During the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Davidson, Jane Rigg, Caleb Finch, and others produced a series of recordings of musicians from southwestern Virginia and adjacent regions of North Carolina for Folkways, all of which are still available from the Smithsonian Institution. Their revival old-time band, the Iron Mountain String Band (consisting of Eric Davidson, Caleb Finch, and Brooke Moyer) has remained active since the 1960s. The following essay is derived from the liner notes that accompany the memorial album assembled by Davidson and Rigg entitled Uncle Wade, released as Folkways 2380 in 1973 following the banjo player's death.
Wade Ward was seventy-nine when he died "just settin'" early in the evening of May 29, 1971, on his familiar porch overlooking the Peach-bottom Creek meadows. He had spent most of his life in that house, outlived two wives, operated a small farm, and became famous as perhaps the greatest living exponent of the old time clawhammer banjo style. Wade began playing the traditional fiddle and banjo tunes of his country as a lad. Like most of the traditional mountain musicians he was born into a family of musicians, and for the first years his musical performances consisted of playing with his brother Crockett at nearby home dances. By the end of his life, his music had been distributed by major record companies, and interested people had come from all over the United States and England to see and hear him play.
All his life Uncle Wade stayed home and played music at local affairs, with local people. In a time when great highways and new populations and the events of history were uprooting the customs of his youth, Uncle Wade remained near Independence, Virginia, always living in more or less the old-time rural way. His repertoire contained few, if any, "new" tunes, and his musical style was never overlain with bluegrass harmonies and rhythms, as was so generally the case for old-time musicians who originated in his area over these same years. His was a rich and humorous outlook, and the comings and goings of local people were a source of pleasure and amusement to him. Everyone who knew him loved his gracious, easy ways. For whatever deeper reason, Wade was spared the frequently bitter and destructive restlessness which led so many mountain men off to wars and violent troubles and distant adventures. If ever there was a man who liked where he was, it was Wade.
So, for the love of playing, all his life Wade preserved his country's most intricate and memorable local traditions in music. Banjo-fiddle string band music was the first music Wade learned, and was always the music he played best, and by his own words the music he loved best.
ORIGINS
Benjamin Wade Ward was born October 15, 1892, one of five sons and four daughters of Enoch Ward and Rosamond Carico Ward. Both his father's and mother's people came from the mountains and valleys above Independence, Virginia. As far back as legend goes the Wards had lived near Saddle Creek, where Wade was born. Enoch Ward had been raised in Saddle Creek, and he died near there in 1922, at the age of seventy five, which would set the year of his birth around 1847. Tradition has it that the first Wards to come to Virginia were three brothers, all confirmed bachelors. One morning one of the brothers, who did all the cooking, set a fourth place at the table, and each time he took something he placed the same on the fourth plate. When breakfast was over he pointed to the fourth plate and said, "It would take too much food to keep a woman here." But eventually one of the brothers, the Ward family ancestor, married, and when this happened the other two brothers left, never to be heard from again.
When Wade was nine, the family moved to the nearby Rock Creek Community, and in the next year, 1902, Enoch Ward purchased the Peachbottom Creek farm a few miles above Independence where Wade lived ever since. One of Wade's earliest memories dated from this period. He once told me that he had gone into Independence town one summer day when he was nine or ten and saw a great crowd around the County Courthouse, which still stands. Peeking through the fence, he watched a Negro being hanged by the sheriff there, a sight which he said he always remembered and never wanted to see again.
Wade began learning to pick the banjo when he was eleven, and began fiddling when he was sixteen. His main teacher in both instruments was his brother, David Crockett Ward, who was twenty years older than Wade. Eventually Wade became an even more proficient banjo picker than Crockett though Wade's aunt Katy Hill states that there were certain tunes Wade never did learn "just right." Although Wade was mainly to become famous as a brilliant clawhammer banjo picker, he was also a first-rate fiddler. Katy feels that Crockett and Wade were about equally good on the fiddle, though she felt Crockett's performance was a little more "old timey."
There was much old time music in the Ward family background. Enoch Ward had played the fiddle, though by this time he had quit, and Rosamund Ward was the source for many of the ballads and songs which Crockett knew and later performed. There was also another older brother, Joe Ward, who picked the banjo as well. Wade once explained to me that he never sang with the banjo himself because he had a physical disability with his voice stemming from a bout with whooping cough when he was fourteen, but this could not be confirmed. A contributory reason was probably that there were always good singers around, first Crockett, and then Crockett's son, Fields. Whatever the reason, Wade's later musical activities were almost exclusively instrumental.
