A region in harmony: southern music and the sound track of freedom.

IT HAD BEEN A SCORCHING DAY ON THE SOUTH CAROLINA COAST IN THE summer of 1949, and it promised to be a steamy evening. Out on the beach the lifeguards had already taken down the umbrellas and stacked the beach chairs. The waves kept up a persistent rhythm, undulating beneath the seductive obligato of a sea breeze. I stood by the jukebox at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion, patting my foot to the hypnotic beat, observing a provocative ballet of poise and sublimated passion called "the shag," with the darkening Atlantic in the background. It was my fourteenth summer. Onlookers pushed in so tightly around the dance floor there was barely room for the shaggers.

Good shaggers kept a calm equilibrium, lethargic but suggestive. I stared at the bronzed Adonises of the dance floor and their beautiful female partners, with their long legs and short shorts. I envied their cool graceful steps, moving with elegance and abandon. Visitors called the salacious rhythms and double entendres they heard at the Pavilion "beach music," because they did not find it on the jukeboxes back home. But legendary shaggers such as Chicken Hicks knew its source. "Beach music," he said, "was race music." Big George Lineberry, who had a job installing records on jukeboxes, had persuaded his boss to install race records on jukeboxes at both black and white locations. (1)

From the Pavilion it was about half a mile to "Charlie's Place," in the African American section known as "the Hill." It belonged to a black entrepreneur named Charlie Fitzgerald; and many of the white shaggers gathered there late in the evenings, scorning the admonitions against interracial "mixing" in the tightly segregated South of the 1940s. As Harry Driver remembered it, "We were totally integrated because the blacks and whites had nothing in our minds that made us think we were different. We loved music, we loved dancing, and that was the common bond between us." Betty Kirkpatrick, another star shagger, concurred. "It was the music and dance that drove us. It had nothing to do with color." According to Leon Williams, "The colored girls danced with white boys, and the colored boys danced with white girls.... We hugged each other's neck. If you had been at the beach in that period of time, you'd have thought segregation didn't exist. You know, if the masses of people could get along as we did, we'd never have any race problems." If the shag was not born in Charlie's Place, it certainly moved in at an early age. (2)

But the shaggers' deliberate flouting of Jim Crow met with heavy-handed reaction from some elements of white racial resistance. In the summer of 1950, a group of Ku Klux Klansmen paid a visit to Charlie Fitzgerald. His friend Henry Hemingway recalled, "They told him they didn't want the white kids there listening to music.... Charlie told them to go to hell." On August 26 about sixty Klansmen formed a motorcade down Ocean Boulevard past the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. The shaggers would never forget what they saw that night. "They had on white sheets and cone hats," Harry Driver said. "I get cold chills right now just thinking about it." Betty Kirkpatrick agreed: "It was the most frightening thing I have ever seen." (3)

It was almost midnight when the Klansmen made their way down Carver Street to find a forewarned Charlie Fitzgerald standing outside his club with a pearl-handled pistol in each hand. The Klansmen overpowered him and locked him in a car trunk, bombarding his business while customers dived under tables and tried to get away. Then the music stopped abruptly as the jukebox was riddled by Klan bullets. An eerie quiet followed, as Klansmen and customers alike grasped that the area's most profound symbol of shared traditions had been silenced. The Klansmen sped away to a lonely road, where they lashed Fitzgerald with a whip, pummeled him bloody and nearly unconscious, mutilated his ears with a pocketknife, and left him lying by the side of the road. (4)

The shag neither began nor ended in Myrtle Beach. But in Myrtle Beach in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an incredibly talented group of young people found a creative environment where they cultivated their own realm of musical and kinetic self-expression. It was at that place and in that time that the shag--their particular cultural fusion of European and African traditions--enjoyed its first golden age. But as I stood by the jukebox at the Pavilion on those summer evenings of 1949, looking past the shaggers to the white crests of the breaking waves on the dark waters of the Atlantic, no one foresaw next year's bloody Ku Klux Klan assault on this kind of music and the people who loved it.

To this day, I can close my eyes and still see the great shaggers, still hear the joyful music blasting from the jukebox, still sense the throb of the rhythm through my body. I can still feel the sultry heat and humidity of the crowded area around the dance floor, and I can still feel the soft breeze wafting in from the beach cooling my skin. And sometimes I can feel again the same cold shiver that ran down my spine when I first learned of the Klan's attack on Charlie's Place. But as I stood there on that steamy evening in 1949, watching those shaggers, I had no idea that what I was seeing and hearing was the beginning of a revolution.

A century-and-a-quarter earlier, Fanny Kemble, like most European travelers who visited the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, heard southern music for the first time in the form of African American spirituals. An English actress married to Pierce Butler, a Georgia planter, Kemble found the melodies "wild" and striking. She believed the slaves had a natural gift of music, and she was especially interested in what she called "[t]he way in which the chorus strikes in with the burden, between each phrase of the melody chanted by a single voice." It was the same up and down the coast. The singers stretched out the words; and, among those who really listened, their haunting beauty seemed to emanate from some sacred space where, as the Swedish visitor Fredrika Bremer put it, "they sang with all their souls and with all their bodies in unison." Booker T. Washington, who listened to such spirituals as a child, recalled that "most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom." During the war the slaves, he said, "gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to let it be known that the 'freedom' in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world." (5)

Fifty years later in the Mississippi Delta, freedom still seemed far off. Charlie and his friends Son and Willie were musicians, and they played for the Saturday night plantation balls. One Saturday night Son said, "Look who's coming in the door." Willie laughed. "Yeah, Little Robert." Little Robert was a pest. He wanted to play like them; but Son had to tell him, "You can't play nothing." About six months ago Little Robert ran away from home. But now he was back, and he had a guitar with him. When Robert sat down to play, Charlie Patton and Son House and Willie Brown couldn't believe it. "When he finished," Son said, "all our mouths were standing open." He had stolen their styles and synthesized them into something hauntingly beautiful. But there was also something more--something blood-chilling. He had added his own agitated treble runs, his own wicked, rhythmically insistent phrasing, and his own demonic drones on the bass strings, reiterated incessantly to embellish the despairing passion and yearning melancholy of his moaning falsetto vocals. The audience was stunned, shocked. His sudden outrageous virtuosity was unbelievable. How could he learn so much in such a short time? Soon rumors began to spread that he had gone to the crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to Satan. (6)

New Orleans at the dawn of the twentieth century was a crossroads of musical traditions. Into its harbor flowed the Father of Waters, the Mississippi, whose mighty stream had already converged with a dozen other rivers and their tributaries bringing the waters of half a continent to lap against the levees of New Orleans. And into its streets flowed black and white migrants from the countryside who encountered for the first time the city's cosmopolitan mix of European and African musical traditions. Out of the blending of the great slave spirituals with the instruments of the New Orleans brass band tradition, the syncopated treble lines over steady bass rhythms of ragtime, the distinctive musical structures and unique tone colors of the blues, musicians like King Joe Oliver had created a new form of southern music.

It was 1907, and Edmond Souchon was ten. Often on Friday nights he and his friends, disguised as newsboys, would slip into Storyville, New Orleans's legalized red-light district, to sit in the shadows and listen to the sublime sounds of King Joe Oliver playing jazz. One night, when his idol came outside the club to take a break, he got up enough courage to approach him. "Mr. Oliver," he said, "here is the paper you ordered." King Oliver, he would later recall, "looked at us and said, 'You know damn well, white boy, I never ordered no paper.'" But he continued, in a friendly tone, "'I been knowin' you kids were hanging around here to listen to my music. Do you think I'm going to chase you away for that? This is a rough neighborhood, kids, and I don't want you to get into trouble. Keep out of sight and go home at a decent time.'" Later, as a student at Tulane University, Souchon and his jazz-loving friends rarely missed a Saturday night heating King Oliver play. More than four decades later he marveled to recall those times. "A bunch of white boys in the deep South, second lining with utter rapture to a Negro band! In those narrow times, such a thing was unheard of!" Edmond "Doc" Souchon went on to become a distinguished surgeon, but almost every Saturday night for the rest of his life, he gathered his friends around him for a jam session. (7)

He was not the only New Orleans youngster who had fallen in love with jazz from hearing it played on King Oliver's comet. Louis Armstrong, born into grueling poverty, recalled that the Onward Brass Band "had some funeral marches that would just touch your heart, they were so beautiful." As they marched back from the cemetery after the body was interred, King Oliver "reached into the high register beating out those high notes in very fine fashion," he remembered. "And we All followed them All the way back to the New Orleans side and to their Destination." Oliver's comet was lyrical and melancholy, with a beautiful, burnished tone and a world-weary, laid-back attack that seemed to disappear almost before it registered. He fashioned his improvisations into dark, rich, and complex fragments of memory, floating by like echoes on the breeze, then drifting away like smoke. To young Louis Armstrong, the Oliver comet was majesty personified. (8)

There were occasional mixed black and white jazz bands in early New Orleans, even after 1902, when, as Johnny St. Cyr, another of the city's jazz musicians, put it, "they began that segregation outfit." And a few light-skinned Creoles worked both sides of the color line. Much more common were informal jam sessions in which artists of both races played together in a context of mutual admiration. Often they were impromptu, as when Armstrong and Jack Teagarden first met as teenagers on a New Orleans levee. Teagarden said, "You're a spade. I'm an ofay. We got the same soul. Let's blow." The white Texan and the black Louisianan became lifelong friends. (9)

Ralph Peer's recording of Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta in 1923 is generally considered the first country music recording, even though he disdained Carson's disc as "plu-perfect [sic] awful." But his recordings of rural musicians in the August 1927 Bristol, Virginia, sessions marked a major turning point in the history of country music--away from the older Anglo-Celtic string band styles toward newer black-influenced styles and repertoires. Within four days of one another, he recorded both the Carter Family of Virginia and Jimmie Rodgers of Mississippi. There was an engaging hide-and-seek among the Carter family as they wrapped their three voices around one another like talking on the porch on a warm summer evening. Sara sang lead in her soft but clear soprano, lifting her listeners to toe-tapping delight, or moving them to tears with her fragile, aching melancholy. Her seventeen-year-old cousin Maybelle supplied a gentle alto harmony, and A. P. spattered economical melodic phrases shyly here and there, as though the moon slipped behind a cloud and then reappeared. According to Maybelle's daughter June, "Uncle A. P. had a habit of singing just when he wanted to. Mother and Aunt Sara did most of the songs, but if he felt that it needed a little something extra, he would sing just as far as he felt he was needed, and then he would quit. I used to think he sang only where he knew the words." The sound of Maybelle's intricate and often-copied guitar style was as immediately recognizable as their vocals. Their innovative blend of traditional elements established a fresh sound in southern music. They launched their professional career in August 1927, when, as Sara described it, "there was an ad come out in the Bristol, Va.-Tenn., paper for all talent to come to Bristol to try out on records. So we three decided to go." Maybelle asked whether she should bring her guitar. They drove the treacherous twenty-five miles across the mountain to Bristol, where the Tennessee-Virginia state line served as Main Street. There Ralph Peer, an influential producer and talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company, had set up a recording studio. The trio recorded four songs that very evening, and Sara and Maybelle recorded two more the following morning, before the trio returned home to Maces Springs. (10)

