Transcription of an Interview with Cari Norris by Susan A. Eacker and Geoff Eacker October 25, 1997

Transcription

1 Transcription of an Interview with Cari Norris by Susan A. Eacker and Geoff Eacker October 25, 1997 Susan A. Eacker and Geoff Collection Accession 666 Special Collections Marshall University Libraries Huntington, West Virginia

2 Released Form signed by Cari Norris October 25, 1997 Transcriber not identified PDF prepared by Lisle G Brown Marshall University 2009 All Rights Reserved

3 TAPE Interview Date: October 25, 1997 Interview Place: Berea, Ky at the Celebration of Traditional Music Interviewer: Susan A. Eacker SE: It s Sat., October 25th and we re in Berea, Kentucky at the Celebration of Traditional Music talking to Cari Norris, Lily May Ledford s granddaughter. We ve just finished a symposium on Lily May but we d like to hear a little bit about Cari s own musical history. What is your first musical memory? CN: Oh goodness. My first musical memory. That s hard. I don t know; it doesn t fall in a sequence of chronological time. I remember.... I can t remember a time when I wasn t sensitive to music in the world. It goes back so far and my parents tell me that I sang before I talked. So, it just was always primary and I know that Mamaw kept me when I was an infant, everyday for the first few months of my life. And I know she sang to me all the time. I just.... I had such a.... It was almost like a bodily connection to her. It was very visceral. I don t know how to explain it but I think that there s something about music that is physical. And that physical connection that I had with her, just with her holding me and singing to me was very important. I just really... my parents played the Beatles at home and I listened to the Beatles a lot, and really liked the Beatles. SE: Did they play any of your grandmother s music? CN: They didn t play her music. SE: Cause at that time it was passé? CN: Well, yeah. I mean they were....my dad played in a rock band when I was little and so they were listening to the Beatles. They played James Taylor but like I say, Mamaw would rock me with the old songs when I was little. SE: Do you remember what some of those songs were? CN: Pappa Don t Whip Little Benny, Babes in the Woods, Pretty Polly, were the ones I remember. And she would sing em over and over again and I would say, Sing it again. GE: Really? They didn t scare you? CN: Well, I think it was like I was transfixed by it, you know, it was just....it mesmerized me. And the depth of those songs....i think there s still more to be felt in those songs. There s so much there. The old songs; there s just a lot there. I find new levels of meaning in em even in my own life, all the time, the more I sing em. So I think I sense there was a lot there to these songs, you know. It was almost like she was telling me her own story, in a way, when she would 3

4 sing em to me. She had a very hard life in a lot of ways. SE: Well, a ballad tells a story and has a message or a moral. CN: Yeah. SE: You said in the symposium that the ballads your grandmother played, that Mamaw played, or that ballads in general, spoke to a real life experience. And most of them were written about real life experiences. Poor Ellen Smith was about the murder of a pregnant woman in North Carolina. And I m not sure about Pretty Polly, but maybe the message in Two Little Babes was what modern day parents tell their children. Don t talk to strangers or don t go out in the woods by yourself. I don t know. CN: Well, to me what I feel about that song is that it in a way expresses what s happening to a lot of children in the modern world, where so many kids are carted off to daycare all the time, you know, and...1 don t know. I don t want to start talking about the breakdown of the family but I do think in our culture children are a little bit pushed to the side. It s like, we can establish this much in our budget for our kids to go to daycare and we can have two jobs and we can do all this stuff. And we can go to McDonalds to eat. It s just... don t know. I think that that s real. I think that kids are in crisis in a lot of ways. And they are orphaned in a lot of ways. Socially, in this country, from what I can see. I certainly felt that when I was little. I was....both my parents worked. I was in daycare. I was....until I was four, when we lived in Kentucky, two older people kept me during the day. And they were old farm people and they were just like grandparents to me. My grandmother would keep me a lot on the weekends. My parents were both in school when I was born and very young and very busy. And so in my first four years I had kind of a traditional upbringing because I was with Mamaw or I was with Nanny and Pit, which was what I called them. They were just like grandparents. They were just like family. And then we moved to South Carolina and I went into daycare and I was just... Did not adjust well at all. Cut off from my roots. And I think that really affected me, my psychology. I think it affected my music and so, I don t know. SE: Let me ask you a crucial question I always forget, Geoff tells me. You lived in South Carolina. Where were you born? CN: I was born....well, we lived in Richmond, but I was actually born in Lexington, the hospital in Lexington, but we lived in Richmond. GE: While we re on the subject of children, this might be skipping around, but, you are Artist-in-Residence at Hindman Settlement School? CN: Yeah. 4

