Appalachian jazz: some preliminary notes.

It hardly seems necessary to justify the study of jazz and jazz musicians, in this case Americans of African descent, in any effort to understand this music as the product of real individuals, people who belong to a place and who are formed in some measure by the place where they live and work. The Americans here to be considered are roughly 11 percent of the American people; the place to be considered is the Appalachian region, which makes up a sizable part of eastern America. As for the music, it is hardly possible to discuss jazz without considering the role of black America in its origins and evolution. Although no racial or ethnic group is likely to be distributed evenly over the American landscape, common sense tells us that, given the size of Appalachia and the number of Americans who originally came from Africa, a good many of them will be found in this area. Furthermore, given the genius of these people for the improvisational music that we call jazz, a certain number of them will be jazz musicians. So we begin with a people, a place, and a vital part of American musical culture. The first step is easy, although no thoughtful consideration of the topic at hand is likely to remain easy for long.

One way to begin is to establish what is intended in the following consideration of jazz and its creators. Another article in this issue discusses the blues (Pearson 2005). This form of musical expression tends to overlap with jazz, particularly because it is found among black Americans; but since this musical topic is treated elsewhere, it will not be addressed here. We make no attempt at historiography--the origins of jazz or earliest manifestations in Appalachia; rather, we consider the melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically complex music, frequently spontaneous and often startling in its innovations, that is sometimes considered an alternative classical music, even if it is performed in the decidedly informal environment of a cabaret.

Another point to be made as we begin is what is included in Appalachia. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission (Speer and Abramson n.d.), the only state wholly contained within its domain is West Virginia. The next most included state will surprise some--Pennsylvania. Within that state, everything west of 1-81 and north of 1-78, which runs from near Harrisburg to the New Jersey border at Easton, is considered Appalachia. The high country of western Maryland, the headwaters of the Potomac, is a part of this ground, as are all of western Virginia, western North Carolina, and several counties in northwest South Carolina (Charlotte, North Carolina, is not included, but Winston-Salem, Spartanburg, and Greenville are). The Appalachian Regional Commission includes within its borders all of northern Georgia exclusive of metropolitan Atlanta, roughly the northern 40 percent of Alabama, the northeastern sixth of Mississippi, just under half of both Tennessee and Kentucky--the eastern half--southeastern Ohio from just east of Cincinnati to the point where the Ohio River becomes the state border, and finally--this also will surprise some--a sixty-mile strip of New York State bordered by Pennsylvania on the south and west and extending east to within perhaps forty miles of the Hudson River. Given the extent of the region, the reader may begin to consider the improbability that jazz musicians in Binghamton, New York, and Birmingham, Alabama (both in Appalachia), will have ties with one another as strong as those that Binghamton musicians will have with people in New York City or Birmingham musicians with people in the American South--or New York City, for that matter. There may be a certain cultural integrity within the Appalachian region, but it is not one that is easily described.

A question that we must ponder at the outset is how important any largely rural setting is in forming the American music that we call jazz. A few years ago, both writers of this article were in the company of pianist Billy Taylor, who had come to Appalachian State University to be the speaker at fall convocation. On the afternoon following his address, Taylor was good enough to meet informally for a question-and-answer session. At this gathering, Taylor was asked whether it was significant that both he and Thelonious Monk were from approximately the same part of eastern North Carolina, as John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie were from communities somewhat farther south (Gillespie in South Carolina) that still were near each other. Was there something about the Carolina sandhills--how black Americans there lived and experienced their music--that could explain this remarkable concentration of talent? Taylor replied that he felt the association of these men with the same general area was incidental, that some of them had not lived there very long, anyway, so that their leaving for other places was likely much more important than their time in the Carolinas.

It nevertheless remains true that Americans everywhere tend to take pride in someone from home who goes on to distinguished achievement and established fame, however far from home that achievement may be realized. This is the simplest, and probably the least significant, relation between a celebrated person and a native place. In the realm of music, in this case jazz, there are other relations between person and place that have little to do with hometown pride but that are much more important to anyone with a serious interest in American musical culture.

