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Lily May Ledford—A Traditional Life of Song and Story
[The following article was written for the 1998 festival of Kentucky Folklife]
At this year’s festival, Saturday night has been set aside to pay tribute
in song to the life and music of Lily May Ledford, Appalachian singer, storyteller,
and founding member of the original Coon Creek Girls. For years Lily May Ledford’s
name has been widely recognized in Kentucky and throughout the nation by scholars,
musicians, and listeners who have unanimously credited her with bringing the
musical culture of eastern Kentucky to the world. As instrumental as she was
at providing a glimpse of the traditional values and experiences of life in
the mountains through her music, Lily May similarly brought to public light
the strength of one of the nation’s first all-female string bands.
In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Lily May began her public music career in Chicago, where she joined the National Barn Dance. A year later she ventured on to Cincinnati, where she became a regular on musical promoter John Lair’s newly formed Renfro Valley Barn Dance. It was here that Lair, an early promoter of women entertainers, encouraged banjo-playing Lily May along with her sister Rosie, Violet Koehler, and Daisy Lange to form the Coon Creek Girls. In 1939, after Koehler and Lange left the band, the Ledfords were joined by their other sister Susie, and it would be the formation of this trio, singing and playing with the true family mountain sound, that would act as a musical standard for many female country music artists up until the present. Throughout her career, from the smallest informal local dances to an audience with the King and Queen of England, Ledford shared with the world her unique mountain culture through song, ballad, and story.
The following is an excerpt from an essay written about Lily May by her granddaughter Cari Anna Norris. As a performer traveling down a similar path, Norris proudly embraces the career of her grandmother as she also brings to her audiences the never-ending stories about life and its complexities. In this writing Norris outlines for the reader how Ledford has been rightfully cast as one of the preeminent folk performers of our region. By combining personal reflections and rich historical remembrances of her grandmother, affectionately referred to as “Mamaw,” Norris provides us with an intimate glimpse into the musically evolving life of her family, a tradition she continues to share with the world, a tradition begun by Lily May Ledford.
Lily May Ledford as “Traditional Artist” by Cari Norris, granddaughter
Early in 1968, my grandmother was paid a visit by festival organizer Ralph Rinzler, who invited her and her sisters to play the National Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Susie had broken an arm, but Mamaw and Rosie went and found they were very enthusiastically received by the mostly college-age audience. This was a very different experience for the sisters, as Renfro audiences had been mostly composed of “older folks and farm boys and girls.”
At this point, college kids were taking an interest in folk traditions and were interested in learning how to play it. This festival marked the beginning of a second phase in Lily May’s career, one in which she graduated rightfully from the status of “hillbilly entertainer” to “traditional artist.” Charles Faurot and Dave Freeman from County Records came to Lexington, recorded the sisters and released an album. Mamaw played a few of the festivals with her sisters, but Rosie became ill, and Susie moved to Florida. Mamaw took to the stage solo, and though uncertain at first about going it alone, found that she could indeed handle it, and with style. In order to slow the pace a little and “rest,” she began telling stories between songs, and this feature of her performing in later years became an integral part of her artistry.
With humor, enthusiasm, great timing, and often deep insight, she talked about her days growing up in the Red River Gorge, fighting and sometimes sneaking away from her mother in order to learn to play fiddle and banjo and sing “them old drunkard songs.” She told about how she fixed up her first fiddle at the age of eleven and took to the woods to give voice to those fiddle tunes which kept “running through her head” and kept her from concentrating on schoolwork. She told about how the Coon Creek Girls were formed, and about how John Lair named the group, even though the girls had never heard of a place called “Coon Creek.” This revealed the sort of thing she had to put up with in early commercial radio, and she let the audience know it.
She also told how when the Coon Creek Girls played at the White House, John Lair, in order to get in to see the performance, had to pose as the the bass fiddle carrier for the group. She said they laughed in the back of the limo as Lair lugged the big bass along, “Law, how times has changed, back home he’s king, and we’re the subjects you know, up here we’re riding in the limo, and he’s trailing along totin’ the bass fiddle—that done us good!” Mamaw was a master storyteller. She could give the truth of a situation with such humor and warmth and intimacy, and this too speaks to the oral traditions of the mountains where she grew up. Though John Lair used it to try to convince the audience of something that must have been plainly apparent already, Lily May was the “real thing,” though that didn’t mean she wasn’t savvy and very much aware of all the phoniness of commercial radio.
Mamaw played “Man and His World Festival” in Montreal, Canada, in 1972 and the Smithsonian Festival in ’71. She toured the West and Canada in 1976 as part of the “Old-Time Music Festival” organized by John Oilman and Mike Seeger. Other performers included the Balfa Brothers Cajun Band, a fife and drum trio, and John Jackson, a country blues singer. Mamaw wrote of this experience, “Boys and girls came to the stage saying, ‘you’re so traditional—so traditional,’ how did they know? It was very evident they felt my old-fashioned music deeply and I could hardly keep from crying right on stage sometimes.” I just about cry when I read her words, because I realized that during that tour, Mamaw came to be recognized and appreciated for her true artistry, and she knew it and felt it—without slick emcees, without hokey costumes, just direct and by doing it the way she wanted. She did another western tour with the Red Clay Ramblers in 1979, and while in Seattle, recorded an album for Voyager Records, which was later released on the Greenhays label, as “Banjo Pickin’ Girl.” She played the Mariposa Festival in Toronto, and festivals, colleges, and universities throughout Kentucky.
Early in 1979 Loyal Jones received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Mamaw to do a five-month residency there, giving banjo and fiddle workshops, convocations, and ballad and story classes. During this time, an hour-long radio broadcast featuring interviews and stories with Lily May, and early and late recordings was narrated by Ellesa Clay High and broadcast on National Public Radio. Additionally, with part of the grant money, Berea College published an edited form of Mamaw’s longer autobiography which she worked on during the late 70s. Though slowed by diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, this was clearly a joyous conclusion to a long career in old-time music. Mamaw continued to perform until 1983, when she became ill with lung cancer. In 1985, shortly before her death, she was awarded the highest honor given to traditional artists in this country, the National Heritage Award. She writes at the end of the short autobiography published at Berea:
There is no doubt in my mind after all these experiences about where old-time music is going. ALL OVER!! That’s where! It’s now flourishing so greatly in the heavily populated areas, Canada, and the European countries too, so I hear, and I believe nothing can hold it back. It’s resurfacing, more strongly than ever before—recycling with the support of our young. I’m proud of my heritage, my music from the firesides and porches of our humble dwellings in the Kentucky mountains, now being played everywhere, and I hope to be playing right with them as long as I live, when and wherever I can.
My grandmother was proud, proud of her music and the struggles and joys of her life, and that was what she shared with audiences. She was a strong, bright spirit; people always said she had a strong “presence,” and I can feel that even now as I sit here typing this. I think some things in life have such a numinous quality that they can’t be forgotten and abandoned, without doing damage personally and to the community, and this is how I feel about my grandmother’s life and music. It’s how I feel about the experience of being rocked and sung to by her, and hearing her talk and play and sing. I feel like she told the truth about the complexities, pains, and joys of life, and that is something worth passing along. We have to pass on what we know, otherwise we lose precious toil and life experiences of those who have gone before. And in this process of passing on truths through music and stories, the worlds of the ancestor, the living, and the unborn are connected, as they should be.
