This is our third post on “Swannanoa Tunnel.”  Read the first one here, and the second one here.

“Ashville Junction”

Today’s post will be longer on music and shorter on writing, covering a wider variety of approaches to “Swannanoa Tunnel.”  In the previous post, I suggested that the song was originally a regional variant of a certain category of work songs–largely in the “Nine Pound Hammer”/”Take This Hammer” family.  Broader circulation of the song, to the extent that it has circulated broadly, depended on the work of early 20th century folklorists and performers.

Our ongoing discussion about this song is probably less about the truth of what really happened than about how people have used the framework of the song to create something new, meaningful, and/or beautiful.  With a song like “Swannanoa Tunnel,” which in most versions (see below for an exception) lacks a clear narrative like a ballad, the song is even more mutable–with performers adapting it to take on different perspectives and shades of meaning.

Murder will out

Hoyt Axton‘s misspelled version, “Ashville Junction” presents us, at last, with a hint of murder in the song, with weaponry not likely to be in the hands of a convict laborer:

Now, when you hear my pistol growlin’
Well, somebody’s dyin’, Lord, 
Yes, somebody’s dyin’

“Ashville Junction” performed by Hoyt Axton (Spotify)

If we accept the premise that the core song was one sung by the workers at the tunnel or, perhaps more accurately, a song sung through a worker’s perspective, Axton’s version makes you wonder about motive. What role does this expression of one’s own potential for killing play for a singer?  Does this version represent the reflections of a guard haunted by the hardships of the tunnel for the workers and his role in enforcing those hardships? Is this a revenge fantasy from the perspective of a convict laborer?  If this element or something like it was part of a version contemporary with the tunnel (an “if” that gets bigger all the time), could it be a line that expresses for the singer a needed sense of personal power, a claim for dignity? There’s no one answer, because there’s really no one song, just a wide range of possibilities.

To be clear, I’m not trying to figure out the “real” song here, and what we might suppose some authentic version of it might have been at some arbitrarily selected point in time, during the construction or otherwise.  I am trying to tease out what kind of creative or imaginative exercises singers might take up by including certain elements and excluding others.  How do we bring coherence in the act of figuring out what “the song” is for each of us–each time we encounter it?

Axton’s version invokes Tom Dula, a familiar murder ballad figure, who was from Wilkes County, North Carolina, and was executed in Statesville, North Carolina about eleven years before the construction of the tunnel.  Axton’s version makes no mention of John Henry, however.  Both Dula and Henry would plausibly have been part of the cultural soup at the time of the construction of the tunnel.

San Francisco’s Stairwell Sisters retain a bit of this same murderousness in their lyrics, if not in their arrangement, which is far lighter in tone and more old-timey–not as haunted as Axton’s.  As you might surmise from the photo to the left, they appear to be a bit lighter of heart.

 

All Caved In

While we’re adding instruments, we should note that “Swannanoa Tunnel” did not escape “The Great Folk Scare” of the late 50s and early 60s.  Les Baxter‘s Balladeers, a folk music group that at one time included a young David Crosby, give it a rousing, guitar-armada adaptation.

As with a number of folk bands at the time, Baxter’s arrangement introduced a significant amount of new lyrical content to the song, essentially turning our disconnected snippets of workingman’s narrative into a full ballad.  John W. Peters’s liner notes to this album, praising Baxter’s skill as an arranger. They are worth a read as an insight into what many of the arrangers in “the Scare” were up to–adapting these folk tunes to make them into something they would be more palatable for modern audiences.  This the era of “Hootenanny Hoot,” you will remember.

In this new ballad, Baxter tells how the convict laborers struggle to save their comrades, buried by a cave in.

At the other end of the 60s, “Swannanoa Tunnel” gets taken on by the San Diego-based psychedelic rock band, Alexander’s Timeless Bloozband, which takes the core song (mostly like Lunsford’s lyrics) and surrounds it with percussion and psychedelic blues/rock riffs, including an extended guitar and harmonica jam.

The Bloozband gives us a nice capstone to the 60s, which began in many ways with musicians and arrangers trying to find some ways to fill the gaps and smooth out the edges of collected folk songs that they deemed to rough for contemporary, popular audiences, and psychedelic Southern California garage bands going seeming out of their way to find some new edges.

Don’t You Remember Last December

There are a number of other fine arrangements of “Swannanoa Tunnel,” with various shades of the approaches and themes we’ve identified through the week.  I’ve collected a bunch of them, and some of the related material this week on a Spotify playlist:  MBMonday: Swannanoa Tunnel.

One version you can’t find there is Rafe Hollister‘s.  Based in North Carolina, Rafe Hollister refer to their style as “Mountain Rock.”  In their take on “Swannanoa Tunnel,” they begin at a slow, lounge-rocky pace, abruptly shifting gears a little over halfway through to an up-tempo rock jam, and blending in threads from a number of different lyrical variants we’ve listened to along the way.  For a few moments in the transition, it also sounds to me a bit like Greek wedding music.

Full-length version available here.

Truth be told, I’m tacking their performance on at the end here, not only because they’re not on Spotify, but because they named their band after the hillbilly, diamond-in-the-rough singer in the episode “Rafe Hollister Sings“ on The Andy Griffith Show.

One question I have for Rafe Hollister (the band), if anybody has any contacts with them, is whether the Mark Moser in the band happens to be any relation to the Artus Moser who provided us with the Cecil Sharp mondegreen version of “Swannanoa Town-O” in the previous post. (UPDATE:  We heard from Sam Brinkley, the lead singer of Rafe Hollister, who informs us that Mark Moser, Rafe Hollister’s mandolin player, is the great-grandson of the Artus Moser who made the recording we linked in that post.)

Wrapping Up

As with many of the songs we’ve discussed here so far at Murder Ballad Monday, there’s an on-going conversation between the history behind the song and the efforts of musicians to create musical meaning from them.  We’ve often wrestled hard with how the facts matter and why.  With “Swannanoa Tunnel,” it’s a challenge to unravel the possibilities, as there are just too many.  We have not only a song that refers to a specific place, if not a specific historical event, but a song that is said to have been sung by the people involved in that event–whether as a “work song” during or a reflection after, no one can say.  We also have bits and pieces of other songs and legends flowing into the song–sometimes before it took shape as “Swannanoa Tunnel,” sometimes after.

In the end, part of what I hope I have laid out over these posts is a number of ways the song helps create beauty and/or meaning from the experience and sacrifices of those digging that tunnel or workers like them in similar circumstances, however much attention to the details of that kind of ordeal we wish to devote.  Whether one is led to a haunted meditation like Axton’s or a joyful, lilting, or defiant passage through the song like Jen Rouse’s or the Stairwell Sisters’, there is more than one way for the song to be a fitting legacy.