Little Mathie Groves
Dellie Chandler Norton, with Evelyn Ramsey sitting down in the background.
Photograph copyright Rob Amberg 2020. Photograph courtesy of the Photographer.
Little Mathie Groves is what I would call an O.G. in my ballad bank. I’ve heard it MANY times at MANY venues by MANY singers. It has everything you want in a ballad: beautiful, wealthy people doing naughty things that inevitably get heads chopped off and kicked against the wall (again). I have always been confused, however, as to why the audience always LAUGHS when the head gets kicked. Maybe it is the desensitizing influence of movies and television because I always felt that this was a more serious moment than the typical ballad fan seems to. Although I love the story, this song never did capture my imagination like Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar. Little Mathie Groves gives me another kind of gift that is maybe even more important: memories. STRONG memories. Like whenever ANY one ANY where sings Little Mathie Groves, I get to harken back to many an amazing moment in my life long relationship with ballads, ballad singers, and musicians. I am the first to admit that I sort of dropped the ball when it came to getting in there and learning all Mother had to teach me. I sort of beat myself up for not being more driven, more interested, more type-A about it. Here’s the thing, tho: I have ABSORBED ballads and other forms of Appalachian traditional music since BEFORE birth. Ballads make sense to me and the tune, tone, and timbre flows natural through my mind. I know it sounds crazy, but it really DOES feel like each song Mother sings, whether I remember hearing it or not, feels so familiar, so comfortable, so reasonable, lol. I recently saw a video of Mother and David Holt doing a performance in Berea in 1977 and the ‘take me back’ moment almost gave me whip lash.
Mother says she feels like she always sort of knew a few verses of Little Mathie Groves but never really learned the whole thing until she was grown and off singing at festivals on her own. During a conference in Cincinnati, Philip Rhodes, who was in charge of the conference, requested that Mother sing Little Mathie Groves. She went all misty eyed remembering how she called her cousin Keith to go and bring Cas to his house so that, I quote, “He could learn it to me over the phone.” If there were any words that Mother had trouble deciphering, Keith would ‘translate.’ Little Mathie Groves became a staple song for her after that and now I think all of us ‘younger’ ballad singers know it by heart.
Here, I think, is a good place to give a shout out to NC ARTS for giving mother and I the opportunity and in$piration for this project. Although I sort of (greatly) underestimated the amount of work that would go into this project, I must say I am learning SO MUCH. Not just the ballads themselves, but also about their history and their place in my own community. This project has made me see how very resilient and yet how very fragile each and every song is. Also, I have often wished during performances that I had a bit more information about each ballad I sing to share with an audience. I always feel a bit awkward when I just get on stage, belt out a ballad, and don’t have any real story to tell about it. It seems stingy and rude somehow to sing a ballad and not place it respectfully in it’s moment in the past, present, and future.
Knee-to-Knee is a project that will be ongoing throughout my life and I hope that it continues to grow and evolve as I learn more and more ballads, and not just the one’s collected by Cecil Sharp. I recently sat down with Bobby McMillon and he had some songs that I absolutely plan to add to my collection but I am hyper focused on English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians right now so I could not allow myself to be distracted. I am also getting more comfortable using technology as an outlet for organizing all of the information I have been gathering and a platform from which to communicate it to a larger audience. The website itself, beyond the initial set up, has been easier to maneuver through than I thought it would be. Online research has been a dream and there is SO MUCH data out there literally at your fingertips. Right now I am learning how to edit and post some of the voice recordings I have made of Mother teaching me a ballad, me practicing a ballad, and some tales told about the ballads. With the resources from this grant, I was able to get a smart phone with fairly decent voice and video recording capabilities and an awesome laptop that it is taking a bit of time for me to figure out. I don’t want someone else to do any of this for me…teaching myself to fish as it were.