Jimmie Rodgers was a young railroad worker whose dark, lonely eyes contrasted with his bright, confident smile. Peer recognized that Rodgers "had his own personal and peculiar style," fusing the twelve-bar country blues of his black neighbors with the Swiss yodels (or "tyrolean warbling") of popular vaudeville entertainers. As a youth Rodgers picked up the guitar and the blues from black musicians on Meridian's Tenth Street. His vocal range was barely an octave, and his timing was unpredictable, and the hollow resonance of his edgy, uptight monotone sometimes sounded like blowing across the neck of an empty Coca-Cola bottle. But winding and sliding around his lyrics like the great Mississippi River, he had an uncanny ability to convey loneliness, ecstasy, and fear. His "blue yodels" were the earliest publicly acclaimed blending of black and white idioms in southern vernacular music. And in 1930 he featured Louis Armstrong and his pianist wife Lil on his celebrated recording of "Blue Yodel No. 9." (11)

When A. P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter sang their repertoire of old British and American ballads, African American blues, sacred songs from both black and white tradition, and sentimental parlor songs from Tin Pan Alley, they evoked the values of home and fireside. When Jimmie Rodgers sang his songs of that lonesome train-whistle call to ramble, he evoked Moses and the Exodus. Four decades later Dolly Parton would enjoy a breakthrough performance of his "Mule Skinner Blues." As she strutted triumphantly through this sacred relic of the country canon, she not only appropriated its "authenticity," but by transforming its gender stereotypes she also gave it a new authenticity of her own. Together Rodgers and the Carters gave country music its two great themes, ushering in a musical form that would produce a series of family groups from the Delmore Brothers to the Mandrell Sisters, and such ramblin' boys as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Waylon and Willie. Country music would also come to harbor such regional-ethnic musical varieties as Cajun and norteno conjunto. (12)

By the age of twenty-two, when Louis Armstrong joined Oliver's band, Armstrong's range, his speed, and his creativity were like nothing jazz had known before. In his elegant and fearless solos, the melody disappeared and reappeared like facets of a dark jewel, each phrase sweeping away the silence before it in a kind of controlled ecstasy. He thrust the field of jazz into the era of the star soloist, and his influence extended beyond cornet and trumpet players to singers and other instrumentalists. It was an empowering creativity that amounted to the musical component of the Harlem Renaissance, heralding the advent of the Aiken, South Carolina-born Bubber Miley, whose grating, bellicose trumpet growls and tortured, tragic wa-was created a sound so personal and so moving that it forever transformed the Duke Ellington band from one that played the notes that came on the page and the sounds that came with the horns into one that sounded like no other, one that played what Ellington came to call "pride in black culture"; of the Cheraw, South Carolina-born Dizzy Gillespie, whose upper-octave trumpet choruses played at blistering speeds over bewildering harmonic progressions rewrote the language of jazz in the 1940s in a revolution that came to be called bebop; and of the Hamlet, North Carolina-born John Coltrane, who dug deeply into his cultural heritage and tried to play it all on his tenor saxophone in his famous sheets of sound, his frantic flurries of notes played with a scorching intensity as relentless as kudzu. (13)

At about the same time, in a North Carolina mill village, a young textile worker took a seat on his front porch one evening after his shift in the mill and began to play his guitar. "There were mighty few radios them days," he would recall, "and the whole world loved country music." Soon his front yard in the mill village was filled with smiling neighbors, enjoying his free concert. "I'll have to admit," he said, "I too was getting a kick out of it." He had worked out a highly individual style of playing, using a pick on his thumb and on each finger of his right hand. Dorsey Dixon was born in 1897 in a mill village in Darlington, South Carolina, and went to work in the mill when he was twelve. His schooling ended in the fourth grade. When he was twenty-seven, he moved to East Rockingham, North Carolina, to work in the Aleo Mill. He and his younger brother Howard played duets together, mostly in homes in the mill village, "because we enjoyed trying to make people happy and forget their cares and troubles for an hour or so." Influenced by Jimmie Tarlton, a virtuoso slide guitarist who picked the guitar rather than strummed it, Dorsey set out to learn how to pick. (14)

After months of practice, Dorsey Dixon was trying out his new style on his neighbors. In the meantime Howard had also been practicing diligently on a steel guitar he had bought for three dollars. Soon the Dixon Brothers were singing and playing again, in homes and churches and in a union-organizing drive in their county. About a month before the general textile strike of 1934, radio station WBT in Charlotte began broadcasting the Crazy Barn Dance, sponsored by a company that produced a laxative named Crazy Water Crystals, with the fiddler Fisher Hendley serving as master of ceremonies. The Dixon brothers "decided to answer a call over radio station WBT in Charlotte for local talent. Our audition passed with flying colors, and we went on the radio the same day of our audition." (15)

Because most of the musicians on the Crazy Barn Dance were either mill workers or former mill workers, the program became popular in textile communities. Such featured performers as J. E. Mainer and the Dixon Brothers achieved celebrity status, bringing live entertainment to the mill families through personal appearances in school auditoriums and mill recreation centers. The Dixon Brothers were singular in their stark, intense harmonies and their piercing steel guitar lead, in an era of brother duets featuring close vocal harmonies and mandolin leads. They were also distinctive in the proportion of Dorsey's original compositions in their repertoire. They always included, among the religious and comic songs that made up the standard fare in country music, his profoundly sensitive songs of their personal experience in the mills. Tinged with gospel and blues, Dorsey's compositions were a tinderbox of resentment; and the raw, hungry sound of his disturbingly intense vocals was an aural representation of his own interior monologue, expressing the traps and travails of mill life. In addition to his compositions "I Didn't Hear Nobody Pray" and "The Intoxicated Rat" (both cautionary tales against alcohol abuse), Dorsey sang of the mill workers being overworked, underpaid, and subjugated. Listeners liked songs that spoke to their lives and the hardships of mill work, such as Dorsey's "Weave Room Blues" and "Babies in the Mill." In six recording sessions from 1936 to 1939, the Dixon Brothers made more than sixty records. They received nominal payments for their work, but they never made enough to free them from mill work. "Howard and I went on many trips to be on the radio and had to hang around the railroad station for a late train to run to get back home. We never owned a car through all our radio and recording work." During that time Victor Records assigned copyrights of Dorsey's compositions to various publishers, and other musicians claimed authorship of Dorsey's songs. Dorsey knew that he was being cheated, but like other uneducated artists in early country music, he did not know what he could do about it. "I'll never know what happened," he would write, "but we finally got pushed back in the woods and the name Dixon brother[s] was forgotten for many years." (16)

It was 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression, and a youth joined his father on a folk-song-collecting expedition among sharecroppers and lumberjacks, miners and convicts. The songcatchers camped out at night and drove by day across the dusty unpaved back roads of the South, laden with a heavy disc-recording machine and stacks of aluminum discs. They met unlettered people who were great artists, "country fiddlers who couldn't read or write, but could play two, three, or four hundred tunes," as well as "white ballad singers who remembered one, two, three hundred ballads" and African American spiritual singers "who could sing several hundred spirituals." In Angola Prison in Louisiana they met a black convict with a high sweet voice and an enormous repertoire of work songs, love songs, ballads, and blues. He called himself the "king of de twelve-string guitar players," but the other inmates called him Leadbelly. His name was Huddie Ledbetter. On another occasion, they were recording spirituals from sharecroppers in a dirt-floored country church, and "everybody said, 'Let's have Old Blue sing.'" A large African American man rose and sang into their recording machine</p>

<pre> Work all week Don't make enough To pay my board And buy my snuff. It's hard, it's hard It's hard on we poor farmers, It's hard. </pre> <p>Then he "spoke into the recorder horn as though it were a telephone. He said, 'Now, Mr. President, you just don't know how bad they're treating us folks down here. I'm singing to you and I'm talking to you so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks here in Texas.'" The moment had a profound impact on the eighteen-year-old Alan Lomax. "I realized right then that the folklorist's job was to link the people who were voiceless and who had no way to tell their story, with the big mainstream of world culture. I realized then what my career was going to be." After completing the field trip John Lomax and his precocious son Alan deposited more than one hundred discs in the Library of Congress. Alan gave a lecture in the library's Coolidge Auditorium about the music they had recorded, insisting that America's folk artists and their listeners had produced and preserved a legacy of songs and instrumental tunes as important as any on earth. At twenty-one he was put in charge of the library's Archive of American Folk Song. (17)

Unlike most folk-song collectors of his era, who sought what they considered the "last leaves" of dying folk-song traditions, Lomax sought the living traditions of living folk. He and his father were aided in their endeavors by such energetic and dedicated local collectors as Genevieve Willcox Chandler in Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina, and Ruby Pickens Tartt, in Livingston, Alabama. In his preface to Our Singing Country, Alan described them as "two intelligent and creative Southern women," who "explored the singing resources of their communities and welcomed us with our recording machine." He was less generous in crediting the work of such African American scholars as the musicologist John W. Work, the sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and their graduate assistant Samuel C. Adams Jr., whose field project in the Mississippi Delta he joined and took control over. And there were a few other folklorists, such as Frank and Anne Warner, recording in North Carolina's mountains and on the Outer Banks, and John Quincy Wolf, recording in the Arkansas Ozarks, who shared Lomax's preference for the folk above the lore. No one who has heard the Warners' field recordings of Frank Proffitt--of the way his subtle and poignant baritone flowed through his ballads like a quiet mountain stream, leaving his emotions more implied than stated--and no one who has heard Wolf's field recordings of Almeda Riddle--of the way she put the haunting ambience of her a capella singing behind the song, evoking the sacred--could doubt the continuing power and beauty of the southern ballad tradition. (18)

Lee Wiley's voice was husky and diaphanous, with a hint of smoke; and there was an appealing quaver of emotional fragility in her tone. She was immediately identifiable by her wide vibrato, her wistful intimacy, and the gently mocking sensuality of her phrasing. She was born of English, Scottish, and Cherokee parentage in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, in 1915. She described her home as "about as small as a town can get," and she was a misfit from the beginning. "I had a boyfriend who would skip school with me," she recalled, "and we would go over to the local store and play records. The records that we listened to and liked were called 'race records.' And they were only sold in a certain part of the town, the colored part." Having absorbed the vocal influence of Louis Armstrong, she ran away from home at fifteen, launching a career as a singer in jazz clubs, on records, and on the radio. After she recorded his "Easy to Love" and "You Do Something to Me," Cole Porter said, "I can't tell you how much I like the way she sings these songs." Her twilight lyricism and her swinging improvisations made her one of the most distinctive voices in jazz. (19)

