Ancient Music is Silenced in America

Song Collector Patrick Gainer

...preserves music of America's youth

TANNER, W. Va. (AP) -- The singer's voice trembles with the lilt of lament as old as the quiet, remote hills, the words thick with timeless images of forgotten love, lost friendships and the sadness of death.

"A few more years will hush my song, my earthly song when they lay me in the valley," chants the rich, strong voice of Patrick Gainer, writer, musician, folklorist and former professor.

A wiry man with a peppery vigor that belies his 76 years, Gainer spends his days studying and preserving the folk music of America's youth.

The walls of Gainer's study are lined with reels of tape filled with hundreds of songs filled with stories of lovers, towering heroes, frightful rogues, disasters and the simple patters of life in a bygone age.

"Singing was part of their daily living. You could hear singing everywhere. My grandfather down in the fields or my mother spinning. Not because they were happy but because it made them feel good," Gainer explained.

Gainer's career as a collector of folk music began when he was 19, and his apprenticeship was served behind the wheel of the Model T Ford of another collector who taught him the art and skills of hunting out songs that were being forgoetten even then.

In later years, Gainer became a professor of English at West Virginia University, but he always found time for the music of his youth.

Much of Appalachia's folk music was brought across the Atlantic by the first settlers and endlessly shaped and amended by the experiences and surroundings of the New World. Traditionally, the songs were unaccompanied, and Gainer used no musical instruments on the records he has made.

Many of the songs were known to only the few who passed them from generation to generation in some remote valley, and Gainer spent countless hours scouring remote hills and valleys for the last old man or woman who might still remember a song brought by the first settlers.

Every time he found a song, Gainer would retreat to his study to spend long nights assuring the authenticity of the songs, som of which he traced back to 13th century England and Scotland.

The dual assault of radio and TV, however, has all but silenced the ancient music, Gainer said.

"Now it's impossible to find songs anymore. They're all gone. I've been all over the state and I can't get anything anymore," he said. "I was in a home and an old lady wanted to sing to me but they wouldn't turn the TV down. She took me into a back room and sang to me. But you could still hear the TV over the singing."

Gainer said he still thinks of the words of Uncle Frank Kennedy who sang to him of the "few more years."

"If I hadn't got it from him I guess the song would have been lost entirely," Gainer mused. "It's gone now. Our oral traditions are all gone."