From
May/June/July 1996 Vol.41 #1 |
by Dan Kedding
David Holt is a storyteller, musician, collector of old songs
and stories, television host and all around nice guy. His
T.V. program "Fire on the Mountain" was a celebration of old
time and folk music that introduced our musical heritage to
a wide and varied audience. He currently hosts "Riverwalk:
Classic Jazz From the Landing" that combines traditional jazz
music with his stories of the legends of this American music.
David has been nominated for a Grammy and has won the Notable
Award from the American Library Association. He has recordings,
a video and a book he edited with his friend Bill Mooney,
Ready to Tell Tales that was released by August House in 1994.
He is a three-time winner of the Frets magazine poll as "best
old time banjo player". David was also selected in 1984 by
Esquire Magazine to be included in its list of "Men and Women
Who Are Changing America."
David moved from his native Texas and settled with his family
in Southern California when he was in junior high school.
He attended the University of California in Santa Barbara
and soon after began his lifelong odyssey collecting, learning,
and presenting the songs and stories of the southern mountains.
In 1975 he founded and directed the Appalachian Music Program
at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C., the only program
where students study, collect and learn the traditional performance
arts of the southern mountains.
David Holt tells stories, he sings songs, and the best part
of that equation is that he really enjoys himself and so does
the audience. I first met David at a ghost story concert we
did together with storyteller Janice Del Negro at the Fermi
Lab in suburban Chicago. At dinner afterwards I was struck
not only with David's knowledge of old time music and the
mountain tales but also with his complete respect and admiration
for the people who had gone before him and the folks from
whom he had collected many of his pieces.
Our paths have crossed several times since though usually
only for a few minutes to say hello and catch up on each other's
news. This past fall though we performed together at the Northern
Appalachian Storytelling Festival in Mansfield, Pa. (one of
the finest storytelling events anywhere) and had time to take
a walk, do a little antique shop hopping (David knows his
washboards!) and to sit down for an interview.
Dan: How did you achieve the
marriage of stories and songs?
David: I moved to North Carolina
in the early seventies to learn traditional banjo and to collect
music. As I was going around collecting music, there was always
some little tidbit about the song. I began to use those stories
in concert and realized it made the audience more interested
and gave them a reason to care about the music and about me.
I started telling things about myself as well. I think with
any performing, one of your main goals is to give the audience
a reason to care.
I didn't really think about form in stories until I came
across two stories. I heard about the elephant that was hanged
in Irwin, Tennessee, in 1916. I said to myself, "What? An
elephant was hanged?" So I went to the newspaper and got the
old articles from 1916 and put together the story. I told
it at a concert and it let the audience totally bummed out
and angry with me, the teller! But, it also made me realize
the power of storytelling.
I had a banjo student who told me about some man who lived
in Rozman, North Carolina who made a telephone from his house
to an old woman's house by taking a ground hog hide and tacking
it to his window pane, taking a wire, putting it in the middle
and running it half-a-mile down the hill to the old woman's
house. She also had a groundhog hide tacked in her window.
From that anecdote, I made the story of the hogaphone. I started
telling that story. I thought to myself, this is incredible
stuff! You can hold a person two-to-three minutes with a song,
but with the images of a story you can hold them for fifteen.
That was really fun.
So, that's how the mix of music and stories came about--by
collecting the songs and then finding the traditional stories
and making some of the stories out of anecdotes. Then I was
invited to the National Storytelling Festival in 1970. The
revival of storytelling was just beginning. I had never met
anybody who called themselves a storyteller. So I started
using the musician-storyteller idea.
Many years ago, in the mountains of western North Carolina,
there was a young couple named Ross and Anna. They were just
sixteen years old when they decided to get married. Ross'
father gave them sixty acres of mountain land. It was steep
land, and Ross had to walk all over that sixty acres just
to find one flat place. The best place he found was a large
flat granite rock that stuck out over the hollow. In the center
of that rock was a hole about the size of a man's fist that
went straight down, deep into the rock. It looked like a great
place to build a cabin. They could center the cabin right
over that hole, and they would not only have a granite floor,
but they would have a drain hole in the center of their cabin.
