Last Wisps of the Old Ways: In Conversation with Derek Piotr

Written By: 
Blake Wagner
Tags: 
Share:
  •  

Step into a world of North Carolina mountain singing with music archivist Derek Piotr.

A series of recordings collected by Herbert Halpert for the Library of Congress in 1939 served as the launchpad for two new compilations showcasing the vocal talents of North Carolina mountain singers, specifically Lena Bare Turbyfill.

Blake Wagner talks to archivist and musician Derek Piotr, who was responsible for curating these songs last year on reissue label Death Is Not The End. The compilations are titled Last Wisps of the Old Ways and Ever Since We’ve Known It.

Is it kind of freeing, working on a project that isn't wholly yours? The voices on these two compilations are a mix of vintage archival as well as personal recordings. How did it feel to just let the tape run?

It’s so much easier to be enthusiastic about someone that isn’t you. I used to play shows all the time, like three times a month or more. You’d get off stage and there’d be ten people wanting to talk to you all at once. But it’s so thankless to put a record out and then not tour it.

So, in a way, these compilations have been way easier for me to talk about. In the beginning when I was thinking about Lena Bare Turbyfill, trying to bring her back from the brink of obscurity, I kept checking in with myself, and I was like, “Am I sick? Am I just fixated on this woman because she’s the first thing I heard? Is this just like a weird bias that I have?”

Then, after I listened to all of these tapes from the Library of Congress, I realized, no, she’s by far the best of the seven people recorded in 1939. You had her two sisters, her father, her sister-in-law, and then Ben Duggar, who I think was the mayor of Elk Park, North Carolina at one time. There were myriad other people in the room, and some of them even sang the same songs. Lena’s sister, Lloyd, sings a version of “George Collins” as well, and it’s just clear from an aesthetic and musicianship and athletic level that Lena was the best singer. She had the best control. She had the nicest briskness. She had the sweetest tone in her voice. 




I think the family agrees that Lena was the best in terms of technical ability. But I had some moments of self reflection while completing this, and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna be talking about Lena Turbyfill again.” I don’t want to be too one-note.

Derek Piotr and Nicola “Aunt Nicky” Pritchard (Turbyfill), photo by Eileen Mitchell

There are other field work projects that I am interested in. There’s a woman who was born in 1844, who lived in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and she’s kind of the next person that I’m fascinated by. But these things take time. So while it’s much easier to talk about this compilation, I’m already thinking beyond it.

That being said, Lena is the best singer I’ve heard in a really long time, so the simple fact that her face has appeared on places like WFMU and NTS means she has a shot now. I want to at least give her a chance, and I think it’s been going really well. I have this theory that this was sort of her destiny – someone would have done it if it weren’t me.

I love the title of the first compilation, Last Wisps of the Old Ways – capturing something before it disappears into the ether, like the legacy of Miss Lena.

I'm curious about the title of the second compilation, Ever Since We've Known It. Why did you choose to call it that? 

There’s a compilation Lena was featured on, put out by New World Records, titled Oh, My Little Darling: Folk Song Types. On that compilation, Lena and Lloyd sing a song called “Lily Schull,” which they sing together in unison; they’d learned it from their sister, Sabra, who is recorded singing that ballad on Last Wisps. They sing it together and Dr. Halpert asks – because it’s a gruesome song about murdering and burning a body and then getting hanged for it – if they always sing it together when they happen to sing that song, and Lena replies, “Ever since we’ve known it.” 

“Lily Schull,” Library of Congress

So I think it has a double meaning, right? It’s like, “Ever since we’ve known it, we’ve sung it that way.” But it could also be taken to mean, “Ever since, we’ve known it.” Like, “Ever since I’ve seen or heard, I’ve just had this knowing.”

That lack of formality is very present in these recordings. They’re not manicured in the way that a lot of modern reissues are. People are attracted to authenticity, but when they're confronted with something kind of messy, it shatters their sense of disbelief because it doesn’t really cater to the modern ear.