5 GE: And that started this semester and is going through the..? CN: It started in July. GE: It started in July. SE: Now are you working with young children there. CN: Yeah. I m working in the public schools there and I ve been doing traditional music and singing; teaching old songs to primary kids. And I ve also been doing some quilting projects with kids, through fourth, fifth, and eighth grade. That s what rye worked with so far. GE: So these are ongoing projects, your work with them. You don t just go in for one day? CN; Right. What I ve done so far is, I ll schedule....i ll be in a school for like three weeks and do three days a week for three weeks and try to get some momentum going, you know, with a project so that they don t feel like I m just kinda in and out. We actually start a project and finish it. SE: We just interviewed a woman last week at Augusta at Davis 85 Elkins, who lives in Pocohontas County and gives banjo lessons to children in Pocohontas County; children from Pocohontas County who grew up with that kind of music but it was lost on their parent s generation so that it has to be re-taught. Do you find some of the children....do they ever say, Oh, my grandparents... CN: Yes, they do. And that s the connection that I try to make when I go in. I say, Do you have people in your family who play? Do you have grandparents who play? Have you seen these instruments before? Let s talk about the fact that this has been a tradition here. And I tell my stories of my family and then they start telling their stories. I know somebody and they play this and they taught me a little song one time. And I try to strengthen what s already there in their consciousness of a tradition in music. And try to teach them some songs. SE: I was going to ask you, have any of them asked you to give them banjo lessons? CN: Oh yeah, oh yeah. But I don t have a lot of time to do it. I d... SE: You re also doing this other research, trying to compile this CD. Tell us more about what you re doing as an Artist-in-Residence, since Geoff had skipped up in time a little bit. CN: Well, a lot of it is work in the public schools. Another aspect of my residency is finding people in the community who are involved in the arts and trying to give them opportunities to 5

6 perform. Sometimes, like I organized a little festival that was part of the September Festival that the county has in Knott county, a traditional music festival. We did that in early September and we had local traditional musicians come in and play. SE: Any women banjo players? CN: No, no. I really don t know many women banjo players, to tell you the truth. SE: Except Dora Mae. CN: Dora Mae. SE: And Blanche Coldiron. CN: I know Blanche and I know Sue [Massek, with the Reel World String Band]. CN: Do you all know about Carla Glover in Berea? She s just kinda started playing banjo. SE: A younger person who s taken it up? CN: Yeah, yeah. SE: And you re also having some time to put together....you re working with June Appal Records and working together on a CD? CN: I m working with Rich Kirby at Appalshop who has been very helpful to me. He is the director of the radio station there and with June Appal Records and I ve been researching old recordings of Mamaw. Found some here in the Berea College Archives, through the Augusta Heritage Institute. And we have some.... The family has some reel-to-reel recordings of Mamaw that we wanted to explore for this project but they have the sticky shed problem which means that they were recorded in the late 70s and many reel-to-reel recorded in the late 70s have to, when they re played the tape starts to disintegrate but what you can do is bake the tapes, dehydrate. There s this baking process and you bake the tapes and that takes the moisture out of the acetate or plastic, whatever it is. And then you get one play, which you have to transfer onto DAT. So our tapes are now in the process....i just sent them off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and they re going to do the baking. They re going to bake the tapes. GE: How many tapes do you have? CN: Eleven. Eleven. 6

7 GE: Wow! SE: Are these tapes going to be deposited somewhere or are they going to be your property? CN: They ll be our property but UNC s going to make copies for their collection. SE: Do they have a real good....? CN: They have a fabuluos southern folklife collection! Great collection. SE: Our project s only one semester but I can see it going into years and years cause there s more than I thought. Back to....let s go back to your early music. Obviously by osmosis you absorbed this music from your grandmother before you were even conscious of it. But when did you first begin to play and what was your first instrument? CN: I started playing piano when I was around six or seven and just would figure out songs that I heard. I would figure out Beatle s songs. I figured out songs my dad would play on guitar. I figured out songs like Turkey in the Straw, and r d like to see how fast I could play it. SE: Just like Mamaw? By ear? CN: By ear, yeah. SE: Your grandmother didn t read music, did she. CN: No. SE: Do you read music? CN: No. I can read a little bit because I was in band in middle schooland I can read a little bit but I don t like to. So I don t try to, you know. SE: Well, let s move up to the banjo. When did you first pick the banjo? CN: I was fifteen and it was the year that Mamaw died and something happened to me that year. Something happened to me that year. That was the year I started painting; that was the year I really started to listen to old-time music a lot and getting real interested in it. I listened to Jean Ritchie a whole lot that year and became fascinated with her singing and her music, which really led me back to think Mamaw plays that too. I started listening to her albums. We had a recording of her doing Pretty Polly live at this concert and it was just a fabulous version. That music is really powerful. I started playing guitar a lot that year and realizing that I could sing the 7

