Every other spring, a group of students scatter across Asheville in search of open mic nights at a local coffee shop, jam sessions at a nearby pub, or church services steeped in music. At each destination, they jot down notes about what they heard and experienced, and the conclusions they made about the city’s vast and vibrant music community.
They bring those collected field notes back to UNC Asheville, sharing their observations with other students in their North America, Race and Roots Musics course taught by Toby King, associate professor of music.
While bluegrass, folk, and Appalachian music are ever-present in the region, they’re hardly the only genres that could be considered core to North America’s roots. That’s why King leads students through an exploration of four musical traditions — Native American, Appalachian, African American and Mexican American — that together create an interwoven history of American anthropology.
Through the course, King poses a central question: How do people use music to make their lives meaningful? It’s an expansive question that students delve into through books, essays, and musical examples that incorporate everything from border ballads and country music to New Orleans brass bands and the use of the banjo in African and Appalachian folk traditions.
Fox Stroud is a junior majoring in music with a minor in Indigenous studies. The roots music class is part of their ongoing exploration of music, identity and culture, following courses like African American Music: Slavery to Swing.
“My work here at UNC Asheville largely orbits the gravity of questions around how music and culture are aspects of ecosystems, and what stories about this can and are being told,” they say. “The specific vectors of this work are dynamic, but I have my heart, mind, and hands excitedly moving in the direction of instrument making as nodes of story and refuge for hopeful possibility.”
Throughout the semester, students can complement the class by joining parallel musical ensembles that play country, bluegrass, blues, and jazz. King also created a roots music resource room with recordings, video lessons, and a variety of musical instruments.
Finally, the extended ethnographic project gets students to engage directly with Western North Carolina’s music community, a location that King — a banjo player with a deep interest in American roots music — considers tantamount to the Holy Land.
“They turn the field notes into a small ethnography that formalizes their observations from the field and makes some kind of conclusion about a particular musical community,” King says. “It has the benefit of getting students out of the classroom and into real life, bringing some of that back to the classroom, and understanding what it means to analyze a musical performance.
“Asheville is a small town, but the nature of it is so culturally rich.”
The exercise — and the class at large — is also an introduction to the basics of ethnomusicology, which looks at the relationship between music and culture. In this case, Indigenous traditions offer an example of what it means to communicate musically, while the poetic construction of Mexican border balladry shows that lyrics are often more than just a series of words. Meanwhile, the blues allows students to look at the evolution of a homespun tradition mediated through recording technology.
“Music is an alternate form of communicative action,” King says. “It gives us a lens on what it means to be creative and to be alive and can reflect the human experience of those who use it to make their lives meaningful. It gives you a different way of understanding how people think and opens doors of understanding.”
The course naturally draws music majors, but King is also glad to see students from creative writing, anthropology, history, and environmental studies. The multidisciplinary mix aligns with the very nature of ethnomusicology, which can draw from ecology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, and more.
“One of the lessons of the course is that by encountering new musical styles, we realize what assumptions we’ve made about music and begin to undo some of them,” he says. “It’s as much a self-discovery as it is an exploratory treasure hunt.”
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