Ola Belle Reed

Fifty years ago, when she was fifty, Ola Belle Reed looked back to tell the story of her life. For months we had been recording her songs. Now it was time for her life. She tells first about her family, a family famed for music, then lingers emotionally on her childhood, passed on the banks of New River in the high Blue Ridge of Ashe County, North Carolina. She remembers the hard times of the Depression when her family left the mountains and sought work in the north, along the Mason-Dixon Line in Maryland and Pennsylvania. There she cleaned the houses of other women and muffled the pain of home-sickness by performing with other migrants from Ashe County in the North Carolina Ridge Runners. After her younger brother Alex returned from the Second World War, the two of them formed their own country band, the New River Boys and Girls. When we met in 1966, Alex and Ola Belle had recorded for Starday and they were broadcasting weekly from the big store, Campbell’s Corner, they managed in Oxford, Pennsylvania. We began then to record her repertory of Appalachian songs, and I helped Ola Belle establish the solo career that would lead to a National Heritage Fellowship in 1986, shortly after Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley were similarly honored.

Ola Belle died after a long illness in 2002. Six years later, Cliff Murphy found my old tapes and began to track Ola Belle’s legacy, recording her son, her nephews, and other musicians who played Appalachian music in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. We gathered another colleague, Doug Peach, and the three of us produced a book, Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line, published by Dust-to-Digital in Atlanta, and carrying two CDs, one from my tapes of 1966-67, the other from Cliff’s recordings of 2008-14. What follows is the book’s third chapter, containing Ola Belle’s memories, transcribed from the tapes on which she described Appalachian life.

Blue Ridge Mountain Blues

It is springtime in Pennsylvania, the tape is rolling, and Ola Belle has shifted in the story of her life from her family to her place, the place of her childhood in the mountains. Together we are exploring the landscape of memory. She takes sweet, wistful pleasure in describing the mountain life of the past. My concern is less with the objective facts of the past than it is with the subjective facts of the present, the way that Ola Belle’s talk of her place, like her talk of her family, reveals the thought of the mature singer I know, the woman whose songs I have recorded, whose artistry I admire.

What interests me is how nostalgia can become a critical, oppositional position. My master in this matter was on old man in Ireland, Hugh Nolan. He was born in 1896 and lived in the two rooms of the house his grandfather built. A poor farmer and a saint, he had witnessed great changes, and as the revered historian of his place, Ballymenone, he taught that the hard life of the past brought people together. In the bad old days, before electricity and the internal combustion engine, people worked together in the fields and gathered at night in the ceili to chat and sing. The hard life of the past, he argued, brought social order, but the soft life of the present, the life of lonely labor, automotive travel, and silence, has brought social disorder.

Ola Belle thought like that. The problem today, she has told us, is a lack of togetherness.

For both Ola Belle and Alex, the hard life of the past was captured in memories of their maternal grandparents, the Osbornes, who lived just to the north in the mountains of Grayson County, Virginia, in a cabin with a dirt floor. Their grandfather, Cicero, armed himself and trekked out to buy the few things they needed: salt, gunpowder, and lead to mold bullets. He hunted his meat and butchered slain beasts in the house, so the bears and wildcats would not be drawn by the scent of blood. Their grandmother, Darthula, burned corncobs to get the ash needed to make bread rise. She used a spinning wheel to make yarn, and she was a lovely singer from whom Ola Belle learned old songs. They had thirteen children.

When Alex and Ola Belle were among the thirteen in the next generation, they lived during the summers in a cabin of two rooms, with one chimney and opposed front and back doors, the ancient Irish form, translated from stone to timber on the frontier. One of Ola Belle’s memories of that house can serve as an Appalachian emblem. Time and again, mountain people have told me of this experience: when it rained, the wooden shingles of the roof swelled to prevent leaks, but dry snow filtered through the cracks to powder the quilts of the sleepers beneath. In turning her memory into words, Ola Belle begins to counter the attitudes she knows others hold about life in the mountains:

“In the wintertime, when the wind blows and it snows, if there’s a crack anywhere, the snow will come in. And I have woke up many mornings—we’d have our heads covered up—knowing that when we lifted it, the snow would trickle in on us.

“And you know, it didn’t make us miserable. It didn’t make us feel bad.

