Music in the Mountains

Résumé du livre

This thesis investigates the role traditional music plays in shaping and solidifying concepts of regional identity in Western North Carolina. The genres of traditional American music encompassed by this study include Ballads, Old-Time Music, and Bluegrass. Despite the ubiquity of these traditions across the national landscape, all three genres are recognized, both within and beyond the Southeast, as being representative of a Southern Appalachian ethos. This work investigates the causes for such deep associations between music and place. Four years of fieldwork and observation, including the author's active participation with the region's Folk Heritage Committee, which hosts traditional music events through the summer months, provides this study's methodological framework. In brief, this work examines the multiple traditional music communities in Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area, provides biographical sketches of a small sampling of area musicians, and shows how individual musicians and distinctive traditional music communities merge at area festivals to reify concepts of regionalism. It finds that the designation of Ballads, Old-Time Music, and Bluegrass Music as Southern Appalachian regional music is both constructed and affirmed by the interplay between outsiders' and insiders' conceptualizations of regional identity.