4/28/03
START OF INTERVIEW
INTER: How long have you lived here in Swannanoa, in this area?
Joan: Well I have lived here almost all of my life. Except for the first seven years of my life when my mother and father were teaching at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, but my father was from this area so they moved back up here and he built a house for us to live in. It’s the last house in the Wilson Cove.
INTER That’s the same house you used to live in?
Joan: Yes.
INTER: I’ve been there, it’s a beautiful house. What was it like growing up there in that house?
Joan: Well, we didn’t have any central heat when I was growing up, so we did have a big kitchen stove, a wood stove. So we would get up in the mornings and all of us gather around the stove while mother cooked our breakfast. That’s part of what I remember and I remember that we always had good food.
INTER: Did you grow most of the food that you ate?
Joan: Yes we did. We had a big garden, a really big garden and we had an area, we had a chicken lot, as it was called. So we had chickens. When I was growing up the only meat that I ever got was chicken. Which was fine because they were outside, they were raised on the ground okay? So I can’t stand the chicken from Ingles. I won’t eat it in fact. I will not eat chicken that is not raised on the ground.
INTER: The free-range chicken. Does it taste different to you, is that part of it?
Joan: It tastes different and I can see. Okay, and I know that part of the reason that it tastes different is all the chemicals that were used raising the animals. At least I think that must be why it tastes different. Why else would it?
INTER: What other kind of things did you eat. What did you grow in the garden?
Joan: We grew everything that we needed to eat. Then my mother would can. Yes, she canned so that through the winter we had canned food from the garden.
INTER: What was it like going to school here?
2.
Joan: I went to Swannanoa school. The old school. You know the old brick building that is still there? Have you been over there?
INTER: I don’t think I have been over there.
Joan: Well see you are interviewing a lady that was there and you need to walk or drive over there. The old school. Part of the old school, the old brick part is the auditorium that is still there.
INTER: Is it used for anything now?
Joan: I have no idea of how or what it is used for. But there used to be beside that building, another brick building which was the rest of the school. Now they’ve torn that down. But they have I think, an alternative school over there of some kind.
INTER: But it is right down 70?
Joan : You know where the Ingles barn is, I call it the Ingles barn. It used to be Swannanoa but it is all Ingles now. On the other side. If you go on the other side of the Ingles barn and turn and to onto the two lane road, you get to the elementary school. If you go on the two lane road you get to the elementary school.
INTER: So you went to school there from the time you
were 7, right?
Joan: Yes I did. From the time I was 7 and then when I was in what we called Junior High School, my parents started trying to find out more about the students that graduated from that high school, from the Swannanoa High School and they found that a lot of them would go to a state college or university and would flunk out the first semester. So they decided that if I stayed at Swannanoa in the high school level that I was not going to get as good an oppportunity and succeed in a college or university. So they took me out in the junior high level in the Swannanoa school and they took me to Asheville every day. Because my father was teaching at UNC Asheville, or it used to be called Asheville Biltmore College. Now, my mother continued to teach at the Swannanoa school. She was the librarian so she continued her work there. So I went to high school in Asheville.
INTER: How is it different being a teacher yourself? How are schools different now than they were. What are different experiences that you have had that maybe we don’t have any more.
3.
Joan: Well one of the things that I had at that high school. I don’t whether you all knew or not, was I could join the band, which I very much wanted to do and my brother Artus could too. He is two years younger than I. So we both went there. It was Asheville High School. It is now called Asheville High School, but at the time it was called Lee Edwards High School. So we went there and for four years we were both in the band. There was no opportunity you know to get anything like that in Swannanoa. I played the oboe and the bassoon.
INTER: Do you still play now?
Joan: I don’t try to keep those up. I play a lot of different instruments.
INTER: Is that how you got started playing music, when you played in the band?
Joan: That’s right. Now it’s not called Swannanoa High School, it’s Owens. It’s Owens Middle School and Owens High School.
INTER: I know where Owens is, it is right across the street from the Juvenile Youth Academy. At the same place.
Joan: They have all kinds of music there because you know, Krista’s son goes there. Yes, that’s him in the picture.
INTER: So, when you were growing up, what did you used to do for fun? What did you enjoy doing?