There are so many recordings of ballads that are peaceful and fine to the ear, but this doesn’t need to be one of them. That’s already happening. I’m friends with Sheila Kay Adams, and I love her very much. On some of her recent recordings, you can tell that she’s in a recording studio, they’ve got reverb on her to some degree to make it sound beautiful, and it does sound beautiful – a lot of ballad singers do that, because it can be very awkward. Like when you’re riding a train and the power shuts off, and the blower stops, it’s that feeling of realizing, “Oh, there’s no reverb.” 

My point is, we don’t all need to be peaceable to the ear to have beauty, and part of the magic of some of this stuff is that it is so brief and it is so mixed into the clutter, like the “Cumberland Gap” at the end of Last Wisps. You hear Lena and Lloyd’s voices for like, two seconds, and that’s my favorite thing on the compilation because it just hits you out of nowhere and then it’s gone.




How did you wind up in North Carolina in the homes of these people, recording their music?

With Lena’s family, I’d found the recordings and they were aware that the songs had been recorded. But they were very enthusiastic about remembering her. That snowballed into wanting to go meet them. And when I read the words, “Elk Park,” it really activated something for me in a weird way. Being in Elk Park several times as I have now, it’s one of my favorite places on earth. It’s this beautiful small town full of lilies and streams. I’m hoping to move to North Carolina in a few months because I can’t get it out of my head.

That went very well for me, and everyone that I’ve met, they’ve just been magical and welcoming and loving. They consider me family now. So it’s been really unusually warm. I’ve been talking to someone who is the granddaughter of this gentleman who was recorded in the early ‘30s on wax cylinder. She seems really sweet, but I think also, this late in the game, if people know that their ancestors were recorded, they’re excited by the fact that someone’s found these recordings and wants to celebrate them. I think that gets you over any amount of trepidation that would be present.

It’s funny to me to be doing this work and have people say, “No one does this kind of thing with folk music. what you’re doing is pretty new and unusual,” because it’s folk music, it’s always been around – by nomenclature, it feels like tradition. A lot of people think that this kind of field recording can’t be done anymore because there aren’t enough people that remember, and I kind of want to fly in the face of that.

I guess what I’m fixated on are these literal last wisps of someone remembering someone who they can recall through an oral tradition.

The word “folk” by default implies some sort of tradition, which means, “Okay, does this have to be some elderly woman who was born 150 years ago for it to be a legitimate recording of a legitimate song?” There are plenty of young people who are making and singing and playing very authentic renditions of folk music in a lot of these places. 

Ultimately the goal is to give someone something that is so beautiful that they might want to interpret it, you know, show someone a recording made years ago that they would want to keep alive today, not just the recordings themselves, but what people can do with it.

That being said, what I’m interested in are these old ladies with this memory of their fathers singing – whether he was, you know, mowing the yard, or working, or whatever he was doing – and he would always sing that one song. For instance, this woman that I’ve been speaking to whose grandfather was on the cylinder recording – his name was Adam Morris, her name is Lorna Morris Cyr (you can look her up online, she does these amazing psychedelic paintings with aliens and stuff in them) – she’s 78. She can remember Adam bouncing her on his knee when she was a child and he would sing to her. She still sings to her grandkids. She’s not a musician but there are people all over America who had grandfathers that sang, and they can still recall those songs.

I guess what I’m fixated on are these literal last wisps of someone remembering someone who they can recall through an oral tradition. In England, I spent an afternoon on a small farm in West Yorkshire with Will Noble, a well-known English folk singer. He used to go to hunting clubs, and that’s where all the men would gather and they’d sing things like “Derwentwater’s Farewell” – these long, beautiful, 11-stanza things with tricky harmonies on top. I asked, “Do you remember anything from before the hunting clubs? Before you decided to become a singer?” And he had two verses, mostly, “La-la-la-la… (muttering) and it’s all for the pricketty bush…,” and I said, “Oh, that’s the child ballad ‘Hangman!’” It meant more to me than the complicated poems and tricky harmonies, because he just remembered that through oral tradition. He said, “When I was two or three, my uncle sat me on the tractor and sang that while he was plowing the fields.” That was so interesting and cool. He certainly learned authentic songs when he was in hunting clubs, by gentlemen that probably got them sung to them by their fathers. But the fact that he could remember his uncle singing, that was the golden nugget of the day.

