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Stump Singers, Love Songs, and Wild Living

Dan’s relationship with Jean was clearly special, and served as a strong foundation.  But he sought other mentors in his pursuit of that “ancient sound” as well.

“Loyal Jones, then at the Appalachian Center at Berea College, knew a bit of what I was up to concerning traditional music and told me that there was supposedly a ballad singer, Chappel Wallin, still living in southern Kentucky. I found him … I guess I had in mind some remote farm back in a holler, and that it might take a lot of sleuthing to find him, so I was surprised, if a bit deflated, to find Chappel in the phone book. I called, explained that I was interested in old songs and wondered if he would consider talking to me, and he very graciously said yes, and “I haven’t sung them old love songs in I don’t know how long. What is it (to his wife) 10 years?” Chappel didn’t use the word ballad, and it took me a bit to realize that all the ballads were categorized as “old love songs” – in contrast to the gospel quartet music he sang at the time I met him, age 89.

I took my tape recorder to snag his ballads; a pretty amazing set.  I had a really good field recorder, a Nakamichi, and a decent microphone, which I set up after we’d had a few pleasantries and I had explained what I was after. I did notice that his wife seemed nervous for some reason, but she was otherwise very kind and hospitable. Chappel said, loudly (which was his normal volume level) – “Does that thing hear me?” I told him that it heard him just fine.

Lord Bateman – Dan Dutton, 2006
ink and watercolor

His method of conveying the set of ballads he sang for me was a new experience, especially compared with Jean’s somewhat scholarly and objective approach. Chappel had me sit knee to knee with him, slapping time (hard) on my thigh, and singing in a very loud voice … booming and highly dramatic. Each phrase would have a pounding 1/1 beat with the verse and an intentionally suspenseful pause at the end. He sang six ballads for me that first visit, including a very interesting text for “Lord Bateman.” At the end of each ballad he would make an explanatory comment about the story of the ballad, usually to point out the motivations of the characters. His wife sat quietly on a chair in the room, watching carefully and still seeming nervous about something.

On the tape, at a point after telling that he hadn’t sung any of those old love songs in 10 years, he tells that although he sang them for his kids they were “always too busy at something to learn them.” I think this pained him a bit – being a singer was an identity that Chappel was proud of, and although he loved “old hymn pieces” it seemed to me that he thought the ballads were something special, that it took a special kind of singer to learn and perform them, and I believe that also. The lack of interest by younger generations, and the sense of loss that the ignoring of something once considered a treasure, now merely old in an uninteresting way, was commented on by almost every traditional singer that I learned from. It is, as Hazel Dickens pointed out, hard to tell the singer from the song.

It wasn’t until I met his sister-in-law, Berzilla (in her 90s) and his nephew, Doug Wallin, that I developed a theory as to why Chappel’s wife was so nervous about him singing “them old love songs.” Chappel, according to Doug, had been quite a rounder, and ballad singing was just one aspect of wild living that at least once landed him in jail. I decided that his wife was a bit worried that the return of the old love songs might bring the wild ways of Chappel’s younger days with them! Chappel told me that one of the jobs he had had was as a stump singer. He would climb up on a stump, no doubt of the giant old growth trees being logged and cleared back then, and sing ballads in that booming voice, which would have carried a long ways in those quieter days, until a crowd would gather to listen. Then he would turn the stump over to the politician who had hired him.

Doug and Berzilla Wallin
Photographer unknown

When I met Doug and Berzilla, I introduced myself and told them that I had learned some songs from Chappel. They immediately set about conveying two songs to me. Doug sang “The Darby Ram,” a song I was very eager to learn, and which I was able to memorize in a single hearing … Berzilla sang a wonderful song for me, one I had never heard of, but I forgot the words and the melody almost immediately. So it goes. Sheila Kay Adams was singing in a park about an hour’s drive from my home and I happened to decide to go and hear her … and we talked a bit afterwards about ballad singing. I mentioned Chappel Wallin to her and asked her if she’d like a copy of the recording I had made. She was keen on that, as she had learned much of her traditional material from Dellie Chandler Norton, Berzilla’s sister. Like myself, and perhaps most ballad singers who learn in the oral tradition, Sheila had run into this catch: by the time you are ready as a singer to learn the ballads, your mentors are starting to forget them. She had a tantalizing ballad text that she had copied down from Dellie which she believed might be the only American version of “The Grey Cock,” but alas, Dellie could remember nothing of the tune, and Sheila had long given up hope of singing that rare bird. When she listened to the recording of Chappel that I sent her, she called me in high excitement. I had never paid much attention to the snippet of a ballad that Chappel started to sing and immediately stumbled on, as he couldn’t remember even a whole stanza of the text – (one line he obviously made up on the spot to fill in a gap) – but Sheila could hardly believe her ears. Even with the stumbles and inserted invention, he gave enough of the tune to completely reconstruct the ballad.

Death of a Ballad Singer – Dan Dutton, 1984 – acrylic pigment on linen – private collection

It seemed like a miracle, and in a way it was.

I didn’t get to visit Chappel too many times before his daughter called me and told me that he had passed away, and tearfully asked if I still had a copy of the tape I had made of him singing. They had nothing of his music, or even his voice, even though it was central to his identity, and his daughter at least was involved somewhat in music herself, running a music store catering to gospel music performers. After I promised her that I would make her a copy of the tape and hung up the phone, I had an image in my mind of a painting that would become “Death of a Ballad Singer” – based somewhat on Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death of a Miser.” In it the skeleton Death reaches for but cannot catch the bird-soul form of music flying from the dead man through an open window, into the unknown beyond.

Tape recorders can produce ghosts, and maybe that’s the best thing they are able to do. What is the difference, really, between an ethnomusicologist and Andy Warhol? And how much is tradition dependent on repetition?”

Coda – Tape Recorders and Ghosts

Dan’s last comments in the previous section set us up well for our next post. In that one, we’ll focus more on the intersection between Dan’s music and visual art, and we’ll explore that creative tension between tradition and innovation that fascinates him.  For now, his reflections on the interactions he described above give us a good stopping point and transition.

“I think a lot of people that I met in what was called the “folk music” world were hoping that I would drop all the other interests and focus on being an old timey ballad singer, a concept that I was, and still am, very skeptical of, since it begs the question of what a ballad singer is. I really couldn’t understand the consternation in the story Jean told me about Bob Dylan’s infamous performance at the Newport festival that wigged Pete Seeger out – after all they were all dependent on electricity, microphones and audio speakers at that point.

My experiments with tape recording and electronic music had convinced me that the use of any of those devices was an absolute division from the traditions that the material originated in, and that the mode of presentation, partly growing out of Rock & Roll and Tin Pan Alley, had very little to do with the way we sang ballads when we were stripping tobacco. Forms are transferable sure, but form, as they say, follows function – the voice recorded, or amplified has (for me) only a barely passing resemblance to the experience of what could be called “pre-electric” music, a music that few people today know anything, if anything, about, at least not in our culture.

After, or perhaps right along, with electricity came nostalgia for its absence and I think that was part of the glamour of what was called folk music during the ’60s & ’70s, and is still today. Jean’s mode of presentation was much about evoking and controlling that nostalgia for things past. I wasn’t quite ready to agree that they were past …  Maybe I just should say that the genre title itself became very suspicious to me – even when applied admiringly I can’t help but think it is classist, trivializing, and descriptive of nothing in particular.

Either we’re all folks or none of us are.”

Ancient sound in a post-modern medium – Jean Ritchie sings “Shady Grove” on Pete Seeger’s “Rainbow Quest” television show, 1965