She was tall and athletic and walked as she lived. That’s to say, at a pace that was difficult to keep up with, even for those much younger than she. Just two months shy of her forty-ninth birthday, it’s hard to imagine that Eleanor Roosevelt was anything other than undaunted by the approaching half-century mark or by the uneven, bald ground of volcanic rock that she strode swiftly across on White Top Mountain in Southwestern Virginia. A news photographer who’d stepped onto a ledge for a better shot lost his footing and had to grab a tree limb to save himself from a two-hundred-foot plunge. But for Mrs. R. (as members of her all women press corps called her), perilous drop-offs be damned.
It was August 12, 1933, and the tenure of America’s longest-running first lady was in its infancy. Franklin Roosevelt had been in office just over five months. The FBI was still called the Bureau of Investigation, and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, hadn’t started compiling what would become his largest secret file — the 3,271 pages on Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities, many of them anti-segregation and, thus, “subversive.” The Ku Klux Klan didn’t know Eleanor Roosevelt well enough yet to have a price on her head. Another six years would pass before her infamous resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) over that organization’s refusal to allow African-American contralto Marian Anderson to perform in Constitution Hall.
So here was Mrs. R. on a resplendent August Saturday, standing on the second highest peak in Virginia. She wears a white hat and a dark (probably blue) dress with a loose, matching jacket. A corsage is pinned beneath the left shoulder of the jacket as she extends her arm and points off into the distance, as one is still inclined to do when looking out on that vista of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Some say Kentucky and West Virginia are visible, too — a stretch perhaps, but from more than a mile high — 5,520 feet up — it’s possible.
“My father spent two very happy years here, riding and living all through this country,” she said. “Now I know why he loved it so and said he knew of few places so beautiful.”
One of the festival’s organizers, John Powell, proudly asserted that “the great proof of the importance and the significance of the great musical heritage of our people is in the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt should come.”
Like many a memorable character, John Powell, who was also a founder of the Anglo- Saxon Clubs of America, is both compelling and repelling. A classical composer and pianist from Richmond, Virginia, Powell studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky, in Prague with Karl Navrátil. He made his debut in Berlin in 1907, when he was twenty-five years old; the performance was hailed by critics as one of the most successful the city had ever known. Within months of his Berlin debut, he would play Paris and London, too. He counted writer Joseph Conrad and sculptor Auguste Rodin among his friends.
In the first part of his career, Powell incorporated all forms of American music — notably, African-American music — into compositions like Sonata Virginianesque and Rhapsodie Nègre. But by the 1930s, when he was selecting and shaping the White Top Folk Festival musicians, he was committed to promoting what he considered “Anglo-Saxon” music: a pure, white music from a pure, white region of America, whose music was dangerously at risk of becoming defined by a black American baby called Jazz.
By excluding black musicians, probably of some Anglo heritage themselves, Powell and other festival organizers brought to the mountaintop the pernicious bias that would become Powell’s legacy.
In 1924, Powell was instrumental in a court case that prevented the marriage of Dorothy Johns and James Connor by proving that one of Johns’s ancestors was black, thus she could not legally marry Connor, who was white. Some thirty-four years later, Powell was also
Instrumental — by virtue of his efforts in the 1920s — in making sure that interracial newly-weds Mildred and Richard Loving didn’t get a full night’s sleep. A few weeks after they were married, the Lovings were awakened around two a.m. by flashing police lights and escorted from their bed so they could be booked into the Caroline County, Virginia, jail. Each was charged with a felony.
The Dorothy Johns case was the first test of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the Lovings’ the last. The “one-drop” law made interracial marriage a felony in Virginia and was especially targeted at whites marrying blacks, blacks being defined, of course, as anyone with “one drop” of black blood. Powell worked with other racial eugenicists to get the law passed in 1924, and was the self-proclaimed originator of it. By 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Racial Integrity Act in Loving v. Virginia, there were similar laws in fifteen other states as far north as Delaware, and as far west as Oklahoma.
