How Long Can One Singer Endure?

In 2009, seven years after the death of Ola Belle Reed, Maryland state folklorist Clifford Murphy set out to unearth how her mountain music was playing out in the small Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania towns where her music had flourished after her family left the Southern Appalachians during the Great Depression. 

Murphy found Reed’s authentic brand of old-time mountain music alive and well along the Mason-Dixon Line. His audio recordings documenting her modern-day musical descendants accompany Dust to Digital’s biography, Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music, along with a CD of her 1960s recordings.

Here Murphy shares his take on what makes Reed’s legacy rise above the noise.

What makes Ola Belle Reed stand out? 

Ola Belle stands out in at least three ways—her prolific songwriting, her distinctive banjo style, and her prominence in the region she called home. The role of women in early country music has really been given short shrift by mainstream histories of the music. There is an impression that women didn’t get involved in country music until the 1950s, and that they were (and are) passive participants in the process of making, writing, arranging, and performing country music. Ola Belle’s life story really blows that up. She was not the only women of her time to achieve prominent, regional significance, but she is one of the most documented and interesting. Her influence was not bound by gender, either. There is a very long line of prominent men in country music who have been influenced by Ola Belle’s style, outlook, and songwriting, including Del McCoury and Marty Stuart.

What’s the biggest impact of Reed’s music? 

I really have no doubt that Ola Belle Reed’s original songs will be her most impactful and enduring musical legacy. “High on a Mountain,” “I’ve Endured,” “Tear Down the Fences,” and “Sing Me a Song” are standards in bluegrass and Americana music circles. Henry Glassie makes a compelling argument in the book that these songs are meaningful to so many because they were borne of a process very much tied to traditional repertoire and community experience rooted in the southern mountains. 

How do her values play into her legacy?

Ola Belle’s son, Dave Reed, and many of the people who were closest to Ola Belle, would say that her most important contribution to the world was her generosity and selflessness. She was known as someone who would provide a safe harbor for the most destitute, vulnerable, and disenfranchised. Her home was constantly full of young people seeking refuge from abuse, or people seeking to connect to her nurturing wisdom. She had a very strong moral compass that seems to have been established during a rather difficult, if nurturing, childhood. That moral compass also orients her songs—both her originals and the older songs that she sang most often: songs such as “Six Feet of Earth” and “In the Springtime of Life.” On the surface, these are songs about coping with loss, but at their heart they are stinging critiques of materialism and the pursuit of financial wealth and power. Ola Belle was not impressed with money, or with people who had lots of money. If anything, she was consistently drawn towards providing comfort—either in her home, in conversations, or most enduringly in songs—to people who had little or no money.

What surprised you most while working on this project?

How strong Ola Belle’s musical influence was—and is—on men. There are prominent and important women in country, folk, and Americana music who point to Ola Belle as an inspiration: Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, the group Olabelle, and others. Country music history had instilled in me a false impression that women influenced women, but not so much men. I was happily dissuaded of this now seemingly obvious false impression while carrying out the fieldwork for this project. 

I was amazed to hear how powerful Ola Belle’s influence was on men like Danny Paisley, TJ and Bobby Lundy and their fathers (Bob Paisley and Ted Lundy), Del McCoury, Dave Reed, Zane and Hugh Campbell, and many, many others along the Mason-Dixon Line. Their commitment to tradition and to authentic self-expression in original songs is something that was clearly nurtured by Ola Belle, and these men pass her stories and influence down to their daughters and sons. And while some of that influence is musical, much of it is also her political and spiritual outlook, which always had its eye on the marginalized, on issues of injustice, and on equality, tolerance, and acceptance.

Originally published Aug. 8 2016.