Episode 2 Wayfaring Stranger with Phil Cunningham

This is the story of a musical migration,

unfolded over many generations and many journeys.

It's taken me from Scotland

to the northern part of Ireland,

as I've explored an enduring musical relationship.

I've followed in the footsteps of 17th-century Scottish migrants,

whose traditions became a vital part of the music of Ulster.

THEY SING A HYMN

Their descendants would become migrants again 100 years later,

when up to a quarter of a million Ulster Scots left Ireland

for what they hoped would be the promised land - America.

# Oh, my brother, take this warning

# Don't let old Satan hold your hand... #

They would leave their mark on religion, politics,

education, and on a new nation's democracy.

But I'm here to trace and to celebrate their influence

on what I would consider to be one of America's greatest gifts

to the world - the music.

# I am on my way to Canaan's land

# Where the soul never dies

# And there will be no parting hand

# Where the soul of man never dies

# Dear friends, there'll be no sad farewell

# There'll be no tear-dimmed eyes

# Where all is peace and joy and love

# And the soul of man never dies... #

Granny always said that we came from the border country.

She said, "But do you know? They loaded us up on a ship

"and shipped us off over to Northern Arlan,"

and wanted me to find that on the globe.

So I went looking for Northern Arlan - A-R-L-A-N -

never found it.

Finally, Daddy said, "Lookee there, it's right next to England."

THEY CHUCKLE

# ..I'm on my way to that fair land

# Where the soul of man never dies

# And there will be no parting hand

# Where the soul of man never dies

BOTH: # Dear friends, there'll be no sad farewell

# There'll be no tear-dimmed eyes

# Where all is peace and joy and love

# And the soul of man never dies... #

That was great.

SHIP'S HORN BLARES

-RADIO:

-WSM Nashville.

Now, from America's music city...

# WSM Nashville... #

# I've got a feeling called the blues, oh, Lord... #

# Blue moon keep on shining bright

# You're gonna bring me back my baby tonight... #

The Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tennessee.

# I'll sail my ship alone

# With all the dreams I own... #

Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world

come here to pay homage to country music's brightest stars.

# ..Good morning... #

..many of whom have Scotch Irish roots.

# ..I had a friend named Rambling Bob... #

The taproot of this music

is deep enough to go back centuries,

generations, across seas, across continents.

# ..Jolene, Jolene

# Jolene, Jolene... #

Whether it's rock and roll or bluegrass or country music,

one way or another, it goes back to old-time Appalachian music.

# ..Oh, can the circle be unbroken? #

The contribution of those who came from Ulster can never be taken away.

It's a foundational element.

# ..I saw the light I saw the light... #

The first layer of the music

that would be built upon

by successive generations.

# ..Concerning a great speckled bird... #

It's part of a continuous line, you know?

Its tradition is a step-by-step process.

Is it important?

It's beyond that.

It's just part of its fabric.

But I've come here to look behind the rhinestones,

in search of a forgotten treasure

from country music's earliest history.

CRACKLING RECORDING OF FIDDLE MUSIC

This is a relic of an epic migration,

carried here to America by one of the hundreds of thousands of people

who left the north of Ireland during the 18th century.

It sang to the South lands

in the hands of one of America's earliest radio stars.

It was played on country music's very first hit record.

Ah, if only this fiddle could talk.

I bet it could tell great stories of its life here in America.

Tales of restless pioneers, of slavery and civil war,

of a great depression and of a grand ole opry.

But it might tell another story too -

of a trade in strangers and a dream of liberty.

# Our ship, it is lying

# On fair Derry harbour

# Just waiting to take us

# Safe over the main

# So heaven be our pilot

# Aye, and bring us strong breezes

# Till we reach the green fields of Amerikay

# Come to the land where we will live and be

# Don't be afraid of the storm or the sea

# For it's when we get over

# We will surely discover

# That this is the land of sweet liberty. #

I just love that song, The Green Fields Of Amerikay.

It's the story of a wayfaring Ulsterman back in the 18th century.

He most probably would have made landfall right here,

as so many others did, in Philadelphia,

the City of Brotherly Love.

These Ulster setters knew all about mobility and change.

Mostly Presbyterians, many of them had suffered economic hardship

and religious discrimination.

Migration from Scotland had happened within living memory.

They knew what it meant to call more than one country home.

