Sometimes he says he’s already married, sometimes he lies and says he’ll be back in the spring. Afterwards she asks him to marry her and he tells her he has to go. The pair sit by the riverside, he woos her with his fiddle.
The singer sees a young woman walking with a soldier. The story’s the same no matter what it’s titled. The next number is an ancient one, dating to the 17th Century: “One Morning in May,” also known as “The Nightingale’s Song” and “The Bold Grenadier.” Their version is called “ The Soldier and the Lady.” The Coon Creek Girls take five while engineers get the next platters ready, then fall back into position around the mike, making some furtive tunings. “People just had to make do with what they could get,” as Lily May Ledford said. And the people of the Upper Gorge, scattered through the hollows and hills, who scratched out a living by moonshining and tenant farming. Those who remained were families that had farmed by the Red River for generations, some holding deeds granted by Patrick Henry. By the Twenties, the land was logged out the railroads left, taking most of the workers with them. These were the boom times: logging shantytowns built along tracks that snaked through the Gorge the occasional drunken murder on a Saturday night revival meetings by the riverside with snake-handling Pentecostals. In 1910, engineers for the Dana Lumber Company dynamited through solid limestone to make the Nada Tunnel (a photo of its opening is below). In the half-century after the Civil War, men logged through the Gorge, at first dragging trunks of oak and poplar and birch to the river and sailing them down. The story of the modern Gorge is one of successive extractions. Settlers, mostly from Virginia, came after the Revolutionary War and drove the Shawnee out. He likened the Red River to a great tree, “steadily incising its branches into the land.”Ĭenturies upon centuries ago, the Adena lived here later, the Shawnee. House-high boulders, deep hollows, and everywhere water, which runs from the mountains in countless trickles and gushes, “all moving towards their union in the river,” Berry wrote. “A country of overtowering edges,” Wendell Berry called the Gorge in 1971. Red River Gorge today, as seen in its 2020 hiking guideįifty miles southeast of Lexington is the Red River Gorge, a piece of the jagged border between the Appalachian Mountains and the bluegrass fields. Ohh if you been a TATT LER, you better quit TATT LIN’īetter hold your TONGUE and keep it from a- RATT LIN’ Lily May takes to the field against the gossipers: Where Sara Carter has a steady phrasing, singing like a judge, the Ledfords are the wild angels of rebuke, giving a lash to the first syllables in their ranks of sinners: drunnk-ard, gamm-bler, liii-errr. They take the song fast, rocketing through the changes (“their zeal is so irrepressible you’d swear they were gaining momentum with each successive verse,” Bill Frizkics-Warren wrote). The Coon Creek Girls make the Carters sound genteel. Sowing in the mountains but reaping in the valley seems like you might be getting away with something. You’re supposed to sow and reap the same field. But because the song is such a stitchwork, the metaphor doesn’t hold together. The refrain- sow ’em on the mountain, reap ’em in the valley, you’re going to reap just what you sow-is from the Bible (see Job 4:8 (“they that plow iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same”) or Galatians 6:7 (“for whatever a man soweth, so shall he reap”)). Carter had knocked a song together from a few Appalachian folk pieces, nicking gospel lines as well. “ Sowing on the Mountain” works over the Carter Family’s “ Sow ‘Em on the Mountain,” from 1930.
The first thing that the Coon Creek Girls cut is the latter. So Lair’s picked old-time love and murder ballads, hillbilly comedy numbers, uptempo pieces, songs soaked in religion but not quite gospel. The record business is still getting back on its feet after being leveled by the Depression, and Vocalion wants variety in the titles. John Lair, their manager, has chosen the selections. None of them are more than twenty-two years old. They are the first all-woman country string band in the United States, or at least they’re the first who recorded. And on bass fiddle, Evelyn “Daisy” Lange, a showbiz kid who elbowed her way into the group, playing an instrument that she’d never touched until half a year ago. On mandolin, Esther Koehler, stage name “ Violet,” the dreamiest and most shadowy of the quartet. Rosie Ledford, jovial where her younger sister is reserved, sings and plays guitar.
Lily May Ledford, a radio pro but still uneasy at the microphone, looks sharply around the studio. The Coon Creek Girls, from Pinch-Em Tight Holler in the Red River Gorge of eastern Kentucky (a fib-only two are the others are Yankees). There are four of them here this morning in Chicago, eight AM on the second-to-last day of May, 1938.