Learn about Appalachian music. Gain an understanding of different Appalachian instruments such as the banjo and dulcimer, as well as its history, and artists known for this style.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Appalachian Music Influences, Instruments & Artists
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Frequently Asked Questions
What style of music is related to the Appalachians?
Appalachian Mountain music is known for its folk music that inspired bluegrass, country, blues, and jazz. Appalachian music is known for virtuosic banjo and guitar playing that accompanies singers.
Is Appalachian music the same as bluegrass?
Early Appalachian music evolved the style of bluegrass, which is related to country music, blues, and jazz. Appalachian music is also known as old-time music, which is acoustic American folk dance music.
What makes Appalachian music unique?
Appalachian music is unique because it integrates the music of the British Isles and the immigrant songs of England, Scotland, and Ireland with traditional African American music.
Table of Contents
ShowAppalachia is a mountainous highland region located in the eastern part of the United States. It includes the southern states of North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky, though the mountain region reaches beyond southern Maine. This ethnically and geographically diverse region is known for folk songs and stories that express the storied emotions of the people that inhabit this region. From these mountains emerged Appalachian music, also known as Appalachian Mountain music. This traditional music incorporates Appalachian bluegrass music and Appalachian country music into its harmonies. Bluegrass is related to country music, jazz, and blues, and it includes virtuosic guitars and banjos that accompany multi-singer vocals.
Appalachian music is highly influenced by Celtic folk music, Cherokee music, and African American songs. It can be traced back to the 1700s when English settlers arrived in the Appalachian Mountains and began incorporating music of their homeland into new musical avenues of artistic expression, creating a vast musical soundscape. British immigrants from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland brought Anglo-Celtic traditions with them to the region. The ballads and fiddle music of Scottish traditions wove its way into the Appalachian artistic tapestry, integrating with African American spirituals and other traditional music. Ballads were unaccompanied songs that told a story, while fiddle music was frequently used for dances and celebrations.
Appalachia music has influenced blues, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, honky-tonk, gospel, ragtime guitar, and Southern rock. It also inspired old-time music, a type of American folk dance music played on acoustic instruments. When categorizing the folk traditions of Appalachia, old-time music is used as a general term from which country music evolved. Old-time music also became elemental in the evolution of bluegrass and is believed to be one of the oldest forms of traditional American music.
Celtic Appalachian Influence
One main contributor to Appalachian music was the folk music of British immigrants, primarily from English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish descendants. Beginning in the middle of the 1700s, Appalachia was known as a region of opportunity. As life in the mountains was difficult, mainly lower-class immigrants moved to the region. In terms of population, over half of the immigrants that settled in the Appalachian Mountains were of Scottish, Irish, or Welsh descent. When Ireland experienced the potato famine in 1840, the number of people emigrating to the New World from Ireland increased dramatically.
Celtic Appalachian music was descended from old English ballads that used modal tuning and melodies. The genre of Scottish and English popular ballads known as Child ballads emigrated to Appalachia with the immigrants' journeys. Musical books such as Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, compiled in 1898, served as the foundation for bringing British songs into the New World. The subject matter of these ballads incorporated texts about loneliness, unrequited love, heartbreak, and cautionary tales that told stories of murder and death. Anglo-Celtic traditions also incorporated dance music into the community and used stringed instruments like the fiddle and dulcimer to evoke lively tunes that accompanied energetic social gatherings.
African American Influence
Appalachian music is also highly influenced by the traditional secular and sacred songs of African American musical traditions. African American slaves brought the banjo to the US, and the popularity of this instrument predates the Civil War. A banjo is a small stringed instrument similar to a guitar with a specific twanged sound, and it is one of the oldest instruments used in the style of Appalachian music. African American music was known for call-and-response, rhythmic complexity, and improvisation. By the early 1900s, African Americans, mainly emigres from the South, comprised twelve percent of the population in Appalachia and brought their cultural ethos into the mountain region to merge with the Anglo-Celtic style.
Traditional Appalachian instruments associated with Appalachian music include the dulcimer, the banjo, and the fiddle. Drums were not common, as traditional Appalachian music derived its rhythm from the banjo and later the bass. The banjo, derived from West African instruments brought to the New World by slaves, evolved from earlier styles that were developed in the Caribbean islands in the 17th century. By the 1850s, the instrument incorporated metal strings; in the 19th century, resonators and frets were added to the instrument. The banjo was played frequently during the Civil War and World War I, giving soldiers an uplifting musical performance that helped pass the dark days. The modern banjo maintains five strings and is frequently used in popular music, bluegrass, and jazz.