Though they referred to themselves as Irish,

when they came here to America they got a new name.

They were known as the Scotch Irish,

although nowadays we call them the Ulster Scots.

They came looking for land and freedom.

Philadelphia was just the starting point for the road to the frontier.

Right here on this very street was

where their American adventure really began.

These are two of America's finest country gentlemen.

Their family stories are part of that great migration from Ulster

and Scotland that helped shape America's music.

The first Douglas came in through Philadelphia

and was put on a wagon road south in about 1748.

They loved to drink, they loved to dance and to play music.

It's what I've heard about all of the Douglases back before me.

My mother was a Thomson,

my grandmother was a Ferguson.

Our whole life was built around music.

If you see a piece of beautiful fabric that American music is,

the fiddle tunes, the lyrics, the songs, the old hymns,

that red thread that's in there, and you can see it so plain,

to me that would be Scots Irish music.

My grandfather, I know, was a fiddle player.

And I think his father was a fiddle player.

So it goes back at least 150 years in this country,

so I can only imagine that it went back further.

It was a rough world that these Ulster Scots immigrants came into.

Most of the land they went into was covered with oak trees

and elm trees and nut trees, and you had to cut 'em down.

It was a rough place to be.

I think one word that may describe these settlers is perseverance.

But it was indeed a hard life,

not exactly like it was portrayed by some of the agents back in Ulster,

or the old country, who were trying to sell opportunity in America,

that land of honey, and it was in some ways,

but it was also a much harder life than they ever could have imagined.

The promised land wasn't what they expected.

One settler wrote to his brother that there was nothing here

"but trees and a wheen of Injuns".

The first settlers from Ulster came to the Pennsylvania backcountry

in 1719.

They named their settlements for the homes they'd left behind in Ireland.

And as they tried to make sense of their new lives in this harsh land,

the clung to familiar traditions and the old ways of worship.

By 1721, in a log cabin on this site,

they had built a Presbyterian meeting house.

# ..By thy salvation... #

The Presbyterian Church really was the centre of their lives

in those days.

That was their educational institution,

the focal point of their religion,

their whole world view revolved around the Presbyterian Church,

and the musical tradition was extremely important.

The early Presbyterians believed in worshipping God

with the tools that were provided in the Old Testament,

which means the Psalms of David.

When they first got here, they were isolated. Culturally isolated.

The Scotch Irish were distinctive in holding to

the old Scottish Psalter, and they fought over that,

if anybody tried to come in and sing something differently.

It's an icon of Scots Irish culture.

The faith of their Scottish forefathers helped them define

the new community, as the sons and daughters of Ulster

became American pioneers.

Beholden to no-one,

they came to embody the spirit of an age of revolution.

The children of those first settlers headed south to where

land was cheap and plentiful,

and they were joined by waves of new immigrants from Ulster.

Music has taken me down many, many roads in my life,

I can tell you, but this road that I'm on today

winds its way through thousands of years of history.

A natural corridor that stretched from New England

to the Southern Appalachians, this was once known as the Warrior Path,

a Native American trail

that, in the 18th century, became the settlers' Great Wagon Road.

Cutting through the mighty Shenandoah Valley,

the Wagon Road and the routes that grew from it

brought the settlers south and west.

Countless migrants from Scotland, Ulster, and their descendants

would have travelled this road before me,

and I suppose their stories and their journeys have become

a part of the legend of this historic highway.

And one of these journeys has been reimagined by my old pal,

bluegrass musician Tim O'Brien.

# I'm one of the few

# I'm proud to be standing

# I walked up the pier

# From the coffin ships landing

# My clothes were just rags

# No use for this weather

# But my back was strong

# My hands tough as leather

# I climbed these hills

# Till I came to the spot where I stand

# I cleared these fields

# And I pulled up the stones with my hands

# No more a wanderer

# No more a refugee

# A mountaineer is always free. #

I was actually consciously trying to write songs that dealt with

the immigrant experience in my home state of West Virginia.

# ..I took a Cherokee bride

# She gave me five babies

# And I sang at their wakes

# And I cried at their weddings

# I taught all my children the songs of my youth... #

You can imagine someone fleeing oppression,

either religious persecution or taxation

or just kind of getting away from a landlord or anything like that,

and going to the new land and making your own thing,

just building it with your own hands, clearing the field,

and then having your new family and showing them everything

around here is yours, and you don't need to bow down to anybody.