For example, we have already touched on the improbability of jazz musicians at opposite ends of Appalachia being as much influenced by each other as by people much closer but outside Appalachia. Implicit in this observation is something that we all recognize: artistic cross-fertilization and its undeniable importance in coming to understand how the musical imagination works. This is especially true with jazz, which is highly improvisational, nearly always in the process of being invented, so that the means by which this invention takes place, the inventions that take hold and become dominant, and the mechanisms that permit sharing and general distribution of new musical ideas are matters of true interest. Is there an American jazz that can be identified with musicians in Appalachia? If the question were asked about string music, finding some kind of answer would not be too difficult. Jazz is a different matter. If there are no purely musical elements in jazz coming specifically from the Appalachian region, how is the region anything to consider in the first place? We may in fact be able to find musicians within Appalachia who are in sufficient proximity to one another so that mutual influence is recognizable and worthy of critical reflection, but this would be true throughout America. It has little to do with a particular geography.

Particular geography may matter, however, if we consider not how jazz musicians relate to (or influence) one another but rather how individual musicians are perhaps influenced by their feeling for a place and how that feeling may be manifest in their music. If jazz musicians in New York or Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans compose and perform music from an attachment to their city, why should the same not apply to the Appalachian region? Much of the country called Appalachia is lovely, which musicians are able to perceive as well as anyone else. Here, one of the present writers (Higby) must assert himself individually to note that the other (Wright) has written and recorded a piece called "Watauga Sunset," which was composed in response to the beauty of the music's subject. It is a bossa nova tune--Appalachia evoked by way of Brazil--but then, jazz is often assimilative. What is important is to recognize that black Americans have as much capacity as anyone else to respond to the natural beauty of a rural, even a forested, landscape. A few years ago, there was a PBS feature on Oscar Peterson, who was shown at one point at his camp on a lake in the Ontario backcountry. For all his urban sophistication, Peterson still was shown taking great pleasure in wilderness fishing trips.

Quite simply, recorded music by black Americans that has grown out of their attachment to, or feeling for, Appalachian America is a potentially fruitful subject for investigation, more than could be attempted here. The methodology for such a study would not be particularly difficult, but to do a thorough study would take much time and patience and might finally produce enough material for an extended study. Furthermore, there is always the possibility that patterns of response would emerge from the music, which would indeed constitute a kind of Appalachian-based jazz.

All of this leads to another point. If some musicians are to be identified with the Appalachian region only because they were born there and lived there in childhood, leaving later to pursue a career in jazz in a more predictable environment, certainly people who chose to remain or who found a way to move in from outside and still have their music are worth some consideration. There is a suspicion that these will often turn out to be the people whose feeling for the place is reflected in the music that they compose.

Still another element to consider is black musicians who have no direct connection to Appalachia but who take music at least tangentially connected with that region, transform it to a greater or lesser degree, and then record it with notable success. The classic example (there are undoubtedly others) would be Ray Charles and "Please Release Me" or "The Green, Green Grass of Home." Technically, these would be considered country and western tunes, which, if they were to be identified with a musical place, would be associated with Nashville, itself just outside Appalachia. But it would be disingenuous not to see that the "country" part of "country and western" means, in the minds of many people, the Appalachian region. What jazz frequently does is take music that is "country" or "commercial" or out of a Broadway show or a rock-and-roll moment and reinvent it to show the many musical possibilities that have been hitherto overlooked.

The truth of the matter is that Appalachian America is just too big, and perhaps too culturally amorphous, to be the repository of a jazz that could be identified with the whole region. Jazz does in fact lend itself to study that has a geographical dimension, but that geography is, in most cases, local. The localities tend to be urban and relatively few. Undeniably, there is a jazz, particularly in its early period, that is to be identified with New Orleans and the Mississippi from Memphis on down. One may legitimately focus on Kansas City if the blues as ensemble music is the topic at hand. New York tends to dominate if jazz and geography are linked, although this may be even more true if the topic is bebop in the 1940s and 1950s. Chicago also is a city, even as early as the 1920s, that may be the focus of a jazz study. The only large geography that comes to mind--geography more expansive than a metropolitan area--is the West Coast jazz, "cool jazz," of the later 1950s and early 1960s.

A practical approach to studying black jazz musicians in Appalachia, then, may be found not in attempting to consider the region as a whole but rather in identifying fruitful concentrations within the larger area and then looking carefully at these pockets. Such an approach has its own limitations, of course. One of the arguments made strenuously by multiculturalists is that, for too long, we have accepted structures of (cultural) power and influence that have tended to ignore the diversity and complexity that are important American strengths--that altogether too many people, musical or otherwise, have been pushed to margins. There is a certain virtue to this argument, which still may be countered by noting that with something like jazz, a gifted performer may well start in rural Kentucky but will soon recognize the necessity of being in the company of other musicians and will gravitate to a new, more populous place. So if not all Appalachian places and musicians living in them appear in this undertaking, that must simply be accepted as a limitation. We must start somewhere.

