Addie Graham: Life and Times
Our family had music in them; it was borned in and you can’t get it out. That’s one thing you can’t get rid of is singing.
Addie Graham sang all her life. She was surrounded by music from birth: from neighbors, friends, travelers; from timber cutters, railroad workers, stage entertainers; most of all from her family. She grew up in a culture where music was as natural as talk; she had it all through her and was only too happy to pass it on.
She never revealed her age, but she was born before 1900 at Gilmore, Wolfe County, Kentucky, and grew up on the headwaters of the Red River, an area which includes parts of Magoffin, Morgan, Wolfe, and Breathitt Counties. It is a rough, beautiful country, and even today it is peaceful and isolated. When Addie was born, the area had not changed all that much since the days of the earliest white settlers. There were few roads, few stores, few jobs; people lived on farms and what they had was mostly what they grew or made.
This was as true of music as of anything else. People who have lived all their lives with TV, radio, movies and the like can have little idea of the richness and variety of the homemade music of people who had no other entertainment. In Addie’s community there were banjo players and fiddlers, ballad singers, hymn singers; as as black people came to the area to build the railroads they brought guitars and the blues. Addie learned from them all.
Certainly, the strongest influence on her music was her mother and father. She was the youngest of five children of Thomas T. and Gillian Prater. Tom was a farmer and logger; he and his wife lived all their lives in the Morgan-Magoffin-Breathitt area. Addie did not remember much about her father’s family except that they had lived there for a long time.Gillian Williams was the daughter of James Harvey Williams and his wife, a Rudd from Virginia. James Harvey’s grandfather was Elder Daniel Williams, a Revolutionary War veteran who was one of the first settlers in Morgan County. 1
Like most of the people in the area, Addie’s family was descended from immigrants from the British Isles, and their music accurately reflects their travels. It was the folk music of England and Scotland, unmistakably shaped by the southern mountains. Addie’s mother sang many of the “classic” British ballads. Her favorites were “The three Little Babes”* (Child 79) and “Greenwood Sidey-O” (Child 20). She also sang “Lord Randall” (Child 12), which Addie knows but will not sing because “I never did like that song.” In addition to the ballads, her parents sang many folk hymns of the Old Baptist church and several religious songs which they regarded as personal family possessions. “The Indian Tribes of Tennessee”*, a nearly unique piece, Addie believes to have come down from her pioneering ancestor Daniel Williams. A religious nursery song, “To See Poor Indian in the Woods,” was passed down in her mother’s family for at least three generations. A quasi-religious song—perhaps we could describe it as an Abolitionist hymn—must have been a possession of the family since Civil War times, when slavery was a heated question in the Kentucky highlands. The song, “We’re Stole and Sold from Africa,”* is a moving plea for freedom.
As Addie grew up she learned music from many people. Her sister Nan, twelve years her senior, married John Henry Coffey of Magoffin County. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Addie and a principal source for many, especially native American, ballads and songs. Examples are “Poor Omie”* (Laws F 4)2; “The Lonesome Scenes of Winter”* (Laws G 3); “The Wexford Girl” (Laws P 35); “Darling Corey”: and “Drunkard’s Dream.” One of her most striking memories is if Grant Reed, a black banjo player:
The only colored man there was around there; everybody liked him. He’d go along the road pickin’ the banjo and I’d stand and listen at him. I’d get out behind the house and here Grant come—and nobody on earth could pick it like Grant Reed—and I’d try to dance it. Daddy wouldn’t let us dance none; he’d have killed us if he caught us dancing. He didn’t believe in it.
It is most likely Reed’s banjo style we hear in Addie’s piano playing. Another source of songs was R.B. Dunn, a family friend who was noted around the Red River area of Wolfe County for his fine singing. He taught her “The Dummy”* and various “frolic” pieces like “Putt Around the Kitchen Till the Cook Comes In.” Himself white, Dunn sang many songs of black origin.
Grant Reed and R.B. Dunn were not the only source for a somewhat surprising store of black material in Addie’s repertoire. Between the years 1899 and 1910 the Ohio and Kentucky Railroad (O&K) was being built from Jackson, Breathitt County, into the timber and coal fields toward Cannel City and the Licking River in Morgan County. The building of the O&K was perhaps the most exciting event of the era for the people who lived along its route.3 The young men of the region worked on the railroad alongside black crews imported from the South, some perhaps as prison gangs.4 These crews brought work songs and lonesome railroad blues to the region, and the residents were quick to make such songs their own. Some of Addie’s kin (cousins named Lykans) worked on the train, one of them as a fireman. The train passed right by the house. Not only were she and her family delighted when when her cousins would “just roll big chunks of cannel coal off that train” for the family’s use, but Addie was also eager to garner in the train songs she heard “those mountain boys running around singing.” Three of these are included on this recording: “Darling Don’t You Know That’s Wrong”*, “Wouldn’t Mind Working from Sun to Sun”*, and the “O&K Train Song.”*
Not only did the O&K introduce new folkways into the region, it also gave previously isolated people the means of travel, thus consolidating a sense of community which overlapped county lines and superseded the usual boundaries of river valleys. Or at least it accomplished this for a brief period of time, for the O&K made its last run in 1933, and Addie and her family long mourned its passing. During its existence it created a sense of excitement, romance, and unity within the region—at the same time hauling away its vast resources of large timber and cannel coal.