Joan: What we did whenever the weather was good, was we went hiking. My mother being particularly interested in all the botanical names of the plants, she would teach all those and she had plant books. In fact, I have one of her old plant books at home. She had plant books that would help identify the flowers that she could not. So we would take plant books and we would go for all day hikes. We did picnics and that was for me, it was growing up in the mountains. It was not just sitting there. Well, sometimes it is nice to just sit and stare out, but we hiked a lot and that is how.
INTER: Was there any particular spots that you really loved?
Joan: No, just anywhere. As long as it was on the mountain. Maybe I should explain. We owned 200 acres which we have. It took us about three years to go through the process because we had to have naturalists to come and explore all of the plants in the 200 acres. They had to do it in the springtime and then again in the fall and then in the winter. So it took about three years. But we are in the nature conservancy now. So you know with 200 acres you can find a lot of places to hike. 4.
INTER: You have a lot of beautiful trails right outside your home. We walked along one of those trails.
Joan: Then you know what it’s like. When did you go out there?
INTER: That was last semester. It was first term. I took Appalachian medicine with you and we went up there. So what are some social events, or like some institutions like the church, what are things about this area or your personal experience growing up in your family that really stood out to you.
Joan: Well, we went to the Swannanoa Presbyterian Church, not the college church. We went to the one in the brick building. Do you know what I am talking about? The old church. We went there. My parents took us there, you know fairly often, not every Sunday. But they took us there because they thought that we needed to, because we were living up on the side of a mountain, they though we needed to meet more people and so you know, we did that. But I have to say quite frankly, it never had any effect on my.
INTER: Really.
Joan: I am not a church-goer.
INTER: So there is your sister and you and you have a younger brother. Do you have other siblings too?
Joan: No, there is three of us.
INTER: What was that like. You’re the oldest right?
Joan: Yes, I’s two years older than my brother and seven years older than Irene, I think.
INTER: What was that like, growing up with the two of them?
Joan: Well, she being the youngest, we were supposed to take care of her. We were not very good at that, because we didn’t want to be bothered with her. But we managed. When we hiked, we all hiked together growing up. One of our parents always hiked with us. We probably left to our devices, would have left her on the side of the mountain by herself. But we were not encouraged to do that in any way.
INTER: Well now the two of you are really close, right?
Joan: Yeah, uh uh.
5.
INTER: Does she play music too?
Joan: Oh yes, she is a very good musician.
INTER: How did you start? You told me that you played music in the band in high school, but how did you get really into music and playing instruments and singing and stuff?
Joan: Well, we grew up, my father bought a second-hand guitar out here at the pawn shop in Asheville. He got a little book that showed where to put your fingers and he had a good ear so that he would tune it up and so we started, all of us started on the guitar when we were 8 or 9. Then I learned how to play a lot of different instruments now because when I was in graduate school I had a Fulbright fellowship. You know what that is.
INTER: No what is that?
Joan: Well it is a grant, or it is a scholarship or something. Anyhow it gives you, if you get a Fulbright fellowship, the people that award it, it is a US Government grant, a fellowship and it is to go to some particular country. So I applied to go to Norway because I wanted to compare the mountains string music and vocal music traditiona with those of the European countries. So the fourth language that I studied was old Norwegian and new Norwegian. There are several different Norweigian ways of speaking. So I studied Norwegian also when I was in graduate school and then when I got the Fulbright scholarship I was in Norway for a year-and-a-half. So that was another language that I learned.
INTER: What other languages do you know?
Joan: I guess French, German, Norwegian, and Cherokee.
INTER: So how did you come to learn Cherokee?
Joan: Well, my sister Irene and I decided because our grandmother was a mix of Scotch, Irish and Cherokee, that we would try to learn that language. My grandmother did not speak Cherokee but she had traced her ancestary to the Cherokee great-grandmother. So we decided that language was part of our family language and our heritage being Cherokee. We drove to Cherokee every Monday. Every Monday at 4 o’clock we drove for an hour and 15-20 minutes and got to Cherokee with our light suppers and ate our light suppers and then we had three solid hours of Cherokee, no breaks. I mean you could go to the restroom but that was it. We had a Cherokee teacher who taught everybody, mostly Cherokees and us too for three hours every Monday for an entire year.
