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Teanga wrote:
| Keith Dunn wrote:
|
| >Unless I'm wrong.......bluegrass music is heavily influenced by Scottish
| music.
| > Mostly out of the Appalachian Mtns. I know there are a lot of Scottish
| Sir names >among the folks living in the Blue Ridge Mtns. ( which is the most
| southerly range >of the Appalachians.)
You're not wrong at all (except that the Great Smokies are somewhat
more southern than the Blue Ridge, a west-southwestern extension
really). Scottish and Irish names are extremely common all along the
Blue Ridge and the other mountains further west.
| The Scottish surnames came from Ulster Scots who began settling in the area
| before the American Revolution. Two examples of the many Scottish tunes
| that traveled to the US are "Campbell's Farewell to Redcastle" and "Lord
| MacDonald's Reel" ("Leather Britches" and they had their names altered over
| here.
True to a great extent, but over-simplified. There have been Scottish
immigrants into the southern mountains over many centuries. I've read
a few histories that make the point that Gaelic-speaking Scots from
the Highlands would often end up in this area because of the
significant Gaelic-speaking population. Gaelic died out after the
Civil War, but there were several centuries when the language was
fairly common along the Blue Ridge and other southern mountains.
My wife is a McCoy, as in Hatfields and McCoys, and she has quite a
lot of the history of the Scots/Irish immigration. Her favorite
explanation is that the McCoys (originally MacKay) were kicked out of
Scotland because they were too boisterous and warlike even for the
Scottish clans. So they were pushed over to Ulster to help pacify the
unruly Irish. But they were still too uncivilized to get along with
either the Irish or the English (or the other Scots), and they were
"strongly encouraged" to emigrate to the Colonies. There, they
couldn't get along in the cities, so they ended up back in the hills.
There is also a common theory among the McCoys and Hatfields that the
big feud a century back was really just a case of Evolution in
action. The crazies finally got around to eradicating each other, and
the survivors were the ones with the sense to keep out of the line of
fire. Their descendants now get along just fine with their neighbors
and each other. Part of both clans left the hills for Saint Joseph,
Missouri, where my wife was born. In the 1880's and 1890's, St Joe
was a major frontier town, though it's pretty sleepy today. If you
drive around there, you notice a lot of stores with the names
Hatfield and McCoy on the signs. They all get along quite well. We've
made a few trips to the Kentucky-W.Virginia border area, roughly the
area sound of Williamson, and dropped in on places with Hatfield or
McCoy on the sign. We've been impressed by how friendly they all are
to strangers, even before they know we're kin. When my wife lets on
that she's a McCoy, the Hatfield reaction is to smile and invite us
to dinner and to stay at their place.
| A lot of people think that the roots of Appalachian and old-time music lay in
| Ireland; that's OK if they consider the Scots' descendants in Northern
| Ireland to be "Irish", which from what I've observed, they don't, I wish I
| could make it to the fiddle tent in Stone Mountain but I'm up here in NYC
| where appreciation of Scottish fiddling is just about nil, compared to Irish
| fiddling.
Then there's the term "Scots-Irish", which some historians have said
was a sort of euphemism developed in the US for the Ulster immigrants
at a time when being Irish was only a small step above being black.
It was far better to claim to be Scottish. I have a copy of a book
from a few years back called "How the Irish Became White". It got a
lot of good reviews from historians, and has many interesting stories
of the experience of the various Irish immigrant groups, including
the "Scots-Irish".
Just about any old-time Appalachian fiddler will instantly agree with
the Scottish origins of their music. Those with any historical
knowledge will start bending your ear with the history of various
tunes, and the forms they take in Scotland, Ireland and Appalachia.
The southern Scottish population hasn't kept close ties to the old
country, however, so the music has diverged a lot more than the music
of Irish immigrants has.
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