Muse

From PRX.

On March 11, 1879, James Wilson, the president of the Western North Carolina Railroad Corporation, sent a telegraph to North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance. It read, Daylight entered Buncombe County this morning through the Swannanoa Tunnel. The Swannanoa Tunnel was the last of seven tunnels, spanning over nine miles, ascending 1,100 feet up through the Blue Ridge Mountains. The crews that hand-dug these tunnels were made up primarily of black men, convicted of petty crimes with protracted sentences by the state of North Carolina. The Swannanoa Tunnel was the longest, at 1,832 feet, above the length of six football fields. The cheers of Western North Carolina Railroad Corporation's leadership celebrating their engineering feat were soon drawn out by a deep rumble. The Swannanoa Tunnel collapsed, killing 19 of the black men forced at gunpoint to work on it.

Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, walking in, walking in, walking in, walking in.

That's James William Love. He's singing Asheville Junction, also known as Swannanoa Tunnel or Swannanoa Town. Love was a letter carrier at Duke University. Folklorist Frank Clyde Brown recorded him as part of a larger collection of North Carolina and Appalachian folk music. Will Love served as a deacon at his church and loved to sing. He worked at Duke, as far back as when it was still Trinity College, and retired after 44 years of service. This 1939 recording of Asheville Junction is the earliest known rendition of the song sung by a black person. Asheville Junction is a work song that laborers on railroads use to keep time while laying track and drilling through rock. Work songs often detail the nature of the job and events that happened on the line, like the Swannanoa Tunnel cave-in. If it wasn't for recordings like Will Love's Asheville Junction, and the academics who discovered and valued them, we might never have known this story. One of so many about the people who built America's railroads. That's what drew Silk Road to create the American Railroad Project. I'm Rhiannon Giddens, Artistic Director of Silk Road. We're a collective of artists representing dozens of nationalities, traditions, and ideas, who use music and art to demonstrate how great beauty can emerge from great difference. We strive to engage difference, sparking radical collaboration and music with a purpose, for a more hopeful and inclusive world. Inspired by the historical Silk Road trade routes that connected Africa and Asia, world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma formed the Silk Road Ensemble in 1998. When I started as Artistic Director in 2020, I wanted to honor Yo-Yo's commitment to people and ideas from around the world. And as an American folk musician and historian, the work I do is rooted in Americanness and what that means, and how the world is represented through American stories. And what better way to tell the history of oppression and opportunity in this country than through the lens of the development of the Transcontinental Railroad. America's railway system is one of the largest, most ambitious projects ever undertaken. It covers all 50 states, contributed to the country's economic growth, and accelerated the spread of our population and the building of communities and cultures. With the American Railroad Project, we wanted to find the stories that were buried or forgotten in the name of that progress, and tell you all about them through an album, a national tour, and this podcast, American Railroad. The labor and lives of countless African American, indigenous, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrants built our nation's railroads.

But their service, stories, and songs are largely silenced in the conversation about the growth and prosperity of our country.

The Irish came over by the million at the turn of the century, and they took the jobs nobody else wanted to take. They were the infrastructure, they were the sand hogs, and they carried with them their wit and their good humor and their songs. The island of the bloody strings, PRS on their fear and unity. Both the railroad system and the fossil fuel pipeline,

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I love the idea of picks and shovels and rocks and blasts becoming this percussion orchestra that people heard all day long. And their heartbeat and their pulse beat lined up with the syncopation of work. And they invented incredible new music.

It's in every part of my DNA. It just makes me go, wow! So I love that. And I know that. I know those sounds and those songs. And they're very much like from where my family comes from in terms of stomp dance music.

Our journey in this first season of the American Railroad podcast will take us across the United States, from the subways of New York City to California's Pacific Coast, from Standing Rock in the Dakotas back to Back Bay Station in Boston. But our first stop? My home state of North Carolina. From Silk Road and PRX, welcome aboard the American Railroad. We'll be right back. This is American Railroad. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. If you didn't know about Will Love and the origins of the Swannanoa Tunnel song, you're not alone. I'm a roots musician from North Carolina, and I didn't know. I read about Will Love's story online in the Bitter Southerner article called Somebody Die, Babe, a musical cover-up of racism, violence, and greed, written by Drs. Jeffrey Keith and Kevin Kerberg, who we'll meet in a minute. The article blew my mind because it was right in line with what we set out to do with the American Railroad project. Here is a song, Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, sung by Black convict laborers most often arrested for petty crimes and forced to serve drawn-out terms. And to have that song cross the color line and become a bluegrass standard, which in doing so erased that history? That's a uniquely American story, and a powerful one. Musicologist Kevin Kerberg and historian Jeffrey Keith are professors at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. They are also musicians. They met as graduate students at the University of Kentucky and played together.