# ..A mountaineer is always free

# No kings or landlords to treat us like beggars and thieves

# No-one but God here to fear or look down on me

# No more a wanderer

# No more a refugee

# A mountaineer is always free. #

Every year, musicians and music lovers gather at Mount Airy

to celebrate the traditional music of North Carolina.

The old tunes still ring out round the campsites,

just as they must have done along the Wagon Road a long time ago.

I have imagined it a lot, because my family came down that wagon road,

all the way to North Carolina.

I think music was incredibly important because it was

something everybody could unite around. Everybody understands music.

Everybody understands the community feeling that it builds.

That was how people entertained themselves back then.

There was no other thing, really, to do, except maybe tell stories,

so music was incredibly important.

# ..Does my love Willie sail on board with you? #

As pioneers, travelling with a fiddle or something small

like that, it was a way of just bringing some joy to your heart

after a long day or after sorrow or whatever, you know?

Joy kills sorrow, you know?

If you're joyful, you're not going to be sorrowful.

Those two things can live in the same moment.

# ..Well, preaching and praying

# Singing everywhere

# Shouting the praises of his loving care... #

In November 1736, the Virginia Gazette carried what may well

have been the first reference to country music in America.

Some merry-disposed gentlemen from Hanover County,

who must have been of Scots or Ulster Scots descent,

announced their plans to celebrate St Andrew's Day

with a festival of music - a great fiddling contest.

The prize was to be a Cremona fiddle,

and it would be competed for by any amount of country fiddlers.

And isn't it nice to think that, 250 years down the line,

that country fiddling tradition is still alive and kicking

in the Blue Ridge Mountains?

The fiddle built community.

It certainly did on the crossing, on the boats coming over

and in the gatherings along the way,

and in the midst of hardship, the fiddle was at the core,

I think, of sustaining and building community.

Thank you.

Back home, we call this tune The Fairy Dance.

I've known it all my life.

But to Virginia fiddler Eddie Bond and his friends,

it's known as Old Molly Hare.

When this old Scots tune came to America,

it didn't just acquire a new name.

It got words too.

# Old Molly Hare, what you doing there?

# Running down the road just as hard as I can tear

# Step back, step back Daddy shot a bear

# Got him in the eye and never lost a hair... #

It was the hot new instrument of this new republic.

New styles of playing instrumental music,

a new repertory,

a new world,

it was an amazing revolutionary symbol.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Of course, some religious people found it troubling and problematic,

and so the fiddle has this dual role, you know,

powerfully important to many people,

but also scary and maybe evil to others,

associated with drinking, carousing, unruliness,

so it had this dual character, as the community did...

..both good and upstanding and a little loud and dissolute

all at the same time.

And without the fiddler, no dance.

The dances that came with the Scots Irish settlers,

they would refer to them as jigs and, back then,

"jig" did not mean six-eight time, it just meant a fast, lively dance.

They also did reels that could be done in

a small cabin or tavern or whatever, and those are, really,

the basis for our Southern square dances that developed later on.

Dance was hugely important in society at the time,

and when people from different worlds come together

in the same physical community,

the dance helps to seal that physical community as

a spiritual community, because when you're dancing together,

you're meeting and getting acquainted,

and you're really functioning together.

Ah, good stuff.

The dances that developed in frontier society grew out of

many different traditions -

European, Native American and African too.

America was a cultural melting pot,

where the Scotch Irish were just one people among many.

And as they encountered different musical cultures,

their own music began to change too.

There's no finer example of

different traditions coming together than this.

The musical conversation between the fiddle and the banjo

began at least 200 years ago.

There's a lot of rhythm and wisdom in the banjo.

The fiddle can imitate it or join in with it,

and those two rhythms together are incredibly powerful.

The hybrid of those two things just made this rocking dance music

that really never had been heard before.

When that African American influence got in there,

it just sent it into overdrive.

# Where'd you get your whisky? Where'd you get your dram?

# Where'd you get your whisky at? Way down in Rockingham

# Come on home, Cindy, Cindy

# Come on home, Cindy

# Come on home, Cindy, Cindy Sure do love you, girl. #

Thank you.

HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

The American banjo began life

as a folk instrument with the deepest African roots.