8 old songs and they kind of suited my voice. And it was like, This is something that I can sing. And I just kept learning; learned a lot of Jean Ritchie songs and I guess I was either seventeen or eighteen when I finally got up the nerve to call Sue Massek and ask her if she would show me the frail. And she was really nice and said, Yeah. So I went over there and she gave me lessons. She gave me about three lessons, I guess, and showed me what the frail was. SE: And that s all it took was just three lessons. CN: Yeah, just three lessons. She showed me the frail and she taught me how she played Red Rocking Chair; Mama s version of Red Rocking Chair. Which is still pretty much the version that I play. She taught me Ola Belle Reed s version of Shady Grove. She taught me Highlander s Farewell. That s a G-modal tune. I was very interested in the G modal tunes. SE: When you were fifteen and finally turned on to old-time music, were you aware before that age of what a popular performer and what a ground breaker your grandmother was in terms of an all-girl string band? Were you aware of that? Was that talked about in your family? CN: That s a good question. I knew that she had had a career and that she was at work, I guess. But I didn t really; I don t think I really did. I think I m really only beginning to realize that now. SE: I was amazed at all the people that showed up for the symposium. That s more than you would get on a college campus, believe me. CN: I was really heartened too. SE: There was a lot of interest. CN: I think so. SE: So you learned to play your grandmother s music through a protégé of hers? But also, you must have listened to her recordings? CN: Oh yeah. I listened to her recordings. And the way I play Pretty Polly, and East Virginia And White Oak Mountain, which she called Blue-Eyed Boy, are just about how she plays em. I really feel those songs pretty much like she did. So yeah, just hearing....growing up. I didn t hear her play a lot when I was growing up, but... SE: Was that during the time that she had gotten out? CN: Yeah. Well, no. I was born in 70 so she was back into it by 70. But we moved from Kentucky to South Carolina. So I was only around her a couple times a year. It really wasn t till I 8

9 was fifteen that I....I did have memories of her playing but I got so interested then. Something inside. You know, really got interested and I went back and listened to her recordings and... SE: Well, one of the questions I ask any of the banjo women I interview is Who was your greatest influence? But that question is obvious in your case, your grandmother. When did you....so you first when you were fifteen started playing the guitar. How old were you when you started getting banjo lessons then? CN: I think I was seventeen. SE: Do you remember when you first public performance was? CN: I think....my parents had a stringband when I was growing up. And that too I should definitely mention cause that was....it was called Raggedy Robin String Band. SE: That was in South Carolina? CN: That was in Kentucky. We moved back to Kentucky in And that was formed around....they formed that band around 81 or so. And I think I performed with them when I was maybe seventeen or eighteen. I played bass or something with them. But when I went to college... SE: Where did you go to college? CN: I started, I went two years at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. SE: It s really close to my home. CN: Really. Yeah. I formed a string band there the first week I went to college called Hurricane Sadie. We performed a lot around campus that first year. We stayed together a year. SE: Was it all girls? CN: No, it was two women and three men. SE: And you played? CN: I played banjo and guitar and mandolin. SE: And it was oldtime music? CN: Yeah, traditional music. 9

10 SE: Was it well received at Earlham? CN: We were a huge hit. People loved it. We played when the college would have different festivals and this and that. We would play at the coffehouse, they had a coffeehouse. WE played there quite a bit. And we made a tape and sold a couple hundred copies of it around the campus. So that was the start. SE: So you played banjo then. Standard question: Older women that I ve interviewed that played the banjo always talk about some of the problems playing a traditional instrument that still is not considered traditional for women to play. Just like your grandmother had to go hide out in the woods because her mother didn t want her playing the banjo. I ve interviewed women whose fathers told them, Nice girls don t play the banjo. And Jean Ritchie just said today, The banjo s a low instrument. CN: Right. SE: The dulcimer was considered more appropriate, especially for hillbillies who wanted to become more like their Elizabethan ancestors, right? CN: Right. SE: Did you find....have you ever experienced any of those difficulties that the older woman banjoists did? CN: No I haven t and part of that maybe my beginning association with Sue Massek, who was such an accomplished and confident and exuberant example of a woman who plays the banjo and comes from very much a feminist perspective. She was just so supportive in the beginning that I never....my parents never discouraged me at all. They were just delighted so....no, I really haven t experienced that. SE: Even in eastern Kentucky? CN: No. No. SE: What would Mamaw say? CN: Oh she would love it. She would love it. Yeah, since I have lived in eastern Kentucky I have been more aware of the religious traditions there and the conservatism. And I have felt that. SE: More than the gender, that the music, the music in general is not good? 10