Everybody in the community got together and helped Ross and
Anna hew the logs and build a beautiful one room cabin.
Dan: Everything you do musically
is basically traditional.
David: Something I've collected
and usually had contact with.
Dan: You don't usually play
pieces that are penned by others or your own songs.
David: I do write songs and
know a lot of other people's songs, and I occasionally perform
them. But what I really love--what I feel is my calling--is
to collect, present, and perform traditional songs from the
southern mountains.
Dan: As we approach the Twenty-first
Century, what do you see as the relevance of traditional songs
in our lives? Why are they so valuable?
David: I think that they
contain more wisdom than we know. The same as with stories.
I feel that these old tunes are old mantras, little bits of
wisdom that people have put into a musical form. By playing
an old tune over and over, which is what we do in traditional
music, you're putting some kind of ancient wisdom through
your body. Sometimes, like with Soldier's Joy or Arkansas
Traveler, its a very positive, uplifting kind of thing and
its a very happy view of life. But, there are tunes like Frosty
Morning or Wayfaring Stranger, that have another message that
they are sending through your body. For me, they are like
a mantra--an old wisdom that can only be put into music. You
cannot put the meaning of Frosty Morning into words, its wisdom
is locked in the tune.
Dan: We agreed the other night
that in the sixties and seventies we were performing to the
converted, and now we are not. It seemed that the audience
in Mansfield (PA) held a lot of people who hadn't heard claw-hammer
banjo or slide guitar. How difficult is it to get a modern
audience hooked on old-time music?
David: I came of age in the
sixties. I am of this world, I'm a modern person, but I love
old-time music and traditional stories. I feel as if my goal
is to join those two and bring the music forward so it isn't
antiquated. I came to the southern mountains to learn it as
a real thing, not as a dusted-off piece from some museum.
I learned it from people who were actually playing it. Many
of those people have passed away, but the music survives in
younger people in the mountains. It is important to me to
take the living energy of the music and carry it forward.
It's not easy to communicate this to an audience, that I want
to make a living playing the same music some of my old-timey
friends played some fifty or seventy-five years ago.
I do believe the music still has relevance, the stories still
have relevance. It's my job, as the presenter, to find the
very best songs, the ones that people can relate to, that
have good rhythm. To me, rhythm is the basis of everything.
They also have to have good melody, good words, then I put
it in a setting that allows people to take it into their lives,
today.
I know hundreds and hundreds of songs, but I'm probably working
from a performance repertoire of maybe one hundred that I
know will work. For some of the more difficult ones, the subtle
ones, it is my job to give the audience a reason to care about
them. That's where the stories come in. I have to also give
them a reason to care about me as a performer, so I don't
lecture to them because they don't want to hear that. They
want to be entertained. But I've discovered that to get people
to think is entertaining as well. You don't always have to
be funny. The audience never knows where it's going to come
from. I have tremendous variety because I like to keep them
guessing as to what's going to come next.
The day of the wedding came, and everyone in the community
came out for the wedding, they had a wonderful time dancing
and singing. After the wedding, they had a "pounding" for
Ross and Anna. This was an old custom where everyone would
bring a pound of whatever a young couple would need to get
started in life.
A pound of meal, a pound of lard, a pound of sugar, a pound
of salt, a pound of meat. Ross and Anna took their goods up
to the cabin, put them on the shelves and settled in.
Dan: Since you perform both
traditional music and stories, what do you see as the differences
and similarities between the art forms, the audiences, and
the presentations?
David: When I learned the
songs, people were telling the stories that went along with
them, telling about them and where they came from. The mix
of music and storytelling was a natural thing for me. I really
don't find much difference at all. The songs and tunes work
on a different part of the mind and a different part of the
heart than the stories. They are so complimentary--that's
the beautiful thing! I think traditionally there have always
been stories and songs together.
Dan: You are not afraid to
use technology, though. That's what I think is exciting about
your performances. You are doing traditional music AND you
have thunderwear! Tell us about it.
David: I don't really care
anything about technology. None of my instruments are electrified.