INTER: Well, did you learn it pretty quickly? Could you say something in Cherokee?
6.
Joan: ____________________.
INTER: What does _________________ mean?
Joan: ______________. _________________. ______________, that means Hello. It’s glad to meat you or something like that. There is no goodbye or farewell in Cherokee.
INTER: So has the Cherokee tradition or way of life, has that also influenced you or affected your life being in this area?
Joan: I think that is has in a sense that I care a great deal about the land and the Cherokee tradition was to maintain a balance, don’t destroy, don’t tear up. Maintain the balance between people and the land. I learned a lot about the Cherokee mythology. Perhaps you learned that with Irene. So you know what I mean.
INTER: So that has influenced you in ways?
Joan: Very much. In a way I think that is why the days, on Saturday and Sunday if it is not pouring down rain I go outside and I hike. Now part of that is just growing up with my family and doing that growing up and part of it is that is what I want to do and part of it is because I love the land.
INTER: Has the land changed a lot since you were young?
Joan: Well, our land has not changed because we put it in the nature conservancy. It will never change in other words. We have four houses where we live but there will not be any more houses ever built because
once you join the conservancy nothing happens to the land. No developments of any kind. Do caring the land, loving the land, taking care of the land, I think we grew up feeling that way through our parents, but I also think perhaps we also inherited some of that from our Cherokee ancestor.
INTER: So you are like an eighth Cherokee, is that what it is?
Joan: No not that much. I don’t know how much it was. I would have to get someone who calculates all that. I guess it was my great-grandmother and so I don’t know how much Cherokee that makes us.
INTER: How have you felt about all the changes that has occurred to Swannanoa and to Asheville.
Joan: How I felt about it?
7.
INTER: I mean seeing it for what it was then and seeing it now. I’m just trying to picture what it must have been like growing up here years ago and then what it is like for me being here now and going to college. How different it is. What are maybe some of the developments that you have seen occur in the last how many years.
Joan: Well, there were no four lane roads at all. So that you know…… The land is destroyed when the four lane roads come in. I guess what I have seen the most of is destruction of the land because some people have a philosophy of progress and progress to some people means bigger and better highways and to hell with the land.
INTER: Did you have certain traditions in your family growing up. I guess that the hiking was kind of a tradition, but things that your family used to do together or that the community and people from the surrounding area would get together and do together. Were there like different gatherings or events or holiday traditions or anything like that?
Joan: I don’t remember anything like that. Well we would have turkey once a year and that would usually be the Thanksgiving turkey which we would, that would be the one thing that we might have to buy but there were wild turkeys. I had an uncle who from time to time would shoot a wild turkey and bring it in. But you know, that was the only thing we had other than chickens was the turkey. At Christmas we didn’t have turkey we just had chicken. We got together with relatives if they wanted to come and join us. You’ve seen the house, it is a big house. You can put a lot of people inside. You can get a lot of people in if you want to and if they want to come.
INTER: I had a question that I was going to ask you and I forgot it. But then I was listening.
Joan: Well I could add that all the rocks in that house were brought down from various parts of the mountains by my father who borrowed a mule and he built a wooden sled so that the mule dragged the sled with the rocks in t he sled. So that he did this for about two summers when we were getting to move of Tennessee. For two entire summers he got the mule and he built up several sleds. He would tear up one and do another. He brought all those stones from which this house where I live now was built and he did that entirely by himself.
INTER: What year was the house built?
Joan: In 1940. Between 1940 and 1942 I think was the dates when he came up from Tennessee. You know those were the times that we stayed with grandmother because the house was going to be built and then he found two brothers that were called the Cordell brothers and they had helped to do the stone work at Grove Park Inn. So they were very experienced stone house builders.
8.
Joan: Ok, they had helped to do the stone work at the Grove Park Inn. They were in their 70s, the Cordell brothers were in their 70s at that time. But they said sure, they’d be glad to do it and he asked them, did he have enough rocks.. They said well, not quite, go get some more.. So he kept hauling rocks in. But they came and they had some helpers you know. They knew how to motar the stones. You’ve seen the house. They had to motar them so that it looked like they were just stacked. You could hardly see the motar in between each one. Do you remember that? They looked like they were just stacked.