11 CN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh huh. It s something that I m real interested in and I wanna....i m actually thinking of moving to Red River next year and spending some time there and just checking out the culture a little bit more. SE: Where would you live? CN: Well, I don t know. It s just an idea. I d like to find just a little place to rent in a remote place. SE: Last woman I interviewed that I told you about, similar story. You d love to hear her story. She lives in a cabin in Pocohontas County. No heat, wood stove, no electricity, lives by herself, gives banjo lessons. Just a real simple way of life that she thinks goes well with the simple music and helps her music. CN: Wow, that s wonderful. SE: What are your plans? You ve got this wonderful project going and the fellowship, residency at Hindman School. Future plans? CN: Like I said, I am interested in spending some time in Red River and part of this project with my grandmother, I want there to be a visual component to it. I want to do a series of either paintings or, I do quilted wall hangings. I don t know which medium it will be but I ve already begun. I ye done a couple of the quilted wall hangings in relation to memories I have of Mamaw. SE: Did you happen to do your dress [points to embroidery on bodice of dress.]? That looks like Hmong. Do you do traditional quilting patterns? CN: I do the kind of... I do very simple patterns. Very simple....right now they re just squares. What I like to work with is color and pattern. And I look around for very specific patterns and colors and combine them. Kind of the combination and the placing is what I concentrate on. But I would like to paint in Red River, because as I said in the symposium, I think there is something about that place that connects to Mamaw and the music, and I just want to spend some time there. SE: There has to be the connection. I ve interviewed... It can t be by coincidence that Appalachian music came out of the Appalachians. CN: Right. SE: It was the place that inspired the music. 11

12 CN: I think so. I think so. And that s an idea that s ancient. SE: And I tell my students who aren t interested in it. Yeah, do you like rock n rock? Do you like country? Do you like bluegrass? Well, the roots of all that music is in Appalachia. CN: Right, right. SE: One more question I d love to ask you. We talked about this earlier. The more I get into the banjo music and the ballads, the more it seems to me that so many of the ballads that women banjoists have chosen have what we call in literary theory a cautionary message. In the nineteenth century they called it a cautionary tale. It was literature written for women about what s gonna happen if you go away with that red-coated soldier or the first boy who comes along. Your grandmother recorded, at least on the tape I have, at least three-fourths of those songs are cautionary tales to music. If the music is an expression of real life, was there anything you know about in your grandmother s experience that would cause her to chose those particular ballads? I ask that because I ve also read in her autobiography where she talks about When the boys would be after us, we knew how to....we d sometimes have to fight `em off. CN: Yeah. Well, as far as Pretty Polly goes, I think that in a way that song expressed her own feelings about, in a way about her career under John Lair, in a way. Because she was controlled in many ways. And I think she felt powerless in a lot of ways as to what to do. She came from a very poor family. She had an eighth grade education. While she was an extremely intelligent, extremely smart and talented and gifted, she... don t really believe that she knew how to strike off John Lair if she wanted to, and manage her own career. And I m not sure any woman would have known, in her situation, how to do that at that time, in the 1950s. SE: Who would they have gone to, except another man? CN: Right. But at the same time she wanted to play music professionally. That s what she wanted to do. And so she... SE: You ve just given me this wonderful idea. The song is a metaphor for the power over the powerless. Do you think? CN: Yeah. And she told the story. You know, it s like she found the most powerful way to tell that story. And she was a consummate performer and storyteller and she wouldn t come out and say to a crowd, John Lair was blah, blah, blah, this and this and this. But by god, she could sing Pretty Polly and everybody just... like you didn t have to say it directly. And that s what art does. You say things in metaphors which are more powerful anyway. SE: It s a subtlety. It can be very powerful. I m not just making this up. 12