The arrival of the O&K in Breathitt County opened the area to large-scale logging, and Tom Prater moved there with his family when Addie was a young woman. Until it was cut doiwn, the Appalachian hardwood forest was the largest in the history of thr world, and for many mountain people like Tom Prater the logging industry was their entry into the “modern” world of jobs and wages.
"You don’t know the wealth that went out of that country. It’d kill you to know of it. When the big companies came in they bought all the timber in that country, all through it … HE was a timber man, my father; he could fell a tree as big as you could build a house with and never split it. All that walnut timber, millions of dollars worth, went out of there. The wealth that was in that country, they never got nothing much for it; it went too cheap."
It was in Wolfe County that Addie met and soon married Amos Graham, a tall, flamboyant and colorful man who became something of a legend among those who knew him. Born in Wolfe County in 1866, he went west where he became (by his own account) a lawyer, doctor, and gambler; returning to the Kentucky mountains, he became (among other things) a timber man and a merchant. He and Addie moved to Jackson, which at that time was the center, not only of the area’s political life but of the thriving coal and timber business and the commercial activities which those interests spawned. Amos opened a general store under the name “Cheap John the Revelator, the Poor Man’s Friend, Independent as a Hog on Ice.” He was quite successful. The family soon purchased the historic J.B. Marcum home.
J.B. Marcum had been a prominent lawyer in Jackson and a principal in the last of a number of major family feuds (Hargis-Cockerell) which had given the county the epithet “Bloody Breathitt” in newspaper stories across the nation. The Hargis family, opposition leaders in the feud, still ran a store in Jackson. Addie was well acquainted with family members and allies from both sides and often heard stories of the feud, which climaxed with Marcum’s assassination in 1905. To the end of her life she was hesitant about relating too many of these stories, for she never forgot the short tempers and long memories involved.5 But she does sing the ballad written about the murder, “J.B. Marcum” (Laws E 19). Around 1918 or ’19 she heard blind fiddler and singer J.W. “Blind Bill” Day sing it at the county courthouse, probably during one of the “court day” celebrations that used to be common in east Kentucky when court was in session.
Day is one ofd those seminally important people in the course of mountain folk music whose influence on other folk musicians is still evident. He was born in Rowan County in 1860 but lived in Ashland, Boyd County, for many years, becoming the “Jilson Setters” of Jean Thomas’ books and “American Folk Song festival.” In spite of his blindness, Day was evidently a tireless ballad composer and inveterate roving musician throughout the region. He seems to have sung and fiddled, and sold printed broadsheets of his own and other ballads, in a great many towns of eastern Kentucky.
Jackson had long been considered the “feud capital” of Kentucky by the time Addie lived there, and indeed the old feuding spirit enjoyed somewhat of a revival during this period of intense competition for coal and timber fortunes.7 Addie was acquainted with one of the last of Breathitt’s powerful clan leaders (and he must remain nameless here). He was prominent, powerful, and unscrupulous. He rode tall in the midst of armed bodyguards. He was in fact the embodiment of a cultural type created during the chaotic period following the Civil War.8 Addie’s attitude toward this man is ambivalent and interesting. She told us how wealthy he was and about her various encounters with him with more than a hint of pride in her voice. But her truest attitude was quite stringently expressed in her final comment:
"I don’t know how many men he killed—or had killed. But I went down there to his funeral and he had beads of sweat on his forehead—and him layin’ there a corpse!"
The days in Jackson were sort of a Golden Age to Addie. She threw her considerable energies into running the store and raising a family. The store did well; she, Amos, and their three children were widely popular; her parents, brother and sisters were all close by. It was not to last. The timber boom collapsed and the Depression followed soon after, and Jackson’s prosperity was no more. People left—as Addie says, “some went east, some went west”—and the Grahams did too. Eventually they left the mountains for good, heading for the bluegrass. Locating in Cynthiana, Harrison County, they re-established the store and settled in. Amos died in 1962; Addie and her daughter Opsa continued in business until 1973. For the remainder of her life she enjoyed a well-earned rest—but did not retire from singing. She appeared at a number of folk festivals in Kentucky and gained recognition as a fine traditional singer, a reputation enhanced when Appalshop brought out the LP Been a Long Time Traveling in 1978. She passed away in Cynthiana in 1978.
Addie’s life spanned a period of extraordinary change in her native Kentucky; yet neither her music nor her values seem outdated, and she has a great deal to teach us. Looking back on her life, she reflected:
"People had a better time back then than they do now. As long as we have our family … If I could call my days back, I could live them over."
She often says, drawing on her Bible as source, “that that has been, shall be again.” We hope that with this recording her music and her history will continue to live and grow.