It’s rare that a musician hands over a business card after a gig, but that’s exactly what happened last month at Folk Alliance International, an annual gathering of Americana-related musicians and music industry folks, held this year in Montreal. If one night you wandered into one of the hundreds of private showcases in hotel rooms, you may have heard two women and one man singing mountain ballads from hundreds of years ago, including “The Soldier Traveling from the North” and “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again.”
After their half-hour set, one of the members, Donna Ray Norton, chilled out in a hallway and offered a card the color of a freshly cut lawn that read: “Save the Ballads.” On the flip side: “Appalachian Ballads: Love & Murder a Cappella.”
Like her two bandmates, Norton is based in North Carolina, in between Asheville and Marshall. The latter town, population 800, was slammed hard last year by Hurricane Helene, leaving behind a trail of deep mud and washed-out buildings. “It’s hard to put into words,” says Norton, a gregarious blond sporting a nose ring. “We knew a storm was coming, but it was not made to sound like it was going to be a big catastrophic event. Every time something comes in, the mountain breaks it up and it dissipates. But this one didn’t dissipate and ravaged everything in her path. Fields of trees turned over. Cars on top of tall trees. It’s changed the entire landscape. It’s like a moonscape now.”
Among the vital parts of Marshall that were devastated were the bars and venues where live music once took place five nights a week, including the bar and restaurant area of the Old Marshall Jail Hotel, a former jail until 2012. Once a month for the last few years, Norton and as many as a dozen more local singers, including the scene’s matriarch, Sheila Kay Adams, and her daughter Melanie Rice, would gather there for a “ballad swap.” They’d sing some of the hundreds and hundreds of four-centuries-old traditional ballads they all grew up with in the area. A few of them, like “Matty Groves” (or “Little Mathey Groves”), may be familiar to rock fans thanks to versions by Fairport Convention.
The Old Marshall Jail Hotel is currently being rebuilt. But in the meantime, Norton and the other members of the ad-hoc group, who call themselves Nest of Singing Birds, are hoping to spread the word about their work and the effects of climate change on a music community — and they’re doing it by taking their tradition-steeped act on the road, including a stop in Montreal. “Our goal is to talk about the hurricane and continue to share these songs and stories, so we had this idea to travel the ballad swap,” Norton says. “When something like this happens, in a place with all these traditions like North Carolina, there’s a risk of losing something so sacred and special, and it’s really scary. There’s not a ton of ballad singers in the world.”
Like her bandmates, Norton has been singing these songs since they were kids, learning them from parents, grandparents, and other family members. They’re so old-school that until recently, Norton had never sung with musical instrument accompaniment, only a cappella. “We were sort of isolated, and lot of the time it would be the women who would keep the songs going because they’d be working in the fields or cooking supper or working in the garden, and you can’t play an instrument when you’re doing that,” she says. “But you can sing a song and entertain people around you by singing about lords and ladies and witches. We were providing our own entertainment.”
The fact that Nest of Singing Birds (a phrase coined by British folk-song collector Cecil Sharp when he visited the area over 100 years ago) have fewer places to sing, thanks to Helene, is just one of several pressing issues. When Norton was growing up, the tradition was passed along by family, which is no longer a given. “A long time ago, your family would have five or ten kids,” Norton says. “Now, I have only three and my cousin only has one. It’s a lineage that’s slowly starting to whittle down and not as many families are carrying those traditions.”
Along with shows in Nashville, Knoxville, and Raleigh, North Carolina, Nest of Singing Birds are also planning to release an album: Marshall Sessions, recorded right before Hurricane Helene and intended to help get out the word about their music. “I was down in Marshall digging out the mud after the hurricane, shoveling mud,” Norton says. “It was really heavy and slippery. I just turned 43, so I’m not as young as I was, and a friend of mine said, ‘What the best use of your skill set? Let’s do the thing we do best with our songs and stories.’ That really resonated with me.”
Whether this effort will add up to an O Brother, Where Art Thou? moment — when mainstream culture catches up and becomes enchanted with mysterious mountain songs of the past — has yet to be seen. But Norton takes heart in some of the younger people who started dropping by the Old Marshall before Helene. Since children weren’t in the audience, they were able to pull out some of their more risqué material, like that one often MIA verse in “The Soldier Traveling from the North” (“Well she pulled off her blue silk gown/She laid it on the table/It’s he pulled off his uniform suit/And he hopped in bed with the lady”). Norton also has plans to record an album of trad songs with Tyler Ramsey, the North Carolina singer-songwriter and former member of Band of Horses.
While the group will always stick with the folk songs from their area, they aren’t averse to mixing it up every now and then. “I’m about to blow your mind,” Norton says with a laugh. She didn’t only listen to folk music; a child of the Eighties and Nineties, she says she also loved Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and classic hip-hop from Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G., and Run-DMC. Asked to consider a modern cover for a recent project, she selected the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere.” “We wanted to pick something out of left field,” she says. “We didn’t want a Sheryl Crow or country song. And that one works really well. It’s the timing and how it rhymes.”
That moment of frivolity aside, everyone involved in Nest of Singing Birds knows how fragile their music eco-system is now. The North Carolina Music Council has made Nest of Singing Birds the official ambassadors for the state’s newly established North Carolina Music Office. Asked if she thought climate change would impact the state’s musical history, Catherine Swain, of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, says, “No, I didn’t. But then L.A. happened and it made me think we need to be more vigilant about preserving our cultural heritage. We just can’t take things for granted.”