Africans introduced a totally new approach to rhythm and melody,

and they had a huge impact on

America's developing musical culture.

Music was helping to connect the culture across racial lines.

It's harder and harder to treat a person as a kind of a nonperson

when you see them making music

that makes you lift up your feet and dance.

That's what happened with African music,

banjo being a key part of it.

Thank you. Merci beaucoup. Yeah.

Music is always a two-way street.

White musicians fell in love with the banjo,

but African musicians also began to play European fiddles,

finding new ways to play the old tunes that had crossed over

from Scotland and Ireland.

Around about the time of the Revolutionary War

in the United States,

half of the fiddle players in the South were African American,

so there was a tremendous sharing of traditions.

They were picking up the fiddle and the tunes,

but they were playing it in a way that recalled

their instrumentation on the banjo.

You might have a tune that sounds kind of like the chords of an

Irish tune, but yet it has kind of the bluesy slides and inflections

of what you might find from African American practice.

I could just show you very quickly what one of these would be like.

So, this is a tune that's called Midnight.

The basic music track of Appalachian music started with the Scotch Irish,

but then it became a tapestry and an even richer story

of many other ethnic influences.

Just like their music, the Scotch Irish were changing too,

adapting to meet the challenges

of life on the frontier and forging a new American identity for

themselves and their children.

But in that century of restless, continuous migration,

an awful lot was lost.

Whole family histories, the stories of who they were

and where they once belonged were forgotten.

But, thankfully, some clues were written in stone.

In this kirkyard at Old Waxhaw, in South Carolina,

there are some very unique grave markers,

the earliest surviving art of British settlers in the Carolinas.

Between here and Pennsylvania, there are at least 1,000 similar stones.

I discovered who the carvers were -

the family named Bigham, B-I-G-H-A-M, Bigham,

who arrived in Pennsylvania and began carving about 1738.

In fact, I was able even able to take it back to County Antrim.

When we searched over there to see if we could find the antecedents

of these stone carvers, it seemed to be that Larne was the source area.

This is a stone from the Bigham workshop.

It says here, "In memory of John Crockett,

"who died December 16th 1800."

But if you look round the back, it would seem that our dear Mr Crockett

was actually born in a ship on the way here in the year 1730.

# But I am in the house of God

# Like to an olive green... #

Many of the stones feature the metrical psalms

from the Scottish Psalter of 1650.

# ..My confidence for ever hath

# Upon God's mercy... #

I've held the actual Psalter from 1650 in my own hands,

and to see words from it carved here in stone

by the hands of an Ulsterman,

it's a very powerful thing indeed, I can tell you.

What a long, hard journey they must have made to get here.

But the challenges of life on the frontier

made it harder to hold on to the old world

and the old ways of worship.

It had a lot to do with the stresses of life in the backwoods and

of making a new identity

in a place where you had people scattered over these wide

territories and moving so much.

So the music reflects all this change

and these shifts in identity.

You must be born again - it was a simple message but a powerful one.

Many Presbyterians experienced intense religious revivals

that inspired a freer and much more emotional expression of faith.

# I stand

# And cast a wishful eye... #

Thousands came together along the frontier

at great outdoor gatherings that became known as camp meetings.

The first one of these took place in Kentucky

and it was called the Great Revival,

and it was held outside of a Presbyterian meeting house,

but the ministers involved represented Baptists,

Presbyterians and Methodists,

and so the idea was not to represent church doctrine.

But rather to emphasis the religiosity,

the sacredness of the events,

and to get people really to experience,

you know, the power of God or the power of Christ.

Thousands came seeking salvation

and music would play a central and very powerful role

in these great gatherings.

# ..and scatters night... #

What you're talking about is basically Woodstock

of the 18th century, right?

But obviously it's not Woodstock and it's a religious event,

so what do you do with 20,000 people

and you want them all to do the same thing...

and there's no books

and you can't even guarantee that the people are literate?

So you have to come up with something else.

They discovered that if they sang songs with repeated lines -

"My Lord, what a morning

"My Lord, what a morning My Lord, what a morning

"When the stars begin to fall

"Rocks and mountains" - now you could pick it up from that point on.

All the mothers want to go, they want to go up to heaven

and experience God - OK, that's the first verse.

So what do you do for the second verse?

Well, instead of mothers, let's do fathers.