“And when we jumped out, boy, we lit for the other room where the fire was, and I can look back, and I don’t see that our life was miserable.”

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If it was not miserable, it was certainly hard, demanding courage and bringing people into generous connection:

“Talk about enduring and endurance, they really had it, and on my grandmother’s side, I know that when they lived on dirt floors—they were one of the first families—I know that they, well, they had to have each other. They had to live close together because, I mean, people had to help each other.”

Another time, trusting her memory and contradicting negative opinion, she spoke of the human understanding that drew mountain people together:

“You don’t change that much. I could stay away from the mountains a lifetime, and I can still see, know, feel the things that I grew up with. And our way of life was embedded into you so strong that you just naturally knew it. You didn’t have to be told.

“You don’t have to be told, and really and truly, a lot of people might think that the way of life in the mountains was so horrible—but the thing they had for each other. They had love for each other, as human beings. They had understanding, compassion.

“And if I would be away a hundred years, I don’t think I’d ever forget a minute of it.”

Love brought collective generosity. “If anybody really didn’t have anything to eat,” she said, “well, the neighborhood mostly would see that they did have something. And they’d share what little they had.” Later she elaborated:

“You’ve heard the old statement, I neither lend nor borrow. If we ran out of something—see, we didn’t live close to a store—or if we ran out of anything, we had no trouble atall. Maybe it might be a mile to a neighbor’s house, but we borrowed. And we took back the same amount that we borrowed.

“And, to me, that was kind of a wonderful thing, because people sort of looked after each other. I mean, together they kind of looked after each other.

“And they shared with the others. It was a sharing kind of life.”

It was, you can be sure, more, and less, than a sharing kind of life. There had to be the kind of neighborly nastiness, familial friction, and personal desperation that Patrick Kavanagh described for his rural place in Tarry Flynn and The Great Hunger. But Ola Belle stressed generosity, remembering her grandfather buying shoes for the family of a poor neighbor, remembering her father giving Christmas gifts, little paper bags full of fruit and candy, to all the kids in the neighborhood. And she fixes on sharing to reveal, like Hugh Nolan, the benefit in hardship, and, like him, to register her complaint about the present. In his case, social disorder had led to violence in the time of the Irish Troubles. In her case, the lack of togetherness had created the gulf between the rich and the wretched in America, and the disruption of unity by greed and prejudice had caused many, feeling unloved, to drift into the anti-social acts that others call bad, but Ola Belle, seeking reasons, understands as the consequence of what others call progress.

What is good about hardship, for Ola Belle, is that it leads to togetherness, an old mountain virtue. Her theme of unity and its connection to difficulty runs into her account of the church. Church meetings provided excitement, and religion encouraged endurance:

“All in all, I think the life down there—well, we at night we used to go wherever we wanted to go; we used to walk to meetings. They’d have a revival meeting miles away. We didn’t think anything of walking five miles. Get together and go. And everybody went.

“The church meetings back then was something that I would just say, actually, was out of this world. Whether they were right, whether they were wrong, they were devoted, dedicated, because they felt that when they went to the church, they felt that they had something more to live for, more to hang on to, because life was, if you look at it right, it was hard. Survival. It was really hard, but it surely was great.”

Setting aside the experience of her grandfather, the fiddling preacher Alexander Campbell, Ola Belle describes the church as a source and locus of togetherness, a unity now lost:

“Now, we used to go to church. Everybody went; in our country most everybody went. You didn’t have to belong to go, and you didn’t have to be what they call a Christian to go.

“We just went. We all sang. Everybody sang.

“We were together. And it’s like the song I sing about the little church called the shelter. They’d sing and praise the Lord together.

“That’s how they felt. They were all welcome.

“We had a togetherness that I don’t think that I have ever seen again. In our community, if there was somebody that didn’t have, regardless of the reason—maybe the father didn’t work, maybe the father was an alcoholic, but that didn’t alter the fact that the children were hungry.”

They all sang together at church, and that experience, the familiar onflow from the shape-note singing schools of the past, made possible the tight harmonies of bluegrass in the future. When the voices of Alex, Ola Belle, and Burl blend easily, naturally on the stage at Campbell’s Corner, something sacred runs in the undertone of their union.

