Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Several summers ago, I joined a friend and her dog outdoors, at Percy Warner Park, for the Full Moon Pickin’ Party. Along with hundreds of others on blankets and collapsible chairs, we listened to musicians pull forth into the Nashville night air that “high lonesome” sound that is bluegrass. I treasure the music’s African origins in the banjo and celebrate its lesser-known history of early black string players such as Jimmie Strothers and Lesley Riddle. A younger generation of musicians have only increased my devotion: Rhiannon Giddens, Jake Blount, Kaia Kater, Blind Boy Paxton, and others.

Listening to all those banjos, mandolins, and fiddles took me back to my childhood summers in Tennessee. After dinner, Aunt Kitty, charged with my care, watched The Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw on TV. I heard secular songs about love and heartbreak, as well as sacred gospel tunes that asked, “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

That was long ago, it seems — truly, a bygone era. Bluegrass conjures up the past in ways that feel both celebratory and painful. They call it mountain music, and some believe the creeks, rivers, valleys, and woods carry a hurt that one hears in all that fiddling, a sentimental history of Appalachia, but also a palpable history of poverty, subjugation, bondage, and musical ingenuity. That haunting, for me, is embedded in the folklore and spirit of the South, which I am just beginning to feel in my body.

Today’s poem locates the plaintive in Southern music and history, whose more malevolent past occasionally shows up in the supernatural.

Bloodroot
by Mary-Alice Daniel

I’ve been trying to get it down—
what I mean when I think 
back to Southern Melancholy.
You can see it in our old story charts
and in the radio short about a barefoot boy
who tried buying his way outta Appalachia,
selling bloodroot a buck a pound.


              Here is the Cumberland River.

Here a strain of the heartsickness bubbling
through it, and so through childhoods.
Still I don’t know many love songs, yet
I learned two names for each tree.
Alaqua—sweet gum. Chinquapin—
chestnut. Serviceberry—amelanchier.
One blackberry winter, I went
behind our apartment and down
the slippery ravine in flip-flops
(Blue Ash saplings saved my life)
just to touch what it was
that flooded, killing twenty.
What, once, when I was ten,
as if to confirm existence
of a petty/personal god,
claimed a neighbor’s porch set,
which I did envy.


              What could have stuck in these hills to make
              the Scots-Irish accent drawl out—and twang
              like certain strains in certain songs?

Expository music of the same sad stone:
The Baptist Church. The other churches.
Pentecostal in the major days of diablerie.
Fleeing the root of rapture. Coming back,
always coming back. The call of the night
collector. The spectrum of the Bell Witch.
To make it more personal, I will elaborate.
If there must be a tornado, make it a fire whirl!
Feral as the Supercell that tore a Ford-shaped hole in the water tower.
We shielded our heads with slavery-apologetic textbooks—
those who knew to hide under underpasses
hid under underpasses.

“Bloodroot” by Mary-Alice Daniel from MASS FOR SHUT-INS, © 2023 Mary-Alice Daniel. Used by permission of Yale University Press.