BALLAD NIGHT IN MARSHALL
Once a month a group of old time ballad singers meet at the Marshall Jail restaurant, Zadie‘s, for of couple of hours of ballad singing. They don‘t get paid for doing this, although they do pass around a collection container for donations.
Their ballad singing, almost always not accompanied by a musical instrument, in a sharp edged roller coaster voice tells stories of love and sorrow, infidelity and murder, the hard passage of life in the mountains. These ballads have a Scotch Irish history and were brought to the Appalachian mountains by people escaping Europe for one reason or another and scrabbling out a hard living in the narrow rocky fields in mountain valleys. Most of the dozen or so singers Wednesday night come from Madison County which has Marshall with its courthouse at the center. This was Sheila Kay Adams birthday. She was the emcee, introducing everyone, and someone had made a couple of trays of cupcakes to distribute.
This time I set my iPhone on a tiny tripod and recorded an hour of singing in spatial video. I‘ve trimmed this down to twenty minutes which I hope will download enough that you can see and hear it. If not you‘ll have to take my word for it that the singing was both heartfelt and special.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0daK8CTS0F7HxzzcDUGdqg-pA
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 