In the middle of the eighteenth century, residents of Ulster, the northeast region of Ireland, set sail across the Atlantic. Many were actually from Scotland, having originally immigrated across the Irish Sea to Ireland at the insistence of Britain’s King James I, who wanted to plant a contingent of loyal Protestant followers in the traditionally Catholic country. These migrants were known as “Scotch-Irish” when they reached the shores of America.
Traveling south from the New England port cities, the Scotch-Irish found a landscape in the southern United States that was not too different from their old home. The southern Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont regions, located in western North and South Carolina, contained a soil and climate conducive to farming and livestock—just like in Ireland. (The mountains of the Carolinas and Ireland and Scotland were once part of the same chain before the continents drifted apart.) There was plenty of farmland available, and they no longer faced discrimination for their Protestantism. Small, isolated Scotch-Irish communities sprang up in the mountains, bringing an oral tradition of tales rooted in the Irish and Celtic cultures. The people in these folk tales were inseparable from the land, which provided them with their livelihoods. The land was sacred.
And if you ever listen to traditional Scotch and Irish folk music, you’ll know where Bluegrass comes from. They came over here in the 1700s and went up into the mountains. They didn’t come back down for a couple hundred years or so, and when they did, they brought Bluegrass music with them. It was basically the same music they arrived with back in the 1700s.
From the article:
“poor too long / turns the smartest man stupid, / makes him see nothing beyond / a short-term gain.”
I spent the last 3 days in Memphis visiting my son, and this thought above summed up what I witnessed in Memphis.