My name is Kevin Kerberg. I'm a musicologist and a music faculty member at Warren Wilson College, just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. I was in a band with a musician named Chris Sharp, who was from the Asheville area. And when I started playing with Chris, one of the songs that Chris loved to play was Asheville Junction.

Last December, I remember the wind blow cold, the wind blow cold.

Chris popularized the song when he was a guitar player for the late John Hartford, a very well-known bluegrass musician. And so when I was playing with Chris at this time, it was a song that we played a lot. I thought it was just another kind of folk song, maybe a disaster song from the area. A disaster song is a category of folk song that documents events that happen in history, whether it's a flood, railroad accident, the sinking of the Titanic. I assumed that's where this song came from, and it must have been about a railroad accident in this region.

Somebody died, babe. Somebody died. When you hear that hound dog howling. Somebody's coming, babe. Somebody's coming.

Hello, my name is Jeff Keith. I'm a historian, and I teach history at Warren Wilson College in the Swannanoa Valley. Kevin and I learned to sing it together before we ever started exploring it as a research topic. But then it was this coincidence of us both teaching at Warren Wilson College that allowed us to teach a class together where we were talking about work and music. And we decided, well, we should find out what this railroad song commemorates. And that's when this whole project exploded, because this was... horrific story of racial subjugation and forced labor under gunpoint. And when we realized the song was about that, it changed everything. It was no longer just a sing-songy folk song that we wanted to know and perform. It became instead kind of a pathway into what had been a very muted and underappreciated and critically important aspect of Southern history.

Before that Bitter Southerner article came out, Asheville Junction was considered a classic white Appalachian folk song. It was covered by many prominent bluegrass, old-time, and folk artists, including Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Paul Clayton, Brian Sutton, and the Johnson Mountain Boys.

Asheville Junction, it's one of no tunnels. It's all caved in, darling.

It's all caved in. I'm going back to that swampy little tunnel. That's my home, baby. That's my home.

Asheville Junction, seven mid-morning. Walk it in. Lord, it all caved in.

Popularized versions of the song are thought of as an ode to Asheville, a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains known for its beautiful vistas and gorgeous waterfalls. Over time, the song became a part of the city's cultural heritage. The Swannanoa Tunnel is about 10 miles north of Asheville, and the railroad coming through that part of North Carolina contributed to the city's boom. In the decade after the tunnel's completion, Asheville quadrupled in size and is now the largest city in western North Carolina, and is well known for its bluegrass and Americana music scene. Before the railroad, the western part of North Carolina was cut off from the rest of the state. The eastern border of North Carolina is the Atlantic coast, while the western third of the state is in the Appalachian Mountains. Sandwiched in the middle is the Piedmont region, where I'm from, the foothills of the mountains. As you can imagine, the mountainous terrain made it difficult for indigenous communities and eventually white European settlers to navigate the western part of the state, save for a pass in the mountains. For the railroad, the North Carolina government came up with a solution, the Swannanoa Gap.

Today we came up from a lower point on the grade, so we're climbing up after about a mile of hiking to the mouth of the tunnel, the eastern portal of the Swannanoa Tunnel, which is really important because this was the approach for trains that were coming up from the Piedmont.

That's Jeffrey Keith again. He and Kerberg are hiking uphill as they approach the Swannanoa Tunnel, the last of seven train tunnels spanning the Swannanoa Gap.

This was the final barrier to access to Asheville, and it's appropriate geographically, but also poetically in a way. When you think about the history, at the top of this tunnel was the passageway for people across millennia. You had plenty of foot traffic and wagons and eventually cars. Now you have the interstate. And all through that time, ever since at least 1879, you've also had trains right here at the Swannanoa Tunnel.

The Western North Carolina Railroad Corporation, or WNCR, began constructing the Swannanoa Tunnel in 1877 to connect this part of the state to the eastern coast. Swannanoa was one of seven hand-dug tunnels spanning nine miles, ascending 1,100 feet through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Construction began on the tunnel 12 years after the passage of the 13th Amendment, which ended chattel slavery in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. The state-owned WNCR built the Swannanoa Tunnel largely with an incarcerated labor force. Between 1876 and 1894, the black prisoner population in North Carolina nearly tripled. Over 3,000 people, mostly black men, constructed the Swannanoa Tunnel. As the sun peaks over the horizon on this late summer morning, Kerberg and Keith traipse through overgrown kudzu, reflecting on how difficult it must have been for the people who built the Swannanoa Tunnel to survive their workday.