For Eleanor Roosevelt, this 1933 trip to Southwest Virginia was a sentimental journey. Her father, Elliott, lived out the Panic of 1893 — the Great Depression’s predecessor — in the Southwestern Virginia town of Abingdon, close to the Tennessee and North Carolina borders. He was thirty-two when he left his family in New York; his daughter, Eleanor, whom he called “Little Nell,” was seven.
In letters to Eleanor in New York, Elliott was by turns pessimistic and self-absorbed: “I have had a very trying time of it down here and am now trying to quiet the poor miners in the Coal field who will listen to no one but me, and who are absolutely, for lack of employment, starving. There is great distress all through this country and I too have suffered much. I like to think of you as happy and would like to hear the same from your dear sweet little lips or read the words from your pen.”
Unlike his younger brother Teddy, a stern and disciplined civil servant who would become the ultimate hunter-cowboy-rough-rider- man’s-man of U.S. presidents, Elliott was a good-looking charmer who couldn’t resist the spirits or the ladies. Ostensibly, Elliott moved to Southwest Virginia to work in the mining and timber interests of his brother-in-law. In truth, he was exiled from New York society after fathering a child with a servant — the thinking being that, as an alternative to an even more embarrassing divorce, Elliott could redeem himself by proving to be an upstanding, chaste citizen capable of making a living apart from his inheritance.
The picture of Abingdon that Elliott painted for Eleanor in his letters was of a pristine and romantic landscape, as if to assure her, and himself, that the separation was merely a vacation:
“Shall I tell you of the wonderful long rides, of days through the Grand snow clad forests, over the white hills, under the blue skies as blue as those in Italy under which you and I and Little Ellie...used to sail over Naples Bay to beautiful Capri.”
He described entertaining scenes: “I was staying at a Scotchman’s House the other day, up in the woods at a Lumber Camp, and he had two dear little Daughters, who danced all manner of Highland Flings so prettily andtheir grave wee faces were so funny. And it was amusing that they had a Parrot! who tried to dance with them and was that not queer?” He signed off, “Goodnight Sweetheart—Love to all from your loving father.”
And he was melancholy: “The fields are covered with a soft mat of thick blue grass and painted by the most lovely blue and white violets. I keep my room filled with them and they smell so sweet. Just like your sweet little
self when I pick you up and bury my face in those soft baby cheeks.” He even sent Eleanor some of these white violets, instructing her to mark the twenty-third Psalm with them.
The idea to invite Eleanor Roosevelt to the festival came from the event’s founder and director, Annabel Morris Buchanan, a talented composer and prodigious collector of all kinds of folk music. Buchanan’s papers in the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection include about 13,000 items, or seventeen linear feet, ranging from white and black spirituals to Native American ballads, and so on.
In February 1933, she wrote to the soon-to- be first lady: “I think you and President Roosevelt might find the mountain, with its marvelous view and the folk musicians, a refreshing change from Washington.”
At the festival, Eleanor warmly addressed the crowd of some ten thousand attendees: “To the people who live here I want to say a special word of gratitude. They have given me the feeling that they remember affectionately my father, whom I adore.” And then she ended her speech, “For the rest of the day I hope to be just a spectator.”
There on White Top, Eleanor the perpetual Inspector — the eyes, the ears, the legs, the field reporter for Franklin Roosevelt — wanted a break.
At the age of fourteen, Elliott first started having symptoms of a “nervous affliction,”
which manifested itself in headaches, seizures, and maybe even panic attacks. The diagnosis today might be something like anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder, but what good is a twenty-first-century diagnosis for a kid in the 1870s? With a physician friend of
the family, Elliott went to Texas and Florida to hunt and recuperate. From Texas, he wrote to his father on February 20, 1876: “Everything is in an advanced state in Texas, by everything I mean all fruits, flowers and vegetables and by ‘Texas’ I mean the civilized portions thereof.”
When his father died, Elliott took his inheritance and traveled to India. He returned to the States for his sister Corinne’s wedding— Corinne would move to Abingdon with her husband, who would eventually give Elliott work.
