Ann Whitley-Singleton

Interview Highlights

How did you first start learning music? 

My family valued music very much. My mother played the piano and she sang in the church pew, but never sang in the choir—she had a lovely alto voice, always sang the alto part. And so when I was a little, little girl, I started singing as soon as I probably talked, and always wanted to sing, and sang with my mom. So when I was eight years old, [my parents] sent me to piano lessons around the corner from my house, a neighbor who taught them, and got us a piano for our home. And then when I was ten, our public school system—High Point, North Carolina is where I grew up—offered orchestra lessons, violin and probably some other stringed instruments, beginning in the fifth grade. So I took violin in the High Point school system, all the way up through graduating from high school. I made it to second chair, first violin, in my high school orchestra and I made it to first chair, second violin, in the All-State orchestra—which I always thought meant, I wasn’t that great, but then somebody told me, “You wouldn’t have made first chair in your section had you not been pretty good.”, so that, in my older years, boosted the image of myself as a violinist.

Not only did I do those things, but back in those days, South Pacific and The King and I and My Fair Lady and Oklahoma—all the great musicals came out, and Mom and Dad would get me all the records. To entertain myself, because my brother was five years older—he was also quite musical!—and he didn’t want much to do with me, so I sang and sang and danced and danced in my room by myself. I knew every part and every word in every musical there was in those days! So it was always very important to me. And then, when my brother got to be in early college, or maybe it was even late high school, when we were both old enough to get along, he learned guitar and I would pick up my violin and play little things with our songs. That was the sixties, so it was The Kingston Trio and those folk legends from that day and we sang those songs together. And I learned harmony singing from my mom singing alto in the church pew, so it just kind of all came together. That was my early musical experience.   

When did you start playing fiddle music?

I didn’t really pick up my violin much at all after high school. There was no orchestra in college—I took it with me, and occasionally I would meet other students who would say, “Oh yeah, I play the cello or” and we’d find music and try to play together, but it was never anything big, so I just put the violin away. When I was probably in my early thirties, I took it to Quaker Meeting—I was raised Quaker in Guilford County, North Carolina—oh, but I forgot about the transition to Atlanta! I moved to Atlanta in 1974 to go to graduate school at Emory, so my community was the Atlanta [Quaker] Friends Meeting. So I took my violin occasionally to Friends Meeting because we’d have singalongs and I thought, “This might be fun to see what I could do off-page with violin”. There was a woman there—her name is Judy Lumb—and she was the musician for the Garland dance team, the Old English women’s dancing team with the hoops and the flowers on the hoops, and they played traditional English dance tunes. A lot of them were also contra dance tunes. So I started playing for those women, because of Judy, and they were all contra dancers in Atlanta. “You’ve gotta come to the dances! Come to the dances!” they’d tell me. Oh, and I forgot to mention that in elementary school and in junior high school, my most favorite phys-ed activity was square dancing. All the other kids were like, “Nooo!”, and I was like, “Yes!!! Let’s square dance!”. 

So I started going to the dances in Atlanta, which were at the First Existentialist Church in Candler Park. And all the bands back then played old-time music. In my memory, they did. Primarily, the Peavine Creek String Band did, which John Grimm was a member of. I started dancing and listening to Peavine Creek as I danced, which was my favorite dance band, and I was just so tickled by it. I had loved bluegrass music all through college and beyond—I never, ever wanted to pick up the violin and play bluegrass music with it. But when I heard Peavine Creek, it was John Grimm, Albert Smith, and Lewis Wills who were the fiddlers. Three fiddlers! They were all very different, but it worked. So when I heard that, I thought, “I wanna do that!”. Friends began to ask me to come to jams, and, oh, to get that bow to sound like an old-time fiddle—that was the hard part. I never called it the dark side [laughs], but it was so hard, sometimes I would just cry. Because I had to drop the vibrato in the left-hand, and stop the long bow in the right hand, and make the bow dance in that way—because that’s what has to happen, your bow has to dance. 