It's laid off. August. It's pretty hot and muggy. The sun has just come up probably about an hour ago, and you can already feel the heat of the day beginning to bear down. This would be a pretty

punishing environment all four seasons for different reasons. Being here right now in the summer, though, it's particularly daunting to imagine these men out here, and women, but mostly men, working to create this grade out of the mountain we're on. Laborers worked year-round

throughout this punishing heat of summer and frigid winter temperatures. They were fighting

the elements. They were working in conditions that were dreadful. There was terrible housing. The stockades that were built were inadequate. There are also records of people having to live their lives in railroad cars. So the work done by the workers, these incarcerated workers,

was truly dangerous. It's estimated that over 300 laborers died during the tunnel's construction, but the true number is lost to history. Their bodies tossed aside in mass graves along the tunnel's path.

If you look to records of the memories of people who worked on the railroad, hundreds of people may have died from disease, but they were in unmarked graves. If you look to specific records from the state, you get more modest numbers, but still hundreds of people died. It seems very reasonable, given these conflicting sources and the overall danger to say that over a thousand people probably died. We do not know exact numbers, and that's one of the terrible things about the way laborers were mistreated, and more specifically, how incarcerated people and incarcerated Black people were treated in the Jim Crow South. But it was absolutely, to be clear, very dangerous work to build the railroad at all. To build tunnels, it was even more dangerous because you had to move so much rock, you had to blast rock, and you had to do this year-round. The conditions were completely unbelievable.

The laborers needed to keep up with each other. To avoid accidents, they needed to move at the same pace. And that's where music comes in. It tied communities together, sure, but it also helped people stay in time. Swananowa Tunnel is a work song. One person would hold a spike, another would use a hammer to drive it in, and everyone would sing together to keep the rhythm. This is common in the genre. You might already be familiar with John Henry or Track Colin, other songs that have the same structure.

You can hear John Henry hammering. Oh, Lordy, hear John Henry hammering.

In the morning, when you rise, pick and shell by your side. In the morning.

Conchie take this hammer. Hammering. Get you the captain. Conchie tell him I'm going. Lord tell him I'm going.

But there was something that made this work more dangerous than before. A new explosive. Nitroglycerin. Here's Kevin Kerberg.

One of the bottlenecks of this work was that in order to use nitroglycerin, you had to drill holes into the rock. So they needed to drill as many holes as quickly as possible. So a lot of these workers were set to work doing this process where you would have one or two individuals holding a large drill bit and then one or two individuals holding sledgehammers and they would pound on the bit. And then in between hammer blows, they would turn the drill bit. So the song Swannanoa Tunnel really originated as a way to time this work. As you can imagine, it was very dangerous work where you had the potential for serious injury. So it was important for these people doing this work to really time it precisely.

Mr. Ed Watson, supervisor. Charlie Watson, roadmaster. Ed Williams, got your money. And done gone to the country.

If the rhythm of the work song was the heartbeat, the lyrics were the soul. The folks who built the nation's railroads were often the most marginalized. escaped communities to remember from being in society. Ari зав it history has passed through the

Poor, black, indigenous, immigrant. And the lyrics of work songs were often coded ways for laborers to express their frustrations, communicate with one another without tipping off overseers, or to document significant events on the line. Lyrics were often improvised and would change over time.

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And if you work on the valley road, you'll get your money every 24th.

The lyrics were elastic. You could add verses. You could take them away. You could make them up on the fly. So there was an element of improvisation in it. But the origin of the Swananoa Tunnel song was as this work song, and then there's the whole story of the song traveling into the local folk music tradition of the area.

One of the verses added to the song, that we heard in Will Love's version, was about the March 11, 1879 cave-in. But as the song gained popularity, and was eventually recorded and documented by historians, folklorists, and musicians from outside the African-American community, that history became more and more obscured, and the true meaning of the song was lost. The first known documentation of the tune was by English folklorist Cecil Sharp, who came to the United States from London to collect what he characterized as English folk songs. Here's Dr. Jeffrey Keith of Warren Wilson College.

Cecil Sharp was an Englishman. In 1905, he left his position at a music conservatory, and he kind of got more involved in sort of trying to collect what he saw as the very important English folk tradition of music.

Cecil Sharp was unhappy with the industrialization of England. He thought that he could find English folk songs, the roots of English culture, throughout the English diaspora.