During a late session in our series on mountain life, I asked Ola Belle to talk about the music back then. She said they sang at “house-to-house get-togethers,” at parties, bean stringings, and corn shuckings, and they played for square dances. She continued:

“When we’d play music it would just mostly be for a group of people to listen to. And I can remember I used to go to different houses and stay all night, you know. They’d invite me to stay all night and play music. And then somebody else would play, and we used to dance. I used to do the Charleston.”

She laughs and goes on:

“Our type of music is a sort of togetherness type of music. And most everybody—I mean, maybe, even if they weren’t professionals, they would play a little bit, and it’s passed on from one to another.

“And even now, as old as I am, at fifty-one, every once in a while a song will come back to me that I have completely forgotten, that nobody does, that is not recorded. And I’ll work on it in my own mind to remember, and eventually I’ll remember that song because it’s a type of music that gets embedded, you know, right in your very soul, I guess you’d say.

“And, course they had medicine shows, but if you recall where I came from, there wasn’t many towns, too many towns. It was a mountainous type of country. They used to get together and play music. Not for no reason other than the enjoyment of it. And that’s how it got spread around.

“My father always played music. He was a school teacher; he played an organ, one of the old-fashioned organs, and he played a fiddle, and he played a very good clawhammer banjo. And then on my father’s side, my uncle played, and on my mother’s side, my mother’s people, there was music in their generation.

“And I think they played for enjoyment, rather than for money, and that’s how they kept it alive.

“And as time went on, music, as you know, naturally, the songs got changed because possibly, maybe, they wouldn’t sell as much if they did them the old, unadulterated way.

“And I’ll tell you another thing that’s very important. They used to have in the churches, you know, gospel music. In the churches. And they used to have prayer meetings in homes and everybody sang, see. In the home. Not just me: everybody.

“And they also had what they called—today they’d call it association, but back those days they called it the sociation of churches, in other words, people’d come from churches all over, and they’d have dinner on the ground. They’d have gospel music.

“And everybody got together, and most types of get-together had some kind of music.

“And people mostly enjoyed playing this sort of music. Because it was their music. It was music of their land.”

Settlement on her mountainous landscape was dispersed in the pastoral manner. Houses stood amid the fields where the cattle grazed. They stood apart from one another, and apart from the plain white churches that also stood alone. Togetherness was not as easy as it was in the English agricultural village where the farmhouses clustered tightly around the parish church. It took effort, compelled by need, driven by the desire to travel long distances and join in making a togetherness type of music, the lonesome sound of their land.

Sometimes her mood was emotional and blue, sometimes she seemed as cool as any historian reporting the facts of the past, but by considering the virtue of togetherness in relation to difficulty and desire, Ola Belle had one way to arrange her memories of the Blue Ridge and shape them into a critique of modern times.

Interlinked with that rhetorical move, she had another. She countered views of mountain life as miserable with memories of her own. It wasn’t so bad. They had enough to eat and clothes to wear:

“Every part of the country had different foods. Every place has its own kind. They had different kinds in different places. They are given to cooking different things. Let’s say, over in Italy they have spaghetti.

“Well, down where I came from, when I grew up, we had very few potatoes. We had beans. We had corn bread, we had biscuits. We had milk. Good wholesome food.

“We didn’t starve. That’s one thing. We did not have the many things we have on the table today, but we had enough. Because my mother said, A good cook is a woman who can take what she has, and make something for her family to eat out of it. Not one that has everything in the book to take out of a can.

“We moved into town in the fall of the year when school starts. And of course there would be five or six of us going to school at the same time.

“Now, we had clothes enough, nothing fancy, and we had enough to eat. We had plenty to eat, but we didn’t have the things they have now. And I can remember one thing that I was very hungry for was sweet things.”

The place she remembers is the cabin by the river where they lived in the summer, working on the farm that supplied their wholesome food. There were fields of corn. There was an orchard, and twice in our talks Ola Belle paused to praise the apples, red or yellow, big and sweet. They gathered greens along the banks of the river, and from the mountains above they gathered wild raspberries, wineberries, elderberries, thornberries, huckleberries, and big sweet dewberries; they gathered hog plums, fox grapes, possum grapes, chicken grapes, and crab apples. She remembered:

“We grew a lot of our food. As I told you before, we grew a lot of our tame food in the summertime, and then we gathered wild on the mountains, just a wonderful lot of wild foods like blackberries. They were large and sweet, and they even grew in shaded places, you know. We used to go out with two or three buckets in the morning, and maybe not come back till after dinner with them full.”