INTER: So neat.
Joan: So anyway that’s the story of that house and for the first three years, until 1945 or 1946… In 1945 or 1946 was the first time we had any electricity. We had oil lamps so we would sit and read with the oil lamps for light.
INTER: You spent a lot of time with you family.
Joan: Yes.
INTER: So your dad starting learning the guitar. Does you mom play instruments too?
Joan: She played piano. She was a really good pianist. So I, in fact, we found. Well she had bought a piano when we were still in Tennessee. She had bought a piano so it was very carefully…… when we moved we got a moving van. My parents, they wrapped that piano very carefully and brought it in the moving van. So we always had mother’s piano. She was a really good musician.
INTER: They taught you how to play different instruments.
Joan: Well she taught us how to play the piano and my father you know, taught us how to play the guitar.
INTER: So do you sing a lot of songs that are native to this region together. The old time songs? What kind of music did you learn?
Joan: We learned the ballads that my grandmother knew.
INTER: What are some of the different ballads?
Joan: Well Barbara Allen. Barbara Allen is one everyone knows probably or has heard if they were growing up there. Just dozens of them. I don’t know.
INTER: Do you still sing some of those same songs?
9.
Joan: Oh yeah, I do. In fact, my folk my folk life class which I have at 8 o’clock every day, has had to endure singing some of them. I gave them copies and had them sing along. Don’t know if I have any copies of those songs or not.
INTER: Is that one of them?
Joan: Wildwood Flower? Yes, that’s one of them. Cumberland Gap and there’s one called Swannanoa Tunnel, or Swannanoa Town, which we did.
INTER: Can I keep this?
Joan: Yeah, uh uh.
INTER: So, do you know lot of people from around here that also grew up here, that still live here?
Joan: The people that are my neighbors in Buckeye Cove, which you know the Buckeye branches off and Wilson Cove where I am is on one side and Buckeye Cove is on the other side. You know the road forks. The people that I grew up with in Buckeye Cove are still around in Buckeye Cove. I mean we all, you know, it’s traditional I guess, it may not be just in Appalacha but you know you wave at people that you know as you drive by. So yeah, the people that I grew up with are a lot of them are still there. What they have done in some cases and maybe that is what I have done too, is lived away but then they are drawn back and they come back. If they can keep their land or a part of it, they come back and either rebuild or build on their land. I guess that that is an Appalachan tradition but I think it is also a tradition that you would find anyplace where you have rural people still living. It is the rural, the sense of being rural that draws you back to the land because the land is still there. And a sense of your place on the land you have retained. Unless it has all been paved over.
INTER: What is it about having a sense of place or being close to the land. What are ways that you do that. I am trying to think how to word that. Does that make sense? What are some ways that you are close to the land? Not just spending time there but what do you like to do. Do you have different rituals or ceremonies or anything like that that goes along with being close to the land.
Joan: No, I don’t have any rituals or ceremonies.
INTER: What is there about that that is so valuable to you?
Joan: A relationship with the land?
INTER: Umhum. Why is it so valuable?
10.
Joan: I don’t know. It’s just valuable to me. I don’t know why.
INTER: It definitely seems like it is at the very core of who you are. So I was just trying to learn more about it. So, did you spend a lot of time with your other relatives, like your grandparents and your aunts and uncles growing up?
Joan: I spent some time with them.
INTER: Were they also musicians?
Joan: Not that I know of.
INTER: With the music do you ever put on any sort of event, like in town? Do you ever perform in front of people?
Joan: Well, I used to have a group called the Mountain Women’s String Band.
INTER: Oh yeah? Ok, I’ve heard of that.
Joan: We played together, Mountain Women’s String Band for probably 15-20 years.
INTER: That’s great. Was Irene a part of that too?