13 CN: And in her marriage too. Both of her marriages were unhappy and that s why I didn t really....i haven t found a way to deal with that in this presentation so far, which I m gonna have to try to do that. And it s still in the very beginning stages. SE: One person asked that question. It would be the last question that would come to my mind. CN: Really? I don t know what I m going to do. But her husband was a lot like John Lair. Her second husband was a lot like him. Very interested in the business aspect of the music and not really interested in traditional music. And so, maintaining the image. SE: It s interesting to me that when your grandmother, Mamaw, came on her own; now I don t think this is a coincidence, in the later pictures she cut her hair; she didn t wear the little calico dresses. CN: Yeah. SE: The pictures I saw she had short hair; she had on pants. She didn t have the Daisy May image. CN: She did wear the long calico dresses at times when she started to perform in her later years, but not always. I think in a way... don t think it was an entirely negative thing when she did wear those dressed in her older years, because I think for her it identified for the audience what kind of music she played and she....lisa Yarger [a woman writing a thesis on Lily May Ledford] has made some points that she was still kinda under the influence of Lair in wearing those dresses. But she would wear em sometimes and other times she wouldn t wear em, so I think she felt like she could decide whether she wanted to wear it or not. And she was beautiful in those dresses in her older....they weren t like the frilly dresses. They were completely long and I just thought those dresses were majestic when I was little. That s an interesting point. SE: Course he gave them all the names. CN: They named themselves. SE: I had read that he gave them.... CN: No, they named themselves the flower names. But he came up with The Coon Creek Girls name. They wanted to name themselves The Wildwood Flowers, but he insisted that they were The Coon Creek Girls. SE: Before the light is fading and we can t get some excellent photos, are there.... Have I missed huge passages of your life you d like to talk about? Are there questions I should have 13

14 asked you that I haven t? Is there something you d like to add? CN: Living in eastern Kentucky now, I ve been playing a lot with Rich Kirby, who s a great fiddle player from Virginia and I ve....there are a lot of good fiddle players and banjo players come through Appalshop and I ve gotten an opportunity to play with them and f e learned a lot more tunes and that s really fun. And I m really impressed with the music that comes out of Virginia and West Virginia. And that s been real fun for me as a banjo player lately. SE: But still no other women banjo players? CN: No, I haven t run into. I know the Whitetop Band or the Whitetop Stringband has a woman banjo player, but I m not sure where they re from. You could find out from Appaishop, from the people at Appalshop. SE: We haven t been there yet. That s on our research trip. GE: Have any other plans for the future. SE: I asked her that already. She s gonna move to the Red River Gorge. CN: I want to spend some time at the Red River. GE: Geoff said....we hiked there and then Geoff got Titan Rock [a book on the Red River Gorge and also Lily May Ledford] and Geoff said, You know I think we were right on that very same spot. Right? GE: I was looking at the government survey maps. We hiked there and I was trying to figure out where Pinch-em-Tight [where Lily May was born]. Was that a John Lair invention also? CN: What? Pinch-em-Tight? No, there actually is a Pinch-em-Tight holler. They actually lived in Pinch-em-Tight holler. GE: I read somewhere that that was... CN: Well, what the invention was that Evelyn and Esther also came from Pinch-em-Tight. He said that they all came from Pinch-em-Tight, but that wasn t true. GE: I see. I know we weren t gonna talk about Lily May, but you seem to have been talking about her when I walked back in the room. The story.... I heard a story on one of the tapes from... don t even....i listened to so many tapes in the archives the other day that I don t know where it was from. It was Lily May talking about how her brother brought back the one verse of 14

15 Banjo Pickin Girl from the coal fields of Pike County. So, do you know anything about that tune? CN: I know that... don t know where it originated but I know that the Coon Creek Girls and John Lair sat down, Mamaw said, and wrote out forty other verses to the song and then honed it down from that. SE: I just bought a book today honey that says it s a nineteenth-century and it was called Goin Round the World. The original title was Goin Round the World. CN: With a Banjo Pickin Girl. And it was originally Goin Round the World With a Banjo Pickin Girl so it was from the perspective of a man. I m Going Round the World With a Banjo Pickin Girl. So they changed it. SE: So it was Lily May that changed it to Banjo Pickin Girl? CN: I don t know if it was Lily May s or John Lair s idea. SE: See that was another....i love the lyrics to that too. Again, it s a metaphor. It s not very subtle. It s obvious that I ve got my banjo and I can go anywhere I want. And you can too, right? I m not gonna take up any more of you time. Thank you so much, Carey. And we hope to hear that CD and hopefully get some pictures too. [Cari plays Pretty Polly ] END OF INTERVIEW 15