The place was a cabin by the river. When Doug Peach and I were wandering Ashe County, we met Austin Miller who lived beside the North Fork of New River and directed us to the site of the Campbell home. A relative of his, Lester Miller, played with Ola Belle in the North Carolina Ridge Runners, and Mr. Miller, who was born in 1939, had heard Alex and Ola Belle play in Maryland. Beside a narrow back road there is a big flat rock where, he told us with slight conviction, Ola Belle used to sit to compose her songs. Below the rock at the riverside, no trace remains of the old house, but the topography is telling. There is little level land for farming. Mountains rise abruptly, densely wooded now, from both banks of the North Fork of New River.

The time Ola Belle remembers is when she was big enough to handle serious responsibilities. Ola Belle was born in the middle of the thirteen; “I diapered six” is how she put it. She recalls taking babies from her bed to the bed of her mother when they needed feeding. Her mother, she said, “nursed all the babies at the breast. They were fat, quiet, healthy babies; they were satisfied. There was a satisfaction in those babies that you don’t find with a bottle baby.” Work on the farm was a duty, but within it she found feelings of contentment:

“We had a cow and we milked the cow, and I have many, many times gone to the milk gap myself, and you know there was always a warm, comfortable feeling, sitting on an old bucket, milking the cow.

“And you just don’t capture these feelings. People couldn’t imagine that never went through something like that. You couldn’t imagine how those things feel. When you go to bed at night, you’re tired, you’re weary. You can sleep.

“And in our house, in our house I used to take about two or three of the kids to sleep with me, the smallest ones. And we had plenty of covers, understand, but no heat in the one room.”

The work was hard, but it was relieved by instants of play, and at the end came the nourishing delight of dinner:

“In the summertime when we raised our corn, we’d go to the field in the morning to hoe. You might have used a cultivator plow, but it was mountainside”—too steep—“and you couldn’t do very good with it.

“And lots of times they had what you called new ground. We cleared off the trees, and in the spring of the year you’d have to take a hoe and chop the roots, because you didn’t get them all grubbed out. And that sometimes raised the best of corn of any ground, because it was rich.

“We would hoe corn until dinnertime. And you walk off the mountain with your knees a-knocking for dinner.

“Dinner to us came in the middle of the day, and we’d walk off the mountain with our knees a-knocking, and head for the river. We’d go swimming, and we’d come back to the house, and we’d eat our dinner.”

What strikes the listener is how an older child in a big family has to assume responsibility early, how the child of an alcoholic has to grow up quickly and take control. What strikes Ola Belle about her childhood was the absence of fear. They roamed the mountains without fear:

“We used to get just literally lost in the mountains. We were right at home. We weren’t afraid of anything. We had snakes, we had copperheads, and they were very deadly, but I think they were more or less afraid of us.”

They played on the river without fear:

“We used to have a flat-bottom boat, made out of wood, and you didn’t use oars. You poled it on New River.

“The one thing that I look back on a lot of times: we weren’t afraid. Nothing. Nighttime, daytime, no other time. Many times we took a blanket outside and slept outside when it was warm because there was very little dampness and no mosquitoes.

“And I used to take the kids, and put them in the boat, and take them up the river, and pole it with the boat pole.

“We played in that river. We swam in it.”

Another time Ola Belle said:

“I think the good Lord looked after all the youngsters down there, because we used to ride boats up and down a rough river.

“Danger? You didn’t seem to know danger. You weren’t afraid of the things you’re afraid of today. And I think sometimes that has a lot to do with the fact: they let us go, and they let us come.”

They were not sucked into an environment of fear by the mass media, by the reports of murders and houses in flames, of famines and disasters in faraway lands, that turn people into frightened consumers of things they don’t need. She recalled:

“See, we didn’t have no radio. There were no radios. There was no way of communication.

“Naturally, we didn’t worry about world affairs, because maybe after something had happened, it would be six months, maybe, before you’d hear it. And really and truly, you didn’t bother yourself with it because you didn’t know about it.”