These two compilations do have a certain lived-in quality. It doesn't feel like Lena’s singing for a microphone. It sounds like she's singing for herself, like you could be working or sitting, enjoying an afternoon alongside her, just listening.

I think Lena was a very relaxed singer. When Dr. Halpert visited, they may not have owned a radio yet – it was 1939. Most families down there probably didn’t have a radio. I know a woman from Tennessee who said that she didn’t own her first electrical appliance until the 1970s. A heater, maybe? Their father would warm a quilt on the fire.

What I’m getting at here is part of the reason Lena sang the way she did is because she’d never heard anyone sing any way differently. She hadn’t heard Bing Crosby. I would be very surprised if she’d heard pretty much anything that was a performance, aside from going to a county fair. There’s only one mention of electricity in any of the songs she sang, which is in this song called “Jim Blake”: “‘Your wife is dying,’ came over the wires today.” All the other songs are so old that they predate electricity, and they’re about sailors and lords and farmers. So I think that she was very much existing in this space where there was nothing but your voice to pass the time and there were no performances. There’s your radio right there.




We could open a bottle of wine and talk for hours about how detrimental radio and modern media has been to voices like Lena’s. You eventually had the crooners and the Elvises, who could get really close to the mic and sing softly. Not only did it change the way people emulated singing, but it changed the subconscious association people made with singing. Everyone just stopped singing as forcefully, because they didn’t have to.

It's a complicated blessing for us that she could have one foot in both realities.

It was kind of a perfect storm. I heard an interview with Herbert Halpert that echoed this sentiment. He was explaining that these men down South in black felt hats with guitars were dying to have him record. They knew that he was coming and they just wanted to impress him and be in front of the microphone for the first time ever. He would obviously quiz his informants before he set about recording them, and if they said they knew things that seemed more modern, he simply wouldn’t take them. He wanted to capture these musical memories rather than whatever was on the radio last week. He was sort of chasing time – the same thing I’m chasing almost 100 years later.


For further listening, we highly recommend checking out Death Is Not The End on NTS radio.