Wade played intensively during his teens. During this period he was out making music with Crockett almost every night. By this time the duo had become well known in the area and were playing at a variety of local events, including Christmas and other festivities at school houses in the Independence and Sparta, North Carolina, area, and weekly dances at a local Independence hotel. The main activity of all rural family string bands such as Crockett and his young brother Wade, however, was playing at home dances associated with important events, both social (weddings, celebrations) and economic (corn shuckings, house raisings, etc.).
The traditional banjo repertoire and the traditional fiddle repertoire in general overlap; i.e., a given banjo tune normally has a matching fiddle counterpart, and vice versa. The extent of overlap is not symmetrical for the two instruments, however, for although all banjo pieces may have possessed matching fiddle counterparts, the converse was clearly not true. The traditional fiddle repertoire was thus more complex, even though the major part of this repertoire was indeed banjo-fiddle string band music.
Both the clawhammer banjo and the old-time fiddle music are characterized by the prevalence of drones, usually in fourths and fifths. This is accomplished by the use of almost continuous double stops on the fiddle, and on the banjo by the use of the monotonic fifth string. This string is never noted on the fingerboard of the instrument, and is plucked continuously with the thumb. On both instruments, the strings are tuned differently for different songs. Five or six tunings exist on the banjo as played in Grayson and Carroll counties, and at least three or four on the fiddle.
The exciting harmonic character of the early banjo-fiddle music is due basically to the extensive use of bagpipe-like drones, and to the prevalence of unusual scales or modes. These are the factors which give this music an archaic, unique flavor. Most of the tunes and songs collected elsewhere in the United States are couched either in the common seven-note major (ionian) or minor (aeolian) scales, but the traditional southern Appalachian songs utilize a variety of pentatonic and hexatonic scales as well as some uncommon seven-note modes such as the mixolydian. In the Grayson and Carroll counties area almost all the early rural band style dance tunes are pentatonic or hexatonic, and the instruments tend to be tuned directly to the main notes of the scale. Chording and noting with the left hand on the fingerboard are kept to a minimum in this style, and the one or two chords used in a given piece always include open strings acting as drones. This open-stringed harmonic structure, based on intervals of fourths and fifths, tends to be harmonically incompatible with conventional "major" or "minor" chords such as are played on guitar, accordion, piano, and so on.
The old-time dance music is characterized by a driving, accented rhythm, in which upbeats and offbeats are often stressed. Intricate offbeat notes picked on the banjo are interlocked with equally intricate fiddle rhythms; the two instruments are integrated perfectly in the old-time versions of the band dance tunes. One of the most fascinating aspects of this music, in fact, is the ease with which the traditionally learned fiddle part to a given tune can be fit to the traditional banjo part of the same tune by musicians who are both from the same general area, but who may never have played together before.
WADE THE MUSICIAN: MANHOOD
On August 6, 1913, Wade married Lelia Mathews, who was then nineteen years old. He was twenty. Lelia came from the community of Spring Valley, Virginia, a few miles north of Wade's farm. Wade met Lelia through one of his sisters, who with her husband was working on the farm of a neighbor. There Lelia was staying also, and Wade's sister induced Wade to visit specifically so that Lelia and Wade would meet. Often Lelia would travel about over the countryside with Wade and whoever was playing with him. She is remembered as a woman who enjoyed such travels but who was jealous of Wade's time, and particularly when she stayed home, of the days and nights he was off picking the banjo and fiddling. She was not a musician, and according to some informants she never really became closely familiar with his music. Wade and Lelia lost two children in childbirth and raised one son, who, like so many others, left the mountains when he was grown to return only for occasional family visits.
Nineteen-nineteen, when Wade was twenty-six, was an important year for his musical activities. This was the year the Buck Mountain Band was formed, including Wade, the banjo picker, a well-known local fiddler called Van Edwards, and the latter's son, Earl Edwards. Earl played guitar, and the Buck Mountain Band was one of many new string bands forming in this area in which the guitar was for the first time incorporated. This instrument had been unknown in these mountains until after the turn of the century. The advent of the guitar in the local music would result eventually in many changes. Along with other influences it can be said to have been partly responsible for destroying much of the unique harmonic structure of old-time music, leading in the end to its replacement with bluegrass music. In the less distant future, however, lay one of the great periods of traditional southwest Virginia band music, in which guitar, an increased use of vocals, and the old banjo-fiddle tradition were blended excitingly together, sometimes with the addition of autoharp as well. The band music of this period, which we referred to in earlier essays as the "Old Galax Band Style," still relied mainly on the older repertoire and harmonics.
Some years later, Wade was to become a key figure in what was one of the greatest of all the string bands of this genre, the Grayson County Bog Trotters. His early musical experience with the Buck Mountain Band must have served to prepare his ear and his repertoire for later participation in the Bog Trotters Band. Wade began to pick the banjo Charlie Poole style, with his fingers and picks, in order to fit with the guitar and fiddle on tunes with which the archaic clawhammer harmonies and rhythms were not completely compatible.
