Strings of Life: Conversations with Old-Time Musicians from Virginia and North Carolina

Buy Now

Strings of Life by Kevin Donleavy. 2004. VA. Pocahontas Press. 347 pp.

Reviewed by Diana Fields

The Great Wagon Road is present VA Route 11, which runs from Pennsylvania to Georgia. This was the path carved first by the Native Americans and then used by the earliest pioneers on their quest for land and freedom. Immigrating Scots and Irish, along with English indentured servants and runaway African slaves, made their way through the wild frontier of Virginia along this path. This influx of cultures to the mountains and valleys of Appalachia brought with it a blending of several ethnic musical styles. Strings of Life – Conversations with Old-Time Musicians from Virginia and North Carolina by Kevin Donleavy is more than an academic history of traditional Old-Time music it is a personal in-depth interview with hundreds of living musicians living in 11 counties on the borders of Virginia and North Carolina.

Kevin Donleavy, graduate of University of Virginia, independent historian, musicologist, and educator has combined his talents to create a “historical-musical census-of-sorts” identifying more than 1300 banjo and fiddle players of traditional music in a span of over 250 years. Donleavy spent seven years traveling, living, playing music and most importantly, listening to the residents of Carroll, Grayson, Patrick and Wythe counties in Virginia and Alleghany, Caswell, Forsyth, Rockingham, Stokes, Surry, and Wilkes counties in North Carolina. He has now complied a collection of oral histories not found anywhere else. Strings of Life is well organized and Mr. Donleavy’s research is thoroughly documented complete with a annotated Discography and Bibliography, as well as three separate indexes: Persons Mentioned; Tunes; and Bands and Musical Groups. In addition, of the 1300 some musicians mentioned in this volume, Donleavy has been able to identify the burial sites of about 660 in 170 graveyards scatted throughout the 11 counties. Some of the families documented are Hawks, Jarrell, Lowe, Martin, McKinney, Sutphin and Tate, along with many others. It would have been nice if a list of the nearly one hundred wonderful photos had been included in the table of contents, but truly, the pictures are enough.

The first chapter, “Where Cultures Meet. The people, the geography, the instruments and the music” gives an overview of the history of traditional Old-Time music. Traditional Old-Time music is distinct in that its combination of banjo and fiddle come with a unique style of picking and bow-pulling added to traditional early English music; this is the ancestral music of the Appalachian Mountains still played today. Perhaps the isolation of the mountains from the rest of the developing New World gave room for more tolerance of race and religion. The area Donleavy has concentrated on is home to a large population of Melungeons. Melungeons were referred to as “free persons of color” by census takers and school officials, many being denied the right to vote or attend school. They are thought to be a mix of the Lost Colony, the Native Americans, runaway African slaves and Portuguese peoples brought for the settlements of the Spanish in Georgia. Together with the immigrating Scots and Irish, these merging cultures and races have made Old-Time music what it is today.

The main body of this comprehensive book is focused on the musicians. Each county fills a chapter of its own, except Carroll County, VA, which fills two. Each chapter details not only the musicians and their history, it also traces the history of the songs they play, these are songs passed down from generation to generation for the more than 250 years that these families have lived on the borders of Virginia and North Carolina. During the mid 1700’s this region was called “Squabble State”, due to the "squabble" over the western Virginia-North Carolina boundary. This land dispute started as early as 1749, when the tract of land, then known as Sapling Grove of Augusta County, Virginia was surveyed for Col. James Patton overlapped the
King's charter for the Proprietorship of Carolina’s specified boundary. After hundreds of legal disputes over land claimed by Virginia and North Carolina (and part that later became East Tennessee), spanning more than a century and a half, many disputes settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890. As governments argued over land rights these mountain families traveled back and forth between invisible borders, playing music, getting married and raising families. The music was a social connection for many of the families, offering opportunities to court and find a mate. Since the geographic conditions of the landscape made travel arduous, most families inter-married within their own communities helping to keep the music essentially unchanged for generations.

It is amazing sometimes how things come into our lives just when the time is right. I have been researching my ancestors for the last couple of years trying to find when my family of Fields were originally Hamiltons. My search has taken me to the Fields of Grayson County just days before I read this book for my review. Now I find descendents of my ancestors listed in these pages, Blackburn, Cox, Hash, Phipps, Osborn and many others I haven’t documented yet. This book is not just for music buffs, its historical details and accuracy make it a font of information for the genealogist as well.

The region focused on in Strings of Life by Kevin Donleavy is by no means the only area of Appalachia where traditional Old-Time music is alive and well. We right here in Giles County have a heritage rich in Old-Time music boasting greats such as Henry Reed and his family, whose son Dean Reed can still be seen and heard some Thursday nights at Anna’s Restaurant in Narrows. This is a book I would highly recommend. Be sure to check out all the titles available from Pocahontas Press of Blacksburg, VA.