Related Articles

Sort By
12th Isle
2 Tone
2020
2022
2023
33rpm
45rpm
4AD
5 Selects
7"
99 Records
A&M
Abbey Lincoln
Aboriginal
Abstract
Ace Tone
Acid
Acid Archives
Acid Folk
Acid House
Acid Punk
Acid rock
Acoustic
Adrian Sherwood
Africa
African
Afro
Afro-Cuban
Afrobeat
Alan Ginsberg
Alan Greenberg
Alan Thicke
Albert Ayler
Album Cover
Alex Patterson
Alice Coltrane
All Genre
Altec
Amaro Freitas
Amazon Music
Ambient
Ambient Jazz
ambient techno
American Primitive
Amoeba Music
Amplifier
Analog
Anatolian Rock
Andrew Weatherall
Andy Warhol
Anenon
Animal
Animation
Anna Butterss
AOR
Aphex Twin
Aquarium Drunkard
Archie Shepp
Archival
Armenia
Art
Art & Design
Art Dudley
Art Film
Art Pop
Art Rock
Artform Radio
Arthur Russell
Article
Arvo Part
Ash Ra Temple
Asian Underground
Audiogon
Audiophile
Audiovisual
Austin Peralta
Australia
Autechre
avant
Avant-Garde
Avant-pop
Avant-Rock
Avent-Garde
Balearic
Bali
Ballad
Bargain Bin
Baroque
Baroque Pop
Basquiat
Bass
Bauhaus
Bayou Funk
BBC
BBC Radiophonic
Beat Scene
Beats
Beats in Space
Bebop
Belgium
Bennie Maupin
Berlin-school
Best of 2020
Beverly Glenn​-​Copeland
Bhutan Stamps
Big Band
Bill Laswell
Black Ark Studios
Black Jazz
Blaxsploitation
Blue Note
Blues
Blues Rock
Bob Marley
Bola Sete
Bollywood
Boogie
Book
books
Boredoms
Bossa
Bossa Nova
Brainfeeder
Brazil
Brazilian Folk
Breakbeat
Breezy
Brian Eno
Bruce Weber
Bruton Music
Buddhism
Budget Audiophiler
Cabaret
Calypso
Cambridge Audio
CAN
Candombe
Cannanes
Canterbury
Cape Jazz
Cape Verde
Caribbean
Carla Bley
Cartridges
Casio
Cassette
Cats
CD
Celluloid
Chamber Jazz
Chamber Music
Chan Marshall
Channel One Studios
Chanson
Charles Lloyd
Charles Mingus
Chee Shimizu
Chet Baker
Chicago
Chillout
Choral
Christmas
City Pop
Classic Album Sundays
Classical
Classics
Clothing
Club
Cocteau Twins
Coctueau Twins
Coffee
Coldwave
Colorfield
Comedy
Commercial
Community
Compass
Compass Point
Compilation
Concept Album
Condesa Electronics
Conlon Nancarrow
Conny Plank
Contemporary Jazz
Cool Jazz
Cornelius
Cosmic
Cosmic Disco
Cosmic Folk
cosmic jazz
Country
Country Pop
Country-Rock
Covers
Cult Classic
Cumbia
DAC
Dacne
Daft Punk
Dance
Dance Music
Dancehall
Daniel Aged
Dark
Dark Entries
David Behrman
David Bowie
David Byrne
Davida
Dedicated listening session
Deep Dive
Deep House
Deep Listen
Deep Listening
Delia Derbyshire
Demo
Dennis Bovell
Denon
Detroit
Devotional
DFA
Diasporic Disco
Dick Verdult
Diggin in the Mags
Disco
Discogs
DIY
DIY / Amateur
DJ
DJ Shadow
Documentary
Dogs
Don Buchla
Don Cherry
Donald Byrd
Doom Metal
Downtempo
Dowtempo
Dr. John
Dream House
Dream Pop
Dreamy
Drone
Drum Break
Drum Machine
Drum n Bass
Drums
Dual
Dub
Dub Poetry
Dub Techno
dublab
Dubwise
Durutti Column
Düsseldorf School
Dust and Grooves
Eames
Earl King
Early Electronic
East African
Easy Listening
EBM
ECM
ecoustic
ecoustics
Electric Lady
Electro
Electronic
Electronic Jazz
Electronica
Elegant Pop
Elvin Jones
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam
Enossified
Environmental Music
EOY
Eric Dolphy
ESG
Esoteric
ESP Institute
Essential Listen
Essential Listening
Essential Listenning
Ethereal
Ethiopian Jazz
Ethnic
Event
Events
Exotica
Experimental