So it's all the same words, except fathers.

And then what do you do for the third verse?

Well, let's do sisters.

Fourth verse - brothers.

And then fifth verse - everyone.

# Beneath the sacred throne of God... #

So the camp meeting tradition really emphasised

the idea of emotion and the power of emotion and communicating

with the personal role that religion could have in people's lives.

The experience of singing these simple hymns became part of

everyday life throughout the South.

Something that would have a profound impact on the development

of modern popular music.

SHAPE NOTE SINGING

In the early 19th century,

the desire to improve congregational singing

led to the development of a uniquely American tradition -

shape note singing.

This music has never been owned

by any particular congregation or church.

People are free to get from it what they get from it -

that varies by the person -

so there's no-one telling them that this is how you have to believe.

# I am a poor wayfaring stranger

# I journey through this world of woe... #

We're singing for ourselves and for God.

We're not singing for an audience.

When we're singing, we're seeing each other's faces

and there's a type of bonding and fellowship in that singing,

just as there is with people

when they gather and break bread together.

# I want to wear a crown of glory

# When I get home to that good land

# I want to shout salvation's story

# In concert with the blood-washed band. #

We start the music with a note,

not with a rest,

and so we will start singing the laws when our arm is headed down.

There...

about two-thirds of the way down.

Not all the way up, not all the way down,

but about two-thirds of the way down. About four o'clock.

Shape note singing was designed to help those who couldn't read music.

It was a simple system,

where the notes were represented by geometric shapes,

which anyone could follow.

SINGING

Singing schools became very popular and soon song leaders began

to produce the first shape note song books,

the most popular of which was called The Sacred Harp.

Good.

The shape note books are anthologies of a great variety of music,

so the tunebook's compilers, who were self-taught musicians,

who went to the little singing schools and learnt how to do it

and then compiled the books and wrote pieces and...

and took in things they knew from oral tradition.

It really was a popular music.

The story is that, in the decades around the civil war,

The Sacred Harp was the book most often found in Southern homes

outside of The Bible.

# Farewell, my friend

# I'm bound for Canaan

# I'm travelling through the wilderness... #

The Sacred Harp was also, of course, a way of describing the human voice.

For believers, it was God's gift -

their first and best musical instrument.

Certainly among the Scotch-Irish, we have song leaders

and one of the most prominent in this area was William Walker,

who is known to history as Singing Billy.

And he was a song teacher,

and he went from town to town

teaching people how to sing secular hymns in worship services.

When he was 18, William Walker wrote his first song,

supposedly, called Solemn Call.

He ran a bookstore in Spartanburg

and he also worked for the Spartanburg newspaper -

called the Carolina Spartan -

so it's kind of interesting when you can find little blips

from newspapers back then,

where he has ads for his books.

This thing that says, "Just out. Best book ever. Buy it."

You know, this kind of thing -

which I think I have for you in the hand-out.

Singing Billy drew his source material from popular culture,

the songs and tunes he'd grown up with,

and it struck a chord.

His songbook, The Southern Harmony, sold more than 500,000 copies.

William Walker said, "Why should the devil have all the good tunes?"

We think of this music now as traditional, historic music.

At the time, it was popular, current music.

SINGING

Songs of the day, many of which were field tunes,

many of which were perhaps played by a fifer...

..or even ballads, these songs that were in the air,

were good musical material to arrange with harmony parts

and to set to hymn texts.

Pop and tradition were not separate categories of music at that time -

it was just all music -

so whatever was a good source of a tune,

whether it was from a ballad singer or from a piece of sheet music,

it was all fair game.

THEY HARMONISE

# Glory, glory, hallelujah

# Praise God

# I'm heaven bound

Amen

# When he hard my prayer

# When he heard my prayer and he answered me

# Yes, he answered me

# Glory, glory... #

This is coal mining country, Central Appalachia,

on the border between Virginia and Kentucky,

where old-time religion is still strong.

When the Scotch Irish pushed on into new territory like this,

where Presbyterian ministers were in short supply,

many among them turned to the Baptist church.

# I often kneel with friends and pray... #

Traditional Baptist congregations here still hold on to the way

of unaccompanied singing in their worship.

THEY SING

This musical tradition reaches back to Presbyterian psalm singing...

to old tunes and folk songs

and the revival choruses of the camp meetings.

