Hollywood’s uneducated and feuding mountaineers couldn’t have been a fair picture of this area in the 1930s, even if it was close to the truth in the era Fox wrote about - the 1880-1900 coal boom years in Southwestern Virginia. It starred Sylvia Sydney, Fred MacMurray and Henry Fonda, and the dialogue of “we-uns” and “furriners” and “green-up” (for springtime) got old in a hurry. novel that inspired it for feeding outsiders’ unflattering preconceptions of Appalachian mountain folks.Īfter I read her novel, interested in her critique of 1930s journalists, I bought myself a copy of the movie on DVD. McCrumb’s characters blame the movie and the 1908 John Fox Jr. My first encounter with the movie wasn’t this film course, it was in Sharyn McCrumb’s novel, “The Devil Amongst the Lawyers,” set around the time the 1936 film came out. But “Blue Ridge” has two syllables and “Cumberland” three, and the song gets to say “…like the mountains, I’m blue.”) (More recently, the lyric set me to questioning whether the area mentioned in the book is rightfully called part of the “Blue Ridge,” which I associate with the ridgeline of the Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of hundred miles east. (Media students: Look him up!) And more recently, I heard the tune at Ralph Sweet’s New England square dances in the 1980s, particularly a “singing square” that used the original song’s refrain and encouraged the dancers to sing along on the line “In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on the trail of the lonesome pine.” If singing while dancing doesn’t stick a tune in your head, nothing will. I remember Arthur Godfrey singing snatches of the catchy tune on his TV and radio shows in the 1950s. I’d first heard the title “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine” as the refrain of an old song. “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (1936), the first big outdoor three-strip Technicolor film, played an important part in Scott Higgins “The Language of Hollywood” online “MOOC” course I’ve been taking, and is discussed thoroughly for its “restrained” approach to color in his book, “ Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow.” (Fox’s novel, a not-quite-western frontier romance, with men on horseback and a battle to establish law and order, had inspired earlier silent films, but I still haven’t seen them.) Here’s Tony’s site, and here’s one for Ralph Sweet, whom I first heard call this dance in the 1970s.) ( Watch the dance or watch the caller Tony Parkes and musicians. The 1937 recording by Laurel & Hardy from their film “Way Out West.” (In the video clip, the very low and very high voices on the last verse both appear to come from Stan Laurel, under the influence of liquor and a knock on the head, respectively)Ī search of YouTube will find many more singers and dancers on The Trail, from the Laurel and Hardy scene to a player piano roll, Rex Allen (with and without Brenda Lee), British ukulele strummers and New England square dance musicians. ![]() Laurel and Hardy managed four voices between the two of them, with the help of a bung starter. ![]() The original song is more a product of the barbershop quartet era of sentimental melodies and harmonizing. ![]() Harrison (Frederick J Wheeler) at Internet Archive. (This page may be a bit of a jumble, with some duplication because of pieces cut and pasted from my movie course discussion site I’ll try to come back and clean it up some day.)ġ913 recording Edna Brown (Elsie Baker) & James F. My film course (a non-credit MOOC) has led me to an interesting popular-culture chain of media, starting with a 1908 novel, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and wending its way to a 1913 pop song, an outdoor drama still performed each summer in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and a singing square dance still done in New England, all available on the Web, especially in the Internet Archive and on YouTube, with separate Wikipedia pages for the novel, song, and film.īecause of the coincidence of the 1913 song’s centennial, here are some links and connections, mostly a celebration of the Internet’s varied ways of archiving media - and giving me ways to distract myself.
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