I had a buddy, Trent van Blaricom, who was a very good old-time fiddler. And he would help me, help me, help me. And I would cry sometimes, but I started to make progress. I went to Augusta [Heritage Center]—actually with Trent—in Elkins, West Virginia, for Cajun Week and Bluegrass Week, but Pete Sutherland taught an old-time fiddle group class that week. And I came home, just with leaps and bounds of progress in tunes. Then Trent moved away, and I no longer had my buddy teacher, so I asked Lewis, John, and Albert if I could start coming to Peavine practices and sit in the back of the living room and just learn tunes. And they said, sure! That was in the fall of ‘88, and John was transitioning his way up to Dahlonega then. And it wasn’t long after that, did he make the leap to Dahlonega and—as all of us who moved to Dahlonega from Atlanta, we find the road gets longer and longer from Dahlonega to Atlanta—so he said he couldn’t come to practices anymore. Lewis and Albert invited me to sit basically—I couldn’t take John’s chair [laughs]—but to sit in the third seat of Peavine Creek, and that really helped. 

I also forgot to tell you that I did go to John Grimm’s home in Atlanta when he lived in Grant Park. His kids were little, little. And I learned a few tunes from him in his home. I was so eager for anybody and everybody who could teach me something. So John—what was that first tune he taught me…West Fort Gals! Was the first tune he taught me. 

And then I just kept going to music camps, I went to the first Clifftop in 1990—I kept going to Clifftop, I kept going to Augusta, and then I learned of the Swannanoa Gathering, which was closer and easier to get to, so I started going there, and the rest is history I guess! 

How do music camps fit into the ways that people have been learning and sharing music like this?

That’s a great question. My first Augusta was ‘88. I went back to it three more times after that. I know a mess of us piled into a van John Kelley rented for a Bruce Molsky week of lessons at Augusta. I think Augusta was probably several years old by the time I went in ‘88. I went to the twentieth year of Augusta, I think, but I can’t remember when that was! Swannanoa has probably been going I bet for thirty years at least. I know Mars Hill is approaching thirty years. And the camps—like for instance, my first year in ‘88, as I recall, Bluegrass Week and Cajun Week at Augusta at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia. My buddy Trent took me up there and introduced me to so many people, and he was already a very good cajun fiddler. Tracy Schwarz was there, his son Peter was there, Dirk Powell was there—Dirk, golly, he was very young, he might have been a late teenager or in his early twenties—Christine  Balfa, Dewey Balfa, Canray Fontenot, plus Pete Sutherland, Pete Vigour… so these weeks were extremely influential because I learned a lot about cajun fiddling in the evenings on the Halliehurst porch, and then in the daytime, I would go and learn about old-time fiddling from Pete Sutherland. 

And then at Swannanoa, I always went to Old-Time Week, until I went to Elise Witt’s Sing & Swing week as a volunteer assistant for her, which probably informed my going to Mars Hill, NC as a staff musician at the Blue Ridge Old-time Music Week, at Lewis Wills’ recommendation, and then being invited onto the staff of Mars Hill, administratively, which has been twelve or thirteen years now for me. All these camps, so many of us have been time and time again, if we could afford it. There are always scholarships and volunteer positions too.                

There are other camps too! Of course, John C. Campbell Folk School has been going on all this time, it’s very old [est. 1925]. And the Alabama Folk School sprang up—could it be fifteen years? I’m just guessing. But more and more camps. And of course, now with COVID—oh my goodness, we can sit in our living rooms at our little computers and learn from these people and teach. Online community right now is powerfully good. And I imagine, when we feel safe gathering again—of course, we will!—as soon as we can be back to our festivals and jams and our live camps, I’m still imagining online learning will really take off.   

What was the first Clifftop like?

Well how it happened for me, because I had been to Augusta—probably just once, I might’ve gone back in ‘89, but I’m not sure…you know, it’s so long ago that I don’t remember every year that I did everything!—but because I’d been to Augusta, and of course Clifftop was started by the West Virginia people who had ties to Augusta, they probably got Augusta’s mailing list. We didn’t have email then! So I got this flyer in my mail and—well, I’ll back up a little bit. I don’t think I’d been to Galax yet, but I had been to Mt. Airy. Galax was so much more heavy into bluegrass—there was an old-time community at Galax, but there was also the bluegrass community, which I love bluegrass music, but I never wanted to play it. 