At its heart is a powerful singing style

that has shaped the voices of generations of country singers.

THEY SING

# The Lord has promised good to me... #

Most of them old-time songs, Amazing Grace,

if you sit down and go through that

and look at it and read it,

it will tell you about a man that's went through a travel...

from nature to grace.

That the love...

When you're born again, God borns you with his love.

Working in the old coal mines,

my heart would get so heavy, I was troubled up.

When I gave it all into God's hands,

God made a new man out of me.

Some people say, "Well, you ain't got no music."

Yes, when God blesses his service and the whole crowd to sing,

you already hear the music...

Their spirit, yeah.

# Beulah Land

# I'm longing for you

# And someday on thee I'll stand

# There my home will be eternal... #

The vocal style, that is an identity marker.

It's not a sweet tone, it's a strong tone,

that may come from that Scots Irish tradition.

The Ulster singers brought a kind of stronger,

harsher tone with them and that pleased a lot of people

and a lot of people picked it up or retained it.

That vocal style is one of the things

that I love best in the music.

# Beulah Land

# I'm longing for you

# Sweet Beulah Land. #

As well as sacred songs, the centuries-old ballad tradition

of the Scotch Irish was strong in these mountains.

Great story songs of murder and revenge, love and loss,

were part of everyday life.

The women who sang them, for their children and for themselves,

became the guardians of a living tradition.

# Come, you fair and tender ladies

# Take warning how you court young men... #

# Oh, the black jack baby came riding by

# Whistling so merrily... #

To get a sense of who they were and what they were thinking,

what they were feeling,

we have the tunes and we have the songs.

# In Scarlet Town, where I was born

# There was a fair maid dwelling... #

These are not museum pieces, these are not relics

from the old country.

# And they called her Barbriallen. #

The songs speak of things remembered,

the songs speak of things hoped for.

# Oh, if I leave my house, carpenter

# And sail away with you

# What will ye have to maintain me upon

# When we are far away? #

They are the legacy of those who came before,

both in Scotland and in Ulster.

They come out of the lives of people who are now in America,

but they'd had experiences back in Ireland,

just as their great-great-great grandparents

had had experiences in Scotland.

# It's been a year since last we met

# And we may never meet again

# I have struggled to forget

# But the struggle is in vain... #

The mountain music of Appalachia became the well spring

from which so much American music would draw,

and the songs were at the heart of it.

# And the midnight on the seas

# His bright smile haunts me still... #

They've been shared and celebrated all over the world

by North Carolina folklorist,

musician and seventh-generation ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams.

# ..haunts me still... #

The community itself had this wealth of old songs

and each person knew their 10 or 15,

and then somebody else might know 20,

but my granny knew over a 100 themselves.

And granny's sister, she must have known 500 songs.

That's amazing.

And did your grandmother ever talk to you

about where these songs came from?

She always said they came from across the big pond...

in the homeplace, if you can believe that.

Tell me a little bit about your family connection

to Scotland and Ireland.

My family came out of Portstewart, Coleraine...

and I think it was like Omagh or Armagh.

There's both.

Well...are they close together?!

-Not that far.

-OK.

-Nothing's very far from anything in Ireland.

-That's right.

But she said we, the majority of us, came from "Northern Arlan".

Why were the songs so important to people here, in this area?

Well, I got to study a lot about that because I couldn't

figure out why these old women had remembered all these songs.

And so one day I said to Granny's sister,

"OK, so you had how many children?"

She said, "Well, 15, 13 living."

She was left in that, what they called a ten-by-ten...

which was a ten-foot-wide, perfectly square, log cabin

-with 13 children under the age of 18.

-Yeah.

Who all need entertained.

Wouldn't you have sung about spirits and sprites and ladies and

white knights if you'd had to do all this?!

A lot of those kids learned the ballads

just that way cos their mother sang them.

# If I had the wings of an angel... #

You know, they were always thinking about ways to get away from

-them little ten-by-tens with all those kids in them.

-Yeah.

That's why, I think,

they survived.

-And they told stories, great stories.

-Yeah.

And you're still singing...

I'm still singing them, yep.

I just fell in love with them, too, Phil.

There was something about them that reminded me...

I mean, think about all the loving hearts

that carried these songs across the ocean.