This is in a pre-recorded age, so he wrote them down to record them, and he wrote down notes. And Cecil Sharp, very importantly, documented that this song existed as a sung ballad in Western North Carolina. He wrote it down as Swannanoa Town-O. It's unclear whether they were saying Swannanoa Town-O and had changed the song for their purposes, or if he was mishearing the word tunnel through a southern accent. But he was seeking English music in Appalachia, and he found English music in Appalachia, but he also found music like Swannanoa Tunnel, which came from the brutal experiences of these mostly black incarcerated laborers. And he wrote it down as English folk music, and therefore created a complete confusion about the history of the song. It's a song that was sung by mostly black people, but he recorded it by writing it down when he heard it sung by two white women, and then made notes that created further cultural confusion.

Here's a quote from Cecil Sharp's diaries.

She told us of Watson's Cove, about three miles off, with her, accordingly, we tramped. A very hard and warm walk, mainly uphill. When we reached the cove, we found it peopled entirely by all our trouble and spent energy for naught.

I just feel like that's critically important to understanding how messy and weird this history gets.

When we come back, we'll talk more about Asheville Junction's journey from chain gang work song to Appalachian folk anthem. Welcome back to American Railroad. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. English folklorist Cecil Sharp first documented the Swannanoa Tunnel song in 1917, when he heard it sung by two white women who lived nearby. It's more than fair to wonder how two white women in early 1900s America learned a tune created by mostly black men working on a chain gang. At the end of a long workday, these black laborers would decompress in their camps by playing music, and people in the towns nearby would come near to enjoy the tunes. Over time, those listeners became learners, taking the music back to their homes. Do this enough times, and the song gets absorbed into the larger genre of Appalachian music. Now, when people think Appalachian music, there is often an image of a white person plucking away on a banjo. But the genre is far more complex than that. America's share of the Appalachian Mountains runs almost the entire length of the East Coast, from Maine in New England to Alabama in the Deep South. Appalachian music, and the music back to their home.

Appalachian music, Appalachian music, Appalachian music, Appalachian music,

comes from the songs and stories of Scotch-Irish, Germans, French Huguenots, and of course Native Americans, and free and enslaved Black people. All that influence forms the tapestry of Appalachian music. More from musicologist Kevin Kerberg.

Appalachian music is often used as a blanket term for acoustic styles of music making, typically involving a fiddle and a banjo. That have some kind of connection to the region of Southern Appalachia. Unfortunately, that term Appalachian music is often coded as white, right? Appalachian music is more complicated than white people playing fiddle and banjo. It has a multicultural history that involves not only Black musicians, but also Indigenous traditions, among others.

Asheville Junction Swannanoa Tunnel The Swannanoa Tunnel song cemented its place in the canon of Appalachian music after a nod from one of the genre's biggest proponents.

The song was collected in the early 20th century, most prominently by a gentleman named Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who was a local lawyer, newspaper editor, impresario, who did a lot of song collecting in this region of Western North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains around here. And Swannanoa Tunnel became one of Bascom Lunsford's signature songs that he would go around and present as an example of folk music from where he was from, Western North Carolina. As a result of that, the song spread far and wide among people playing folk music.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford's version of Swannanoa Tunnel was recorded in 1935. This was the early days of recorded music. Much like the railroad allowed people and goods to move around the country more easily, recordings allowed more people to hear and cover a song. Lunsford's rendition of Swannanoa Tunnel became the standard, and was covered by countless musicians throughout the 20th century. And as it grew in popularity, it moved further and further away from its origins as a Black work song. But there are contemporary musicians reminding us that bluegrass, Appalachian, and folk music looks and sounds as diverse as the region it comes from.

My name is Trey Wellington. I am 25 years old. I am a musician. I'm from North Carolina. I'm from the mountains of North Carolina, up near Boone, in a place called Ash County. And yeah, I'm primarily a three-finger, Scruggs-style banjo player.

Trey is the head of the Trey Wellington Band and a part of the Black String Band New Dangerfield. He's a young Black man playing banjo in a genre not generally known for young Black folks playing in it. Trust me, I know.

I'm one of the few Black band leaders in bluegrass music. I'm one of the few Black touring musicians at all in the bluegrass world, really. For people who aren't as forward-thinking, they take that as a political statement. It's just me stating who I am and my place in this music.

Trey wants to make bluegrass a place where it's not noteworthy anymore for him to be Black.

I definitely think as a Black person within this music, it's very important to my whole creative process and to the way I think about making music. Because I also want to make music that brings in Black audiences into the bluegrass world. Because, you know, 99% of the time when I go and play a festival or a venue, I end up seeing a primarily white audience. And I really want that to change.

The song, Swananoa Tunnel, echoes what Trey is talking about. Bluegrass and the Swananoa Tunnel song have Black roots. And seeing the Blackness in them is important to understanding them fully. When we return, we'll learn more about Will Love's Asheville Junction, popularly known as Swananoa Tunnel, and how he inspired a new rendition with Silk Road. We'll be right back. The Catalyst for Doctors' Junk...

