Swannanoa Tunnel
This is the first in a series of three posts on “Swannanoa Tunnel.” Read the second here and the third here.
Those of you who have found your way to Murder Ballad Monday by way of our Facebook page may have wondered about our profile and cover images there. I took both pictures last year near the Swannanoa Tunnel at Ridgecrest, in western North Carolina, east of Asheville. This week, I’d like to explore the song named for this tunnel.
You will note right away that it is not a murder ballad. It is a work song. I’ll explore in the next post whether it is a song for work or about work. I want to write about it this week, though, because this blog has always been about the attempt to find or create meaning through music out of extreme, and often deadly, human experience. You’ll see before the end of this post, or perhaps before the end of the week, that “Swannanoa Tunnel” easily qualifies on that score. After some of Pat’s posts during his week with Woody Guthrie, it seemed worthwhile to explore the theme of workers’ conditions, work songs, and the sacrifices workers make, often with little choice in the matter.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford included “Swannanoa Tunnel” in his Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina. His version was the first I heard. Lunsford, who was from Mars Hill, in Madison County, North Carolina, writes of the song, “The air was brought to our mountain country at the time of the digging of the great Swannanoa Tunnel through the Blue Ridge east of Asheville, North Carolina. It’s been mentioned in some of the books that it is a variant of an old English song, but it’s definitely a work song. And the word ‘Swannanoa Tunnel’ in the song sounded like ‘Swannanoa Town-o’ so that accounted for the person making the entry that it was an English variant.”
“Swannanoa Tunnel” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (Spotify)
The Tunnel
As I have family nearby, I visit Lunsford’s “mountain country” reasonably often, and during one of these visits last year (before I thought of creating this blog), I thought that it would be an interesting field trip to go on a kind of photographic safari to find and shoot the tunnel that was the source of the song. So, my dad and I ventured out to find the marker for it, and then to find the tunnel itself.
After we got back from this short trip, I found a copy of The French Broad (1955), a history of the region by Wilma Dykeman, where I was staying. My aunt had recommended it to me after she heard about this side trip. For the record, “The French Broad” refers to a river in the region, whatever else you might be supposing.
(photo by Ken Bigger)
What I read in Dykeman’s book about the circumstances of the tunnel’s construction, and the sacrifices of the mostly African-American convicts forced to construct it, changed my feelings about the expedition to find the tunnel. It was still well worth doing, but what was an exercise of a bit of folkloric curiosity, a bit of a lark, turned took on a more serious aspect. After reading Dykeman’s account, which I’ve excerpted below, I began to think that what we found was, in essence, a monument to the sacrifices of prisoners who found themselves condemned to hard labor, and in many cases death, in the service of its construction, and the bringing of the railroad to Asheville. These were indirect death sentences, perhaps, but as you’ll see, the conditions they worked under made such deaths foreseeable.
The development of road crews was largely driven by a desire to solve prison overcrowding, and, of course, to find cheap labor to build the railroad. (You can find more detailed information here and here.) The vast majority of these prisoners were African-American, and none of them had committed a violent crime. Stephen R. Little (the author of the first parenthetical link above) notes that African American men generally made up about 90% of the convict work force, and white men 6%; African American women made up the remaining 4%, generally providing for food, cleaning, and other supporting services. It was cheaper for the state to put the prisoners to work in western North Carolina than imprison them to the east.
If one can think of it as a monument, it’s obvious that the tunnel in no way decorative, particularly compared to the lush landscape around it, but it was a significant achievement of hard labor (probably more than of engineering) and constructed at an enormous cost of human suffering. It’s fairly obvious that I didn’t listen to the song very closely to begin with.
(Despite the ukelele being an unlikely choice for this piece, and its being recorded in a camper van, this homemade recording is my favorite version available on YouTube. Special thanks to Eoin O’Mahony and Jen Rouse for making it available, and then making it available again.)
Was the song “Swannanoa Tunnel” a work song for the workers at the time, or a subsequent working persons’ tribute to the backbreaking and often lethal work involved in the creation of the tunnel? Perhaps both. I’ll have a few thoughts about this before the end of the week–I hope they’ll be coherent. Right now, a lot of them are conflicting.