# Dinah, oh, Dinah

# Please say that you'll be mine

# Take you home and love you

# Kiss you all the time

# I'll kiss you all the time

# I'll kiss you all the time. #

# You ride on the old grey mare

# And I'll ride on the roan

# If you get there before I do

# You better leave my Dinah alone

# Better leave my Dinah alone

# You better leave my Dinah alone

# It's snowing, it's snowing

# The world is turning white

# Sun lights up the daytime

# Save Dinah for the night

# Save Dinah for the night Save Dinah for the night. #

These songs endured not just because

they reminded people of who they were and where they had come from,

but because they expressed deep human emotions.

They spoke truths to people about their experiences,

whether on the journey across the ocean

or through the trials of life.

# WSB, the voice of the South

# Radiophone broadcasting station... #

As the 20th century dawned, the music,

which had sustained and helped define those isolated rural

communities for so long, would come down from the mountains.

The new medium of radio would now carry the music

to a national audience and make it the voice of America.

March 16, 1922 - WSB Atlanta made the first ever radio broadcast

in the South.

A Scotch Irish millworker and part-time moonshiner

became the first musician to play country music on American radio -

his name was Fiddlin' John Carson.

'Hello, John, how's your cat popping today?

'Fine as frog hair.

'Run 90 gallon last night, as good as Sal ever smacked her lips on.'

That historic broadcast made him a star in the South

and, in 1923, he made his first record

with New York talent scout Ralph Peer.

FIDDLE MUSIC PLAYS

"Pluperfect awful" was Peer's verdict on the songs

Carson recorded for him in Atlanta,

but the record company released them anyway.

When the first 500 records sold out,

a local agent called Peer and told him he had a riot on his hands

and he demanded 10,000 more.

So he put Fiddlin' John on a train to New York,

where he would make a proper studio version

of what had now become the first hit record in country music history.

TRAIN HORN BLARES

# The chimney's falling down and the roof is all caved in

# Letting in the sunshine and the rain

# And the only friend I have left is this good old dog of mine

# And the little old log cabin in the lane. #

Almost a century later, the song that made a Scotch Irish moonshiner

a pioneer in American music history

is still a folk and country standard.

Half a million people bought this record.

John Carson had changed everything.

He'd shown the world there was money in this "hillbilly music".

# Oh, I don't have long to stay here

# What little time I've got

# I want to rest content while I remain

# Till death shall call this dog and me

# To find a better home

# In that little old log cabin in the lane

# Oh, the chimney's fallen down

# And the roof is all caved in

# Letting in the sunshine and rain

# And the only friend I have left is this good old dog of mine

# In the little old log cabin in the lane. #

Bristol - a town with one foot in Virginia and the other in Tennessee.

It calls itself "the birthplace of country music".

The street names here honour

the town's place in American music history,

harking back to the summer of 1927.

Ralph Peer, that same New York talent scout

who struck gold with John Carson,

came to Bristol looking for another hillbilly hit.

He wanted to tap into a deep vein of American folk music

and the country round Bristol was full of musicians and singers

steeped in the same Scotch Irish musical culture

that had produced John Carson.

# Once I had a sweetheart... #

In a makeshift studio over an old hat factory

he recorded Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman,

who fused hillbilly music with the blues he'd learned from black musicians.

# ..dark and curly

# His loving eyes were blue... #

Peer also recorded the treasured songs of a mountain family

and America fell in love with the distinctive voice of Sara Carter.

# Single girl, single girl

# She's going dressed fine... #

The Carters became the first family of American folk.

Many believe those Bristol sessions

were country music's Big Bang moment.

But it was John Carson who lit the spark.

# ..that little old log cabin in the lane. #

It was his success in 1923 that inspired

a generation of working men and women to see their musical

heritage as a way to escape from poverty.

If Fiddlin' John could do it,

well, they might just have a go themselves.

That's what brought the Carters and Jimmie Rodgers here to Bristol,

that hope for a better future -

the same dream that brought John Carson's people and that

grand old fiddle across the sea all those years ago.

John Carson's fiddle is silent now,

an honoured relic in country music's Hall Of Fame,

but it still speaks to us of the people whose musical traditions

can claim a proud place in the founding story of American music.

In the next episode, I'll follow the story from the recording boom

of the '20s to the folk revival of the '60s.

And I'll trace the unbroken circle of music that still connects

the New World and the old.