Saving the Cumberland, one folk song at a time

In the 1930s, a young woman in college wrote a thesis about the links between folk music in northern Hamilton County and the centuries-old and "lost" ballads of England, Ireland and Scotland.

The woman, Ruby Duncan, is gone now, but her thesis has picked up the beat once again in a one-of-a-kind folklorist program operated for the last eight years by Cumberland Trail State Park Manager Bob Fulcher.

The program, known as the Cumberland Trail Music Heritage Project, has documented hundreds of Cumberland Plateau musicians, often remastering family recordings from 78 rpm discs, reel-to-reel and cassette tapes and custom-made LPs.

"Our hope is to be a great voice for the trail," Mr. Fulcher said.

That great voice -- complete with an obscure weekly radio show -- is now "probably the largest collection of Tennessee voices in the archives of the Appalachians," he said.

The trouble is, few people know about it. And with the economy and state budget dragging, the program could be endangered just as time is running out to find the folks who can still recall the songs and life along the 12-county trail corridor in a time before "American Idol," interstates and the Internet.

For the past three summers, Mr. Fulcher has been able to hire interns and seasonal workers to travel roads near the 300-mile trail in search of oral histories about neighborhoods, music and family life.

Last year, Joseph Decosimo, 26, tracked down soon-to-be-gone students and friends of Ms. Duncan, who made the earliest recordings of the region's folk music for her thesis, which was titled "Ballads and Folk Songs Collected in Northern Hamilton County."

This week, Bradley Hanson, another seasonal worker, interviewed fiddler Ray Blackwell about growing up as the son of a coal miner in the shadow of the Devil's Racetrack, a craggy tower near Cove Lake in the Caryville, Tenn., area.

"I was born in a house down yonder," said Mr. Blackwell, 65. "Dr. Gallahar was a mining doctor, and he came to the house to help my mother."

He said he remembers that his mother and grandmother used to climb up the Devil's Racetrack -- or "race path" as he sometimes calls it -- to pick huckleberries, the country name for wild blueberries.

Nights were quiet then, Mr. Blackwell said, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the relentless roar of trucks climbing a hill 100 yards away on Interstate 75.

"You'd hear frogs and whippoorwills and owls," he said. "I miss that quiet."

Back to the future

For Mr. Fulcher, the park's folklorist program was the merging of his passions: music, history and the park.

"It comes from the earliest part of my career. I had an interest in music and desire to meet older musicians," he said.

But he also discovered it was a great way for a park to make friends with its neighbors, who were flattered with the interest in their stories and arts.

When Cumberland Trail State Park was established 1998, he was given the opportunity to put that knowledge to work, and in 2001 he began the weekly radio show "The Cumberland Trail," to present the music and voices of the trail's neighbors. The show still broadcasts on WDVX-FM in upper East Tennessee and now is available by webcast.

Mr. Hanson, who's working in the folklorist program for a third summer, said the Cumberland Trail Music Heritage Project -- the program's main focus -- has documented hundreds of Cumberland Plateau musicians.

Mr. Decosimo, now a teacher and the new president of the Friends of Cumberland Trail State Park, hopes the Friends group can help support the program and spread the knowledge of it.

"It's a good resource and a good way for our region to be documented," he said.