Factory Records
Faye Wong
Feel Good All Over
Fela Kuti
Festival
Field recording
Films
Fingertracks
Fingetracks
Fishing with John
Fleetwood Sound Company
Floating
Floating Points
Folk
Folk Funk
Folk-Rock
Fonts
Footwork
Fourth World
France
Free Improvisation
Free Jazz
Friends of ISC
Frippertronics
Fundraiser
Funk
Fusion
G-Funk
G.S. Schray
Gal Costa
Gamelan
Garage Rock
Garrard
Gems from the Dollar Bin
George Martin
George Oban
German techno
Gifts
Gilberto Gil
Glam Rock
Glitch
Gogo
Gospel
Grado
Graphic Novel
Grateful Dead
Group Sounds
Growing Bin
Guide
Guitar
Gwo Ka
Gypsy
Habitat Ensemble
Haçienda Club
halloween
Hard Bop
Hard Rock
Harold Budd
Harp
Harry Nilsson
Haruomi Hosono
headphones
Heavy Metal
Henry Lewy
Herbie Hancock
hi-fi
hi-NRG
Hidden Gem
Highlife
Hip Hop
Hip-Hop
Hiroshi Yoshimura
history
Holger Czukay
Holiday
Hollywood
Holy Grail
Home Listening
House
Hypnotic
Iasos
Ibiza
IDM
Illbient
Illustration
Improvisation
Impulse!
In Conversation
In Stock
India
Indian
Indian Classical
Indie
Indie Rock
Industrial
Ingmar Bergman
Installation
Instrumental
International
Interview
ISC Classic
ISC Collection
isc guide
ISC NYC
ISC Record Store
ISC Selects
Island Records
Isolation
Italo Disco
Italo House
Italy
Jackie McLean
Jah Shaka
Jamaica
James Baldwin
Jangle Pop
Japan
Japananese
Japanese
Jazz
jazz funk
jazz kissa
Jazz-funk
Jazz-rock
JBL
John Coltrane
John Fahey
John Martyn
Jon Hassell
Joni Mitchell
Judee Sill
Jungle
K-pop
K. Leimer
Kankyo Ongaku
Keiji Haino
Keith Haring
Keith Jarrett
Kid-Friendly
Kim Yaffa
Kitty Records
Klaus Schulze
Klipsch
Kompakt
Kosmiche
Kosmische
KPM
Kraftwerk
Kranky
Krautrock
Kruatrock
kwaito
L.Shankar
La Monte Young
Labels We Love
Lafawndah
Lagniappe Sessions
Laraaji
Larry Levan
Last Resort
Laswell
Latin
Latin Jazz
Laurel Canyon
Laurie Spiegel
Leaving Records
Lebanese
Lee Scratch Perry
Left-field
Leftfield
Lena Horne
Les Baxter
Lester Bowie
Library
Library Music
Liquid Liquid
Listening
Listening bar
Listening Party
Listening Session
Live Performance
Live Recording
Loose Ends
Loren Mazzacane Connors
Los Angeles
Lost & Sound
lost and sound
Louisiana Blues
Lounge
Lounge Lizards
Love Songs
Lovefingers
Lovely Music Ltd.
Lovers Rock
Luaka Bop
Mad Professor
Magazine
Mandopop
Marantz
Marcel Duchamp
Marcella Cytrynowicz
Marcos Valle
Mark E. Smith
mbaqanga
McCoy Tyner
McIntosh
Meditation
Meditational
Meditative
Melancholic
Mellow
Melody As Truth
Meredith Monk
Metal
Mexico
Miami
Michael Franks
Microhouse
Mid-Century
Miles Davis
Milford Graves
Mills College
Minako Yoshida
Minimal
Minimal Techno
Minimal Wave
Minneapolis Sound
Mixes
Mixtape
Mizell Brothers
mo wax
Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs
Modal
Modern Classical
Modern Soul
Modular Synthesis
Moki Cherry
Mono
Mort Garson
Motown
MPB
MTV
Munich
Music Blog
Music from Memory
Music Interior
Music Therapy
Music Video
Musique Concrète
Mwandishi
Narrative
Neneh Cherry
Neo Soul
Neptunes
New Age
New Islands
New Jack Swing
New Music
New Orleans
New Wave
New York
News
Nico
Nightmares on Wax
Nina Simone
No Wave
Noise
Non-Profit
Northern Soul
Now Sound
NTS
Nubian Pop
Nubian Soul
Numero Group
NYC
OBI
Obscure
Obscure Sound
Occult
