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Kathryn Ray
On the family farm
Jeremy Jones plays his banjo on his family’s land in Henderson County, North Carolina.
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Kathryn Ray
The saga of a Saga
Jeremy Jones with his banjo.
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Kathryn Ray
America's instrument
Older slaves often taught young white men to build and play what we call the banjo (or banjer, as most old-timers say).
A native of Henderson County, North Carolina, Jeremy B. Jones left Southern Appalachia for college, with ambitions to see the world. After time in Central America, he returned to his ancestral land to teach alongside his former teachers at the local elementary school. Jones explores sense of place and identity amid a changing culture in Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (John F. Blair Publishing, 2014), a portion of which is excerpted here.
Late in the Civil War, Union scouts donned Confederate uniforms to slide through enemy lines seamlessly, ghosting through the woods, trying to gather information. Most Southern soldiers were dressed raggedly by that point in the war, so the scouts intentionally dirtied the uniforms to make their appearance more believable.
I think of them when I pull out the passed-down flannel shirts I’d packed away before leaving the country. I toss on a tattered mesh hat to venture into Edneyville on Saturdays, dressed in the clothes of my grandfathers.
For those Union scouts, looking the part was only half the battle. They also worked at perfecting a Southern drawl. It was part espionage—they believed they’d be able to infiltrate enemy camps more easily with the right twang and regional lexicon—but also part self-preservation—they figured a Southern accent would invite sympathy if they were captured creeping through the woods and slipping into Confederate camps.
I imagine the men practicing their new accents, looking into rivers and lakes as their companies rested. I can see them working out the kinks, watching their rippling reflections adopt a foreign-sounding tongue, opening their mouths wider to soften their long i’s, slowing the rhythm of their sentences. I wonder if some of them became so invested in this character, so enamored with the sound of their new voices, that they began speaking to Union comrades with a Southern tongue.
Since moving back to these mountains—a place where my family has been for two centuries—there are mornings when I wake up and wonder if I’m dressing in these old clothes and this accent to fade easily into the world around me. Even though it at times feels intentional, I’ve started dropping regional words back into my speech, started bending my tongue back toward home. A reckon here and a plumb there. Otherwise, I know the men at the general store or the women in the gas station might look at me, hear my voice, and think, He ain’t from around here. They may see the Union in me, hear the outsider on my tongue, and know.
Last week, I bought a banjo, in part to find a way to grab hold of this place. A Saga, it’s called. While I can’t make it run smoothly yet, I thump along slowly in the afternoons after leaving the elementary school, trying to find enough notes to build a melody.
It’s a strange thing, the banjo. Some skin and strings. It looks as if its maker couldn’t decide between percussion and chordophone, and just threw the two together. And then there’s this string that doesn’t even reach the full length of the neck, stopping short at a peg sticking out halfway up. The whole thing makes me think of an open hand—four tuning pegs at the top and a thumb on the side.
My Saga has no back, no resonator to catch the sounds and roll them around. When I decided to buy a banjo, I looked for this pre-bluegrass breed because it felt distinctly Appalachian, clearly affixed to the region’s history. I bought old CDs of North Carolina banjo players including Fred Cockerham, Clarence Ashley, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The recordings were simple and crinkly, but they sounded right.
I suppose I’ve been looking for this—a connection to the region—since I returned to the Blue Ridge. The banjo sitting on my lap seems a tangible bit of Appalachia. When I was living in Honduras, I felt at times like I was slowly and steadily being pulled back to my place. And here I am, nearly re-placed in the body of my boyhood. I’ve taken a job at my elementary school. I’m teaching beside my former teachers, living just up the creek from family land. It’s as though I’m searching for a taut line leading to Southern Appalachian identity because I’m not sure what it is that makes me from here—what connects me to these mountains.
In elementary school, we had folk teachers. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Whitfield came to our class monthly to teach us about our region’s traditions. We learned to make candles and candy. We learned old-timey games and ghost stories. The women sometimes wore long dresses and played music or churned butter.
I don’t remember either of them playing a banjo. Actually, I don’t remember anything specific about their lessons, except for a day when we made some chocolate desserts called Martha Washington Jets. But the classes intrigue me now. They existed to teach us of our place, of the world around and behind us. They said, This is important; be proud.
Appalachia is supposed to be a region of backwardness. We’re toothless, gun-toting, moonshine-drinking hillbillies. We’re Ernest T. Bass, Hatfields and McCoys, inbred, banjo-wielding figures lurking in the woods. It seems the question in education ought not be where we come from but rather how we can get away.
In many ways, that question of escape and change did shape pieces of the curriculum of my boyhood. Most of the teachers at Edneyville then were from the area and had last names drifting back hundreds of years in the county. But they were taught in college how to clean up their accents—“Ain’t ain’t a word, so I ain’t a-gonna say it”—because those were the sounds of ignorance, the sounds of benightedness.