In 1930, at the age of nineteen, Freddie Green left Charleston, South Carolina, for New York to try his luck in the music business. He got a day job upholstering furniture and played various clubs in Harlem, where, as his girlfriend Billie Holiday would later describe it, "Every night the limousines would wheel uptown. The minks and ermines would climb over one another to be the first one through the coalbins or over the garbage pails into the newest spot that was 'the place.'" Soon, Green recalled, "I moved to the Black Cat, in Greenwich Village" and "hadn't been there long when John Hammond, started coming in and listening." Hammond was a record producer and talent scout who arranged for Green to audition for a new band he had just brought east from Kansas City. As Count Basic remembered it, "John told me something about a young guitarist. He said he thought he would be good for the band." The strong individuals in his rhythm section had a tendency to go their own way. Their styles did not always mesh, and they often played in their own tempos, pulling against rather than with one another. Perhaps a guitarist could focus their attention and unite them into a more coherent unit. "Hammond brought his man in there," Basic related, "and I said, 'Why don't we just play?' and we played maybe one song with a couple of choruses, and when I heard that much, I knew that was all that was necessary." Freddie Green, he added, "was on the bus the next day when we went to Pittsburgh." Freddie Green's sly, self-effacing strumming, like a bird hiding its head beneath a wing, would become one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz. His guitar was unamplified, and he never took a solo. But his unfettered, freewheeling energy made him the essential element in what came to be called the "All-American rhythm section." His playing is almost imperceptible on recordings; but the band heard him, and his faint but fluid strumming became its heartbeat, the force that made the Count Basic band the swingingest band in jazz history. "I'm a quiet guy," said Green. "Not shy, mind you, just quiet. I like to be there on the sidelines, but near the big action." Freddie Green sat within touching distance of Count Basic, near the big action, for the next forty-seven years, until Basie's death. Altogether he played almost fifty years with the Basic band, until--as a Harlem newspaper put it--he himself joined "Basie's Heaven Gig." (20)

In the middle of the Great Depression, a young white boy began to hang out with a black musician named Rufus Payne. Known locally as Tee Tot, Payne played for pocket change on the streets of Greenville, Alabama. According to Hank Williams Jr., Tee Tot "taught my father, as a boy of thirteen, to play the guitar and introduced him to the Blues. Daddy said, in so many words, 'My musical education was learned at the school of Tee Tot.'" Payne not only taught "him the bluesy, driving rhythm that became Hank's trademark," said country-music disc jockey Ralph Emery, but also "gave him something far more important: a complete lack of racial prejudice." Young Hiram "Hank" Williams, in the late 1930s, was developing a repertoire and singing style that blended the blues he learned from Tee Tot with the traditional country music of the era of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, along with the influence of church music. Emery notes, "He loved to praise the Lord and even more, to sing the mournful, dirgelike tunes about death and damnation." He grew up to be an awkward, angry, and alienated misfit, living a life as wild and dangerous as Robert Johnson's, stumbling and staggering through his appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. But he was also one of American music's most gifted lyricists, introducing new themes and a poetic sensibility to his songs. He sang with a bluesman's achingly passionate voice that could sound mournful even on upbeat songs. On really sad songs his voice filled with a crushing melancholy, and his ghostly walls were bathed in a somber, shadowy half-light in which ancient prophets and poets, barely hidden behind their masks, seemed to speak their passions in mordant and metaphor-laden phrases. In his "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Hank Williams epitomized a lifetime of grief. (21)

The ability of southern music to reconcile an uncertain present with an anguished past, to root innovation in tradition, and to project a future in harmony with the best of past and present was nowhere better illustrated than in the gospel music of both races. Religious music was always the bedrock of southern vernacular music, from the spirituals, camp-meeting hymns, and shape-note hymnals of the nineteenth century to the exciting expressions of gospel music in the twentieth. Virtually all the major southern grassroots musicians--whether country, jazz, bluegrass, rock, or even blues--have testified to the influence of religious music on their early musical orientations.

Quartets became the most popular groups in black gospel music. Among the most important of them were the Fairfield Four, formed in 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee; the Dixie Hummingbirds, organized in 1928 by high-school students in Greenville, South Carolina; and the Golden Gate Quartet, founded by high-school students in Norfolk, Virginia. The Gates' vocal imitations of trains, boats, cars, and whistles as background for their singing distinguished them from other groups and helped to make them the most famous gospel quartet of them all. But the greatest figure in gospel music was Mahalia Jackson, who grew up in a household of devout Baptists in New Orleans--surrounded by jazz bands and blues singers. "When the old people wasn't home, I'd turn on a Bessie Smith record and play it over and over," she said. "That was before I was saved." But she was also influenced by "the Sanctified or Holiness Churches," where "[t]hey used the drum, the cymbal, the tambourine, and the steel triangle" to create "a powerful beat, a rhythm we held on to from slavery days." In 1937 she began a fourteen-year association with the gospel composer (and former blues singer) Thomas A. Dorsey, touring the country and recording "Move On Up a Little Higher," which became one of the best-selling gospel records of all time and made her the preeminent star of black gospel music. She sang in the unashamedly southern style of the down-home churches, her music skipping and strutting like sanctified preachers; and she became intensely popular among black and white listeners alike. (22)

The creative era of gospel music was no less apparent in the music of white southerners. The most famous of the early groups was a family group from Texas called the Chuck Wagon Gang. After World War II Wally Fowler of Georgia organized the Oak Ridge Quartet and began to promote package tours of white gospel music, typically renting an auditorium and presenting what he called "All-Night Sings." Mainstream country and bluegrass artists included gospel songs as a mainstay of their repertoire, and the Grand Ole Opry and other country radio shows routinely included gospel ensembles. By the early 1950s popular gospel groups such as the Blackwood Brothers, the Statesmen, the Jordanaires, and the Happy Goodman Family had become well known in countless southern rural homes through their broadcasts and recordings. The 1960s witnessed the coming of country and even rock styles into gospel music, as the Rambos and the Kingsmen introduced larger vocal groups and amplified instruments. By the 1970s "contemporary Christian" music, performed by such singers as Amy Grant, sounded more like rock than gospel. (23)

Although out-and-out collaboration between white and black gospel artists was rare, they routinely performed songs learned from one another's recordings. The Blackwood Brothers, for instance, recorded the Golden Gate Quartet's "Swing Down Chariot," while Mahalia Jackson recorded Porter Wagoner's country hit "Satisfied Mind." Black and white musical expressions were rooted in similar sources and similar experiences, but each remained highly distinctive. (24)

It was November 1940, and New York gave a cold reception to Lee Hays, a young man recently arrived from the South with a bag of songs. He was born in Arkansas, the son of a Methodist minister. Growing up in a series of rural parsonages, Lee learned to sing the folk songs and the old rural hymns of the South. He marveled when his father came back from a trip to the Holy Land with a jug of water from the Jordan River to baptize people. But he rebelled against his father when he caught him refilling the jug. Young Lee was radicalized by the Great Depression. He saw the shared fear and poverty of black and white southerners who plowed their worn-out fields and lost their worn-out farms to the drought and the mortgage companies, or lived on cornbread and beans in rickety tenant shacks. He believed their only way out was to get together to fight for honest pay and fair treatment, for freedom and justice and brotherhood. But he learned that whenever blacks and whites got together they were called Reds. (25) At the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, he learned of the links between the folk songs he loved and the effort to make a better life for southern working people; and he learned how those songs might be applied to organizing a union or conducting a strike. In 1937, Lee was hired by Commonwealth College in Arkansas, where he began to write labor lyrics to traditional tunes. He joined the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) and participated in the union's biracial organizing efforts in the winter of 1936, "signing up members" and "making up songs." (26) His lyrics echoed what he had learned from hungry farmers bending their backs and dragging their sacks, of organizers telling of the beatings and sluggings and cheatings and killings they faced trying to organize the STFU.

After Commonwealth collapsed, Hays came to New York, hoping to publish a songbook for use by the labor movement. There he met Pete Seeger. "Lee and I hit it off immediately," Seeger told me. "I couldn't sing with the banjo; I had to either play the banjo or sing, but couldn't do both." Either way, teaming up seemed a good idea. In another month they had acquired a repertoire, a residence, and a name--the Almanac Singers. (27)

Soon they were joined by the Texas-born Bess Lomax, fresh from Bryn Mawr, and by Woody Guthrie--a dust-bowl Okie who could write a song on any subject and play anything with strings on it. Woody wrote to Bess's brother Alan that Lee and Pete were "a knocking songs out to beat hell and I hope they beat it. Good old boys." Recalling an old recording by South Carolinian Chris Bouchillon of the "Talking Blues," Lee and Pete wrote new union verses. Pete performed them with the Almanac Singers as "Talking Union." Lee's vibrant vocal chords served as the foundation of Almanac harmonies, his resonant bass making everything they sang sound like an old southern gospel song. He had something to say; and he knew how to say it in a way people could understand. In addition, Pete told me, "he was a better song leader than I, and I learned a lot from him." Lee's labor background, his sly southern wit, and his down-home style of storytelling enabled him to endow traditional songs with new lyrics specific enough to be topical but universal enough to last. Some of them, such as "Lonesome Traveller," "Times Are Gettin' Hard," and "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd," are still being sung after half a century. (28) The Almanac Singers got small bookings on what they called "the subway circuit," five dollars here and ten dollars there, with subway rides between. Prospects were poor in 1941, but the question was made moot in the summer of 1942 when Pete was drafted, Woody joined the merchant marines, and Lee--ineligible for military service because of diabetes--found a job with Russian War Relief. (29)

After the war, Lee, Pete, Woody, and others organized People's Songs to spread the message of their music to as many people as possible. Lee and Pete continued to write new songs together, but Lee's lyrics were too controversial for them to find a publisher. One of them had a chorus that declared,</p> <pre> I'd sing out danger I'd sing out a warning I'd sing out love between all of my brothers All over this land. (30) </pre> <p>By 1949 financial and political problems compelled them to shut down. That year they formed a new quartet, one--as Lee put it--"like the old Almanacs, but with discipline." They called themselves the Weavers. Lee said they would weave themselves into the warp and woof of American music. "I'll take care of the woofing," he added, "and the others will continue being warped." In 1949 the Weavers' prospects were negligible. By 1951 they were pop stars, with a series of number-one records including Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene"; Woody's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You"; an Israeli song named "Tzena, Tzena"; a South African freedom song named "Wimoweh"; and a traditional folk song named "On Top of Old Smoky." By 1953 they had run afoul of the blacklist, and their prospects were negligible again. They took what Lee called a "sabbatical," adding that it "turned into a Mondical and a Tuesdical" as well. Then, on Christmas Eve 1955, they staged a comeback with a well-received concert at Carnegie Hall. Many now consider that concert, and the recording that came from it, to have launched the folk-song movement of the sixties. (31)

By 1940, the same year that Lee Hays arrived in New York, a group of southern-born musicians began to meet regularly at a place in Harlem named Minton's Playhouse to try out new musical ideas. John was not quite twenty-three, but he was already developing an original trumpet style in keeping with the harmonies he heard in his head. Five years earlier, however, he had been tempted in a different musical direction. That was in late 1934 or early 1935, when King Oliver and his band played a date in Laurinburg, North Carolina. John and his cousin Powe were studying music at Laurinburg Institute, a black preparatory school modeled on Tuskegee Institute. They and the other students were excited to see the great pioneer of jazz, even in the declining years of his career. After the performance, John and Powe met the veteran cornet player backstage. When they told him they were studying music, he asked them to show him what they could do. They must have passed their audition, because the maestro invited them to join his band for the remainder of the tour. John declined. He needed to work on the school's farm during the summer to earn his tuition. But Powe accepted the offer. After two or three months of weary one-nighters between uncomfortable trips in a dilapidated bus, he returned with little to show except the thrill of having played with the great King Oliver! John was at least properly envious. By 1940, John was already a veteran of Cab Calloway's Band and had acquired the nickname "Dizzy." At Minton's the South Carolina-born Dizzy Gillespie jammed regularly with the North Carolina-born Thelonious Monk and the Texas-born Charlie Christian. Monk was only twenty, but he was already playing many of the jagged but oddly logical melodic contours that would make him a major jazz pianist and composer. Christian had just turned twenty-one and had a steady job with Benny Goodman. His unique style on electric guitar was clearly marked by the influence of western swing (a new fusion of jazz, blues, and string-band idioms developed by Bob Wills and other white country musicians in Texas and Oklahoma). But Gillespie was the essential catalyst. "You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other," he said. He would blow upper-octave choruses of long asymmetric lines at blistering speeds, embracing all sorts of crisscrossing, reversal, and implied polyphony over the most bewildering of Monk's harmonic progressions. A synthesis began to take place; a new kind of jazz began to crystallize. It came to be called bebop, after a characteristic Gillespie trumpet phrase. By the mid-forties Gillespie and Monk were recording the new music and finding employment in clubs on 52nd Street, where they could bring modernist ideas to a broader jazz audience. (32)