The fiddle was imported to Appalachia when settlers from Northern Ireland and Scotland brought the instrument with them, while African Americans brought the banjo. The fiddle can be traced back to Europe's Medieval period in the 10th century and was an early prototype of the violin. The fiddle is a stringed instrument with a long neck that is bowed or plucked. A combination of fiddle and banjo ensembles were frequently performed in minstrel shows.
While there are numerous instruments based on African and European precedents, the uniquely sounding mountain dulcimer, an American folk instrument, was invented in Appalachia in the late 1700s to early 1800s. A descendant of the lute or fretted zither, the dulcimer has a long body with strings and a raised fretboard that encompasses the length of the instrument. It is believed that immigrants brought an instrument known as a German scheitholt to the region, and this was evolved into the mountain dulcimer. The earliest dulcimers were hand carved, had three strings, and used nails for frets. The modern dulcimer is larger than earlier versions, and its sweet melodic sound is used in classical music, blues, bluegrass, and jazz.
There are countless popular Appalachian music artists that have recorded and performed Appalachian folk music.
Charlie Poole (1892–1931) was a pioneering performer from Appalachia who played the banjo, sang, and recorded country music. The son of an Irish immigrant, Charlie Poole came from an impoverished background, building his own banjo from a gourd. He formed the string band the North Carolina Ramblers and grew as a performance artist in the 1920s, often playing old-time music at square dances and celebrations. The band traveled to New York City in 1925 and began recording Appalachian Mountain music for Columbia Records. The band was hired to play the soundtrack to a western movie, but Poole tragically suffered a heart attack before the project commenced.
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Etta Baker (1913–2006) was born in North Carolina and learned to play parlor music, hymns, and Tin Pan Alley songs as a child from her father. Etta was adept at playing several instruments including the banjo, guitar, piano, and violin. She married at the age of 23 and did not engage in a professional career until 1956, at the age of 43, when she met the legendary Paul Clayton and recorded on his influential album Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, which was said to have inspired Bob Dylan. She continued to perform for family and friends and did not begin performing at festivals until the 1970s. She recorded her first album in 1991 called One Dime Blues and recorded three albums in total. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship in 1991.
Arthel Lane ''Doc'' Watson (1923–2012) was an American performer of country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music who was born in North Carolina. Doc Watson lost his eyesight at a young age from an eye infection and attended a school for the blind when he was a child. He bought his first guitar as a youth working on the family farm, and he was highly influenced by country music. He was known for his virtuosic guitar playing and incorporating quick melodies and fingerpicking into performance solos that were usually played on the banjo or fiddle. He elevated the role of guitar solos in folk music and was prominent in the folk revival and protest song movements of the 1960s. Doc Watson frequently performed on stage with his son, Merle Watson, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and seven Grammys during his long career. Albums which received the Grammy include Then and Now, Two Days in November, Riding the Midnight Train, and Legacy.
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Earl Scruggs (1924–2012) is hailed as the most influential banjo player in the world. He revolutionized a specific style of banjo picking with just three fingers known as the ''Scruggs style'' that evolved into an elemental form of bluegrass music playing. This style elevated the banjo into the forefront of the ensemble with new solo capabilities. His virtuosic playing helped redefine the style of old-time music, and his collaborations with stars such as Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, Joan Baez, Elton John, and Dwight Yoakam became legendary. In 1985, Earl Scruggs was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, received four Grammy awards, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
Modern bluegrass artists include Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, Sugar & Joy, and Mandolin Orange.
Appalachian music comes from the mountainous highland region of Appalachia, located in the Eastern United States, particularly in the southern states of West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky. Traditional Appalachian music incorporates bluegrass, country, blues, jazz, and gospel to create a uniquely American folk art. Appalachian musicians were descendants of two distinctive lineages; British immigrants from Wales, England, Scotland, and Ireland brought Anglo-Celtic traditions with them to the mountain region, while African American descendants of slaves brought traditional spiritual and African American styles such as blues and jazz.
Appalachian music is also known as old-time music, which incorporated ballads as well as American folk dance music that was played with acoustic instruments such as the banjo and fiddle. Both are stringed instruments, the banjo being similar to a guitar and the fiddle a descendant of the violin. While these instruments are descendants of European and African instruments, the mountain dulcimer, an instrument with a raised fretboard and a long body with strings, was invented in the Appalachians and is unique to the region. Famous early Appalachian musicians include Charlie Poole, Etta Baker, Doc Watson, and Earl Scruggs.
Additional Info
Appalachian Music
If I asked you to describe traditional American music, there are a few directions your answer can go in. You could talk about jazz and blues of the southern deltas, or perhaps the swing and rock of mid-20th century cities. When the United States government, however, rounds up musicians to send across the world as American cultural ambassadors, there's another kind of music that's often included: bluegrass.
