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“A Pair of Sassy Singing Boots”

Barbara Ellen – Dan Dutton, 2006 – ink and watercolor

Dan’s stories about his entrée into the world of ballads are enlightening. From his parents to mentors like Jean Ritchie, he learned the old a Capella tradition in the best way a kid in a new electric world might.

“I learned the traditional ballads first from my parents. My Mom sang “Barbara Ellen” & “Babes in the Woods”, my Dad sang “The Fox on the Town-O.” Later when I began to learn songs from other singers in the community, I found out that they knew other, more recent, ballads as well, but had forgotten about them until I would bring them up ~ such as “Rose Conalee” and “Floyd Collins.” I didn’t think of the ballads as separate or even different from the other songs that we sang. I remember memorizing Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” when I was pretty little, because I was sure that it was about a pair of sassy singing boots. That put it right in with the fairy tales and ballads that my parents knew.”

Certainly though, Dan learned the most from people steeped in the tradition – older people who were busy with finding ways to pass it on to kids like him, hoping they might preserve it. Jean Ritchie was the first of several such mentors. Dan was more than eager to learn, though his idea of preservation wasn’t always what his teachers had in mind.

“I was fifteen, I think, when I first heard Jean sing at the first Berea Craft Fair … I was awestruck … completely infatuated … every time that she sang in Kentucky thereafter, if I could be there I was. I would take her bouquets of carefully chosen wildflowers and I think that may have been why she put up with me and all my questions. I got the Smithsonian recordings of her ballads, and everything else she had recorded and started memorizing the entire lot. I got a copy of the first volume of Child’s collection, bought an unplayable dulcimer from a local music store, picked out “The Two Sisters” to start with, and went down to sit on the roots of a giant sycamore in the edge of the branch to figure out how to play it. I was sure that I could, even though I was clueless as to how to begin, but I did know that I needed an isolated and romantically mystical location to have the right setting for evoking what I considered an ancient sound. That ancient sound, which to my ears the modal tunes of the ballads had the most of, was the main thing I was after …

I was in my twenties when Jean taught a class at Berea in Appalachian music, and you can bet I had wormed my way into that class, even though I had a hugely swollen foot from being bitten by a copperhead the day before it began. By the time we had spent a week together, we had become pretty close, considering the difference in our ages, and to a certain extent our aims. Jean was a musical conservative (especially when it came to her tunes!) and although I appreciate the wonderful things that that approach has preserved, my feeling for the ballads was and is that they must incorporate and process every cultural change in order to truly live on. Both approaches are important in that sense – sometimes Jean and I would fuse and sometimes we would clash. In retrospect I marvel at her generosity in taking time to sing entire ballads just for me to hear, as she understood how much a ballad singer learns from hearing a complete performance, especially one on one … even more so since she had every reason to expect that I might change the tune, change the harmonization, change the words, paint it, make it into a ceramic design.

Dan Dutton and Jean Ritchie – ca. 1980s

I think she had respect for what I was doing, but it annoyed her sometimes too, to the point of rolling her eyes at least once. After I went over to her place in Viper a few times, I started driving over there to play poker with her sisters, who would fleece me for every bit of money I had, one quarter at a time, because they all could sing as well. And I visited with Edna May in Winchester quite a bit and she taught me several songs. Jean taught me to play the dulcimer, “bum-biddy-bum” – holding my hand in hers to show the way that the pick (she recommended cutting your own out of plastic coffee can lids, the transparent ones having the preferred thickness, and I still do) can dance in threes or twos on the drones and chanter strings.

… I already thought of myself as a composer, and my other musical idol, along with Jean, was the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. I was learning to play the dulcimer, and I was cutting up cassette tapes with a razor blade and assembling the bits back together to make “musique concrete” – trying to figure out (alone) what jazz is, ordering field recordings of African Pygmies and Japanese Noh music, and making field recordings myself, since I was obviously an ethnomusicologist too.”

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