At almost the same time, rumors were already spreading about Bill Monroe's new lineup in his Blue Grass Boys, especially that new banjo player, and there was an air of expectancy in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium when the group stepped out on the Grand Ole Opry stage one Saturday evening early in 1946. It did not take the audience long to realize that here was something new. Hearing the bluesy, cascading fiddle dashes of the Floridian Chubby Wise, the robust guitar runs of the Tennessean Lester Flatt, and the rock-steady bass lines of Cedric Rainwater, listeners knew that Monroe had turned the Blue Grass Boys into an ensemble of virtuosos. The star sideman was the twenty-two-year-old Earl Scruggs on five-string banjo. With a stylistic daring that belied his youth, Scruggs demolished all previous conceptions of banjo playing with a jaw-dropping flood of sixteenth notes and cascading flyaway arpeggios. He established the banjo as a full-fledged solo instrument, himself as its principal exponent, and the music of the band as a national sensation. Blending elements of traditional Anglo-American folk music with elements of the blues, they created an exciting new sound. And unlike the old-time string bands, they took turns improvising boiling hot breaks between the choruses, soloing like jazz musicians. Monroe himself was the crucial stimulus, out in front, pulling the band along with him. He forced his already knife-edged tenor way up above Lester Flatt's lead, reaching into places few singers had gone before. Some said he sang as though his underwear were too tight, but his astringent, extraterrestrial falsetto defined the "high lonesome sound" that would become the hallmark of the new music. And his virtuosity on the mandolin--alternating his bluesy, jazz-like melodic solos with his ornate quicksilver obligatos--spurred his sidemen to heights of artistry they had never before achieved. Together they produced a music as much blues or jazz as country. (33)

Monroe had learned much of his early music from fiddlers back in Kentucky, picking up instrumental licks from his uncle Pen Vandiver and from Arnold Shultz, an African American fiddler whom he accompanied on guitar for square dances. "Arnold played the blues like no other man could," according to Monroe. "Arnold and myself," he recollected, "we played for a lot of square dances back in those days." His early friendship with Schultz instilled in him an enduring fondness for the blues. Earl Scruggs had also learned instrumental techniques from older musicians and, like Monroe, synthesized them into a unique style. His intricate three-finger picking quickly became known as Scruggs-style, but he was not its creator. He was exposed to banjo by his father and an older sister, who played in the old "rapping" (or clawhammer) way, and by his older brother Junie, who had developed his own version of three-finger picking. As a teenager Earl was influenced by the three-finger picking style of Snuffy Jenkins, whose performances on WBT Charlotte in 1934 and on WIS in Columbia, South Carolina, after 1937 gave many banjo pickers their first exposure to the technique. "It all come from a man in North Carolina named Snuffy Jenkins," Bill said, "That's where Earl learned from, and all the pickers that played three-finger style." (34)

According to Jenkins, "I feel like Earl Scruggs has done more to promote this style of playing than anyone else. Earl and I are the best of friends, since I first met him when he was learning to play the banjo." Jenkins's banjo style was intensely personal, combining elements of the archaic and the modern, blending ragtime-inflected syncopations with subtle, stylized phrasing. Don Reno was actually playing the style before Scruggs, having himself learned it from Jenkins. Reno began broadcasting on WSPA in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1940. One of his early fans was young Scruggs, who was then a teenager playing in the Morris Brothers band. According to the banjoist Tony Trischka, "Scruggs used to come and shyly hang back in the corner of the radio studio during Reno's shows." Don Reno was offered a position with Bill Monroe in 1943 but went into the army instead and served overseas in Burma. When he returned Scruggs was playing with Monroe. (35) Bill Monroe thought he had at long last found a unique sound for his Blue Grass Boys. It did not remain unique for long. His achievement, and theirs, was something greater. They did not create a unique sound; they created a new form of music. (36)

The Baltimore-born Billie Holiday favored songs with bittersweet lyrics and brooding melodies. Her singing was intense, her phrasing often acerbic; and her voice sometimes sounded as though dipped in acid. Heating her caustic, utterly woebegone vocals could be an almost unbearably moving experience. The Virginia-born Ella Fitzgerald could spin scintillating vocal lines with an unmatched expressive spontaneity. Her incredible sense of swing blended with the sidemen; she was never merely a vocalist but a full-fledged member of the band. At times she could romp through a melody like a child jumping hopscotch squares. At others her subtle, silken musicality wove a mesmerizing spell over her interpretation of popular standards. (37)

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Nat Cole honed his unique style by playing organ in the church where his father preached and his mother directed the choir. They did not approve of his infusion of jazz licks into the hymns. In 1937 he moved to California, added the nickname "King," and organized the King Cole Trio, featuring his own piano stylings. "I was strictly a jazz musician and played only jazz" then, he recalled. In the early 1950s the Savannah-born singer, lyricist, and composer Johnny Mercer signed Cole to Capitol Records, a company Mercer had co-founded. At Capitol Nat King Cole's soothing, butter-smooth voice and elegant phrasing made him a gifted purveyor of such romantic ballads as "Too Young," "Mona Lisa," and "Unforgettable." His 1961 recording of "Stardust" is generally considered the classic version of the song. Another big hit was "Route 66," mythologizing the highway taken by such real-life Okies as Woody Guthrie. (38)

In April 1956 Cole was the target of a vicious racist assault during a Birmingham concert for a white-only audience. His attackers were members of the Alabama Citizens' Council, headed by the fanatical segregationist Asa Carter. Although Cole had never spoken out publicly on civil rights, what enraged the racists was simply that he appeared onstage with white artists. From that moment on, according to his friend Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole "began to stand up and be counted." He became a mainstay of support for the civil rights movement. (39)

It was 1953, and the summit meeting included some of the most versatile gospel singers in Harlem. The North Carolina-born Clyde McPhatter, son of a Baptist minister, sang with the Mount Lebanon Singers. South Carolina-born Bill Pinkney sang with the Southern Knights. And the Alabama-born Gerhart and Andrew Thrasher sang with the Thrasher Wonders. McPhatter had been asked to put together a rhythm-and-blues group for his label. What Ahmet Ertegun, cofounder of Atlantic Records, was looking for was "something like the authentic blues, but cleaner, less rough and perforce more sophisticated." The new group, the Drifters, excelled in an exhilarating fusion of gospel phrasing and harmony with secular lyrics and R&B rhythms. The ingratiating sweetness of McPhatter's stratospheric falsetto soared above the gospel harmonies of the Thrasher brothers and the complex shifting rhythms of Bill Pinkney's bass vocals. Bringing the emotional intensity of gospel into rhythm and blues, they created a signature sound that made their first six records into R&B top ten hits--"Money Honey" (number one), "Such a Night," "Honey Love" (which also reached number twenty-one on the white pop charts), "Someday You'll Want Me to Want You," "White Christmas," and "Whatcha Gonna Do." That sound would come to be called "soul" music a decade later. (40)

In 1949 Billboard, the magazine of the popular music industry, had changed the name of its African American record-ranking chart from "Race Records" to "Rhythm and Blues." The "race" charts, with music by black musicians for black customers, had been dominated in the late 1940s by Delta blues artists, such as Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters, who had now electrified their work into "urban blues." Since the segregated charts both reflected and promoted segregated audiences, few black artists were famous in white America. The increasing popularity of R&B was hastened by two unusual and short-lived developments--the practice of "covering" and the pursuit of the "crossover." They were limited forms of cultural blending, and the former was designed to forestall the latter. The practice of "covering," or copying, hit recordings by black artists with versions of the same songs by whites--as when Bill Haley covered Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" and Elvis Presley covered Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's Alright, Mama" and "Big Mama" Thornton's "Hound Dog" for white markets--was the most significant counterattack by the record companies against the growing popularity of rhythm and blues in the early and mid-1950s. But ironies abounded. Not only were R&B songs covered by white artists for the pop market, so also were country songs--as when Hank Williams's songs "Cold, Cold Heart," "Half as Much," and "Hey, Good Lookin'" were covered by the pop artists Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and Jo Stafford. And country songs were also routinely covered by black artists for the R&B market--as when Ivory Joe Hunter recorded Ray Price's "City Lights" and Fats Domino covered Hank Williams's "You Win Again" and "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)." And black artists also recorded R&B versions of white pop hits, as when the Chords covered "Cross Over the Bridge" and Erskine Hawkins covered "Tennessee Waltz," both big pop hits for Patti Page. In 1950 six black covers of white top-ten songs charted on the R&B lists. While exploitation (on all sides) was certainly involved in the practice of covering, songwriters of both races profited from reaching expanded markets, while the continued segregation of charts and the preferences of fans held the impact of covers on performers' sales to a minimum. Even so, the cover phenomenon ultimately accelerated the growth of a mass market for R&B and in doing so brightened prospects for black writers and performers alike. By 1956 the cover phenomenon had just about run its course. (41)

By the mid-fifties the Drifters were already crossing over, performing to overflow crowds across the South, sometimes to interracial audiences, sometimes on interracial tours with such artists as the Tennessee-born rockabilly Carl Perkins, whose "Blue Suede Shoes" had become the first recording to reach number one on the country charts, the pop charts, and the R&B charts. While many young southerners were drawn to R&B without regard for political implications, racists in Chattanooga set off a "wild, bottle-throwing, knife-wielding melee" at a concert the Drifters shared with Roy Hamilton, LaVern Baker, and Red Prysock at the city auditorium. Several spectators were wounded, but the performers managed to escape safely. (42)

The fences between musical forms were not high enough to keep musical styles from crossing over. Black and white southerners had long engaged in a vigorous musical interchange, and it was probably inevitable that country music and R&B would merge their cultural traditions and musical chemistries. When they did, the fusion of country music's rural populism with R&B's urban individualism set off a musical explosion called rock-and-roll that still reverberates in its latter-day form of rock. (43)

