Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott.(Book review)

Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott. By Michael Ann Williams. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [xiv, 221 p. ISBN-10 0-252-03102-4; ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03102-1. $60.] Bibliographic references, index.

Staging Tradition tells two stories of two very different and little-known figures in traditional American music. Both came from Kentucky, and neither were musicians but they left a lasting legacy in the field of traditional American music. John Lair created Renfro Valley, and Sarah Gertrude Knott established the National Folk Festival. Respectively, they devoted their lives to these institutions, which survive today still promoting traditional American music, although using somewhat different approaches.

John Lair began his music career in the army during World War I, where he became involved in the production staff of an army musical. But it was his work in Chicago for radio station WLS where Lair began his career as a talent scout and artist's manager, finding talent on his home turf in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. The most famous of these finds was probably Clyde "Red" Foley, but also included, Lily Mae Ledford, Myrtle Cooper (aka Lulu Belle), and Linda Parker. Lair began working with WLS part-time while continuing to work for a large insurance company. In 1935, WLS finally hired Lair as their music librarian, a position from which he was able publish several songbooks and carry out his own research on the origins of many traditional songs, although his ability to find talent and then frame it within the context of a radio show was clearly part of his job description. Lair's greatest legacy, though, was "Renfro Valley," initially only used by Lair as a semi-mythical scenario for the WLS radio shows "Mountain Memories," "Coon Creek Social," and the nationally broadcast "Pine Mountain Social." Lair left WLS in 1936 to freelance for radio station WLW in Cincinnati where he began the broadcasts of the "Renfro Valley Barn Dance" during a fortuitous time when WLW was, temporarily at least, the most powerful radio station in the country. It was during his time there that Lair began construction of his real Renfro Valley complex off U.S. Route 25, south of Berea, Kentucky. With the creation of Renfro Valley, including a barn, tourist lodge, restaurant, tourist cabins, and trading post, Lair moved his operations and substantial stable of performers to the new complex from which he began a series of broadcasts including the "Renfro Valley Barn Dance," "Monday Night in Renfro Valley," and the "Sunday Morning Gathering." By the early 1950s Lair's failure to capitalize on the market for recordings caused much of his talent to drift away. Although Lair had a brief fling with a television show sponsored by Pillsbury Foods in 1956, it lasted for only fourteen shows (a brief clip from one can be seen in the Anne Johnson film Lily Mae Ledford [Appalshop Films, 1988]). Further competition from Nashville's increasing hegemony over the country music field and Lair's failure to market his traditionalist approach to the urban folk revival caused further financial deterioration until Lair finally sold the complex including his music collection and radio station WRVK to Hal Smith in 1967. Lair, who lived next door to the complex, remained involved as its manager, finally arranging to repurchase the complex in the late 1970s. After Lair's death in 1985, his daughters ran Renfro Valley until they sold it in 1989.

Like Lair, Sarah Gertrude Knott began in the world of the theater, although in her case, theater was part of her education at Chowan College where she worked with Frederick Koch (creator of the Carolina Playmakers) and the playwright, Paul Green. After moving to St. Louis in 1929 she continued her theatrical work by promoting amateur drama. Although it is not entirely clear how and why she moved from theater to festivals of traditional music and dance, she enlisted the aid of Green, folklorist/novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and scholars George Pullen Jackson and Benjamin Botkin to put on the first National Folk Festival in 1934. Held in St. Louis, Knott's first festival brought to the stage a wide variety of American traditional performers including ...