Elliott later married the “lovely” Anna Hall. Her New York City family was into society with, as Eleanor put it, “a capital ‘S!’”
From her father, Eleanor didn’t get any of the society-with-a-capital-S judgment that she felt so acutely from her mother, and despite the havoc Elliott wreaked on his family, what with the drinking and philandering,
Eleanor wrote candidly about her sheer adoration of him. Even though she overheard people, notably her mother, talking about his being “sick,” to Eleanor, Elliott was perfection.
Some Roosevelt biographers (of Teddy and Eleanor) have things getting dramatically worse for Elliott in 1889, when Eleanor was five years old. While practicing for an amateur circus, he broke his ankle. Misdiagnosed as a sprain at first, his ankle had to be rebroken and reset. Already an alcoholic by many accounts, he now had to take morphine and laudanum. His behavior became more erratic, leading to violent episodes and suicide threats. He was forced into (what we’d call) intervention — “kidnapped” as Elliott put it — by Teddy and his sister Bamie. Teddy also arranged for Elliott’s money to be put into a trust for Anna and the kids.
The Abingdon redemption plan may very well have worked — all indications were pointing that way — had Elliott’s time to succeed not been cut short by a string of ballad-worthy tragedies.
In December of 1892, Anna — Eleanor’s mother, Elliott’s wife — fell ill with diphtheria and died. It’s surprising how, as a child and as an adult, Eleanor’s response to her mother’s death was to think about her father. She was eight years old when a relative told her that her
mother had died; later, Eleanor remembered being unmoved: “Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else. My father was back and I would see him soon.”
But Eleanor wasn’t going to live with her father once again as she — and apparently Elliott — had expected. Anna had left her children in the custody of her own mother, not Elliott. Elliott wrote to a friend in Abingdon: “Sorely as I need my little ones with me, Iwill return without them.” It’s kind of hard not to share the despondency, not to wonder what if?, when he adds, “I have not found one person in either my wife’s or my connection who encourages me in the slightest…when I propose that the children join their Father.” Eleanor Roosevelt could very well have become a daughter of Southwest Virginia. But if the fathering of an illegitimate child was the proverbial last straw for Elliott’s family, the last straw for Elliott proved to be his family’s denial to him of his children, even after their mother had died.
As Eleanor later came to understand it, her mother’s death, combined with her mother’s leaving the children in the custody of a grandparent, was “a tragedy of utter defeat” for her father. “No hope now of ever wiping out the sorrowful years he had brought upon my mother…. He had no wife, no children, no hope.”
Within a few months of Anna’s death, Elliott’s sons, Little Ellie and Hall, both came down with scarlet fever — only Hall would survive. Soon after leaving Abingdon, Elliott Roosevelt died at the age of thirty-four. In just a few short years, Eleanor Roosevelt’s nuclear family went from five members to two. At the age of nine, she was parentless and the closest thing to a mother that her three-year-old brother Hall had.
In the White House years, the two of them — Eleanor and Hall — would make a striking and elegant pair on the dance floor. As the United Press reporter Ruby Black put it, “Tall Hall Roosevelt’s waltzes with his sister were always dances of extraordinary grace.” But for all that the two shared, Hall was too young to remember his father. For Eleanor, the sentimental “halo of romance” that she described over the town of Abingdon was likely hers alone.
If, as Eleanor’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” for Eleanor, that kingdom was Abingdon. Southwest Virginia was never etched in her memory so much as it was aloft in her imagination, buoyed by a lifelong grief.
Eleanor originally planned to drive to White Top in her blue roadster convertible.
She’d also planned to spend the night in a cabin on the mountain. But all the publicity leading up to the trip made her scale back. She was getting too many invitations from others along the way; she wanted this to be a trip to the land of her father’s last years, period. And a folk-music festival was as fitting an occasion as any. After all, Elliott had told her in the second to-last letter she would receive from him:
“Since my return I have been very sick with a return of my Indian fever and these…Trigg children have made a practice of coming outside my door with a quartette of negroes (in which I have taken much interest) and singing the sweetest, softest, old time songs to me — Those your Grandmother, my Mother, used to sing. Some day you will have to come down and hear them sing….”