In the field of country music, there was nothing quite comparable to the arrival in Nashville of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton within a short period in the 1960s. Each brought with her great talent and great ambitions, and by the beginning of the 1970s, each had become a superstar with such breakthrough hits as Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" in 1968, and Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter" and Parton's "Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8)," both in 1970. (44) It was natural that much of their music derived from their upbringings and personal experiences. They shared poverty-stricken childhoods and dreams of a career in country music, offering what seemed to them the most plausible path to freedom from a life of drudgery. Lynn was a Kentucky coal-miner's daughter, growing up in a log cabin in Butcher Holler in the Appalachians, married at thirteen to Oliver Lynn, known as Mooney or Doolittle, hoping only to be a good wife and mother. She already had four children by the time she cut her first hit record. Parton was a Tennessee tobacco-farmer's daughter, the fourth of twelve children, growing up in a two-room shack in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, learning to sing and play the guitar from her musical family. Wynette was raised in a rural tar-paper shack in Mississippi by her grandparents after her father died before her first birthday and her mother went to work in a defense plant. She grew up chopping cotton and baling hay. Like Dolly, she learned to sing and play the guitar as a child. Like Loretta, she married before finishing high school. She was married at seventeen and divorced at twenty-three, supporting her three children by working in a beauty parlor. Mooney decided that Loretta should seek a career in country music, at least long enough to earn enough money to buy themselves a house. Then she could come back and raise the children. But his management skills never matched his ambitions. Dolly's career was a childhood dream. At eighteen, the day after she finished high school, she caught the bus to Nashville. Tammy, while not giving up her day job in Birmingham, launched her singing career playing on local television and regional shows and auditioning in Nashville. (45)

Loretta Lynn sang like a woman who had learned more about life than she really wanted to know. But in her fragile yet defiant voice, she could sometimes turn secular songs into hymns celebrating the survival of the human spirit. When she came to Nashville, she was signed by Decca Records and recorded three top-ten singles in four years: her first, aptly named "Success," in 1962, another, "Before I'm Over You," in 1963, and yet another, "Blue Kentucky Girl," in 1965. The following year she had two big hits with her own compositions, "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man" and "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind." It rose to number one on the charts in 1966. Tammy Wynette sang like a woman who had left her romantic illusions behind. She could be almost unbelievably lachrymose one minute, triumphantly exuberant the next; but she always seemed deeply and personally involved in her songs. In 1966 she was signed by Epic Records, and in 1967 two of her singles rose into the top ten: "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" and her Grammy-winning "I Don't Wannna Play House." In 1968 she charted again with her "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," her "Take Me To Your World," and her number-one hit, "Stand By Your Man," which won her a second Grammy. She began in an understated whisper ("Sometimes it's hard to be a woman") that suddenly exploded on the chorus into a full-voiced, barrelhouse shout full of majesty and grandeur ("Stand by your man!"). The effect on listeners was like coming out of the deep woods into a bright pasture. Dolly arrived in Nashville in 1964, singing in the hard-country sound she had learned as a child on the radio. Her rich, quavering tonal shadings on her "Coat of Many Colors" and her incongruously cheerful tone on "The Good Old Days When Times Were Bad," as she expressed the deceits and dangers of nostalgia, were like opening a window and letting fresh air in. She also charted with her "Coat of Many Colors" in 1971 and had number-one hits with "Joshua" in 1970, "Jolene" in 1973, and "I Will Always Love You" in 1974. (46)

Since all three women lived their private lives in the public eye, they also sang their lives on stage; but in each case there were ambiguous dissonances between their public personae and their private lives. Loretta Lynn was quite forthright on occasion. "As a woman you have to fight doubly hard in what is a male dominated industry," she said. "I haven't taken any 'male crap' over the years." She said that one night, resolving to put up with Mooney's drinking and tormenting no longer, she "sent his teeth a-scatterin'." But however strong-willed her personality, or her persona, in such songs as "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind," she was in many ways a very traditional woman, standing by her domineering husband until his death in 1996. Tammy Wynette recorded songs urging men "Don't Liberate Me, Love Me" and women to "Stand By Your Man," but she divorced three of her husbands and died a few weeks into her fourth marriage. She and her ex-husband George Jones recorded several hit songs about their star-crossed relationship. Dolly Parton was sometimes an outspoken feminist, but in some ways she embodied an exaggeratedly feminine image. (47)

In the early sixties, at about the same time that Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Tammy Wynette were coming to Nashville, I was returning to the segregated South after two years of unsegregated experience in the United States Army; and I was eager to do my part in the new movement that was trying to eliminate the racism that had held my native region back so long. As an idealistic young graduate student at the University of South Carolina in the early sixties, I shared an apartment in Columbia with three remarkable young southerners--Selden Smith, Hayes Mizell, and Dan Carter. We shared much more than an apartment; we became lifelong friends. We saw the South as it was, but we dreamed of the better South it could become. We knew that southerners could change, because each of us had changed. We became deeply involved in the civil rights movement and deeply involved in organizing a statewide biracial student movement--the South Carolina Student Council on Human Relations. Perhaps because I had learned to play the guitar in the army and knew a lot of freedom songs, I was elected its first president. At one of our conferences at Penn Center on St. Helena, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands near Beaufort, Andrew Young taught us one of the greatest freedom songs to come out of the movement, a song that lifted our spirits and called us to courage, even as it reminded us why courage was necessary:</p> <pre> This may be the last time, children, This may be the last time, children, This may be the last time, children, It may be the last time, I don't know. (48) </pre> <p>While I am proud of our involvement in the civil rights movement, I can never forget that it was blacks, not whites, who were at the center of the struggle. It was the grassroots black community that furnished the leadership and the largest support base for the movement, men and women who risked not only their social standing but also their livelihoods and their lives, and that produced people like the workers from South Carolina who took their great song that we know as "We Shall Overcome" to Highlander Folk School in the early 1940s. It was the grassroots black community that produced people like Alice Wine, of Johns Island, another of South Carolina's Sea Islands, who introduced the song "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize." It was on Johns Island that I met Guy and Candie Carawan, who helped to spread these and other songs to activists across the South. These songs became anthems of the movement. (49)

I do not think any of us who witnessed or took part in the large mass demonstrations and marches will ever forget them. In August 1963, shortly after our marriage, my wife Jeannie and I joined some two hundred thousand others in the March on Washington. Many of us were white, but most of us were black. We marched along, singing innumerable verses of "We Shall Overcome" and a parody of "Amen":</p> <pre> Everybody wants Free-ee-ee-dom. Everybody wants Free-ee-ee-dom. Everybody wants Free-ee-dom. Free-dom. Free-dom. </pre> <p>With each verse, the marchers substituted the name of a state--"Alabama wants free--ee-ee-dom," "Mississippi wants free--ee-ee-dom," "Illinois wants free--ee-ee-dom," etc. I wanted to hear "South Carolina wants free--ee-ee-dom," but nobody sang that. I mentally resolved that at end of the verse we were singing, before anybody started another state, I was going to heist up "South Carolina wants free--ee-ee-dom." (50)

"These new freedom songs were adaptations of our original freedom songs, the spirituals, old hymns, and labor movement songs," Andrew Young would later write. "They provided a unifying force that captured the spirit of the movement." One we used to sing was</p> <pre> Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round, turn me 'round, turn me 'round.

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round, gonna keep on a-walkin',

keep on a-talkin', marchin' up to Freedom Land. </pre> <p>Inspired by such songs, we felt that the movement was unstoppable. (51)

The real story of southern music may never be completely told, for it is the saga of a thousand days and nights in a thousand hoedowns, honky-tonks, hootenannies, picnics, jook joints, jam sessions, brush arbors, revivals, and funerals, when against all odds men and women of all colors and astounding talents came together and created a multifaceted but distinctive southern music that has come to form the sound track of universal human aspirations for a world in harmony. The stream of southern music encompasses a variety of species and a myriad of styles, endowing the world with accomplished creators and gifted performers in many musical forms. The significance of southern music is best revealed, however, not in the number of composers or performers the region has produced but in how their creations have been both distinctively southern and universally meaningful. For southern music has become the sound track of freedom everywhere on the planet.

Out of odd fragments of old remembered hymns and ballads, spirituals and blues, marching cadences and ragtime rhythms, embodying their fondness and their resentment, their mirth and their melancholy, their strutting and their struggles, their ironic symbols, weary prayers, and tearful elegies; out of all the jagged splinters of the broken mirrors of their own culture, southern musicians have not only maintained their traditional role as guardians of the song--the deep repository of their region's archetypal dreams and mythic realities--they have also created an art of global significance. For southern music is multicultural, the product of one of the world' s great epics of cultural transformation. After the achievements of all those southern musicians, now recognized throughout the world, what thoughtful southerner could remain unaware of our extraordinary musical heritage or doubt its enduring value? That musical heritage not only enabled our ancestors to cope with the upheavals of an insecure world marked by centuries of slavery, decades of discrimination, and generations of grinding poverty, but also empowers us to understand ourselves better and to renew our faith in the shared traditions that lie at the heart of our southern heritage. Part of the appeal of southern music to students of the region is that it epitomizes so well many of the major paradoxes of our history--our flaunted individualism and our vaunted community, our presumed conservatism and our regular outbursts of radical change, our sensitive literary achievements and our senseless violence, the perplexing chasms between our traditions and our creativity, and between our social segregation and our cultural sharing. Not least of the attractions of southern music is that its creators offer us a model for reconciling these paradoxes and chasms, and they do so with astonishing ingenuity and originality.

I was in Brazil a few years ago, a thousand miles inland at a place called Manaus. Just above Manaus two rivers come together--the Rio Solimos, a freshwater river coming down out of the mountains, and the Rio Negro, a blackwater river like my beloved Waccamaw in South Carolina. When they first intersect, their waters do not mingle. They flow along, side by side, for a few miles. I have videotape of myself on a boat going back and forth across the divide between the clear waters and the black waters. But after a few miles the Rio Solimos and the Rio Negro unite; and when they do, they form the mightiest river in the world--the Amazon. I did not at first understand the symbolic significance of what I had seen, but Brazilians call that phenomenon the Meeting of the Waters. It enables us now to see the various forms of southern music no longer as separate streams that still divide us, but as a mighty river that unites us. Southern music--by emphasizing the authentic connections between past and present, between black and white, and between the region and the world--offers us the promise of a world in harmony, a world to which the southern past can offer illumination, and perhaps even a few notes of hope.

(1) Chicken Hicks, quoted in Frank Beacham, "Charlie's Place," Oxford American, November-December 2000, p. 55; Bo Bryan, Shag: The Legendary Dance of the South (Beaufort, S.C., 1995), 4, 35. See also Harry Turner, This Magic Moment: Musical Reflections of a Generation (Atlanta, 1994), 112-14. This essay is drawn from a larger study, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.

(2) Beacham, "Charlie's Place," 50-62 (quotation from Driver on p. 62; Kirkpatrick quotation on p. 57; Williams quotation on p. 54). See also Beacham, Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem, and Murder (New York, 2002), 34-35.

(3) Hemingway, Driver, and Kirkpatrick quoted in Beacham, "Charlie's Place," 58.

(4) Beacham, Whitewash, 43-49; Beacham, "Charlie's Place," 59-60. The reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan on the eastern border of North and South Carolina in the late 1940s and early 1950s is treated in W. Horace Carter, Virus of Fear (Tabor City, N.C., 1991). He covers their attack on Fitzgerald and his club on pp. 37-43. Carter, editor of the weekly Tabor City Tribune in those years, won the Pulitzer prize for his courageous editorial opposition to the Klan.

