about the project

Hopefully, this is a collection of songs and ballads you may not have heard. There's an awful lot here: hours of audio, video, photos, a biography of Sheila, a short film, scans of Sheila's handwritten ballads and a short writing on my time with Sheila and what we mean to each other. I'm extremely thankful to Berea College for funding this effort and making it an academic opportunity, and for being a home to me always. I also owe many thanks to my expert project advisors, Prof. Joshua Guthman and Harry Rice. I hope you enjoy looking through the collection and I hope the songs strike something in you that you've been looking for. I hope you will learn as much of this music as you can.  Here's my summer, and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed living it beside my friend Sheila.

-Sam Gleaves,
 February '12

                                                                                                              Photo - R.L. Geyer

knee to knee with sheila kay adams:
a student's reflection

Never in my life did I think that I would get to spend so much precious time with the voice that rang out for me above all the others, the voice that helped me find my own. When I met Sheila Kay Adams as a shaky-kneed teenager, I was immediately mystified by everything about her - from her seemingly endless well of songs and stories to her long, mountain woman hair that ran down her back. I was opening for her and a few other acts at a small storytelling festival in my hometown when my mentor Jim Lloyd pointed to a car rolling up the path, burning into the asphalt driveway with a vengeance. "That's the one you need to go see," he said, "the ballad singer." So, as I made my rounds throughout the day, I made it a point to be at her performances, and finally gathered up the courage to sheepishly ask if I could carry her banjo up the hill to the green room. "Well, aren't you sweet," she said, beaming. In the late summer heat, she was glad to hand off her instrument and we walked up the hill together. I asked her about learning to sing, told her about her relatives that I'd loved to listen to through the field recordings and she smiled thoughtfully throughout. "I hope I'm not bothering you," I said with my eyes lowered. She looked my way and said, "Honey, not at all. If you were bothering me, I'd let you know about it." We heard each other laugh for the first time then.

We walked into the green room and she nursed her bottle of sparkling water as we talked, eventually taking the banjo on her knee. I can still name each and every tune she played for me and the stories she told about learning them, Fred Cockerham's "Ducks on the Millpond," Tommy Jarrell's "Tempie," Obray Ramsay's "Little Margaret," and more. When I asked her if she had a particular favorite love song, she said, "No question. It's this one here." She raked her hand across the G chord and played for me one of the most spellbinding, sweet tunes I have heard before or since, Dwight Diller's "Dinah." She sang the verses she had written to the song, because it was so dear to her. Snowing, it's snowing, the world is turnin' white. The sun lights up the daytime, save Dinah for the night. I had been playing the banjo for no more than a week or two, but when I confessed to "fooling around on it a little," she didn't wait one second to pass it my way. I played the only tune I could play and sing at the same time, "Darlin' Corey," and she harmonized lightly behind each verse. She cleared her throat, "Doesn't sound much like three weeks to me," she said with a wink. To my surprise, that day when I waved goodbye to Sheila from across the crowd, she hollered, "Come over here and get you a hug! You ain't allowed to leave without a hug!" When I ran to her, she drew me in and whispered, "You've got it, honey. Just keep at it."

That's what I have been trying to do ever since. I decided that part of “keeping at it” would mean studying all the records I could find of the singing of Sheila's family, and records of all manners of other ballad singers. At times, I learned three or four in a week, carrying them with me wherever I'd go, humming them while walking to my music store job downtown or singing them out full and loud against the ocean on family vacation. There was something about those songs that stitched me together inside, mending up the adolescent yanks and pulls in my chest. Sheila was in touch with me online immediately after we met and always encouraged me to continue singing and to come on down to her house sometime. As soon as I got a car, I did just that and our friendship has done nothing but grow ever since. This past summer, I applied for a grant from Berea College to create a course for myself that would allow me to travel over the summer and make an extensive collection of field recordings of my two mentors, Jim Lloyd and Sheila Kay Adams. After a sea of paperwork and administrative headaches, I received my funding and took off for Sheila's house, ready to ask her the hard questions and pull back songs she hadn't heard in fifty years or more.

So, here you have a summer’s worth of stories and ballads that I’ve taken down, in hopes that they’ll be heard in days to come.  The focus of my work this summer was to try and learn the vast recesses of obscure material that both my mentors know, the songs that might slip away if no one cares for them. Part of that meant learning to use the electronics and recording and cataloging the songs properly, but mostly, it was an inward journey. I had to learn these songs as well, as that was the only sure way that told me they would live on. Who says folklore can't be personal? So I did just that, and I wouldn't give up for the world what I learned this summer, the closeness I knew with Sheila, all the late nights spent talking about whatever came up, the cups of Denny's coffee after a gig, the gleam in her eye when she knew I had learned what she had offered up to me.

I think the summer's defining moment with Sheila came up during one of our many hours spent together riding in the car, her burning up the road like a wild woman. She sighed and paused conversation, looking over at me briefly, but wistfully. "You know, you're gonna be the one to learn these songs. Ever' one of 'em. And you realize, if I don't get finished, you'll have to teach them to Ezra when I'm gone." Ezra is Sheila's young grandson, the little towheaded, blue eyed darling that runs up to me and grabs my leg, calling me "Uncle Sam."

"I will," I say, hoping she doesn't catch the tear making its way down my cheek.

-Sam Gleaves
 February ‘12