Appalachia.  To eke out a living on precarious land subject to the constant raids of the native people, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Choktaw and Creek tribes who had lived on the same land for centuries before them.  What made these northern Britons so suited to such a task?

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The northern Britons, or borderers, had suffered from centuries of quarrels between the Kings of Scotland and England.  They lived on land with forms of tenancy designed to maintain large bodies of fighting men and fight they did.  From 1040 to 1745 only three Kings of England would reign without suffering a Scottish invasion or without becoming an invader themselves.  It was a place of constant skirmish, battle and war.  The people lived in large clans bearing the names of Taylor, Bell, Graham or Bankhead, amongst many others, with rules laid down by chieftains.  Clan honour was just as important, if not more important, than the ruling law.  A society where incessant violence created a social system very different from the south of England.  Cattle rustling was endemic, organised on a very large scale with constant raids and skirmishes and the resolution of disputes came through feuds, violence and blood money.  It was a place very much apart from the rest of England.

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Then came the Act of Union in 1707 and along with it, the slow road to peace.  The old border warlords, deprived of their livelihood, fell deeply into debt and were replaced by agricultural capitalists who extracted profit and sent it south to London.  Rack renting and several rebellions ensued as the poor rose up against their oppressors as the nature of tenancies changed and the focus on fighting men was lost to the relentless push for profit.  To compound the problem crop failures in the 1720's, 1740's and 1770's led to famine and disease.  People emigrated in droves, often in family groups of 100 or more, some villages and hamlets just upped and left.  Authorities were horrified by the hollowing out of the population, in the sparsely populated areas of the English borderlands as many as one in every three were disappearing through the ports of Whitehaven, Barrow and Maryport.  And as they went they took with them their ancient habit of belligerence towards authority and disdain for any other ethnic entities.

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When they arrived in the colonies they were pushed by existing Puritan, Quaker, Anglican and Cavalier settlements into the South Appalachian back country or frontier land.  They came through the great immigration ports of Wilmington and Philadelphia and moved west to the rolling hills and south to mountains of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas.  There they rebuilt their clans and staked out their land and held it hard and fast from anyone who would take it from them.  In this new world they would play the fiddle tunes and sing the songs back from the hills of home. As time progressed, each area would develop it's own musical styles and traditions as had been the case back in the home they had left behind.  Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians has 274 songs and 968 tunes in two volumes notated between 1916 and 1918 showing folk music from the British Isles was still very much alive in South Appalachia at this time.

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Whilst this was going on black musicians were playing balls in the plantation houses and the balls of Jamestown, Richmond, Wilmington and Charleston.  Each musician was paid and for an enslaved musician the fee would be paid to the master.  South Appalachian fiddlers also played these balls to supplement their income.  It wasn't long before the rhythmic music that accompanied the dancing of African Americans in Southern Appalachia during slavery and after emancipation was introduced to the traditional fiddle tunes of the borderers.  This syncopated music, accompanied by different bowing techniques, is core to the development of the old time and string band music of the time.  Some scholars also suggest a Native American influence in the contour of fiddle tunes that start at the top of the tune and cascade down, something very common in the upper south of the Appalachians.

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Other instruments were added along the way but essentially the music remained relatively unchanged until being categorised as mountain music or the more derogatory term, hillbilly music, in the 1920’s.  It was one of the most popular music genres in the USA at that time. Hillbilly music, with its innate reference to King William of Orange, morphed into further categorisations such as old-time, western swing and, in the late 1940’s, bluegrass.

 

Historians and musicologists have traced the roots of this music back to the British Isles.  Individual songs, fiddle tunes, musical structure and even individual stanzas.

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It is the aim of Rainford Junction Festival Community Interest Company to mine this rich seam of British folklore and musical tradition and re-introduce it to the British Isles afresh. As we do so we intend to influence its forward progression by giving it a distinct feel of the modern evolution of contemporary acoustic music in the British Isles.