So when I got this flyer, “There’s gonna be this festival in West Virginia: only old-time music, and we want you to come!”, I was like, “They want me to come to West Virginia!!!” [laughs] It was like the golden ticket. You know that tune, too? [Golden Ticket by Eric Merrill]. I had all these friends in Atlanta, and I probably wasn’t going to take off by myself—I was fairly newly married, and my husband at the time had no interest in going to an old-time music festival. He supported what I did, but he didn’t want to do it. So I had this buddy in Atlanta, who still comes up here to jam with us—Dennis Edmiston—Dennis and I had been buddies for a long time. I asked, “Dennis, you wanna go to West Virginia with me?” and he said, “Sure!” So we took our two tents and went up to Clifftop and there were probably four hundred people there. We played tunes, we laughed, we camped—and then it started on a Wednesday and ended on Saturday night, and on Sunday we came home. I had so much fun—I saw a lot of the people that I had met at Augusta in ‘88, so there was already a community of people I knew, and I came home and told everyone I knew in all of the old-time community in Atlanta. And we all just started going and going and going, and that’s how it grew, because we came home from the 1990 gathering and told our buddies, “You’ve got to come!!!” And so now, at Clifftop, there are between four and five thousand people there. It’s just gigantic fun—it’s the best city in the world for one week of the year.   

What was the Atlanta old-time scene like when you lived there?

Most of us lived in town. Some in Decatur, a lot of Lake Claire, Little Five Points, Virginia Highlands, that area. But people would come in too. We started having a jam at Manuel’s Tavern—well before that, there was a great jam going on in the Freight Room in Decatur. Barbara Panter was instrumental in all of that. Whit Connah [Barabara Panter’s husband], Laeta and Don Smith had jams at their house for the Atlanta Area Friends of Folk Music and I started going to those jams early on, but they’d been going on. The contra dance—we called it a country dance then, we didn’t call it a contra dance—the Atlanta Country Dance was already ten years old by the time I started in ‘85/86. ‘86 was the tenth year of the Atlanta Country Dance community. And they started at Garden Hills, dancing to live records, not to live music, but to records. And then, Scott Russell, Tim Cape, Lewis, all these folks started playing for the dances. The beauty of those days was that the dancers and the musicians grew up together. And the musicians—a lot of them were dancers. And they knew that they needed to dance to live music. So the dancers were willing to let these musicians grow up as musicians. Maybe they weren’t so great in the early days—the dancers didn’t care, it wasn’t a record! [laughs] There was an early, early band that I got into because it was a jam, and we called ourselves the “Pinchtones”. Leslie Caldwell, Jan Smith got into it, David Tsao, who no longer plays—he was a great fiddler, Jennifer Sproul. There were so many of us that grew up as musicians through those early jams. I don’t know how many of us there were—I think there were eleven of us in the very first dance I ever played for, at the [First Existentialist Church], in 87. I think there were eleven of us playing at one time. And we got paid, I got seven dollars to put in my pocket. And we went to Manuel’s and drank beer afterwards. [laughs] So we all grew up together. I danced too. If I wasn’t there on a Friday night playing, I was there dancing. It was like going to church—we had to go dance on Friday night.  

How did you communicate about jams and dances?

Back then, we made phone calls, and we wrote letters or made phone calls to invite other bands to play for us. Once a month, or as often as we could afford to, we tried to get a band from out of town. That was always interesting to try to put together a schedule. Early on, I got onto the scheduling committee, and the steering committee, and boy those were fun days—trying to get things scheduled and keep it going. But we did it! Without email or text. We would all bring our paper calendars and we had this huge grid, I think Cis Hinkle devised it—she’s a national caller now, fabulous and dear friend of a lot of us—I think she devised this huge grid that we’d lay out and we didn’t have sticky notes, but we could lay pieces of paper down and I don’t remember how we did it, but try to make a schedule for a few months at a time. It was wild. We had fun doing it in those days, a lot of fun. Usually on a Saturday morning, we’d have a potluck brunch and a steering committee meeting to organize the dances. “I’ll call this guy” We had long distance back then! [laughs] It was different, very different, but it all worked. 

How did you get involved in teaching and administrative aspects of Mars Hill Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week?

