Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 10.02 Folklore and Folkways
Presentation #1 Title
“A Story About A Brave Mountaineer”: Ballad Interpretations of the Hillsville, Virginia Courthouse Shootout of 1912
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This presentation will focus on the ballads written about the 1912 Hillsville, Virginia courthouse shootout and how these ballads define this historic event. These musical representations were written soon after the event and have been locally collected and performed by several folklorists and ballad singers. They are a significant part of the research because they illustrate how collective memory played and still continues to play a significant role in immortalizing the event and its characters. These ballads reconstruct the men of the Allen family in several ways. On one side the Allen family is portrayed as overtly violent, stereotypical hillbilly figures. Other ballad accounts associate the Allens as noble men fighting in the defense of their family. Using both genre and folklore theory this study will take a look at the conventions of both of these types of ballads and how the construction of these ballads affect the retelling of this significant historic event. By further examining these ballads we will see how the legacy of the shootout not only lives through the local history books that were published about the event, but through the voices that still sing about and recreate it today.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Travis Rountree is a first year PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Louisville. His interests reside in place-based learning in the composition classroom and folklore surrounding the 1912 Hillsville, Virginia Shootout.
“A Story About A Brave Mountaineer”: Ballad Interpretations of the Hillsville, Virginia Courthouse Shootout of 1912
Corbly Hall 466
This presentation will focus on the ballads written about the 1912 Hillsville, Virginia courthouse shootout and how these ballads define this historic event. These musical representations were written soon after the event and have been locally collected and performed by several folklorists and ballad singers. They are a significant part of the research because they illustrate how collective memory played and still continues to play a significant role in immortalizing the event and its characters. These ballads reconstruct the men of the Allen family in several ways. On one side the Allen family is portrayed as overtly violent, stereotypical hillbilly figures. Other ballad accounts associate the Allens as noble men fighting in the defense of their family. Using both genre and folklore theory this study will take a look at the conventions of both of these types of ballads and how the construction of these ballads affect the retelling of this significant historic event. By further examining these ballads we will see how the legacy of the shootout not only lives through the local history books that were published about the event, but through the voices that still sing about and recreate it today.
