Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from Goldenseal.(Review)

Edited by John Lilly. (Music in American Life.) Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999. [231 p. 0-252-02499-0 (cloth); 0-252-06815-7 (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]

In this volume, Goldenseal editor John Lilly offers twenty-five of the magazine's articles profiling West Virginia traditional musicians. Issued quarterly since 1975 by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Goldenseal magazine is not well known outside the state and is held by few academic libraries. Since its inception, however, it has been the preeminent source of information on West Virginia folklife. Filled with photographs and easily accessible to general readers, it features articles by local freelance authors and, occasionally, by prominent folklorists and music scholars such as Charles Wolfe, Kip Lornell, and Ivan Tribe. Although the magazine covers a full range of historical and cultural topics, many of its articles are on musical traditions, reflecting a special interest of Goldenseal readers.

The musicians featured in Mountains of Music. West Virginia Traditional Music from "Goldenseal" are divided into five categories: fiddlers, banjo players, dulcimer players, guitarists, and family bands. Lilly's goal was to present a balanced rather than a comprehensive sampling, and he has omitted some prominent West Virginia musicians (such as Frank George and Jenes Cottrell) but included others who are less well known. For that reason, the work is less a who's who than a montage, with representatives of various traditions and regions. Readers familiar with the folk music of West Virginia will have heard of Clark Kessinger, Melvin Wine, and Nat Reese, but many of the most engaging stories are about relatively unknown musicians, such as ninety-two-year-old African American banjo player Clarence Tross, who incorporated unusual rhythms into his music, and singer-guitarist Blackie Cool, whose profile reads like a history of rural West Virginia life and music in the twentieth century. The articles vary in approa ch and emphasis, though interviews with the musicians themselves represent the principal source of information anti provide much recounting of life experiences. (Notable exceptions are Tribe's and Wolf's articles.) The informal, reminiscing quality in most of the articles is due in part to thc influence of former Goldenseal editor Ken Sullivan, who encouraged writers to ...