Musical Legacy of the Appalachian Migration

By Cliff Murphy

Living traditions endure in the musical legacy of the Appalachian migration to Cecil County, Maryland. It is here that Dave Reed, Zane & Hugh Campbell, the DeBusk-Weaver Family and others carry on the family musical traditions brought to this region during the Great Depression. These streams of old-time, gospel, bluegrass, and Country & Western music have melded with regional Yankee traditions over the decades and have given birth to a number of prominent figures in bluegrass, including Del McCoury and Danny Paisley & The Southern Grass .

In 2009, some of the living traditions of Appalachian migrant music in Cecil County was captured in a documentary collaboration between Maryland Traditions and WYPR titled “Ola Belle Reed – An Enduring Legacy” as a special broadcast of “Tapestry of the Times.” The program’s video companion piece, produced by photographer/videographer Shane Carpenter, can be viewed here.

During and after the Great Depression, waves of migrants moved from the Appalachian mountains into the nation’s booming northeastern industrial cities. Zane & Hugh Campbell’s mother worked as a “boom-boom” girl in a munitions factory near Elkton. The experience of Appalachian migrants throughout the northeastern USA is dramatically chronicled in many bluegrass and Country & Western standards from the middle 20th Century – songs such as “Detroit City,” and – most pertinent to this story – “Streets of Baltimore.” The passage of “hillbilly” migrants into cities such as Baltimore has been well chronicled, and is embodied in the biographical songs and stories of singer Hazel Dickens, who moved from the West Virginia mountains to Baltimore in the 1950s. It was in Baltimore where Dickens began her professional singing career in the city’s brawling honky-tonks, and she drew much of her inspiration as a strong female lead from the late Ola Belle Reed of Rising Sun, Maryland. Next>>