On Screen
On-U Sound
online radio
Opera
Organ
Organic
Organic Music
Ornette Coleman
Ortofon
Oswalds Mill Audio
Outsider Pop
Overtone Singing
Painting
Painting with John
Pandit Pran Nath
Paradise Garage
Pastoral
Patrick Cowley
Paul Horn
Paul McCartney
Pauline Oliveros
PBS
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
Pensive
Percussion
Pharoah Sanders
Phillip Glass
Philly Soul
Piano
Pioneer
Plantasia
Plants
Player Piano
playlist
Playlists
Plinth
Podcast
Poetry
Political
Polygonia
Pop
Pop Art
Pop not Slop
Pop Rock
Popp
Popul Vuh
Post Bop
Post Rock
Post-Punk
Post-Rock
Power Pop
Premiere
Prince
Private Press
Pro-Ject
Producer
Productions
Professor Longhair
Prog Rock
Progressive
Progressive Rock
Prophet-5
Proto-techno
Psych-folk
Psychedelic
Psychedelic Rock
Psychic Hotline
Psyhedelic
Punk
Qobuz
Quadraphonic
QUARK
Quiet Storm
R&B
Radio
Raga
Rare Groove
rca victor
Receivers
Record Fair
Record Label
Record Store
Record Stores
Record Stories
Reggae
Reggaeton
Reissue
Reissues
Releases
Religious
Remix
Retrospective
Rock
Rocksteady
Roland
Roland Kirk
Roller Skate
Room Recordings
Room Treatment
Roots Reggae
Rotary Mixers
Rough Trade
Rudy Van Gelder
Russia
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Ryuichi Sakmoto
Sacred
Sade
Sam Gendel
Samba
Sample
Samples
San Francisco
Saxophone
Sci-fi
Séance Centre
Seefeel
Sensual
Shamisen
share
Shibuya-kei
Shoegaze
Silver Apples
Simeon Coxe
Singer-Songwriter
Sisters with Transistors
Ska
Sly & Robbie
Smooth Jazz
Soft Rock
Solid State
Songwriting
Sonia Pottinger
Sonny Sharrock
Soul
Soul-jazz
Sound Art
Sound Collage
Sound Installation
Soundsystems
Soundtrack
South Africa
South African
South America
Southern Soul
Space Rock
Spain
Speaker
speakers
Spiritual
Spiritual Jazz
Spoken Word
Squama Records
Staff Picks
Steely Dan
Stereolab
Stereophile
Steven Halpern
Stevie Wonder
Stoner Rock
stores we love
Stories
Streaming
Street Soul
Studio One
Substack
Sun Ra
Sunn O)))
Supergroup
Surround Sound
Susumu Yokota
Suzanne Cianni
Suzanne Kraft
Suzanne Langille
Swamp Rock
SYNG
Synth
Synth Pop
Synth-pop
Synthesizer
Synthwave
Taarab
Tadanori Yokoo
Takoma Records
Tangerine Dream
Tape
Tapes
TD-160
Technics
Techno
Techno Pop
Tel Aviv
Television
Terry Callier
Terry Riley
The Beatles
The Broad
The Fall
The Loft
The Meters
The Mizell Brothers
The Music Center
The Orb
The World Stage
Theater
Thelonious Monk
Third Side Music
Third Stream
This Mortal Coil
Thomas Fehlman
Thorens
Tim Sweeney
Time Capsule
Too Pure Records
Total Luxury Spa
Traditional
Tribal
Trip-hop
Tropical
Tropicalia
Tuareg
Tube
Turntable
Turntable Lab
TV
UK
UK Jazz
Ultramarine
Underground Resistance
Underrated
Val Wilmer
Vandersteen
Vanity Fair
Velvet Underground
Vice
Video
Video Art
Vince Guaraldi
Vintage
Vintage Audio
Vintage Gear
vinyl
Virginia Astley
Visible Cloaks
Visual Art
Vocal
Vocal Jazz
Vocoder
Wackies
Wah Wah Watson
Walearic
Wally Badarou
Warp
Water
Website
Werner Herzog
West Africa
West African
Western Acoustics
Windham Hill
wiring
World
Wrecking Crew
Yacht Rock
Yamaha
Yann Tomita
Yasuaki Shimizu
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Yma Sumac
YouTube
Yukihiro Takahashi
Zamrock
Zither