But, my dad was an inventor and so I'm always inventing. I
have a pick that goes both ways. I designed this banjo with
a really deep pot for a certain sound that I wanted. Since
most of my music comes out of rhythm--I started as a drummer--I
love the hambone rhythms, body slapping. From that, I began
to think, why couldn't you take those slapping rhythms and
put drum triggers on a suit and play that suit through a drum
machine to get modern drum sounds. That was the genesis of
thunderwear, a body-slapping suit. I always try to present
it as an extension, the most modern extension, of the most
primitive form of music. To me, somehow, it fits.
It was kind of cold, end of the winter night, and Ross
built a big roaring fire in the fireplace. He could see how
wonderful that stone floor was going to be, because the fire
began to heat up that stone and fill up the cabin with warmth.
In the middle of the night, after they had gone to sleep,
the fire burned down, so Ross got out of bed to put some more
wood on the fire. He'd gotten about halfway across the floor
when the cabin was filled with a sound like, chchchchchchch.
Anna heard him scream and hit the floor. The last words she
heard him say were, "Don't get out of bed!"
Dan: Tell how you went from
being a drummer to being a performer of about a dozen instruments.
David: When I came to the
southern mountains, I really had only one intent, to learn
to play claw-hammer banjo as well as I possibly could. Luckily,
there were some old-time fiddlers, Byard Ray and a guy named
Tommy Hunter, living around Asheville, North Carolina, which
was my home. They would sit and teach me the old fiddle tunes
note-for-note on the banjo. I wanted to get them just right,
clean, but still coming from a drummer's aspect. I wanted
the music to have a lot of drive. Then I began to find all
these old-timers that no one was collecting from. They played
all these weird instruments, like the bottle, paper bag, jaw
harp, bones, washboard, slide guitar, ukulele. I hadn't realized
that music existed. So, I began to learn these things because
people were willing to show me and encourage me.
When I was doing concerts for audiences that didn't know
anything about traditional music, I realized that having different
sounds was enough to hold their interest. I found that these
odd instruments were useful to me in performance as well.
Since my basic love is rhythm--the banjo is basically a drum
with strings--I love the rhythm instruments. The audience
responds to rhythm on a very basic level. You pull out a paper
bag, some spoons, and you make an immediate connection with
your audience. It's like saying, "Hey, you don't need this
$3,000 instrument. Look at this!" It is also a challenge for
me. When I play the harmonica and the paper bag together,
that's a very hard thing to do, and I get it right! It is
not a gimmick, it's entertaining. And, I'm trying to make
them sound as musical as every molecule in my body can make
them.
Dan: What drew you to the
banjo?
David: When I first came
to the southern mountains in 1969, I was traveling with a
friend named Steve Keith. He was an old-time banjo player.
We traveled all through the mountains going to fiddler conventions
and visiting the houses of people who played music way back
in the mountains. Everywhere we went people just threw open
their doors when they heard that banjo. They'd say, "Come
on in and stay a week!" I had never seen anything like that
in my life. The sound of the old-time banjo, combined with
the unbelievable opening that people gave us, made me want
to learn to play. Then, I found the very same thing happened
to me. I was kind of a shy person, but this banjo would just
open peoples hearts. "I love that sound, what is that?" If
they knew it, they wanted to hear more. If they didn't know
it, they wanted to know what it was. I just fell in love with
the instrument. Even though I play a bunch of things, the
banjo is still the one I never get tired of playing or hearing.
Dan: There are only a few
people who have melded music and storytelling--you, Gamble
Rogers, Heather Forest, Bill Harley. Why haven't more people
gotten into this?
David: I think that luckily
people are using their heads and not getting into it unless
they play the music pretty well. It really pains me to see
someone pick up on instrument, a little dinky autoharp or
something, and just try to add something to a story, because
it usually doesn't! It's like adding a puppet. You don't need
a puppet, you don't need an autoharp. Get it out of there!
If you can't tell the story without it, forget the story.
But, if somebody is already a good musician, it just flows
together. I guess I can't answer why more people aren't doing
it, but I guess it is good that they aren't.