(5) Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, edited by John A. Scott (1863; reprint, Athens, Ga., 1984), 141-42, 259-60 (first two quotations on p. 259); Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, trans. Mary Howitt (2 vols.; New York, 1853), I, 393 (third quotation); William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (1867; reprint, New York, 1951), especially pp. 19-20; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; reprint, New York, 1986), 19-20 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(6) Son House, "'I Can Make My Own Songs'" [edited version of an interview with Julius Lester], Sing Out! 15 (July 1965), 4142. Young McKinley Morganfield, soon to become famous as Muddy Waters, came upon a Delta throng watching a musician. Told that the singer was Robert Johnson, "I stopped and peeked over," he said, "and then I left because he was a dangerous man." Quoted in James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York, 1992), 289. On Johnson's blasphemies, Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch note that "his drunken rants at God could be vitriolic." See their Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (Urbana, 2003), 43. See also Steve West, "The Devil Visits the Delta: A View of His Role in the Blues," Mississippi Folklore Register, 19 (Spring 1985), 15-16. I must clarify that I am not proposing here that Robert Johnson actually sold his soul to the devil, or even believed that he had, only that his actions helped the legend spread. Johnson, Patton, and House may be heard on the boxed set Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings (Sony 46222); Charlie Patton, King of the Delta Blues (Yazoo 2001); and Son House, Preachin' the Blues (Catfish UK 112).

(7) Edmond Souchon, "King Oliver: A Very Personal Memoir," Jazz Review, 3 (May 1960), 8-10. It was on one such Saturday night in 1968, while jamming happily on a chorus of "Bill Bailey," that "Doe" Souchon suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack. [George H. Buck], liner notes to Doc Souchon and His Milneburg Boys (GHB Records LP GHB 131). For background on how the city's lucrative erotic commerce drew customers from across the region to Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, see Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920 (Baton Rouge, 2004).

(8) Armstrong, quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New York, 1966), 14 (first quotation); Armstrong, "Scanning the History of Jazz," Jazz Review, 3 (July 1960), 8 (second and third quotations); Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York, 1968), 63-88 (esp. pp. 70-72, 77-86), 186-88, and 324-26. The sound of King Oliver may be heard on the two-CD set King Oliver: Great Original Performances, 1923-1930 (CDS RP2CD 607-1).

(9) Johnny St. Cyr, quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (2nd ed., Berkeley, 1973), 103; Jack Teagarden, quoted by Louis Armstrong in Satchmo: The Life of Louis Armstrong, a program in the American Masters series, Public Broadcasting System, July 6, 2005. See also Pops Foster and Tom Stoddard, Pops Foster: The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman (Berkeley, 1971), 65; Steve Brown, interviewed by Richard B. Alien, April 22, 1958, William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz (Special Collections Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University), reel four; Papa Jack Laine, interviewed by Richard B. Allen, New Orleans, April 25, 1964, reel one, January 27, 1959, reel two, Hogan Jazz Archive. An extraordinary document of such interracial creativity is the CD of the rare 1923 recordings, New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Jelly Roll Morton (Milestone MCD 47020-2).

(10) Ralph Peer, quoted in Archie Green, "Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol," Journal of American Folklore, 78 (July-September 1965), 208-9 (first quotation); June Carter, "I Remember the Carter Family," Sing Out! 17 (June-July 1967), 10 (second quotation); Sara Carter to John Edwards, December 27, 1955, quoted in Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana, 1972), 395 (third quotation); Charles Wolfe, "'Pre-War Melodies and Old Mountaineer Songs,'" liner notes to the two-CD set The Bristol Sessions (Country Music Foundation Records, CMF-01 I-D); Charles Wolfe, "Early Country: Treasures Untold," in Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown, eds., American Roots Music (New York, 2001), 20-23. For Peer's role in the creation of the commercial country music industry, see also Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (1968; rev. ed., Austin, 1985), 64-66; Charles K. Wolfe, "Ralph Peer at Work: The Victor 1927 Bristol Sessions," Old Time Music, 5 (1972), 10-15; Wolfe and Ted Olson, The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music (Jefferson, N.C., 2005); Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Urbana, 1984), 190-93; Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, 2000), 34-39; and Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst, Mass., 2002), 15-16. The Carter Family sound may be heard on In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain, a CD set on the Bear Family label comprising their entire recorded output (BCD 15865).

(11) Ralph Peer, in Meridian Star, May 26, 1953, p. 24, quoted in Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler (Urbana, 1979), 109. See also ibid., 105-14, 258-60; Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 65, 77-91, 108; Green, Only a Miner, 395; Wolfe, "Early Country," 23-24; John Greenway, "Jimmie Rodgers--A Folksong Catalyst," Journal of American Folklore, 70 (July-September 1957), 231-34; Mike Paris and Chris Comber, Jimmie the Kid: The Life of Jimmie Rodgers (New York, 1977); Max Jones and John Chilton, Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971 (Boston, 1971), 235-36; and David Evans, "Black Musicians Remember Jimmie Rodgers," Old Time Music, 7 (1972-1973), 12-15. Peer did not record Rodgers singing either blues or blue yodels during the Bristol sessions. See the two-CD set The Bristol Sessions (Country Music Foundation Records, CMF-01 I-D). Jimmie Rodgers's entire recorded output may be heard on the six-CD collection The Singing Brakeman (Bear Family BCD 15540).

(12) Dolly Parton's recording of "Mule Skinner Blues" is discussed in Jocelyn Neal, "Why It Took a Man's Song to Make a Woman's Career: Dolly Parton and Artistic Independence," paper presented at Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Memphis, Tenn., April 6, 2003.

(13) Schuller, Early Jazz, 89-133; LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963), 158-59; Larry Gushee, "King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band," in Martin T. Williams, ed., The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz (New York, 1959), 45-46. Louis Armstrong's recordings with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band may be heard on the CD Louis Armstrong and King Oliver (Heritage Jazz 513282W). His Hot Fives and his Hot Sevens, his most important recording groups of the twenties, may be heard on Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives and Sevens, Vol. 1 (JSP 312 CD), Vol. 2 (JSP 313 CD), and Vol. 3 (JSP 314 CD). On Miley, see Schuller, Early Jazz, 320-32; Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York, 1970), 58, 59, 65-66, 85, 86, 105-6, 156-58; and Ellington, quoted in Nat Hentoff, Listen to the Stories: Nat Hentoff on Jazz and Country Music (1995; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 11. Miley may be heard to excellent advantage, especially on "East St. Louis Toodle-o," on the three-CD set Early Ellington (Verve 640); Duke Ellington 1924-1927 (Classics 39); Duke Ellington 1927-28 (Classics 542); Duke Ellington 1928 (Classics 550); and Duke Ellington 1928-1929 (Classics 559). On Gillespie, see Alyn Shipton, Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York, 1999), 11-16, 87-90; Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, 335-50; Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, Dizzy: To Be or Not to Bop: The Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie (1979; reprint, New York, 1982), 140-41,278-302; Ira Gitler, The Masters of Bebop: A Listener's Guide (rev. ed., New York, 2001), 48-109; Gene Lees, Waiting for Dizzy: Fourteen Jazz Portraits (1991; reprint, New York, 2000), 220-51; and Hentoff, Listen to the Stories, 79-88. The earliest bebop performances at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem were not professionally recorded, but a few performances from those creative sessions of Gillespie with the North Carolina-born Thelonious Monk and the Texas-born Charlie Christian are included on the CD The Immortal Charlie Christian (Laserlight 17032). On Coltrane see David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley, 2002), 112-45; Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor, 1999), 111, 132-34, 206-30, 232-49; Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York, 1993), 43-59; Bill Cole, John Coltrane (New York, 1976), 59-60, 128-29, 181-82; J. C. Thomas, Chasin' the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (New York, 1976); and Cuthbert O. Simkins, John Coltrane (New York, 1975). Coltrane may be heard on the sixteen-CD boxed set John Coltrane: The Prestige Recordings (Prestige 4405); and the six-CD boxed set The Complete Columbia Recordings: Miles Davis and John Coltrane (Sony 65833).

(14) Dorsey Dixon, handwritten autobiography, n.d. [1960s], p. 4 (first-fourth quotations), p. 1 (fifth quotation), in series 4, Archie Green Papers #20002 (Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Dorsey Dixon typewritten autobiography, May 30, 1948, p. 1, ibid.; Archie Green, "Dorsey Dixon: Minstrel of the Mills," Sing Out! 16 (June-July 1966), 10-12; Green's liner notes to Dorsey Dixon, Babies in the Mill (HMG 2502); Mike Paris, "The Dixons of South Carolina," Old Time Music, 10 (Autumn 1973), 13. "Children of the poor," wrote the folksinger Hedy West, "were an important source of cheap labor." She recorded "Babies in the Mill," Dixon's song about child labor. See Hedy West, liner notes to her CD Whores, Hell, and Biscuits for 2 Centuries (Bear Family BF 15003). Jimmie Tarlton can be heard on the following CDs: Steel Guitar Rag (HMG 2503); the anthology Times Ain't Like They Used to Be (Yazoo 2048); and (with Tom Darby) Hillbilly Blues (ASV-Living Era AJA 5361).

(15) Dixon, handwritten autobiography, 5 (quotations); Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 98, 101-2; Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis, 2004), 30, 101. On the general strike of that year, see John A. Salmond, The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama (Columbia, Mo., 2002). On Crazy Water Crystals, see Pat Ahrens, "The Role of the Crazy Water Crystals Company in Promoting Hillbilly Music," JEMF Quarterly, 6 (1970), 107-9.

(16) Dixon, handwritten autobiography, 5-6 (first quotation), 5 (second and third quotations); Green, "Dorsey Dixon," 12; Roscigno and Danaher, Voice of Southern Labor, 30; Bill C. Malone, Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana, 2002), 96, 186. All three songs may be heard on the Dorsey Dixon CD Babies in the Mill (HMG 2502).

(17) Alan Lomax, Selected Writings, 1934-1997, edited by Ronald D. Cohen (New York, 2003), 1-3, 61 (first, second, and third quotations), 51 (fourth quotation); Alan Lomax, interviewed by Ralph Rinzler, in "Folk Music in the Roosevelt Era," in Folk Music in the Roosevelt White House: A Commemorative Program Presented by the Office of Folklife Programs at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, January 31, 1982 ([Washington, D.C., 1982]), 14-15 (all other quotations). See also John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York, 1947), 111 ; Nolan Porterfield, Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948 (Urbana, 1996), 296-302; and Filene, Romancing the Folk, 49-58.

(18) Lomax, Selected Writings, 66 (first and second quotations); Porterfield, Last Cavalier, 395, 403-5; Anne Warner, Traditional American Folk Songs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection (Syracuse, 1984). Lomax's report on the Delta project, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), did not acknowledge the contribution of Work, Jones, and Adams. Their report is published as John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams Jr., Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (Nashville, 2005). Also see Roger D. Abrahams, ed., A Singer and Her Songs: Almeda Riddle's Book of Ballads (Baton Rouge, 1970). Recordings by John Lomax, made mostly in Genevieve Willcox Chandler's front yard, may be heard on Deep River of Song: South Carolina (Rounder 82161-2). Frank Proffitt may be heard on the following CDs: Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, the Warner Collection, vol. I (Appleseed CD 1035); Nothing Seems Better to Me: The Music of Frank Proffitt and North Carolina, the Warner Collection, vol. II (Appleseed CD 1036); and Frank Proffitt of Reese, N.C., recorded by Sandy Paton (Folk Legacy CD-1). Almeda Riddle's recordings include Granny Riddle's Songs and Ballads (Minstrel CD JD 203); Songs and Ballads of the Ozarks (Vanguard LP VRS 9158); Ballads and Hymns of the Ozarks (Rounder LP 0017); and More Ballads and Hymns of the Ozarks (Rounder LP 0083). She may also be heard on the following CD collections: the four-CD set Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta, collected by Alan Lomax (Atlantic 82496); Sounds of the Ozark Folk: The 1963 Arkansas Folk Festival, limited-edition CD issued by Lyon College; and The Art of Old-Time Mountain Music (Rounder CD 1166). Proffitt and Riddle each have four songs on Songcatcher II: The Tradition that Inspired the Movie (Vanguard 79716-2).