That said, we can perhaps begin an effective organization of our geography. The upper Ohio River watershed will include Pittsburgh; Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia; Youngstown, Ohio (just outside Appalachia); and all the larger river towns above Cincinnati. Another fruitful area may be found within a perimeter formed by Chattanooga (or perhaps Knoxville), Nashville (just west of Appalachia and a major musical center), and Birmingham, Alabama. A third area of concentration would be the corridor of cities along 1-85 and 1-40 in the Carolinas: Winston-Salem and Asheville in North Carolina, Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina.

At this point, the reader may be frustrated by the amount of space given to geography, with little attention to music. But at least a method of analysis has been established. We can begin specifics by looking at Pittsburgh, a city that may not come quickly to mind if the topic is string music in Appalachia but that is formidable when the subject is jazz. Even a partial list of major jazz artists to come from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area is startling: Earl Hines, Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Billy Eckstine, Ray Brown, George Benson, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Roy Eldridge, Dakota Staton. These artists span much of the twentieth century and represent both various instruments and vocal artistry, so that about the only thing that can be said of them all is that they started their musical lives in Pittsburgh.

But suppose we look at the three major piano players from Pittsburgh--Hines, Garner, and Jamal. Two of them, Hines and Garner, were given to doubling (playing open octaves) in the right hand, both as melody lines and improvisations. All three had a sure, fast right hand, which they often used in a high register. Indeed, a technical virtuosity existed among all three that may have possibly developed as a matter of answering a challenge--doing what other musicians that they heard could do. Finally, it should be noted that Pittsburgh had a pioneer station in radio broadcasting, KDKA. In other words, these musicians grew up in an environment in which they could listen to broadcast music and perhaps be influenced by it (or influence it themselves). The question then arises: How many other piano players could a careful researcher find who lived and worked in the Pittsburgh area and played something of the same style? To be sure, there have been other piano players in other parts of the country who have exhibited the techniques noted here, but if it turns out that there has been a remarkable concentration of them in the Upper Ohio River Valley, this has to have some significance. It would undoubtedly be reckless to speak of a Pittsburgh style, but then it might also be similarly reckless simply to repudiate the idea of a Pittsburgh style. In addition, although some minor jazz artists have probably been overlooked in the previous list, it would be hard to deny the achievement of those included. Of these ten people, five played stringed instruments, which are sometimes regarded as percussive, and two others played the drums--seven out of ten people. Does this then say something about musical interest, and furthermore about musical style, in a corner of Appalachia? If nothing else, this seems a topic for further investigation. Here, a suspicion should be stated: that the researcher would find threads of commonality among Appalachian cities in this region--Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Charleston--but that these tendencies would also be found in urban areas within the same region but outside Appalachia--Youngstown, Cleveland, and Akron.

To return to the piano players from Pittsburgh, Earl Hines might indeed be considered the "Fatha" of the others because he was the first by many years (he was born in 1903, Garner in 1921, and Jamal in 1930). Both Hines and Jamal went to Chicago, and indeed these two musicians are often identified with Chicago (Garner went to New York). In Chicago, Hines had considerable influence over another piano player younger than himself, Nat King Cole (born Nathaniel Adams Coles in 1919), who started life in Montgomery, Alabama, but who went to Chicago as a boy (his father was a Baptist minister; Cole began by playing organ in his father's church). Cole and Jamal had, or developed, their own style, partly by learning to put "spaces" in their playing, Cole by simplifying his voicings, which were sometimes both wonderfully artful and deceptively simple, especially after he began to accompany his own singing, and Jamal by allowing moments of silence within a tune.

Why, then, should Hines and Jamal not be identified with a Chicago style? What has Pittsburgh to do with anything? The reply to such an objection is that although Hines, Jamal, and Garner all left Pittsburgh early for other places, they each had performed more than a little before they left and had each developed elements of what might be called their style. Jazz musicians, like others who pursue an expressive life in one or another art, tend to gravitate to centers of activity and influence--such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. In the domain of jazz, New York in particular seems to be the place where many exceptional musicians want to go. These musical centers then draw not only musicians but the attention of listeners, so that we can lose sight of the fact that many musicians arrive at these centers with some of their gifts and skills already well developed. By putting themselves in the company of others who play or sing remarkably well, they can exchange musical ideas and grow still further, but they were gifted musicians before they moved. Recognizing all of this is a good way to understand why it is worthwhile to think about jazz musicians who come from Appalachia, among other places. They do in fact have something to bring to the musical world when they arrive. Some of the musicians with whom they worked back home probably did not have the skills required of musicians in jazz centers, but the good and not-so-good people together created an environment in which the exceptional people could grow. insofar as they developed a musical idea that the most gifted among them then took to New York and other places, we have to recognize a jazz element, however small, that came from Appalachia.