That was all because of Lewis and Katie Wills. Lewis was in the Peavine Creek Stringband. Well Lewis and Katie were both media specialists in the schools for their careers. When I was learning music—I was a classroom teacher—it was driving me crazy because my mind was consumed with what I was  going to be teaching the next day in the classroom, getting my lessons ready, and all I wanted to do at night was play music and go to one practice or one jam after another. And they both said to me, “You need to be a media specialist, and then your evenings will be your own.” So I followed their lead on that. 

And they just kept opening doors for me. And one of the doors Lewis and Katie opened for me was Mars Hill, because by then, they had moved to Asheville to find good services for their special needs son. And they had gotten involved in the music scene there and had gotten involved in the Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week as administrators to help Hilary Dirlam. They were the team who checked the rolls every morning and helped with whatever needed help—got equipment, helped with whatever needed to be done during that week for Hilary. And so they recommended to Hilary that she hire me as a staff musician because by then I was playing guitar as well as fiddle. And I think Lewis and Katie saw I had good organizational skills because they knew by then I was a good media specialist, and that’s all about being organized. So they got me to Mars Hill, and I think in the back of Hilary’s mind, she was already wishing for someone to learn her job as director, so she could just teach someday. I’m pretty sure she kinda watched me that week, and I didn’t know I was being watched, I had no idea. 

At Clifftop after that week at Mars Hill, she came to me—I’ll never forget it, we happened to be in the big shower house together at the same time and we were in front of the sinks combing hair or whatever we were doing, and she said, “Ann! I’ve been wanting to ask you something—would you like to be director at Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week someday?” Or she might not have even said “someday”—I don’t remember, but I was like, “Whaat?!” [laughs] And so she just talked with me a little about wanting to back down a little bit—I said I can do that Hilary, someday, but right now, I couldn’t do anything during the school year to help you organize. She said, “That’s okay, you’ll just show up in June and help with everything and learn how it works and take over holding the clipboard and making it happen and I’ll be so thrilled.” So I said, I guess I could do that. So I showed up in June and helped out and pretty soon, she said I really want to step back and we asked Amy Buckingham to step in and help me, so, I think that was probably 2006 or 2007 as starting to be one of the directors of Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week. 

Was that at about the same time that you were planning on moving up to Dahlonega?

As a matter of fact, it was getting there, because we probably got Glenda Pender’s letter—we being Doug and me—asking us for money to help get Pick & Bow off the ground. We probably got that letter in 2006, because the first sessions were in 2007. And when I got that letter, it was very much like the flyer that I received to come to Clifftop—it was not necessarily a golden ticket, but it was in a way, because we had already started coming to Dahlonega from time to time for Strings and Things and for the Medicine Show, and “Oh my goodness, they’re gonna be teaching kids to be playing this music? I wanna do that!!” I was already having little group fiddle classes in my house in Decatur then. And the wheels started spinning, and we bought this house that we’re sitting in right now in July of 2007, and in February of 2009, we moved lock, stock, and barrell into this house. And in those interim months, I started coming up after school for Pick & Bow board meetings. And when I could, I would try to get to Pick & Bow at the middle school, just to check it out, and then started helping with jams. They didn’t need a fiddle teacher, because John Grimm was doing that very well, but I just wanted to get my hand in it. So it was all coincidental. 

Why are you drawn to teaching traditional Appalachian music? What are the things that drive you when you teach?

Well, I will say that when we first started going to Clifftop—so I was forty, when I went to Clifftop in 1990—and I remember all of us. We had children, not everybody of course was lucky to do that, but most of us, we didn’t see a lot of young people playing this music in those days, we just didn’t. Because we kind of started learning it because of the revival that started happening in the 60s,70s,and 80s of old-time music. And now we were playing it and we were getting better and better at it. And we thought “this can’t die, we can’t let this die” So we were like, we got to get young people playing this music. And that was it, that was why. In those days, you had to learn it from human beings, who learned it from their elders, who had learned it from their elders, all the way back to Ireland, England, Scotland—wherever. So we knew we had to get it transmitted to the young crowd. And Sarah, you’re one of those now. I just had my seventieth birthday, and I’m so grateful for what we have. I’m so grateful when I go to Clifftop, there are young people your age, a little older, a little younger, playing the pants off of us old farts! [laughs] It just fills me with joy that you all are surpassing us, and your generation is now teaching—you are a teacher, teaching now too. So I don’t have to worry about a thing!