Singin' Gatherin'

The rough stage, with the windowless cabin in the background, looked synthetic. The linsey-woolsey costumes looked as if they had just come out of attic trunks. But the music--the singing, fiddling and twanging of guitars, banjos and dulcimers--was the real McCoy: mountain music, with rough edges as unpolished as stones. On the hills near Ashland, Ky., country folk and tourists gathered this week for Ashland's twelfth annual American Folk Song Festival.

On hand to sing old Scottish scolding ballads was Mrs. Lyda Messer Caudill, who says she is a hillbilly descendant of Mary Queen of Scots. Bud Oney, mighty, black-mustached blacksmith of Long Horn Hollow, fiddled Cherokee Girl, Lost Indian, other lively tunes. Youngest headliner was Bud McCoy, 4. whose family feuded bitterly for 57 years with the West Virginia Hatfields. Announcing numbers in her mountain dialect was tiny, thin-lipped Author Jean Thomas (Blue Ridge Country), the "traipsin' woman," who started collecting folk songs while she "traipsed"' over the mountains as a circuit court reporter, then founded the festival to perpetuate a "singin' gatherin'" she once heard.

Heroic highlight of this year's singin' gatherin' was the Ballad of Sergeant York, celebrating the deeds of Tennessee's World War I hero. It was composed by the late Jilson Setters, bristle-bearded fiddler who once sang mountain songs for the King and Queen of England. Sample stanzas:

He could play a hand of poker, hold his liquor like a man,

He did his share of prankin' in his youth;

But his dying father left him with the family in his care,

And he quickly sought the ways of God and truth.

The eighth day of October the Argonne battle raged,

Machine guns whined and rifle bullets flew;

Then Alvin lost his temper, he said,

"I've had enough, I'll show these Huns what Uncle Sam can do."

He took his army rifle and his automatic too,

And hid himself behind a nearby tree;

He shot them like he used to shoot the rabbits and the squirrels

Away back home in sunny Tennessee.

He took the whole battalionZJne-hundred-thirty-two--

While thirty-five machine guns ceased to fire;

And twenty German soldiers lay lifeless on the ground

As he marched his prisoners through the bloody mire.

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