The next morning some of their neighbors came to see how
they were doing. They knocked on the door and got no reply.
They knocked a little harder and they heard that same sound
inside, chchchchchchch. They put their ear up against the
door and they heard sobbing inside.The door was barred from
de so they couldn't open it.They found a log that was left
over from building the cabin and rammed the door. The door
flew open and the site that met their eyes was unbelievable.
There was Ross in the center of the floor and stone cold dead.
There were rattlesnakes writhing all over his body and the
floor around him. They could see right away what had happened.
The fire had heated up the rock and those snakes must have
been hibernating inside the rock. They came up when they felt
that warmth and filled up the cabin. They had to get Anna
out. They climbed up the side of the cabin and ripped off
some of the shingles. One of the men tied a rope around his
waist, they lowered him down into the cabin and he put his
arms around Anna and brought her out. The only way they could
get Ross' body out was to lasso and try to throw it around
his foot as they stood at the door. They caught his foot and
dragged his body out.
Dan: When the audience is
walking out the door, what do you want them to remember about
you? What idea should they return with to the real world?
David: I want them to go
away, first of all, feeling that we are together as a group.
Something I really love to do at a concert is bring the audience
together. I build the thing, block-by-block, so that they
go out feeling good about themselves, feeling good about me,
feeling good about the music. By the end of the evening there's
something powerful that has happened. If I'm performing for
families, I want the kids to go away saying, "That traditional
music stuff is pretty good. The banjo, that's cool!" I want
the adults to go away thinking, "There's something that I
learned there." To me, that's the joy of putting on a concert.
I feel that traditional music is like an infection. Certain
people hear it and say, "I've got it, I've got to get that,
I've got to learn how it's done." We have to spread this music
wide and far because you can't expect everybody to get into
it. I wouldn't even want to see that. But certain children,
certain young people, certain adults will be infected and
say, "I've got to get more of that!" If it's spread far enough,
we'll cast enough seeds so that it will begin to grow and
will continue on. It is important to me to see that it will
continue on because I believe it does have something for us,
some wisdom and some roots that we can reach back on when
things get really scary in this world. I think that is what
the music was about in the past, and that's what it can still
do.
Dan: What do you stress with
kids in a show?
David: Fun. I want them to
have fun! I want them to come away saying, "I like that guy.
I like that music. I like those stories." I want them to think
two things. "Music and stories are really interesting. Maybe
I can do it!"
Dan: Your stories are finely
crafted. What's the process you go through to get them there?
David: Originally, it was
always telling, then telling, then telling. Making sure that
the story was building, going somewhere, and that it had a
very clear ending. That's very important. We, as humans, need
closure. Now, I can take a story and think it out almost on
my feet.
They had a funeral for Ross and everyone in the community
came. After the funeral they talked about what should be done
about the cabin. They decided that the best thing to do would
be to tear it down and rebuild it next to Anna's parents so
she would have a place to live. They went up there the next
day but the snakes were still all over the floor of that cabin.
They decided to wait a week but when they came back it seemed
like there were more snakes still coming out of that hole
as spring approached. They waited two weeks. When they got
back the snakes were all around the cabin. They couldn't get
close. It troubled the people so deeply they decided that
they would destroy that cabin. They lit it in fire and burned
it down. And that's the end of the true story of Ross and
Anna and their house of snakes.
Dan: Are the books fun?
David: It's a tremendous
amount of work and not as much fun as making a tape. But it
goes along with my collecting and interviewing people that
I like. I enjoy it and will continue to do it, but I like
the live performing more.
Dan: Your stories always make
the audience feel the humanness of it all. Do you look for
stories or do they find you?
David: I keep my eyes open
all the time for material--when I hear conversations, when
I'm reading a book. I've lived a lot in this life. I've had
a lot of tragedies happen to me, and a lot of good luck. I
feel like at age forty-nine I've lived two, full lives. So,
I believe I can incorporate some of that into what I do, whether
its funny or sad. To me, life is pretty mysterious, and there
are no easy answers. So, I keep my eyes open for material
that highlights that. |