(19) Hentoff, Listen to the Stories, 57. See also William W. Savage Jr., Singing Cowboys and All That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma (Norman, Okla., 1983), 102-3. She can be heard on The Legendary Lee Wiley: Collectors' Items, 1931-1955 (Baldwin Street BJH 304), and the two-CD set Follow Your Heart (Jasmine JASCD 411), which includes her now-classic recording of "Down to Steamboat, Tennessee," accompanied by Jess Stacy's understated harmonies and light-fingered rhythm on piano and Muggsy Spanier's airy, gossamer obligattos on trumpet.

(20) Raymond Horricks, "Freddie Green, Basie's Rhythm Base," clipping in Freddie Green Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia) (eighth and ninth quotations); Billie Holiday [Eleanora Fagan] with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (1956; reprint, New York, 1984), 36-37 (first quotation on p. 36); Freddie Green, quoted in Leonard Feather, "'Pep' Green's Pulse Still Beats Strong," Los Angeles Times, n.d., clipping in Freddie Green Papers (second and third quotations); Count Basie, quoted in Tony Gieske, "Much Noise in Memory of One Who Made Little," Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 21, 1987, pp. C1, C2, clipping in Freddie Green Papers (fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations on p. C1); Basie, quoted in Stanley Dance, The World of Count Basle (New York, 1980), 14 (seventh quotation); All Stanton, "Freddie and Eddie join Count Basie's Heaven Gig," New York Amsterdam News, March 14, 1987, clipping in Freddie Green Papers (tenth quotation). See also Count Basie as told to Albert Murray, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basle (1985; 2nd ed., New York, 2002), 178-206, 186-88, 254-85; and Schuller, Early Jazz, 284-85, 295-97, 304-5, 315-16. The "All-American Rhythm Section" consisted of Count Basle on piano, Freddie Green on guitar, Walter Page on bass, and Jo Jones on drums. Green is on all the recordings of the Count Basie Band, but the following are especially relevant to the swing era: Complete Decca Recordings (Verve 611); Count Basie Volume One 1932-1938 (CDS R PCD/ RPMC 602); and Count Basie 1936-1938 (Classics 503).

(21) Hank Williams Jr., liner notes to Hank Williams Jr., Almeria Club (Curb Records 571D CD) (first quotation); Ralph Emery with Patsi Bale Cox, Fifty Years Down a Country Road (New York, 2000), 33-67 (second, third, and fourth quotations on pp. 48--49); Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 239-43; Malone, Don't Get Above Your Raisin', 132-35; James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens, Ga., 1999), 81-82, 85; Robert M. Williams, Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams (1970; 3rd ed., Urbana, 1981), 23-24, 26, 29. See also Chet Flippo, Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams (1981 ; 2nd ed., New York, 1989); and Colin Escott and Kira Florita, Hank Williams: Snapshots from the Lost Highway (New York, 2001), 21-31. Hank Williams may be heard on the ten-CD boxed set The Complete Hank Williams (Mercury Nashville 536077). Of particular interest are his performances on the two-CD set Hank Williams Sr., Live at the Grand Ole Opry (Mercury 546466).

(22) Mahalia Jackson, quoted in Studs Turkel, Talking to Myself." A Memoir of My Times (New York, 1973), 261 (first and second quotations); Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin' on Up (New York, 1966), 32-33 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations); Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, D.C., 1995), 44-45, 118-23, 147-50. See also Jerry Zolten, Great God A'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (New York, 2003); and Jesse Jackson, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord: The Life of Mahalia Jackson, Queen of the Gospel Singers (New York, 1974). The sounds of some of the great gospel quartets may be heard on the two-CD set Gospel. Vol. 2: Gospel Quartets, 1921-1942 (Fremeaux FA026); the Fairfield Four, The Road to Glory: [Original Recording Remastered] (Fuel 2000 F23020613982); Best of the Dixie Hummingbirds (MCA 22043); and Golden Gate Quartet, Vol. 1:1937-1938 (Document 5472). For Mahalia Jackson hear the two-CD boxed set Gospels, Spirituals, and Hymns (Sony 65594). For an example of her in live performance (before an audience of jazz fans) hear Live at Newport (Sony 53629).

(23) James R. Goff Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill, 2002), 8, 131-39, 165-75 (quotation on p. 165), 184-85, 203-4, 210, 23-44, 248, 283-87. CDs providing good samplings of mainstream white gospel are The Celebration: 200 Years of Southern Gospel Music (CBD 77120) and All Time Southern Gospel Hits Collection (Jive 47022). Hear also the Chuck Wagon Gang on Higher." Complete 1940 Dallas Session (Copper Creek 7005); The Blackwood Brothers: Gospel Classics Series (RCA 67624); Hovie Lister and the Statesmen: Gaither Gospel Series (Chordant 44904); the Jordanaires, Great Gospel Songs (Curb 77810); the Happy Goodman Family, 50 Years (Spring House/EMD 42271); Rambos Collection, a two-CD set (Riversong 2271); Kingsmen Collection, a two-CD set (Riversong 2256); and Amy Grant, Greatest Hits, 1986-2004, a two-CD set (A&M 34152).

(24) Goff, Close Harmony, 210. Mahalia Jackson's rendition of "Satisfied Mind" may be heard on the two-CD boxed set Gospels, Spirituals, and Hymns (Sony 65594).

(25) Pete Seeger, telephone interview with Charles Joyner, June 3, 2002, hereinafter cited as Seeger interview; Doris Willens, Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays (1988; new ed., Lincoln, Neb., 1994), 3-4, 9-17.

(26) Lee Hays, "'Let the Will ...," New Masses, August 1, 1939, p. 15; Jim Capaldi, "Wasn't That a Time! A Conversation with Lee Hays," Sing Out! 28 (September-October 1980), 3; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 37-40, 49-59; Seeger interview (second and third quotations). On Highlander see Jacquelyn Hall and Ray Flaherty, Interview with Don West, interview E 16, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932-1962 (Lexington, Ky., 1988); and Robbie Lieberman, "My Song Is My Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana, 1989), 45-46. I also explored the Highlander Folk School Collection in the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville during the summer of 1969. On Commonwealth College see Raymond and Charlotte Koch, Educational Commune: The Story of Commonwealth College (New York, 1972); William H. Cobb, Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College, 1922-1940 (Detroit, 2000); Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography, edited by Ronald D. Cohen (Amherst, Mass., 1999), 112-34; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill, 1994), 157-58; Josh Dunson, Freedom in the Air: Song Movements of the Sixties (New York, 1965), 24-26; and Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), xviii, 71-72. On the STFU see Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (1971; reprint, Fayetteville, Ark., 2000). Lee's version of "We Shall Not Be Moved" appears uncredited in Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, [eds.], Carry It On! A History in Song and Picture of the Working Men and Women of America (New York, 1985), 141-42.

(27) Seeger interview (first quotation); Pete Seeger, quoted in David King Dunaway, How Can 1 Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger (New York, 1981), 76 (second quotation); Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 65-67; Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 75-81.

(28) Woody Guthrie to Alan Lomax, [ca. April 1941], in Folder A, Correspondence, 1940-1950, A20, Box 1, Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection (Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.); Seeger interview. The Almanac Singers may be heard on the following CDs: The Almanac Singers: Their Complete General Recordings (MCA 1149); Songs of Protest (Prism Leisure PLATCD 704); and Talking Union (Naxos 8.120567).

(29) Pete Seeger, The Incompleat Folksinger (New York, 1972), 17 (quotation); Capaldi, "Wasn't That a Time!" 5; "The 'Almanacs' Part, But Keep on Singing," Daily Worker, January 8, 1943, p. 7, clipping in series 4, Archie Green Papers. For the Almanac years see also Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 65-75; Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 79-106; and Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York, 1980), 188-239, 243-46, 255.

(30) "The Hammer Song," printed on the cover of Sing Out! 1 (May 1950); People's Songs Bulletin, 1 (February 1946), 3; ibid., 1 (October 1946), 4; ibid., 2 (February-March 1947), 15; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 114-15; Hays and Seeger, "The Hammer Song," in Irwin Silber, ed., Lift Every Voice! The Second People's Song Book (New York, 1953), 84-85; Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon, 140.

(31) Lee Hays, in Oscar Brand, The Ballad Mongers: Rise of the Modern Folk Song (New York, 1962), 107 (first quotation), 109 (second and third quotations); Seeger, Incompleat Folksinger, 23 (fourth and fifth quotations); Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 137-68, 185; Harvey Matusow, False Witness (New York, 1955), 51. Matusow reportedly once described himself as "such a double crosser that I double cross myself twice a day to keep in practice." Harvey Matusow, quoted in Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana, 2004), 201n56. The Weavers may be heard on the four-CD boxed set Wasn't That a Time (Vanguard 147), comprising most of their post-1955 recordings. Their live concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1955 are also available on CD as The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (Vanguard 73101) and The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2 (Vanguard 79075). Their 1963 Carnegie Hall concerts are on Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall (Vanguard 2150) and Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall, Part 2 (Vanguard 79161). Hear also The Weavers: Best of the Vanguard Years (Vanguard 79580).

(32) Shipton, Groovin' High, 11-16, 87-90; Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, 335-50; Gillespie, Dizzy, 140-41 (quotation on p. 140), 278-302; Gitler, Masters of Bebop, 58-109; Lees, Waiting for Dizzy, 220-51; Hentoff, Listen to the Stories, 79-88. On Monk see Joe Goldberg, Jazz Masters of the Fifties (1965; reprint, New York, 1983), 24-44 (esp. pp. 25-26); and Giddins, Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the '80s (New York, 1985), 214-25.

(33) Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 323-68 (esp. pp. 328-29); Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana, 1985), 68-94; Richard D. Smith, Can't You Hear Me Callin': The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass (Boston, 2000), esp. pp. 86-89; Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (1984; reprint, Urbana, 2003), 60-114; Cantwell, "Ten Thousand Acres of Bluegrass: Mimesis in Bill Monroe's Music," Journal of Popular Culture, 13 (Fall 1979), 209-20; Ralph Rinzler, "Bill Monroe--'The Daddy of Bluegrass Music,'" Sing Out! 13 (February-March 1963), 5-8; Alan Lomax, "Bluegrass Background: Folk Music with Overdrive," Esquire, October 1959, p. 108; James D. Green Jr., "A Musical Analysis of the Banjo Style of Earl Scruggs," Journal of Country Music, 5 (Spring 1974), 31-37. One veteran member of the Opry was decidedly unimpressed. Having patented the stereotype of the banjo player as clown, Uncle Dave Macon is said to have watched Scruggs from the wings and reportedly muttered, "He ain't one damned bit funny." Macon, quoted in Charles Wolfe, "Uncle Dave Macon," in Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh, eds., Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez (Urbana, 1975), 50. Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys from this period can be heard on the two-CD set The Essential Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, 1945-1949 (Columbia C2K 52478). The four-CD set Music of Bill Monroe from 1936 to 1994 (MCA 11048) includes material from across Monroe's recording career.