Joan: Umhum. But we got tired of it, all of us. We all agreed you know, we’re just going to get together in our houses from time to time. We’re not gonna do this, because we in fact, we had got so popular if you want to call it that, that we were asked and paid to come to places and perform. We were paid to go and perform all over Western North Carolina and people would call us and then they would say how much do you want and we would tell them and we would go and perform and we got our money. But, we got really tired of it. It just got to be a drag. That was when we all together decided you know, that’s enough of that. We would just get together in an informal way at our houses from time to time, so that’s what happened. But now we have put together a family band and we sit in the big house, that big house about every other week and all of us play together. Well mostly it is a Saturday night thing and people can bring food if they want to and we will have supper at a certain time but if you want to, you just come after supper and sing and play, or if you want to come for supper bring potluck and that’s the way we work that out.
INTER: On Saturdays you do that?
Joan: About every other Saturday.
INTER: So you have children, don’t you?
11.
Joan: No.
INTER: You don’t have any children?
Joan: No.
INTER: Does Irene have children?
Joan: No she doesn’t. Neither of us have children. My brother Artus does.
INTER: So I was wondering who is part of the family band?
Joan: Oh, ok. There are nine of us. You’ll have to help me if I leave out somebody. There’s my brother Artus, my sister Irene, myself, Artus’ sons Mark and Artus, my cousin David, Bob Irene’s husband and see, I’ve left out somebody. Maybe you can jot them down and then I can look at the list and see who I have left out. OK, Here’s a pencil if you want it. Ok, Joan, Irene, Artus Jr., Mark, Artus III, my cousin David, Bob Irene’s husband, let me look at the list now. Fernadito, Dee for short. You know that he is adopted from Peru.
INTER: Yeah…..
Joan: Ok, so his name was Fernando, that was his Peruvian name, but it’s gotten shorter and shorter and so it’s Deet. Fernandito, they called him little Fernando when he was there. When she adopted him they called him Fernandito, which means little Fernando. But people here call him Chris because one of his names is named after Krista. So has that got them now?
INTER: Yeah, Krista and Chris.
Joan: Is your machine still one?
INTER: Yeah. It’s going.
Joan: Anyhow, and we call ourselves the Bu ckeye band. But some people when we performed here at the college when Sharon McCrumb came. They called us the Moser Family Band at that point. But in any case, that’s how that was. But we had practiced for weeks and weeks and weeks to get ready for this because it was an hour long concert before she did her stories. Now she is a wonderful story-teller.
INTER: Irene is?
Joan: No, Sharon McCrumb is.
12.
INTER: Sharon is, ok.
Joan: Did you hear her?
INTER: No.
Joan: I’m sorry you didn’t. You didn’t hear us perform and you didn’t hear her stories.
INTER: Um, um. When was this? When did this take place?
Joan: In January of this year.
INTER: In January. Was that before school started.
Joan: No, no. School had already started. It was between January and February.
INTER: Goodness. I guess I did miss that. What was it for?
Joan: They have a program every year. A group called the Friends of the Library pay special people to come
and give stories or music performance in some way. So that’s what that was.
INTER: It sounds like that was pretty neat.
Joan: Well we had a good time.
INTER: I’m trying to think….. Is there anything that stands out to you? It sounds like we have talked about a lot already. How do you live now that is similar to how you lived growing up, or how are things similar or different?
Joan: Well, we have a television. We have electricity. We still have a little one lane road which you have driven up to Irene’s. That is the only one lane road left in most places in the mountains. We’ve done our best to take care of the land and we were raised to do that. So I don’t know that…. Well we have central heat. It’s very entertaining to think back on how in the middle of winter, like this time of the year, you get out of bed and you race to the kitchen because the wood stove in the kitchen, you know, has wood in it and therefore the kitchen is warm.
INTER: And all the rest of the rooms are cold.
Joan: Exactly.
13.
INTER: So as soon as you get out of bed you go running for the kitchen.
Joan: Right. So there are some differences but the place is the same.
INTER: Well thanks Joan, this has been wonderful.
Joan: Are we still talking? You might call Irene.
INTER: I did actually and she called me back and told me that she wouldn’t be able to make it for 9:30, but if I wanted to interview her we could do it again some other time.
Joan: Ok. Can you arrange that? Because the reason I say that is because there is seven years difference. She might remember entirely different things. Entirely different things. She could dispute everything that I said.
INTER: Could be. I need to hear her perspective too. Well thanks.
Joan: You’re most welcome.
END
Transcribed by Joan Widmayer 1/28/07