The Abingdon reception was grand, with
people filling the train-station platform, leaning over the rope lines, reaching out to wave at Mrs. Roosevelt with their hands, hats, and handkerchiefs.
White Top Mountain was populated with thousands of people — “in store-bought suits and in overalls, dressed up and in homespun,” according to Black. Also flanking the mountain were Model Ts, pickups, horses, wagons (including a “depression wagon,” described as “half an automobile pulled by a horse”), and even an oxcart.
Mrs. Roosevelt first wanted to check out the view, so the sheriff didn’t stop until he’d reached the top of the mountain.
After the mountaintop visit, Mrs. Roosevelt went to the cabin where she’d originally intended to stay the night, and said a few words to the crowd. Then down to the pavilion decorated in spruce. People flocked around her, holding their babies up, cheering when she passed. One woman shrieked, “I got to see Mrs. Roosevelt!” One little girl who glimpsed Mrs. Roosevelt called out, within earshot, “Why, she ain’t so bad-lookin’!” (These particulars come from reporter Ruby Black, a Texas native, who was on the scene.)
Hundreds of performers took the stage for the festival that year. Among the prizewinners
was Jack Reedy from Marion, Virginia. Black called him an award hog. He won first prize in banjo; tied for first in clog dancing; and performing with the Blevins Brothers in the band competition, tied for first.
In the ballad competition, first prize went to blind Horton Barker of Chilhowie, Virginia. Barker sang “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” — an old ballad about the devil coming for the farmer’s wife. He carries her off in a sack slung across his back, intending fully to “scorch her well,” but then, realizing what a scolding load she is, decides she’s just too much trouble and brings her back.
The Cruise Cousins from Crandall, Tennessee, were also a hit. Authorities had let one of them out of jail — reportedly, he was in for moonshining — so they could all perform together for Mrs. Roosevelt. The Cruises were finalists in folk hymns and square dancing, the latter of which Mrs. Roosevelt would write, “looked…far more fun than much of the modern dancing of today. In fact it was all I could do to keep from joining and I am sure if I go back next year I shall take some lessons and dance with them.”
Mrs. Roosevelt and her press corps wouldn’t have seen all the performers in their brief time on the mountaintop. But they were familiar with Elliott Roosevelt’s words; the previous year, Eleanor had published many of his letters in a book, Hunting Big Game in the Eighties. Many of the news stories alluded to It — “Mrs. Roosevelt Hears Songs Which Her Father Loved” read the headline of the Washington Post’s society-page story.
Mrs. Roosevelt may very well have heard the same songs her father did. But didn’t she, or any of those reporters who’d read about the “quartette of negroes” singing to Elliott in the 1890s, think it curious that in the 1930s, not a one of the singers, instrumentalists, dancers, or storytellers at this folk-music festival with a five-state view was black? Did they not find the complexion of this kingdom to be unusually fair?
As a child, Eleanor didn’t much care for the children of Abingdon, seeing as how they got to spend time with her father and she didn’t. Nonetheless, a couple of them — Jean and Jim Trigg, close to her own age — joined her on White Top Mountain for lunch. Jean was one of the kids who’d come with the quartet of African Americans to sing for Elliott. Jim and other kids had accompanied Elliott on sunrise horseback rides, to hunt for game “and gallop over these broad fields for one or two hours … and never return without roses in the cheeks of those I call now, my children.”
John Smith was there around lunchtime, too. Along with some of the cooks hired to prepare Mrs. Roosevelt’s lunch that day, Smith — who’d been Elliott’s servant in Abingdon — was one of the few black people allowed into
the White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival in the 1930s. And that was apparently because Mrs. Roosevelt had specifically requested to meet with him. (The Christian Science Monitor reported that Smith’s daughter had come all the way from Brooklyn to take her elderly father to meet Mrs. Roosevelt. As the Bristol Herald Courier reported it, Mrs. Roosevelt said during lunch that she wanted to meet her father’s “old colored valet.”)
