ABSTRACT
One of the significant things about Harry Smith’s Anthology is the fact that it is dominated by performers and material hailing from the Amer ican South. The Anthology, as much as it speaks to a national and transnational idea of America, also undeniably contributes to a specifically Southern imaginary-and one formed to a great extent through representations of South Appalachian mountain cultures. This, to rephrase Smith, is an America created through music. Part of the Anthology’s legacy, therefore, is its continuing significance in constructing, recycling and representing images of the South. This essay examines Smith’s project as a major “southern text” in relation to a selection of contemporary fiction. The focus on southern mountain cultures allows for some containment of the material whilst also highlighting the uses and abuses of cultural regionalism on a broader scale. In particular, I am interested in the ways that novelists Lee Smith, William Gay and Colson Whitehead have all employed Anthology songs and performers as materials to construct a fictive South perpetually threatened with destruction. Paradoxically, this South is produced, nurtured and sustained through narratives of threat and loss. Equally the Anthology “saves” a world of southern “traditional” or folk cultures through modern recording technology, thereby questioning binaries of tradition/modernity in song collecting. While only William Gay makes explicit his debt to Smith’s work, all the texts considered perpetuate and develop an Appalachian imaginary reciprocally grounded in Harry Smith’s vision and concerns. In doing so they replicate, extend and develop Smith’s anthologizing project, offering “New Souths” marked by generic playfulness, historical re-evaluation and an ongoing exploration of their cultural importance in the national imaginary. They also express a debt to Smith’s work in challenging simplistic social, cultural and racial distinctions, perhaps most strikingly in the work of Colson Whitehead. The recycling aesthetic is, of course, an integral part of Smith’s working method, and the three writers employ parallel approaches to recover and re-present what might be denigrated as cultural waste material, or “trash.” This study, then, is founded on the idea that southern Appalachian mountain cultures play a key part in the development of what
Harry Smith deems Amer ican folk music (my italics) and maintain the Anthology’s significance in the imaginative territory of contemporary culture. Ideas of the South and “southernness” endure, even while essentialist notions of a singular, distinctive region give way to more nuanced readings. As Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee suggest: “we can think of the southern imaginary as an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories and fantasies about a shifting geographic region and time.” This suggests a transnational approach, whereby the southern imaginary is “fully implicated in the process of national self-creation.”1 However, the South in much contemporary media continues to be represented through strikingly reductive stereotyping, both in pan-southern terms and specific images of mountain cultures. This is expressed in the familiar binary of an “othered” South, estranged from the rest of the USA. Barker and McKee comment:
In a national narrative of limitless opportunity and unrestricted resources that validated the present and looked to a bright future, the . . . South often served in terms of both place and time (the past) as a repository for the nation’s unresolved problems and contradictions.2