(photo by Ken Bigger)
I’m going back to the Swannanoa Tunnel
That’s my home, baby, that’s my home
Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel
All caved in, baby, all caved in
Last December I remember
The wind blowed cold, baby, the wind blowed cold
When you hear my watchdog howling
Somebody around, baby, somebody around
When you hear that hoot owl squalling
Somebody dying, baby, somebody dying
Hammer falling from my shoulder
All day long, baby, all day long
Ain’t no hammer in this mountain
Out rings mine, baby, out rings mine
This old hammer it killed John Henry
It didn’t kill me, baby, couldn’t kill me
Riley Gardner, he killed my partner
He couldn’t kill me, baby, he couldn’t kill me
This old hammer it rings like silver
It shines like gold, baby, it shines like gold
Take this hammer, throw it in the river
It rings right on, baby, it shines right on
Some of these days I’ll see that woman
Well that’s no dream, baby, that’s no dream
“With the state of North Carolina furnishing this labor, the company of J. W. Wilson was given a contract to finish the road across the mountains to Asheville. An able honest man had entered the Western North Carolina Railroad picture—the following year, 1877, Wilson was elected simultaneous President, Superintendent, and Chief Engineer of the railroad company—and three years later he had completed the road to Asheville. They were long, dramatic, grueling years.”
“The largest, most obvious obstacle facing any road builder was the grade on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. The sharp ascent was 1100 vertical feet in three miles. Wilson solved this by switchback or development grading, so that the track would loop up the mountain by curving back and forth. In this way about two thirds of the climb was overcome in seven and a half sinuous miles. “
(Photo by M. Bigger)
“It is the human story that is the tragic and half-told portion of this railroad’s building. During heaviest construction there were 1455 men and 403 boys laboring to clear the path up the steep mountain, and over a thousand mules, horses and oxen. The backlog of workers was the convict force. Nearly all Negro, they had been transported for the most part from the eastern area of the state. Accustomed to a warmer climate, the chill of the mountains, the dampness of mud and tunnels and the discouragement of constant slides soon left them vulnerable to the ravages of flu and pneumonia. The standard food was navy beans and corn bread. For Sunday breakfast there was the luxury of biscuits. Sometimes there was fat pork and a vegetable—cabbage, potatoes, black-eyed peas. Blackstrap molasses was a treat. Since 6 ¼ cents a day was the average allowance to feed a convict, there was little room for the bare necessities and no inclination for the niceties. In an alien climate, with such a diet, pneumonia was the scourge of the camp. One North Carolina resident remembered where there were four hundred unmarked graves huddled near the last tunnel on the route, filled by victims of pneumonia. How many solitary graves were scattered elsewhere along the railroad track, no one has revealed or estimated.”
“On Saturday, work stopped at four in the afternoon and the convicts and other laborers took their required weekly bath. Then, if there was a banjo or guitar handy—and there usually was—someone ‘made music’ for the camp. The lonely, bawdy, sentimental, realistic music of all railroad camps, all men in stripes everywhere.”
Dykeman notes that in order to meet the deadline for bringing a train to Asheville, Wilson brought a train, the “Salisbury,” on an improvised track. Putting down track in front of it and pulling it up from behind, while the tunnel was still getting finished.
“Consistent with the whole previous history of the Western North Carolina Railroad, the final cave-in occurred at Swannanoa tunnel just after Major Wilson had dispatched his telegram of victory to the Governor. Twenty-one laborers were crushed to death.”
View of the eastern approach to the tunnel (photo by Ken Bigger)
When you hear that hoot owl squalling…
Dykeman’s account affected my overall perception of this small photo expedition to find the tunnel. The lush mountain landscape was now dotted by unseen and improvised graves long the rails, and I had a more detailed understanding of the unwilling sacrifices made to connect these mountain communities. Perhaps this is yet another aspect contributing to Asheville being “a sunny dark place.” But, this is a music blog; let’s get back to the song. How did the experience of the song change?As we’ll get into in a bit more detail in the next post, I had lumped “Swannanoa Tunnel” in with some of its musical kindred–especially “Nine Pound Hammer” (to which it can be nearly identical, musically) and “John Henry.” The lyrics, though, had never grabbed me. They were obviously far less narrative than “John Henry.” “Nine Pound Hammer,” typically sounded like a kind of defiant exuberance, with a bit more narrative logic, and a chorus.. “Swannanoa Tunnel’s” couplets are more haunted and sober–or at least they are now.
After reading Dykeman’s book, the song definitely took on more gravity for me, and the verses as they came together seemed like a series of clues or hints to deeper mysteries about episodes surrounding the tunnel’s construction–the watchdog, the hoot owl, Riley Gardner. For our purposes, these factors have made the song something I think worth considering in our discussion of murder ballads. The story it tells, though, is told in hints. While in it lacks an obvious killer, a particular crime, or any kind of confessional/remorse aspect, the song does contain a kind of grim determination borne of surviving an ordeal that killed many. It’s a survivors’ tale.
Next up
In the next post, we’ll take a look at some of the circumstances of how the song was collected, where it came from, and, of course, listen to a few more versions of the song that draw out the song’s character as a work song and, in at least one instance, come just a shade closer to making the song a murder ballad proper.