Week 6: Appalachia/ British Ballads

This week’s assignment was something that interested me. I know this class is very new to me and I enjoyed learning about each week’s topic. But learning about the Appalachia and British Ballads was something that garbed my attention the most. Maybe, because it was also new for other people in the eighteen century when Appalachian songs were being collecting, like Cecil Sharp did. Reading through the article, Cecil Sharp in America by Mike Yates, Cecil Sharp’s made me appreciate Appalachian music. His journey through the Appalachian Mountains and how much time it took him to collect traditional songs that originated back to the English and Scottish ancestors, was inspiring. This article made me imagine Sharp’s adventures and what he experience.

Out of all the songs from the Ballard box, the one that captured my attention the most was Down By The Sally Gardens by William Buttler. When I did more research about the song, I learned that it was a song had been an attempt to reconstruct an old song of three lines that was imperfectly remembered sang by an old peasant woman in the village of Billisopare, Sligo. This right away made me think of Sharps journey and I then decided to make drawing of something that was unknown to me trying to imitate Sharp’s experience going to the Appalachian Mountains, a place that was unknown for him. The Appalachian mountains was a place I had hear in my U.S History class in high school and never did research or been to the mountains in my life. As I Google the Appalachian Mountains, beautiful pictures of green mountains came up. Although I was seeing these images of the mountains it is still an unknown place for me. The image that captured my attention was one of a morning with dusk. This dusky morning was something that I was familiar with and brought me very beautiful memories I had in my life growing up. As I went though drawing the mountains, with my charcoal pencil, it was as if I was going back in time, feeling that dusk and wind on top of the hill as the sun was rising. Re-discovering something that had been lost in my memories and recovering it by this image of the Appalachian Mountains. This is the place, Mike Yates article and the song “The Sally Gardens,” took me and inspired me to draw.