In an effort to illustrate what is presently being overlooked in the study of jazz, which others may choose to investigate in the future, we will give an account of one of the authors of this article--Todd Wright. Wright is a professional musician of African descent with many contacts in the jazz world of western North Carolina and east Tennessee. (John Higby is white, was raised in Appalachian South Carolina, and is a retired professor of English who, like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte's novel, plays the piano "a little." There is nothing more to say of Higby, but Wright should have our attention for a bit.)

We have already argued that if jazz is not evenly distributed throughout Appalachia, there are fruitful pockets of activity to be investigated within the region. Wright does not fit this mold. He was born into a large family of children in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, where his father worked. He began playing saxophone (primarily alto) as a boy but had his first real experience of jazz when he played in the stage band while a student at Pikeville College. He then moved on to graduate study at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and at this point became deeply interested in jazz and improvisational music generally. After study at Appalachian State, he remained in the area and eventually became an adjunct teacher and then full-time faculty at his former graduate school, where he is now director of jazz studies. He has often worked as a studio musician and has also recorded three of his own compact discs, one with the New York-based pianist Frank Kimbrough. (1) In his playing, Wright feels that he has been most influenced by Cannonball Adderley. The particular point to be made here is that an exceptional musician can spring up anywhere, especially in an age when electronically reproduced music can be found anywhere and provide an example to anyone who knows how to make use of it. Now, it is true that jazz musicians will tend to seek one another out. Whether a musical life begins in the coal fields of Kentucky, in the forested country of Pennsylvania, or in a back hollow of east Tennessee, jazz musicians will sooner or later find one another and form perhaps smaller pockets of activity like those already mentioned. This gravitation eases the problem for those who want to find and study jazz in the Appalachian region, but it still remains true that without careful attention by numerous students of jazz in various locations, some people will fall through the cracks.

That said, we can now turn to some of the material Wright has assembled in speaking with various jazz contacts (these contacts have resulted in pointed conversations rather than formal interviews and will be treated as such). Perhaps no one is more interesting than Lance Owens, a black gentleman in Knoxville, Tennessee, who is nearly eighty and has had a long career as a tenor saxophonist. Owens was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and began playing in 1939, when he was sixteen. In 1948, he joined the Illusioneers, a band of black musicians in Knoxville formed three years earlier. This was a well-known and respected musical group in the Knoxville area in its time. Owens feels that there was, in his era, nothing that could be identified as a Knoxville style, although his own playing was considerably influenced, as were many saxophonists of his period, by Lester Young and possibly to a lesser extent by Ben Webster. Owens says that musicians in his time and place learned their art through radio, and that their imitation of what they heard, however fluent, inclined to jazz standards and music in general that would be satisfying to the public at large. A particular spot for musical groups in Knoxville was the Town House Restaurant, at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Cumberland Avenue, near the University of Tennessee. As soon as possible, Lance Owens formed his own group and then had a steady engagement for nearly thirty-one years at the Deane Hill Country Club, where again the fare tended to jazz standards. A country club can be, in some cases, a satisfactory venue for jazz musicians, but it is not where one likely goes for avant-garde offerings.

Owens feels that another saxophonist who has been consequential in Knoxville for many years is Rocky Winder, an alto player now in his sixties who grew up in Florida but settled in the Appalachian region. Indeed, there seems to have been a bounty of saxophone players in the cities of east Tennessee. In Chattanooga, this may be owing to the influence of a white musician, Ed Leamon, who is credited with training many saxophonists and perhaps influencing still others. Again, there seems to have been no distinct Chattanooga style but, even in people who would have considered themselves jazz musicians, a considerable influence from rhythm and blues. In former times, black musicians were concentrated in the neighborhood of West Ninth Street, which in the minds of some has lost much of its former character through urban renewal. It is now named Martin Luther King Boulevard.2