(34) Monroe, quoted in Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues (New York, 1970), 100 (first quotation), in Ralph Rinzler, "Bill Monroe: Notes on his Origins and Accomplishments," notes to Bill Monroe and Doc Watson (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40064), 6 (second quotation), and in Charles Wolfe, "Bluegrass Touches--An Interview with Bill Monroe," Old Time Music, 16 (Spring 1975), 11 (third quotation); Susan A. Eacker and Geoff Eacker, "A Banjo on Her Knee--Part I: Appalachian Women and America's First Instrument," Old-Time Herald, 8 (Winter 2001), 20; Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler, notes to American Banjo Three-Finger and Scruggs Style (Smithsonian Folkways CD SF 40037), 2-3.

(35) Snuffy Jenkins, quoted in Peter J. Welding, notes to Snuffy Jenkins: Pioneer of the Bluegrass Banjo (Arhoolie CD 9027), 2; Tony Trischka, quoted in Peter Cooper, Hub City Music Makers: One Southern Town's Popular Music Legacy (Spartanbnrg, S.C., 1997), 19. After the departure of Earl Scruggs, Reno joined Monroe's Blue Grass Boys from 1949 until 1951, when he joined with the North Carolina guitarist and lead singer Red Smiley to form the Tennessee Cut-Ups. Ronnie Reno, interview with Charles Joyner, Conway, S.C., May 14, 2005. "I don't claim to have taught Scruggs or Reno either one," Jenkins said, "but I was about the first to go on the air with this type of playing, and any time that they just happened to be around I was glad to show them anything I could." Jenkins, quoted in Pat J. Ahrens, A History of the Musical Careers of Dewitt "Snuffy" Jenkins, Banjoist and Homer "Pappy" Sherill, Fiddler (West Columbia, S.C., 1970), 16. Monroe always felt that what he called "the refinement of Snuffy Jenkins' three-finger banjo style by Don Reno and Earl Scruggs" was less important to the bluegrass music than "[t]he right beat," which he said "is close to modern Rock and Roll." Monroe, quoted in Mayne Smith, "First Bluegrass Festival Honors Bill Monroe," Sing Out/ 15 (January 1966), 69. Snuffy Jenkins may be heard on Snuffy Jenkins: Pioneer of the Bluegrass Banjo (Arhoolie CD 9027). Don Reno may be heard with Red Smiley on 20 Bluegrass Originals (Deluxe 7906); 16 Greatest Gospel Hits (Hollywood 125); and On Stage (Copper Creek CCCD 0127).

(36) Neil V. Rosenberg, "From Sound to Style: The Emergence of Bluegrass," Journal of American Folklore, 80 (April-June 1967), 143-50.

(37) Paul Roland, ed., Jazz Singers: The Great Song Stylists in Their Own Words (London, 1999), 79-85, 71-77; John Chilton, Billie's Blues: Billie Holiday's Story, 1933-1959 (New York, 1975); Robert O'Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York, 1991); Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York, 2001); Donald Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon (2000; reprint, New York, 2002); Stuart Nicholson, Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz (New York, 1994); and Leslie Gourse, ed., The Ella Fitzgerald Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary (New York, 1998). Fitzgerald's extraordinary "song books" of the most significant composers of American popular song may be heard on the sixteen-CD boxed set The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books (Polygram 19832). A good sampling of her career is Pure Ella (Verve 539206). Holiday also had her detractors. "I don't like drug addicts," declared the singer and pianist Nina Simone, "and she sounds like a cat. I don't think she's a particularly good singer." Nina Simone, quoted in Kristine McKenna, "Nina Simone: An Exiled Avant-garde Musician Speaks Her Mind," Oxford American, Summer 1999, p. 97. Holiday's singing may be heard on the four-CD boxed set The Lady Sings (Proper 5Q35B); Billie Holiday's Greatest Hits (Sony 65757); and her own personal favorite, with strings, Lady in Satin (Sony 65144).

(38) Roland, ed., Jazz Singers, 56 (quotation); Alan Lewens, Popular Song: Soundtrack of the Century (New York, 2001), 61, 88-89. See also Daniel Mark Epstein, Nat King Cole (New York, 1999) and Maria Cole with Louie Robinson, Nat King Cole: An Intimate Biography (New York, 1971). The sound of the King Cole Trio may be heard on Memories of Nat King Cole Trio (Excelsior EXL 2456) and on the four-CD boxed set Best of the King Cole Trios (Capitol Jazz 497 4802). His major pop hits may be heard on Nat King Cole's Memories of Nat King Cole Trio: Greatest Hits (Capitol 29687), The Very Thought of You (DCC 1119), and the four-CD boxed set Cool Cole (Proper Box 5RT8F).

(39) Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (London, 1998), 95-105, 130, 133 (quotation from Belafonte). On Forrest Carter, see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), 106-7, 139, 149, 196, 210, 216, 294-96, 300; Carter, "Southern History, American Fiction: The Secret Life of Southwestern Novelist Forrest Carter," in Lothar Honnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Rewriting the South: History and Fiction (Tubingen, 1993), 286--304; and Jeff Roche, "Asa/Forrest Carter and Regional/Political Identity," in Philip D. Dillard and Randal L. Hall, eds., The Southern Albatross: Race and Ethnicity in the American South (Macon, Ga., 1999), 235-74.

(40) Ahmet Ertegun, "Great Sound Is No Great Secret," in Billboard, January 13, 1958, pp. 24, 39, as quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 23. See also ibid., 53, 79, 81, 92; Bill C. Malone, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington, Ky., 1979) 100; Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York, 1986), 27; Patricia Romanowski and Holly George-Warren, eds., The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll (New York, 1995), 286-87; Phil Hardy and Dave Laing, eds., Encyclopedia of Rock (New York, 1988), 148. The role of such teams of writer/producers as Ertegun and Jerry Wexler and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller is emphasized in Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (New York, 1993); Charlie Gillett, Making Tracks: Atlantic Records and the Growth of a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry (London, 1988); and Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger, "Entrepreneurship in Organizations: Evidence from the Popular Music Industry," Administrative Science Quarterly, 16 (1971), 97-106. According to Guralnick, "The story of soul music can be seen largely as the story of the introduction of the gospel strain into the secular world of rhythm and blues." See his Sweet Soul Music, 21. The Drifters during the McPhatter years may be heard on the three-CD set Rockin' & Driftin': The Drifters (Atlantic 72417).

(41) Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 28, 40, 44-49, 76; Malone, Southern Music/American Music, 100; John W. Rumble, "The Artists and the Songs," liner notes to the three-CD set From Where 1 Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music, produced by the Country Music Foundation (Warner Brothers 9 46428-2), pp. 3745. Twenty examples of R&B covers of country songs may be heard on From Where 1 Stand, disc two.

(42) Turner, This Magic Moment, 163; Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 49-53; Carl Perkins, interview by Jay Corbin on the Rockabilly Hall of Fame website at http://www. rockabillyhall.com/CarlPerkins.html (accessed October 19, 2005); Ass Carter, in Birmingham News, April 11, 1956, p. 2, as quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 100; "Race Mixing Sets off Wild Disorder: Press Urges Strict Segregation Policy," Citizens' Council, February 1956, p. 2, as quoted in Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana, 2000), 112 (quotation).

(43) Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis; Steve Cummings, "Southern Rock 'N Roll," Southern Exposure, 2 (Spring-Summer 1974), 23-26; Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston, 1994), 289; Joe Esposito and Elena Oumano, Good Rockin' Tonight: Twenty Years on the Road and on the Town with Elvis (New York, 1994); Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock'n'Roll Music (1975; rev. ed., New York, 1982); Craig Morrison, Go Cat Go! Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (Urbana, 1996).

(44) All analysis of country music must begin with Malone's Country Music, U.S.A. The genre's lure to young southerners is clarified in the more personal perspective of his Don't Get Above Your Raisin', in Richard A. Peterson's sociological study of the country music industry, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, 1997), and in Emery, Fifty Years Down a Country Road, a Nashville insider's account of the industry since the 1950s.

(45) Lorraine Ali, "Get Back Home, Loretta," Newsweek, April 26, 2004, p. 52; Irwin Stambler and Grelun Landon, Country Music: The Encyclopedia (New York, 1997), 270, 362. See also Loretta Lynn with George Vecsey, Coal Miner's Daughter (Chicago, 1976); Lynn with Patsi Bale Cox, Still Woman Enough: A Memoir (New York, 2002); Tammy Wynette with Joan Dew, Stand By Your Man (New York, 1979); Dolly Parton, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (New York, 1994); Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800-2000 (Nashville, 2003), 263-80 (Lynn), 281-310 (Wynette), 311-34 (Parton); Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 308-9 (Lynn), 309-10 (Wynette), 271, 310-11 (Parton); Emery, Fifty Years Down a Country Road, 162-63 (Lynn), 258-62 (Wynette), 293-301 (Parton); Stambler and Landon, Country Music, 269-72 (Lynn), 556-59 (Wynette), 362-65 (Parton); Dorothy A. Horstman, "Loretta Lynn," in Malone and McCulloh, eds., Stars of Country Music, 318-21; Dixie Deen, "Tammy Finds Elusive Dream," Music City News, 5 (December 1967), 3, 9; Pamela Wilson, "Mountains of Contradictions: Gender, Class, and Region in the Star Image of Dolly Patton," in Cecelia Tichi, ed., Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars (Durham, N.C., 1998), 98-120.

(46) Lynn may be heard on the three-CD boxed set Honky Tonk Girl: The Lorena Lynn Collection (MCA Nashville 11070); Wynette may be heard on Tears of Fire: The 25th Anniversary Collection (Sony 52741); and Parton may be heard on the three-CD set Legendary Dolly Parton (BMG 762449). The three women may be heard together as Honky Tonk Angels (Sony 53414).

(47) Peterson, Creating Country Music, 153; Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud, 17; Stambler and Landon, Country Music, 272 (first and second quotations, quoting Lynn); Ali, "Get Back Home, Loretta," 52 (third quotation, quoting Lynn).

(48) Dan T. Carter, "Reflections of a Reconstructed White Southerner," in Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg, eds., Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History (Bloomington, 1996), 4243; Carter, "Scattered Pieces: Living and Writing Southern History," in John B. Boles, ed., Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections (Athens, Ga., 2004), 124-25; Charles Joyner, "From Here to There and Back Again: Adventures of a Southern Historian," ibid., 149-50, 159-60; August Meier, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana, 1986), 186, 194-96. The song is rendered from memory.

(49) On "We Shall Overcome" and "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," see Guy and Candie Carawan, comps., We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement (New York, 1961), 11, 111; Carawan and Carawan, "'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize': Cultural Work in the Sea Islands," Sing Out! 31 (October-December 1985), 32-35; and Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana, 1999), 232-36.

(50) A slightly different version of the lyrics to "Freedom" appears in Carawan and Carawan, comps., We Shall Overcome, 20.

(51) Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York, 1996), 182-83. A slightly different version of the lyrics is printed in Carawan and Carawan, comps., We Shall Overcome, 60-61.

MR. JOYNER is Franklin A. and Iola B. Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and director of the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina. He delivered this paper on Thursday, November 3, 2005, as the presidential address at the seventy-first annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Atlanta, Georgia.