My accent thinned through elementary and middle school, but in high school, I took control of it because I didn’t want to sound like the good ol’ boys who wore camouflage and drove big trucks and carried Mountain Dew bottles in the back pockets of their jeans, spitting tobacco into the empty plastic when the soda was gone. Boys like Willie Griffin, who spent their days in auto mechanic and carpentry classes. I didn’t think specifically about how to make my tongue sound different from theirs, but it happened.
It happened because I knew that, in many ways, the thickness of an accent could determine one’s hall. Accent was predestination. Z-Hall meant Willie and other boys in shop classes, nearly all of them from Edneyville. Y-Hall meant girls with equally thick accents in vocational classes, preparing for nursing and hospitality careers. Lesser accents placed students on the science-and-math hall. Those of us in English and art and foreign language classes built an academic voice. We had college plans, and we talked like it.
Late in my high-school career, an older friend who had moved away for college returned home.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asked me.
“I’ve got a soccer match at Poke.”
“Polk?” he asked, emphasizing the l I’d disregarded.
Polk, I repeated softly inside my mouth. I’d never thought of the l before; I’d always said what everyone else said, what seemed right. Even though I’d thinned my accent for classes, I realized that afternoon with the help of my college-going friend that my mouth was still full of words tinged with Appalachia.
After that, I made a conscious choice to pronounce words phonetically. I slipped the l in and felt I had inside information. The Polk incident started me questioning the pronunciation of other words that came instinctually from my mouth: arrenge for orange and dawg for dog.
The small, private university to which I eventually moved was full of Northern students from New Jersey and D.C., most from private and prestigious high schools.
My freshman year, a girl from Philadelphia living across the hall asked me why I said mash when I meant press. “Mash the button?” she echoed as we played Nintendo. “And why do you keep saying ‘used to could’? That sounds funny.”
What she meant was that it sounded stupid. I agreed. I stepped outside myself and quickly decided I still sounded like a hillbilly, a long, buck-toothed dunce from a movie. I blushed but was secretly glad for her pointing out my language’s quirks.
I searched out any other words that might cast me as ignorant and tried to remove them. I took extra moments before speaking to review and dust off the words on their way to my tongue. I made sure I didn’t say innerstin for interesting. I made sure to use those when I might have said them. Them Those books are heavy.
I’d always been a good student, so I knew the parts of speech and their roles, but I had mostly applied that knowledge to writing and academic work. Spoken language was something else, something overheard and taken on. In college, I began to think through my daily and colloquial speech as well, always using an adverb to modify an adjective: “really cold in here” instead of “real.” My speech became upright, more grammatically correct than that of many of the privately schooled Northerners around me, and I liked it.
Once I moved to Honduras, I became English in the flesh. Daily, I represented an entire language for the students sitting in front of me. I had to decide what English I would be. What words and sounds would I give my students? Should I leave a room of Honduran nine-year-olds saying y’all or you’uns?
Outside the school’s walls, my tongue was unwieldy. While my English was bookish and “standard,” I strived to make my Spanish regional and colloquial. My tongue shortened words—va for verdad. I started ending sentences with the quick rise of va, as people did when talking about weather or pigs or money in the cobblestone streets of western Honduras—the quick sound of a question softening a statement. “¿Ayer me vio, va?” (“Yesterday you saw me, right?”) Verdad literally means truth, but my tongue freely chopped it up.
I dropped letters from common words, más (more) becoming má, usted (you) becoming uste. This Central American accent and rhetoric obviously didn’t find their way into my mouth from my genes. My tongue created them from the world around me. I passed through my days tapering words, speaking in a voice recently invented.
When I traveled to other countries, my tongue again reacted. In Costa Rica, I stopped rolling my r’s and spoke more clearly because that was the world around me. In Ecuador and Mexico, I found new words and tempered the formality of Honduran Spanish, freely using the informal second-person tú.
These shiftings mostly happened of my tongue’s volition. It wanted to fit in—an aural chameleon. But while it spent the evenings and weekends pulling in bits of Honduran slang and dropping letters, from eight to three Monday through Friday, it shaped up. It hit every diphthong and smattering of consonants clearly. Then the bell would ring again, and I’d walk into the street to buy homemade bread, my tongue again loosening.
And here I am, back on the land of my boyhood, walking the halls of the elementary school where my tongue first began to shed its Appalachian tics, and my voice is now wholly confused, my tongue often stilled.
More and more, I don’t know how the words coming from my mouth ought to sound. After traveling among myriad accents and grammars, I’m charmed by the ring of my mother tongue, allured by my grandma calling a fight a racket or Mom saying last night’s rain was a gully-washer. The sounds around me are mine; they’re from my place. But I don’t know that I can take them on entirely. I can certainly create the accent and find regional words to line my sentences, but that would feel constructed and modeled. It might feel like a British accent taken on at a party—an affectation.
Chopping up words and blurring sounds to create a Honduran voice felt fair. I had no connection to the language, so inventing an accent for its words seemed necessary. But the language of home shouldn’t be something to take on like an enemy’s uniform. Rather, it should be something to remember, something to slide back inside.