According to Bill Scarlet, a white tenor saxophone player formerly on the faculty at the University of Tennessee, saxophonists--black and white, trained by Ed Leamon or otherwise--were all interested in following bebop musicians out of New York. This information might tend to obviate the idea of a jazz identifiable with Tennessee. But as already noted, if New York abounds in good musicians, they did not all simply become good after they arrived. Surely, their arrival and the opportunity to grow was served by their decision to go to New York, but what we really have in the jazz world is a dialectic between cultural centers such as New York and Chicago and the provinces from which many of these musicians came. If Tennessee musicians wished to sound like the bebop musicians in New York, who is to say that some of the musical ideas did not come from Tennessee in the first place? Even if it cannot be demonstrated that any musical elements had their origin in Knoxville or Chattanooga, if musicians based in those cities become competent bebop musicians or master some other style of playing, the style does not lose any legitimacy because of geography. Good bop music played in Tennessee remains good. What was magical about Fifty-second Street in New York years ago was the concentration of gifted players, many of them, if not most, black. But good players are also to be found elsewhere.

Two or three of the people with whom Wright had conversations seemed to feel that east Tennessee saxophonists, even those in Chattanooga, tended to drift into the Knoxville area. This is understandable since Knoxville is the location of a major university. Although jazz may be played and heard in any location, it remains true that it tends to be urban music that will appeal to the musical sophistication of city dwellers. The experience of the present writers is that in northwest North Carolina, jazz seems most to flourish in Boone, a university town with a school of music, and in neighboring communities (Blowing Rock, Banner Elk) with large visiting populations of city-bred people who come to the mountains for the invigorating climate.

Another somewhat productive contact has been Joe Robinson, a trumpet player, also a black man who is old enough to be aware of what has taken place in the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, area for a number of decades. Robinson's father was Nathaniel Robinson, a pianist who played a boogie-woogie style. The younger Robinson feels that boogie woogie has influenced rhythm generally among musicians in the Winston-Salem area, where there has also been a concentration of piano players, among them Bill Bright, who have lived and performed there for decades. Horn players would sometimes drift out of the Winston-Salem vicinity, but there was one black band, the Royal Sultans, which was prominent for a while. These musicians were in many cases band directors in the public schools.

As Wright has gone about his investigations, he has been somewhat frustrated not to find more information about Asheville, North Carolina. Wright himself plays with some frequency at the Grove Park Inn, and both of us are aware that there indeed have been consequential black musicians in the Asheville area for many years, leading us to believe that much is waiting to be found by a diligent investigator of jazz in Asheville.

We had a brief telephone conversation with Johnny Moon, a guitarist who has been in the Asheville area for fifty-three years. Moon is a pleasant if somewhat short-spoken musician who in the past has made extended tours. On one occasion many years ago, Moon filled in for Freddy Green at his club in Los Angeles while Green was in New York with the Basie band. Moon expressed admiration for "all guitarists who know what they're doing" and cited as examples Charlie Christian and George Benson. He strikes us as a good example of musical (jazz) competence in an environment that, although not obscure, certainly is less prominent than New York.

We now turn to jazz as it is to be found in the cities of the 1-85 corridor, particularly Spartanburg and Greenville, South Carolina, where there are many black Americans, numerous musicians, and presumably, a certain number of performers of notable accomplishment. The problem is that these cities, both within Appalachia as defined by the Regional Commission, are anchored by Charlotte to the north and Atlanta to the south, both of which are just outside Appalachian country.3 But it should be obvious that any cultural solidarity, especially with something like jazz, will likely be a matter of ties that all of these cities have with one another. Whether they lie within Appalachia or not is incidental. It seems probable that the proximity of all of these cities to the Appalachian region means that they all will manifest melodic, harmonic, but particularly rhythmical musical elements that have, so to speak, come down out of the mountains. It also seems likely that these elements will be interracial, particularly as black artists recognize something in mountain music that can be put to good use and then use it.

Earlier, we identified Birmingham, Alabama, as an urban center of consequence in inquiries about jazz at the southern verge of Appalachia. Nothing has been offered in this article because the best we could have done would be to list the names and achievements of musicians known throughout the jazz world, which would add nothing. As with Appalachian folklore or other forms of Appalachian music and culture, a thorough investigation will depend considerably on oral history, and anything at all inclusive of worthy musicians must be the work of numerous people at numerous locations. The sooner this work begins, the better, because some of the people who have important stories to tell are growing old.