The Buck Mountain Band played for the Parson's Auction Company, at public land sales. The day he died Wade had played for a Parson's sale—for fifty-one years Wade and his partners made music for the Parson's auctions. After Van Edwards died, Wade played with Crockett and Fields Ward, the guitar player and singer who was Crockett's son. Then for many years Uncle Charlie Higgins was his fiddler, and later Charlie and Wade played with Dale Poe, a local guitar player. Wade also played with men of the Lundy family, and with other local musicians. According to Joe Parsons, the band was dubbed "Buck Mountain" in the early days by a man whose forced sale of property was accompanied by the music of Wade and Van Edwards, and the name stuck.
Besides dances and land sales Wade and the band also played at local Republican party meetings. "Born a Republican," Wade played at campaign stops all over the country, particularly in association with John Parsons and the latter's son, Joe Parsons, who was county clerk from 1928 to 1960 and was Wade's lifelong friend. Bud Ward, Wade's brother, was a local Republican sheriff for many years, and Wade was well known as a campaign adjunct, providing music between the speeches, for many other Republican candidates as well. On election day he would drive around and help "get out the vote." Playing for political events and for the Parson's Auction Company were both considered exceedingly lucrative, particularly in relation to the scarcity of cash on the farms.
After his father's death in 1922, Crockett moved in to Galax, where he earned a living as a carpenter. Wade would come in to play with Fields and Crockett, and up the road a little ways Uncle Eck Dunford, another old-time fiddler, heard them playing. Eck got a neighbor who knew the Wards to introduce him, and thus the Bog Trotters were born. The fifth regular member of the band, Doc Davis (autoharp), was brought in by Eck Dunford. During the Bog Trotters' era Wade and Fields and sometimes Crockett roamed widely about the countryside, playing music at land sales and other events. Sometimes they were gone for three or four days at a time. The Bog Trotters convened to play at the famous fiddle conventions at White Top Mountain and at Galax and were frequently heard under the auspices of the Galax Moose Lodge.
With the Bog Trotters Wade played in relatively distant places in Virginia, including Roanoke, and locations in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and even Arkansas. At one contest held at Mt. Vernon, Kentucky, the top prize of which was the honor of being recorded for commercial records (the day was won by the famous Coon Creek Girls), the Virginia band was offered $200 a week to stay on, but were unable to accept. This was a far cry from the days of a boyhood trip to Tennessee, when, according to his recollection, Wade and his group had agreed to play a dance for fifteen cents a piece. Later the Bog Trotters played for the campaigning governor of the state down the Shenandoah Valley at Blacksburg, Virginia, and on another occasion they provided the "official" music at the state dedication of a bridge at Hillsville, Virginia. Wade was competing in the widely attended Old Fiddler's Conventions at Galax in the mean time, and was regularly walking off with the first place year after year.
Nineteen-forty was the high-water mark. Three years previously John Lomax had recorded Wade and the Bog Trotters for the Library of Congress and now, through Alan Lomax, it was arranged for the Bog Trotters to appear on a nationwide CBS radio program, American School of the Air, originating in Roanoke, Virginia (January 9, 1940). When the time came for the program to go on the air, everyone in Grayson County near a radio stopped work to listen; in Independence itself the county court-house was the scene of a trial that day, and as the program hour approached the judge temporarily halted the proceedings and called for a radio to be brought into the courtroom. By this time, Wade (1940) was a deep and seasoned performer. He had been playing banjo for thirty-seven years and fiddle for thirty-two, and he was still playing with the man he had first learned from, his brother Crockett Ward.
The music played by the Bog Trotters differed from the older banjo-fiddle music of the country. Some basic changes have occurred, and the way the old Galax string bands turned a tune differs from the mode in which the same tune would have been played by the earlier banjo-fiddle string bands. Often the tempo is slowed down and squared off, with accents relatively confined to downbeats. This is a consequence of the fact that the dominant rhythmic role has been taken over by the guitar instead of remaining with the clawhammer banjo, as in the old rural band music. Despite all the innovations and changes, there is retained an amazingly strong flavor of the ancient rural traditional music, and the main component in the stylistic and repertorial background of the old Galax band music is, in fact, the music of the old rural bands. It is the fiddler who is mainly responsible for this retention of older elements, or the fiddler and the clawhammer banjo player when they play an old tune together, for their parts are least changed.
From about 1930 on, Wade was the sole owner of his Peachbottom Creek farm, and it was this farm which for the rest of his life provided him and his family with a basic living. Income derived from music was always extra, a welcome assistance, but not the source of his livelihood. Wade, like the old-time musicians before him, was not economically dependent on professional music performances.