Festival attendees and performers gave her a bundle of gifts that day: lots of wildflowers; dogwood and laurel canes; a book of local recipes; a handwoven counterpane from North Carolina; a calfskin rug from Atkins, Virginia; a reed basket from the Smyth County DAR; pastel paintings of Laurel Farmhouse and St. Paul’s Episcopal Chapel in Damascus, Virginia, where Mrs. Albert Mock had talked Elliott into donating $250 for the church organ. And then there was the gift from John Smith.
Sharp in a three-piece suit, Mr. Smith’s face was remarkably unlined. Only his hands betrayed his age. They trembled when he gave Mrs. Roosevelt a saucer and cracked teacup from the white-and-gold china set Elliott had used while he rented two rooms at Mrs. Campbell’s boarding house, right next to Prooper’s Alley on Abingdon’s Main Street. Eleanor immediately recognized the china as that handed down from her Grandmother Roosevelt.
“I could show you [Elliott’s] sick room now, where I stood by him eight weeks, day and night after he was hurt by an explosion of a lamp,” Smith told reporters, and maybe Eleanor. “I rubbed him so he could rest.”
Here was an almost tangible detail. Eleanor herself had rubbed her mother’s head for hours on end when she didn’t feel well. Maybe Smith gave Eleanor a fuller glimpse of her father and the people who came to know him in his last years. Maybe Eleanor saw, if only for a moment, a Southwestern Virginia that was more than sleigh rides and picking flowers and galloping over rolling hills at sunrise.
I’d like to think the White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival was the fool-me-once in Eleanor’s evolution as a Civil Rights activist. Although she had said, as she left White Top that day, “Some day I want to motor through this beautiful country. And I should like to ride horseback over the trails my father covered,” she never returned to the White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival or, apparently, to White Top. (She would return to Abingdon, however, gravitating to the Barter Theater, which is now the state theater of Virginia.)
But a few months after the 1933 festival, Eleanor invited John Powell to a press conference. He was one of the few men to receive such an invitation during her twelve years as first lady. There, Eleanor gave him a platform to tell a national audience that “much so called hillbilly music is not representative”; instead, he offered, with a series of folk-music radio broadcasts initiated by the White House, what he called “the true folk music, which comes from the same sources as English speech, and which goes back at least two centuries to be authentic.” He noted that “it has been found in the mountains, because peoplehave gone there to look for it.”
She also invited John Smith to the White House, but he was too sick to make it. In the summer of 1934, not quite a year after he met Eleanor at the festival, he died at his Bristol, Virginia, home.
Eleanor never publicly criticized the White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival organizers for their exclusion of black performers. But her reaction to some of the people who did perform hints at the cost of Powell’s agenda on the music he was trying to elevate. In her “Passing Thoughts of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” column in the Women’s Democratic News, Eleanor wrote of the women ballad singers she saw and heard on White Top: “[They were] fine featured … showing in their carriage and expression that there is something in inheritance.” As for the music, “Their voices were not remarkable but the whole thing was of great interest to those who believe that there is value in preserving the folk lore which has come out of the early customs and experiences of the people of the country.”
Oh for heaven’s sake. Can we not arrange it so that Mrs. R. can come back for just a day and hear some Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson,
and The Carolina Chocolate Drops? And while we’re at it, let’s bring back The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ African-American stringband forebears, too. Let’s put them at the Carter Family Fold, or the Rhythm & Roots Festival on Bristol’s State Street, or on a front porch somewhere, anywhere. See what they sound like there. We can even put them back on White Top Mountain. But please, please, don’t put their concert in the hands of John Powell.
There are two old ballads, “The False Knight Upon the Road” and “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” that are easy to confuse. But for a few differences in characters, the narratives are similar: A sinister or aristocratic questioner tries to outwit a commoner and fails, proving that the common folk aren’t so easily duped after all.