The weight of this feels stronger some days. Days when I picture the students at Edneyville in five years, beginning high school. I hear their voices now and know their futures. I wonder about my responsibility to them, to their accents and vocations. I find myself thinking about my hypothetical children. How I want them to have natural access to the sound of the mountains, but how I know that such a sound has to be tempered or buried or lost to escape stereotypes.
Plus, I’m not sure I could provide the voice box of Appalachia to these ghost sons and daughters, since I can’t find my own.
Today, I’m lugging the Saga to school. It’s Heritage Week, and I’m glad. A month has passed since Mexican Independence Day, and I notice that I enjoy changes in my daily schedule; elementary school is nothing if not monotonous. My immigrant students will learn about their adopted homeland at every turn this week. Yesterday, a man played the bagpipes below the basketball goal outside. Fred Pittillo lined the blacktop with antique tractors from the sod farm and former dairy. Students are learning to clog. A storyteller came to tell Jack Tales, a genre of stories (Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.) that likely began in Britain in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and has managed to persist and grow in Appalachia for over three hundred years.
I’m supposed to play my banjo in the cafeteria while the students eat pizza and broccoli (I translate the menu into Spanish every month, so I’m intimate with the daily offerings). From a Doc Watson recording, I’ve managed to piece together the chords and a few moments of melody from “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains.” The song seems apt for the week. Its history is unclear; it wasn’t recorded until the early twentieth century, but it seems to reach as far back as the Civil War. It was likely sung by men pulled away from the mountains by war. A song of escape and return all at once. I like that.
I did some research into the history of the banjo for today. I figured I ought to know something to share, since I’m a “Mister” now. I checked out books from the library in town; one was called America’s Instrument. What I quickly found was a history I didn’t expect. While America’s Instrument contended that the banjo was likely one of the few instruments—if not the only instrument—created and shaped in the United States, it admitted that its roots reached into West Africa, likely what is now Nigeria. Slavery brought the lutelike contraptions to America. Africans played them throughout the South, sometimes building them from gourds. Older slaves often taught young white men to build and play what we call the banjo (or banjer, as most old-timers say).
What I grabbed hold of as a direct link to my history and region is actually an African instrument transformed by slavery. Something taken and remade. Suddenly, my banjo’s name—Saga—feels loaded. Slaves who played the banjo were worth more money and often were forced to showcase their musical abilities when auctioned off.
The banjo’s entrance into Appalachia is vague, since slaves weren’t distributed uniformly throughout the region. Likely, it found its way in through vacationing Southerners’ slaves, minstrel shows, soldiers, and explorers. Its history is a blurry jumble of lives, but once it found a home, it settled in. Like the Jack Tales, it persisted in the isolated mountains while the rest of the world moved on. Eventually, the African lute was stretched out, given an extra string, and played in English and Scots-Irish ballads. A century ago, a fiddle and a banjo made a band.
Living in Central America, I came across a man on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica playing a banjo to calypso music. At the time, I found the instrument’s presence eccentric, albeit interesting. But blacks living on Costa Rica’s coast were brought from Jamaica to build a railroad in the nineteenth century, their descendants having been transported from Africa to Jamaica as slaves. It makes sense, now, to picture the man wildly strumming the banjo in a town of dreadlocks and displaced history.
I try to see my tongue in this banjo I carry to school. In it, I hear bits of a wholly confused history. The slave and slave owner. The North and the South, the Rebel and the loyalist, and everything in between. I carry both the shooters and the victims in my family tree in this hybrid of an instrument.
And yet it somehow works. The slender neck and lone short string blend sweetly with the faux skin and open back. The near-fist of my hand manages to carve out notes. My fingers slide along and work out the melody. The thing is a mishmash, its form something of Africa, its twang something of the British Isles, its forging something of my mountains. It’s an ambivalent instrument in an ambivalent land.
I wonder if I can do to my tongue as has been done to the banjo. I wonder if I can take pieces here and there—reclaim echoes of a lost voice—and flesh them out into one smoothly singing instrument. If I can make a home of two minds.
I’m taken aback by the sound of the cafeteria as I lug my banjo inside. Perhaps Heritage Week has everyone excited, but it’s likely always this loud. I suddenly miss my hideout in the teachers’ lounge, where the only sounds are gossip and the whirring of the copier. The lunchroom is a static roar.
There’s no microphone or stage, so I sit near the water fountain thumping the beginning of my song. It takes only a few chords for me to realize no one can hear me here on the outskirts of the room with my old instrument. So I stand to walk up and down the rows of tables filled with hungry children. As I pass, they turn with mouths of half-chewed food to reach out and touch the Saga. I tiptoe around spilled milk and strewn lunchboxes while rapping the strings and picking out,
My home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
My home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
My home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains
And I never expect to see you anymore
Excerpted with permission from Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland, written by Jeremy B. Jones and published by John F. Blair Publishing. Jones is profiled on page 11.