Bluegrass is a modern variation of traditional string-based folk music originating in the mountains and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians represented one of America's first frontiers, and frontier music became one of the first truly American forms of musical expression.
Origins
Appalachian music is a fitting metaphor for American history because it emerged from a blend of various musical influences stewing together in the remote Appalachians. For the most part, we can trace the origins of this unique form of expression back to two primary groups: Anglo-Celtic immigrants and African Americans.
Anglo-Celtic Influence
From the middle of the 18th century through the American Revolution and into the early 19th century, the region of Appalachia seemed to promise something: opportunity. Here was a huge area where Europeans and Americans could own property and become self-sufficient farmers. Life in the mountains, however, was difficult and so the people who were willing to move there were mostly lower-class immigrants, particularly those from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
As these immigrants moved into the Appalachians, they brought with them folk music from their homelands. Music was very important to these communities, who lived on remote farms but would get together for dances. In general, two forms of Anglo-Celtic folk traditions planted roots in the Appalachians. First were narrative ballads, sung by a single and unaccompanied vocalist. These songs were almost always sung by women and dealt with issues of love, heartbreak, death, and sexual betrayal. In fact, ethnomusicologists have noted that about half of the American variations of these tunes that were developed in the Appalachians have to do with pregnant women who were murdered by male lovers.
Other Anglo-Celtic musical traditions were entirely instrumental, used for social dances. The single most important instrument, likely brought to Appalachia by Irish or Cornish immigrants, was the fiddle. Fiddles were lively and light, perfect for upbeat dance music. As the people of the Appalachians practiced their music and refined their instruments, they also developed some that were completely unique. The most prominent example is the mountain dulcimer, a stringed instrument developed by Scottish/Irish communities in the Appalachians, but which has no real precedent in Britain. This instrument would quickly spread across the Appalachians as a staple of the growing musical tradition in the mountains.
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African American Influence
The other main group to influence the development of Appalachian music was African Americans. Throughout the 19th century, slaves and freedmen introduced their unique musical traditions into Appalachia. While Anglo-Celtic traditions generally entered the region from the east and north, African-American traditions worked their way in from the South. Group singing, call-and-response based melodies, a celebration of improvisation, and a deep devotion to rhythm were all brought into Appalachia by African Americans.
Along with their singing styles, these musicians also brought a few unique instruments. The most important was a plucked stringed instrument that had originated in Arabia, spread into Africa and made its way into the Americas called the banjo. The banjo was perfect for African American music, with the sharp plucks creating a strong syncopated rhythm.
Appalachian Music Matures
By the mid-19th century, Anglo-Celtic acoustic folk ballads and fiddle or dulcimer-based dance music had begun to meld together into something unique. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, greater African American presence brought in the banjo, new ideas about rhythm, melody, group singing, and a new musical tradition began to emerge. By the 1870s, Americans across the country were becoming more familiar with African American spiritual music, and African-based music developed even greater popularity. By the end of the century, Appalachian music represented a masterful synthesis of traditions that had gained respect around the country.
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Of course, by this point Appalachian music still represented a genuine folk tradition: homegrown and unregulated. That began to change in the early 20th century. This music became known as old-time music, which is the closest thing to a genre we can really use to describe Appalachian folk music. As radio companies became involved by the 1920s, old-time music was standardized. A guitar as added, creating a standard ensemble of guitar, American fiddle, bass, American banjo, vocalist and sometimes a piano or dulcimer.
For a while, old-time music was amongst the most popular music in America. However, by the end of the Great Depression, this genre lost its commercial appeal. Country Western, Bluegrass, and even rock-n-roll (to a degree) would all emerge out of Appalachian old-time music as more commercially viable alternatives, broadcast across American airwaves. Old-time music faded back into the mountains, where it remains a venerated folk tradition to this day.
Lesson Summary
Appalachian musical traditions date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when remote communities mingled in the rugged Appalachian Mountains. One of the biggest influences on Appalachian folk music was Anglo-Celtic settlers, with their narrative ballads and instrumental dance tunes based around the fiddle. These populations also developed a unique string instrument called the mountain dulcimer in the Appalachians.
The other major influence was African-American music, which introduced strong rhythms, the call-and-response melody, group singing, and the banjo into the region. This all came together in the form of old-time music by the end of the 19th century, and was commercially standardized by the 1920s. Today, this music is not found as widely played on radios, but it is still one of the strongest folk traditions in the United States, filling the hills and valleys of Appalachia with a definitively American sound.
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