During the period I knew Wade the main income from his farm accrued from the sale of heifers that he had raised and milked. Vegetables were grown, and in his house the whole range of traditional preelectricity preparations of food for winter storage was practiced: curing of hams and pickling or "canning" of beans, squash, tomatoes, peaches, and virtually all other fruits and vegetables. Potatoes, apples, and cabbages were buried deep in the earth, be neath the frost level. Wade himself had no enormous appetite for farm labor, and apparently never had. Wade "never cut himself too much at hard work," as one informant told me: "What did he like to do besides hard work? Pick the banjo and carry on, laugh and tell jokes, run around. That was his main thing all his life." And he did a lot of fox hunting. Fox hunting was a passion with Wade. This sport consisted mainly of letting the dogs go up on a ridge, and with a large fire and some cronies to keep one company, listening to those wonderful dogs bay the whole night long.
During the war the Bog Trotters stayed home and played around Galax, occasionally appearing on local radio or at Moose Lodge functions. Then, in the early 1950s, disaster struck. Fields left the mountains for Maryland, where he had found a job. That meant the end of the Bog Trotters, for Fields had always been the vocalist and no one else could sing. Though, as Katy Hill put it, "We all hated for him to go, we couldn't tell him not to go," for Fields had got a good job and that was a serious concern. About the same time Crockett Ward, then in his seventies, suffered a debilitating stroke, and though he remained alive until he was over ninety, he never played the fiddle again.
On May 10, 1951, Lelia died at the age of sixty-three. Wade and Lelia had been married for thirty-eight years. Wade began courting again and about three years later, in 1954, he married Mrs. Mollie Yates.
UNCLE WADE : THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS
In 1956 and 1957, Wade was visited by Michael Seeger and myself, respectively, and this began a phase of widening contacts and ever-increasing fame that lasted until his death. In contrast to the old days of the prewar Lomax visits, electricity was now available in the mountains, and it was now possible to make a thorough study of the whole of Wade's repertoire. Comparison with the earlier recordings shows that at this time he had lost none of his famous precision and speed. Later this was no longer routinely true, though on occasion, particularly in the excitement of playing with others, he could still summon his old brilliance.
In 1962, Wade was featured on two records assembled by the writer and others: Traditional Music from Grayson and Carroll Counties (1992 audiocassette reissue, Smithsonian Folkways 03811) and The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward (Folkways Records FA 2363). Half of the latter album was devoted exclusively to his music. From 1963 to 1966 we made an attempt, in which Wade enthusiastically cooperated, to put Wade together with Glen Smith, a very excellent old-time fiddler from Hillsville, Virginia. For some of these sessions Fields Ward, who happened to be in his home country at the time, was also present. Released in 1967, Band Music of Grayson and Carroll Counties, Virginia (Folkways 2832) includes some of the pieces then recorded. Wade exulted in the pleasure of playing the old-time banjo-fiddle music, and his performances were often as good as in the best of his younger days, though he was already well over seventy.
Wade's years with Mollie, a sweet and generous woman, were happy ones, and he was devastated by her death from cancer on August 4, 1961. While Mollie was alive, and for several years thereafter, her mother, Granny Porter, then in her eighties, also lived in the Peachbottom Creek house. Granny was as pithy, sharp, and humorous as Uncle Wade, and together they made a memorable pair. Once a banjo picker herself, Granny Porter too had deep roots in old-time music, having come of the family of a legendary old-time fiddler, Van Sage. Occasionally Granny and Wade made music together. Wade accompanies Granny on a striking rendition of "Barbr'y Allen" in Songs and Ballads of the Blue Ridge Mountains (Folkways 3831, 1968).
As the 1960s wore on Wade was invited to visit the great urban centers of the North-east to perform there. This he was reluctant to do, finally being persuaded to come to the Smithsonian Festival at Washington in 1967. On the way he stopped in Richmond and performed for the governor, Mills Goodwin. He was seventy-five, and it was virtually the first time Wade had taken his music out of his native hill country.
Thereafter he made several other trips to Washington, and on one trip, in 1969, he performed with Fields in Maryland. Recognition was his finally, and as a recent article by John Cohen put it, "the trip to Wade's house was part of the homage to old-time music that one paid." (Sing Out 20 (5), 1971).
But it was very late in his life. By now Wade had outlived not only his two wives and all his brothers, and the two generations of old-time musicians he had played with during his long career, but also the isolated mountain culture from which he and his music grew. He died on a chilly, late May day, a day on which he had done just what he always did, picked the banjo at the land sale, stopped in to see Katy Hill, and gone home to sit on his porch and look out over Peach-bottom Creek.
