Rhododendrons and hillbilly music rarely mix in the same conversation...

Nevertheless, flowers and banjos converged in Asheville, North Carolina, as local businessmen pondered ways to attract more tourist dollars in 1927... 

The first non-Native American tourists to the area dropped by around 1540 when the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto came seeking gold and trade routes to China.  The first person of European descent who desired to be a permanent resident was one Colonel Samuel Davidson.  In 1784, he built a cabin near what he called Christian Creek.  He fatally incurred the displeasure of his Cherokee neighbors who neither used the same name for the stream nor recognized the authority of the United States to give their hunting grounds to other people.  Davidson's demise resulted in troops being sent to make things safer for settlers and slaves.  More people followed the late Colonel's footsteps.  Later, travelers journeyed into the hills to savor the region's scenic beauty.  Others came for other reasons.  One, a British chap named Cecil Sharp, wandered into western North Carolina during World War One to collect old mountain songs that he hoped to link to older melodies in England and Scotland...



Near Asheville: A Grand Rough Ridge



A decade after Sharp's visit, one of Asheville's adopted sons fretted that Appalachia's unique musical heritage was disappearing in the new age of radio.  His concerns dovetailed with the financial desires of the local Chamber of Commerce.   The good burghers of the village held a "Rhododendron Festival" in 1927 to bring in tourists with dollars to spend.  Thinking to attract even more visitors with music and dance, they asked Bascom Lamar Lunsford for help.  Well known and a first-name friend to practically every fiddler in Buncombe and Madison counties, lawyer Lunsford had released his first commercial recordings in 1924 for the General Phonograph Company, including "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground," an enigmatic tale whose narrator is haunted by memories of prison, his love and desire for a woman who wants things he can't afford to give her... a man who longs to be unseen, almost invisible, with power to root mountains down into dust...

Thanks to Lunsford, the Rhododendron Festival became the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 1928 and continues yearly to this day.  People who track this sort of thing say it was likely the nation's first gathering of traditional musicians to call itself a folk festival.  The man who gave the celebration its distinct character performed annually until he suffered a stroke in 1965, eight years before his death at the age of 91...

Lunsford's almost obsessive love of music may have come from his family.  Born due north of Asheville in 1882 in the town of Mars Hill, young Bascom had parents who valued education and the arts while remaining close to their rural roots.  He would study at Rutherford College and became a teacher like his father.   He left the education field for the higher income of a fruit tree salesman... 

Traveling deep into the woods, Lunsford built a rapport with customers by sharing songs he'd heard along his route.  He married and studied law, passing the bar in 1913.  His legal background probably fueled a lifelong passion for politics.  Lunsford managed campaigns for Congressman Zebulon Weaver, a Democrat, and later served as the reading clerk for the North Carolina House of Representatives.  His twin passions, music and politics, merged in 1939 when President Roosevelt asked him to perform at the White House for the visiting King of England...



Bascom Lamar Lunsford



Speaking of England, as the oddities of life would have it, Cecil Sharp, who shared Lunsford's fascination with old tunes, had his own minor connection to the judiciary.  Having lived several years in Australia, Sharp read law there and became an associate to Chief Justice Samuel Ways before returning home to devote himself entirely to the world of music...

Like Sharp, Lunsford took collecting folklore and performing seriously.  He dressed formally in tie and tails, providing erudite lectures to his audiences before attacking banjo strings with furious rhythmic upstrokes.  "The Minstrel of the Appalachians" did a little songwriting of his own.  Lunsford's best known tune, "That Good Old Mountain Dew", was likely inspired by working as a defense lawyer for moonshiners...

Lunsford performing with Frieda English

Years after its recording, the grandly eccentric Harry Smith selected Lunsford's "Mole in the Ground" for inclusion in his epic "Anthology of American Folk Music."  One of the collection's avid fans was a young Minnesotan who, transformed from Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan, tipped his hat to Lunsford in his classic "Stuck Inside Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" when he warned us "all the railroad men just drink up your blood like wine"...

if I was a lizard in the spring, I'd hear my darling sing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6W-E6gWrvc

Note: Photographs taken from Google Images.  "A Grand Rough Ridge" appears on the Asheville Chamber of Commerce site and is credited to the North Carolina Arboretum.  Portrait of Bascom Lamar Lunsford  is from the Southern Appalachian Archives at Mars Hill college.  Photograph of Lunsford performing with Frieda English is from the University of North Carolina Library which credits Hugh Morton as photographer.