What we have tried to do in this undertaking is to suggest elements of a method by which others might make a detailed study of jazz in the Appalachian region and the black Americans who devised this music in the first place and with whom it frequently continues to be identified. We saw from the beginning that we could not be comprehensive. There are just too many good musicians scattered over far too much American geography through too many decades to give them all even perfunctory coverage in a piece of this length and general focus. Some of them (Hines and Garner, for example) have been the subject of book-length writing (Dance 1977; Doran 1985). What could we add? If we were to look in some detail at a few musicians, how could we choose from among the many who have come from this region without giving offense to people who felt we had made the wrong choices?

Then there is the matter of less-than-famous musicians within this whole region who are nevertheless accomplished jazz performers and who in some cases are not widely known simply because they chose to remain at home. Of these, if we consider all of Appalachia, past and present, there must be hundreds. How could all of these people be included in a journal article, and for that matter, how could we write about them all, even if we had sufficient space, without years of preparatory study?

We also saw from the start the limited purpose that would be served if this article simply became an exercise in hometown identification. Americans generally take pride in someone from home who goes on to make a mark in the world, but this adds little to the study of our jazz and the artists, very often African Americans, who made it a part of our civilization.

We concede that there is no jazz to be identified with the whole of Appalachia. We are much less willing to concede that there are not smaller parts of the whole region where black musicians have sufficient rapport with one another to develop a distinctive jazz sound; we are inclined to believe that such people and places exist. Here we think there is fruitful ground for multiple studies. We have already identified urban regions where such an investigation might produce results. There are other possibilities. These would include academic communities with a substantial program in music and resort communities with a clientele who expect some of the music they hear at home.

There may be a future moment when a study, both broad and detailed, can be undertaken treating black musicians, jazz, and the large part of the eastern United States known as Appalachia. It is to be hoped that what the reader finds here will be useful to others who study this part of American jazz and the people who have made it.

(1.) Todd Wright, Begonia and Christmas Time Is Here; and Todd Wright and Frank Kimbrough, Reflections.

(2.) Chattanooga's Ninth Street has been treated by Douglas Day (1995). Day's narrative, interesting in many ways and helpful in a few, is not without its flaws if the intent is to give an account of the music and musicians once found on Ninth Street. Performers who would have had no more than a polite interest in one another are lumped together. Tunes written by white musicians are called the work of "tin pan alley hacks" (22), which seems both gratuitous and solicitous. Local musicians are said to have had skills such that they could "hold their own with any of the national acts" (21) (undoubtedly true in particular instances, but carelessly uncritical as a general statement). There is too much social history for an article that purports to be about music and too long a parade of names whose only connection with Chattanooga is that they represent people who came there to perform.

Somewhat more satisfactory is William Archer's "Jazz in the Mountains? One Town's Amazing Story" (1991), which begins with a social history and a list of a few buzz-names but moves fairly quickly to a somewhat detailed account of jazz in Bluefield, West Virginia, as an integral part of the black culture of that undeniably Appalachian location. This comparison may not be perfectly fair but is offered to make the point that there can be no satisfactory account of jazz in the Appalachian region except by staying carefully to the declared subject.

(3.) This problem might well be solved by those who would make a plausible case for putting Spartanburg and Greenville together with Asheville as an urban grouping whose musicians would be likely to know one another and share musical ideas.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Wright, Todd. Begonia. Wright Stuff WS 0001 (1995). Compact disc.

--. Christmas time is here. Wright Stuff WS 0002 (1998). Compact disc.

Wright, Todd, and Frank Kimbrough. Reflections. Wright Stuff WS 0003 (2003). Compact disc.

REFERENCES

Archer, William. 199]. Jazz in the mountains? One town's amazing story. Appalachian Heritage 19, no. 4: 44-50.

Dance, Stanley. 1977. The world of Earl Hines. New York: Scribners.

Day, Douglas. 1995. Doing fine on big nine. Now and Then 12, no. 2:21 24.

Doran, James M. 1985. Erroll Garner, tire most happy piano. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press and the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Pearson, Barry Lee. 2005. Appalachian blues. Black Music Research Journal 23, no. 1/2: 23-52.

Speer, Jean Haskell, and Rudy Abramson, eds. N.d. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. http://cass.etsu.edu/encyclo/region.htm. (To be published by The University of Tennessee Press.)

TODD WRIGHT is Director of Jazz Studies in the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian State University. He is a professional musician who plays frequent club dates. He feels that his playing has in some measure been formed by his admiration for Cannonball Adderley.

JOHN HIGBY, an amateur musician, taught English at Appalachian State University from 1967 to 2001. He has a particular interest in, and admiration for, piano players.