In Ola Belle’s youth, rural music of the kind she played was being broadcast, and in time the radio would become a force for unifying and spreading the sound, but ninety percent of the houses in the South lacked radios when she was a child, and there were none, she said, in her place. Her music was grounded in a time of face-to-face gatherings in homes and churches. Here is her summary statement:

“To me, the life in the mountains was great. People possibly today if they could see how we actually lived, they would probably think it was terrible; they would think it was horrible.

“But we didn’t know any different. We lived. Even when I was a girl, the things that we didn’t have, we didn’t know we were supposed to have them.

“We didn’t really need for much, but one thing we had that sometimes it’s hard to find today was peace of mind. Let me say freedom of mind.

“Because we didn’t actually know the things that go on out in the world.

“Our life in the mountains was good. We didn’t look for or expect very much, because to us it was a way of life, and the only way of life we knew.”

Growing up and moving north, Ola Belle has learned about other ways of life, other cultures. Mountain life, with its hardships and togetherness, its work and play and freedom from fear, has become, for her, one of many possibilities. They had beans and corn bread; Italians have spaghetti. What is right for her is not necessarily right for others. She has attained a mature cultural relativism, bringing her to new appreciation for her own culture and respect for the ways of others.

It was 1967. We were speaking in the time of civil rights demonstrations and youthful unrest. Ola Belle sympathized with African Americans who, she said, were being treated nearly as badly as her people were when they moved north, and she sympathized especially with the young people who, she said, were once criticized for showing no interest in politics but are now criticized for paying attention to politics and rallying against the war in Vietnam. The young are tired of hypocrisy; Ola Belle sees how angry people the world over could become rebellious.

Seeking to understand others, she has come, by contrast, to a fuller and deeper understanding of the culture of her youth, and Ola Belle is saddened by people from the mountains, including members of her own family, who struggle to distance themselves from their past. But she is proud, determined not to change. She said:

“They always say to me—I take it as a compliment—they say to me, Ola Belle, you haven’t changed.

“And, you know, I haven’t tried.

“I mean, I have maybe, as I’ve growed older, become a bit more mellow, and maybe I appreciate the facts of being back then”—the mountain culture—“ more today than I ever did in my life.

“Because a lot of people say, If it hadn’t’ve been for my background, I could’ve done something.

“Well, if it hadn’t’ve been for my background, I don’t think I would’ve cared to live. Because the important things that happened in my past, they’re with me today. And not only me. I’m talking mostly of myself, but I’m not just speaking for myself. I’m speaking for a lot of the people.

“Truly, a lot of the people would like to be normal, natural everyday people, but they have to put up a face. That’s the hardest thing in the world: to have to put up a face.

“To be honest with yourself, just be honest with yourself. My father used to say, If you want to be somebody, quit trying to be somebody: be yourself, and you are somebody.”

To be yourself is the advice she wants. She attributed that advice to me on the Folkways album My Epitaph. My grandmother, who, like Ola Belle’s father, taught all the grades in a one-room school and played the pump organ in a little country church in Virginia, always said that there’s no need to forget the past while you go forward. “Your background,” Ola Belle said, “is all you have; it starts you off.”

Accepting direction from the principal of her high school in North Carolina, Ola Belle has gone ahead, claiming the right to speak for the people of the Southern Mountains. This is a key memory:

“I could learn when I grew up without trying. I don’t know how it come about, but I never had to study like other kids. I could read a poem once and recite it. I could remember; it wasn’t hard for me at all.

“And the teacher, she told me that she never remembered that I—I saw her a few years back, my teacher—she told me, I never remember you being a little girl. You were always a little old lady.

“And her husband, the principal, told the graduating class. Now, I didn’t graduate. I lacked about four months, but the year before my sister did. And I was there, and he told the graduating class:

“He said, Children, you’re going out in a world that you know nothing about, very little about. And he said, I feel that you have done well here—in his speech to the graduating class—and he said, There’s one thing that I want to impress upon your minds. He said, Never be ashamed of your background. That’s your foundation. Never be ashamed, he said, of the hands that worked hard to put you through.

“And I never forgot that, because I know people now that were born and raised where I was born and raised, that don’t know about their place.”

Ole Belle knew about her place, her place in the Blue Ridge. There she learned the lessons of life from which she shaped an inner vision, more morally coherent than historically accurate. And there she learned the music that nurtured her creative soul.

Excerpted with permission from Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line, published by Dust-to-Digital. 

Originally published Aug. 8, 2016.