For whatever Powell might have thought of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933, it’s quite certain that his opinion would’ve changed drastically by the 1950s, when racists flat-out hated her, some of them wondering why on earth a white person would talk so much about civil rights, others coming to the conclusion that Mrs. Roosevelt must have some black ancestry. Eleanor was downright snide about the whole eugenics thing. In her “My Day” newspaper column, she wrote about receiving an “amusing postcard” from someone in Mobile, Alabama, who wrote: “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:
You have not answered my questions, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.”
To which she responded: “I am afraid none of us know how much or what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations.” She went on, “As far as I know, I have no Negro blood, but, of course, I do have some Southern blood in my veins, for my Grandmother Roosevelt came from Georgia.”
The nerve of that woman! And the nerve of White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival performers who tried to bring jazz into the “original” folk tunes, only to have the jazz directed out by Powell and Buchanan. (As writer David Whisnant so expertly puts it in All That Is Native and Fine, Powell and Buchanan saw a “risk” in “celebrating folk culture in public”: “The folk, if left to themselves, might celebrate the wrong thing.”) And the nerve of A.P. Carter, to traipse around the hills and valleys and mountains of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee in the 1930s with Lesley Riddle, a black man, collecting old and new songs from black folks and white. The nerve of Maybelle Carter for sitting down with Riddle, learning some tunes from him, and listening to him as she developed that Carter-scratch style of guitar-playing that would be audible in country music for generations to come. The nerve of Maybelle for playing “The Cannon Ball” in the 1960s (by then, she was known as Mother Maybelle) — and for telling Mike Seeger she’d learned it from Lesley Riddle.
It’s easy to appreciate the talent of the Carters, country music’s first family, for the melodies they put together and the history they made in 1927, when Ralph Peer recorded them in a hat shop along Bristol’s State Street, so named for being the dividing line between Virginia and Tennessee. But it’s hard to fully appreciate the nerve of The Carter Family — not to mention the nerve of Lesley Riddle — unless you encounter the likes of John Powell. He was too “refined” to wear a white sheet. His cloak was musical brilliance, and that brilliance was about as flooded out as the last-planned White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival. (The 1940 festival was rained out, and organizers never brought it back.)
But for all the record-industry packaging that would corral white into “hillbilly” and black into “blues,” making country music today seem the province of white folk, when it comes down to it, American country music got its start as a Virginia-born, biracial baby. Biracial unless, of course, you were to follow Powell’s one-drop definition — in which case it’s black music, just like Powell’s own early compositions, just like every song played on White Top Mountain with that African instrument, the banjo.
Mrs. Campbell’s boarding house, where Eleanor’s father lived for close to two years, writing letters and pressing violets to send home to his young daughter, is now a bed & breakfast, and like many other businesses in Abingdon, it has a sign for Virginia’s “Crooked Road” posted out front. Generating tourism and economic development along its route, the Crooked Road marks several of Southwestern Virginia’s noteworthy musical spots, including Bristol, the self-proclaimed birthplace of country music, where Barack Obama opened his general election campaign in 2008. (He was
endorsed by the Southwest Virginian, bluegrass-royalty Ralph Stanley.) The Crooked Road doesn’t make it up to Radford. But there on the campus of Radford University, a state school, you’ll find Powell Hall, named for John Powell.
By the time Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to India and Pakistan in 1952, following once again in her father’s footsteps, she was a widow; had served as the United States’ delegate to the United Nations; and had once again had a “first” title foisted upon her — this time by President Harry Truman, who christened her “First Lady of the World.” While in Lahore, a group of young Pakistani women performed a traditional Punjabi folk dance for Mrs. Roosevelt. When they finished, the sixty-seven-year-old surprised the crowd by launching into a demonstration surprise of her own: With the Pakistani music still playing, Eleanor Roosevelt danced the Virginia reel for some fifteen minutes, teaching it to her hosts. Today, that performance of the Virginia reel seems like poetry, sweet, sweet poetry, that’s long overdue.
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