Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 1.01 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
Many songs, many stories: the presence of music in contemporary Appalachian fiction
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Storytelling and music have always been important elements of the oral tradition in Appalachia. In fact, music is a frequent ingredient of storytelling in Appalachia. Although authors like James Still, Jesse Stuart, Don West and Byron Herbert Reece captured the sounds and forms of ballads in their poetry, it is only recently that Appalachian writers started including the oral tradition in their novels. Lee Smith emphasized the importance of the oral tradition in Oral History (1983), which includes a musician, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven (1986) highlighted the role of music as a communal act of expression that united the efforts of black and white coal miners, and Sharyn McCrumb’s ballad novels started to appear in the 1990s. But it was the popularity of Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream (1992) and Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain (1997), which became an international sensation, along with the success of some popular movies like O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Songcatcher (2000), Cold Mountain (2003) and their respective soundtracks, that greatly contributed to mark the shift reflected in Appalachian fiction. A new appreciation of Appalachian culture, no longer associated exclusively with inferiority but with regional pride, seems to have encouraged a group of Appalachian authors who immediately started incorporating mountain music into their fiction. This paper explores the main reasons that have led some Appalachian novelists to claim mountain music as an essential element of their identity and culture and provides examples with specific references to their works.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Carmen Rueda is Associate Professor of English at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). She is the author of Voicing the Self: Female Identity and Language in Lee Smith’s Fiction (2009). In 2010, she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she conducted research on contemporary Appalachian fiction.
Many songs, many stories: the presence of music in contemporary Appalachian fiction
Storytelling and music have always been important elements of the oral tradition in Appalachia. In fact, music is a frequent ingredient of storytelling in Appalachia. Although authors like James Still, Jesse Stuart, Don West and Byron Herbert Reece captured the sounds and forms of ballads in their poetry, it is only recently that Appalachian writers started including the oral tradition in their novels. Lee Smith emphasized the importance of the oral tradition in Oral History (1983), which includes a musician, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven (1986) highlighted the role of music as a communal act of expression that united the efforts of black and white coal miners, and Sharyn McCrumb’s ballad novels started to appear in the 1990s. But it was the popularity of Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream (1992) and Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain (1997), which became an international sensation, along with the success of some popular movies like O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Songcatcher (2000), Cold Mountain (2003) and their respective soundtracks, that greatly contributed to mark the shift reflected in Appalachian fiction. A new appreciation of Appalachian culture, no longer associated exclusively with inferiority but with regional pride, seems to have encouraged a group of Appalachian authors who immediately started incorporating mountain music into their fiction. This paper explores the main reasons that have led some Appalachian novelists to claim mountain music as an essential element of their identity and culture and provides examples with specific references to their works.
