It May Be Hillbilly, but These Kids Love Their Mountain Music

Her friends call it hillbilly music. They laugh.

Ninth-grader Shelley Skidmore doesn’t care.

She’ll sing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” if she wants. She’ll play “Boil Them Cabbage Down.” This is mountain music. Her music.

“Most kids think it’s so not cool,” said Shelley, who has been playing bluegrass since kindergarten. “But I just love it. I just love it.”

That’s a passion this small Appalachian town tries hard to nurture.

In an era when school districts are measured by their test scores, when math and reading and science get top billing, Stanton has committed to teaching its children music. Not just any music, but bluegrass: the jazzy, bluesy music of the mountains, the music of back-porch fiddling parties, of twanging banjos and fast-plucked mandolins.

The idea is, of course, to build well-rounded students.

But the program also aims to give these kids a reason to be proud of their mountain home. To show them there’s much more to Appalachia than the dumb-hick stereotype. To introduce them to their culture. And to give them the skills to keep bluegrass alive out here where it was born.

Pride in Music, Culture

“For these students, it’s a chance to see they’re not just some poor kid in eastern Kentucky, but they’re part of something much larger,” said Dan Hays, executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Assn. “Many kids who live in these mountain areas still suffer under the [hillbilly] stereotypes. If you can take something that’s an important part of their culture and history and turn it into something they can be proud of, then they don’t have to be ashamed of where they come from.”

That process starts in kindergarten at red-brick Stanton Elementary, which sits next to the courthouse and down the street from the video store in the civic center of this hard-up town of 2,700.

Nationally, just 22% of elementary and middle school children study music in school. At Stanton Elementary, however, all 370 students learn to play instruments. And every child gets 35 minutes a week of music instruction.

Former Principal Faye King launched the program six years ago. She figured her students would pick up valuable academic skills, such as counting and recognizing patterns, as they learned to play instruments.

More important, she thought mountain music would be an ideal way to link her pupils with the broader community. Nearly half the working-age adults in the county surrounding Stanton are functionally illiterate or close to it. But many of them know bluegrass--and they are eager to pass the music’s spirit to the next generation. “It’s part of who we are,” King said. “It just resonates within us.”

Sure enough, adults from throughout the region--bluegrass performers, music teachers, instrument makers--began stopping by to mentor the children. Top musicians such as Bela Fleck and Ricky Skaggs also found time to give the kids pointers. “The music of your culture is so important to know and be proud of,” Skaggs offers. “Don’t just play Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Learn from your [cultural] tradition and build on it.”

King, who retired last year, agrees: “Students should study what’s around them.”

And so, students at Stanton Elementary pluck out “My Old Kentucky Home” on dulcimers in class. They write their own bluegrass melodies for homework. They sing for their peers at morning assembly. They borrow guitars or mandolins or bluegrass CDs from the school library for fun, checking them out as they would books. The last week of school every year is devoted to an arts camp crammed with music workshops, many led by professional bluegrass players.

Any student can also join the Wise Village Pickers, perhaps the only elementary school bluegrass band in the country. The 30 or so pint-size Pickers have performed before thousands of bluegrass fans at music festivals across Kentucky and in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia as well. They’ve even played for the International Bluegrass Music Awards show, equivalent around here to the Grammys.

Music teacher Greg Faulkner--an unlikely looking bluegrass fan with from-a-bottle-blond spiked hair, black leather jacket and diamond earring--says he wants his students to get a feel not only for mountain music but for mountain culture as well. As a boy growing up in Stanton, Faulkner, now 27, enjoyed weekly “picking parties” when the pace slowed, the to-do lists slipped away and neighbors sat side by side on a back porch for hours, laughing and making music.

“That’s what everyone did back then,” he says, “but people have gotten away from it now. These children are missing out on their heritage.”

A Preference for Jewel

Of course, exposing them to their heritage doesn’t ensure they’ll like it.

Ten-year-old Alina Martinez plays bluegrass guitar in the Wise Village band, but she says she prefers classical music. Third-grader Abigail Vires belts out “Mountain Music” with the best of them but admits a sneaking preference for “You Were Meant for Me” by Jewel. Shelby Barnett, at age 9 a veteran fiddle player, does rank bluegrass as her favorite music--but draws a blank on why. “ ‘Cause I play it?’ ” she offers, dubiously.

Even bluegrass masters admit the music doesn’t always appeal to young ears--not with titles such as “Muleskinner Blues” and lyrics such as “Boil them cabbage down, boy, boil them cabbage down.”

“It’s never had the tummy tucks and belly rings to be hip,” Skaggs said.

Bluegrass developed in Kentucky in the 1930s and ‘40s, a spinoff of earlier string band music laced with echoes of Scottish folk tunes, blues and gospel harmonies. Bluegrass bands generally feature banjos, guitars, fiddles, a bass and mandolins.

“Bluegrass has never been something where you pay your money and go sit passively and listen to it. That would ruin it,” says promoter Bob Cornett, who stages the Festival of the Bluegrass in Kentucky each summer. “It’s all about participating in the music.”

That’s where the Stanton program excels.

On any given afternoon, Shelley Skidmore and five or six of her friends are hanging out in someone’s living room, trying to pick out by ear a new bluegrass tune or rehearsing songs they already know. There’s no formal music program in the middle or high school, so these Stanton Elementary alumni have formed their own band, Little Bit of Blues, under Faulkner’s guidance. “We’re keeping Appalachian music alive,” Shelley says proudly.

Every Monday, Wise Village band members gather in the Stanton Elementary gym to pick their banjos and strum their mandolins. “Oh, play me some mountain music, like Grandma and Grandpa used to play,” they sing. “Now roll on down the river, to my mountain hideaway.”

Most of the kids, of course, will never become professional musicians.

Many will always screech when they play.

But their fans are proud just to watch the children perform home-grown mountain music.

“They can take it wherever they want to go with it,” said Kathy Merriman, mother of two young bluegrass players. “But they will always have a talent they can pass down. And that’s what bluegrass is all about.”