Violet and the Newsroom

Hello, Clay here!

Anabel, Violet, and I spent last week at Cowan Creek Mountain Music School. Anabel was on hand for emergency instrument repair under the tutelage of our friend Jim Webb, while Violet and I were TAs – Violet for Linda Jean Stokley’s singing class, and I for Matthew Carter’s mandolin class.

CCMMS is an all-ages all-levels week-long traditional music school in Letcher County, Kentucky. It’s a bit like a family reunion, provided your family is both musically-inclined and easy to get along with. The folks at Cowan Creek, the Whitesburg and Mayking locals, and the Wiley’s crew were hospitable and eager to share the best of what they had to offer of old-time fiddle tunes, home-cooked garden-fresh veggies, and good company.

Sunday morning, the first morning I woke in Letcher County, I got up early for a guided hike to Bad Branch Falls, just on the other side of Pine Mountain’s peak. It was a small group, maybe a dozen of us, made up of some people I knew already (Barb! Doug! Stratton!) and some I would grow to know. Our guide, James, walked us along a thin but well-kept trail that swerved up and down the side of the mountain. We talked about chestnut trees (old ones long gone from the blight, young hybrids still hopefully tended) and hemlock trees (plagued by hemlock woolly adelgids, but not yet a lost cause).

This was my second year at CCMMS, and only my fourth time visiting Pine Mountain. I’ve talked a bit about Pine Mountain before, but I learned something new this trip: water that falls atop Pine Mountain can drain into four major drainages across two states.

The falls we stood under drain into the Poor Fork of the Cumberland River, marked in teal on the above map. The falls are fed directly by rainwater, meaning we stood at the very headwaters of the Cumberland; the spray cascading from the rocks here feed the river whose mist creates the moonbow some 120 miles away.

Over the course of CCMMS, Anabel, Violet, and I got many chances to play and dance and sing – even (maybe especially?) outside of class. Every night, there was a different jam at a different place. We jammed on top of Pine Mountain at Wileys, as part of the square dance band at the Cowan Community Center, at karaoke bars, in parks, and even on a houseboat.

On Thursday, Violet and the Newsroom stopped by the WMMT studio to play on Dandy Jim’s Kentucky Roots Music Review.

TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 intro / 00:50 The Cuckoo->Ain’t No Grave / 06:20 chatting with Jim about the Stidham Old Time Music Association’s pick and bow program / 10:30 Silver Dagger / 12:55 reintroduction / 14:11 Maggots in the Sheephide

Anabel and Violet also got the chance to play with some incredible Kentucky musicians at the Levitt AMP in Whitesburg on Thursday. Check them out:

Be sure to listen to Linda Jean talk in that last video – I couldn’t agree with her more. Music sprawls out of the fertile soil of this state, and it’s places like Cowan that keep it well-watered and well-tended. Having marveled at Bad Branch Falls on day one, over on the far side of the mountain, I thought of Cowan Creek on the near side, feeding the same Kentucky river I’ve lived beside my whole life. The work of CCMMS was made clear as the creekwater: we are sustained by the things that others tend, and we, in turn, tend the things which sustain others. It flows with or without us (what a relief!), but our actions shape what it carries further downstream (what a responsibility!).

Similar sentiments were scattered within June’s Cowan Community Center’s SOURCE newsletter, which popped into my inbox earlier today.

Living in the shadow of Pine Mountain, it’s easy to forget that the water beginning here doesn’t remain here. It becomes creeks, rivers, and watersheds that connect our mountains to places far beyond our own. What begins here flows well beyond these hills.

Valerie Horn, Executive Director Cowan Community Center

[O]ur ancestors most definitely recognized that the geographical location of Bad Branch was a direct corridor from the Tennessee Valley to the Ohio Valley, and that the Cumberland, Kentucky, and Big Sandy Rivers, all have sources flowing from Pine Mountain in this general area. Archeological evidence indicates that these river valleys have been used as transportation corridors for thousands of rivers, and that our current culture is continuing to be shaped by the fact that we live on a path that connects communities, that exchanges ideas, and ultimately enhances the gene pool of human society.

James Stapleton, Watershed Coordinator Cowan Community Center

I considered the things I carried to Cowan. In a song sharing circle Tuesday night, I brought two tunes which I had learned from my friend and fellow musician Jeri Katherine in her community singing circles back in Frankfort: To Know The Dark (a Wendell Berry poem set to song) and Pretty Mother’s Home (a Shaker song). I remember, too, how it was Jeri who I first heard about this place from; back when we were both middle schoolers at Good Shepherd, she spearheaded a presentation on the devastation of mountaintop removal that was shown in the church’s sanctuary next door. She’s both a student and a teacher of Cowan herself.

Moving ever onward, as the water teaches us:

Catch you a little further down the banks,

-Clay