Jeffrey Keith and Kevin Kerberg's groundbreaking work, Somebody Died, Babe, grew out of a simple curiosity to learn the origins of a song rooted in their new jobs and home, Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. The article sparked conversations about erasure and ownership, not only among Roots musicians, but North Carolinians. Their work resulted in changes to public records laws in the state to make it easier for researchers to access archival records and fill in the narratives of not only the Black men and women who built the Swannanoa Tunnel, but potentially other hidden histories. Here's Dr. Jeffrey Keith with more.

Those records were being suppressed under old laws because they pertained to the identities of people who were imprisoned. So we reached out to a local congressperson who made an adjustment to the law that was signed into law last year by Governor Roy Cooper, opening up records. So this is going to be very important for anyone who's wanting to find the identities of people who were locked into this work. We've also had incredible feedback at the political level. We have been continuing our work and we're writing a book called Song of the Unsung for UNC Press. And in order to do that, we were in the archives in Raleigh and found records that were going to get us closer to making these anonymous workers into individuals, just sort of like Will Shorty Love's story became Will Love's story.

Kerberg and Keith's research not only unearthed the story of the Asheville Junction song, but that of James William Love himself. In Duke University's folklorist Clyde Brown's notes, Love was referred to as Shorty and labeled a colored janitor. But that is not the man his family knew. As a letter carrier at Duke for 44 years, he never met a stranger on campus. Because of him, the Swannanoa Tunnel song's true meaning is familiar to us. Now he's able to take his place in the huge treasure trove of black acoustic musicians from North Carolina. Folks like Etta Baker, Elizabeth Cotton, Earl Scruggs, and Joe Thompson, who've made such an impact on Appalachian, bluegrass, and folk music. Although it was recorded a few years after Baskin-Lamar Lunsford's popularized version, it is a world away from it. Will Love's version harkens back to the tune's work song origins, with Love striking his hand down as if driving a hammer.

Somebody died. Somebody did.

Love's steady beat on that surface is at the heart of Silk Road's rendition. The ensemble is inspired by music rooted in traditions and histories from throughout the world. And although we make something new and unique, we always honor its origins. The team at PRX put me on the other side of the mic for an interview about how Silk Road's version of the Swannanoa Tunnel song was born. This tune, Nashville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, was kind of taking it off of Will Love's version.

Nashville Junction Swannanoa Tunnel All caved in, babe. All caved in.

You know, I kind of just threw away the modern version and just kind of based it on his version and just sort of going, okay, if I was just learning this as a song, what would I do with it? It just kind of pops up in these different, you know, maybe it's just the voice, maybe it's the voice and tabla, maybe it's a string quartet version of it, you know, this idea of it sort of being a through line of this is what happens, you know. There's something that's inspired by what happened on the railroad and then it just makes this journey through these different people to end up, you know, where it ends up in the show, not necessarily as a bluegrass standard. We don't bust it out as bluegrass.

That's my home, babe. That's my home.

Yeah, it's a good tune, you know, a good tune, you can do kind of anything to a good tune and a good story. The older tunes, like the ballads, you know, work songs, they tend to be simple melodically, simple rhythmically, so that people...

People can pick them up.

...

You don't have a lot of complexity in these songs.

... ...

That's what makes them folk songs. It's like a stone.

... ...

The more it gets tumbled in a river, the smoother it gets, you know?

...

Next time on American Railroad, we're headed to New York City, where Irish-American sand hogs burrowed the tunnels of our nation's most sprawling subway system while maintaining a strong connection to their homeland and heritage through song.

The Irish have travelled across the globe. They're in every corner of the planet, and their stories and the history of the oppression of the Irish people lies in the notes and the songs and the stories that we tell. And often people associate this type of music with a jolliness. We tap our foot along with the jigs and the reels of Irish music, but there is real sorrow in those notes.

American Railroad is a production of Silk Road and PRX. The show is produced by Amber Walker, David Newtown, and Perry Gregory, and edited by Genevieve Sponsler and Jocelyn Gonzalez, executive producer of PRX Productions. Our mix engineer is Tommy Bazarian, and our project manager is Tony Carlson. Our recording engineers are Ben Rollins and Jacob Wolfe at the University of Limerick. Special thanks to Phil Jameson, Will Bruno, Duke University, and the family of Will Love. For more on Silk Road's American Railroad project, including our tour and album, go to silkroad.org. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. See you at the next stop. T unten in the violation.

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