Janice Birchfield, Roan Mountain
On September 7, 2019 Bradley Hanson and Evangeline Mee recorded Janice Birchfield at the Annual Mountaineer Folk Festival in Fall Creek Falls State Park. Janice is a founding member of the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers, an old-time string band formed in 1974. The original band featured the fiddle and banjo playing of brothers Joe and Creed Birchfield and the washboard percussion of Joe’s wife Ethel. Their son Bill played guitar and his wife Janice played the washtub bass. The Hilltoppers have shared the repertoire and culture of a rural Appalachian musical style that predates radio and the phonograph. Followers have described their music as “mesmerizing, raw, rapid-fire, and trance-inducing.” Musicians from around the world have taken up the Hilltopper’s tunes and sought the band members out as musical masters. As the last surviving original band member, Janice is one of the very few remaining links to pre-commercial Tennessee mountain music.
We sat down with Janice before her afternoon set at the festival. Amidst the bustling festival soundscape of wood chopping, ax throwing, bluegrass jams, and the clinking of a distant blacksmith forge, Janice reflected on nearly 50 years of memories with the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers. She talks about her early life, spanning tales from homemade instruments to hosting musicians from all over the world in her home.
For more information on Janice, visit the biography and video created in honor of her 2019 Tennessee Governor’s Arts Award. The following is an interview transcription.
Janice Birchfield —
“I’m from Roan Mountain, Tennessee. Carter County, up toward High Country toward the North Carolina line. My grandparents played old-time music on my dad’s side. The other side of my family was more religious, brought up in the Holiness churches. At one point, my grandmother on my mom’s side wouldn’t let anyone dance in the house.
I grew up with grandparents most of my life. My dad had to go away to earn a living, and he and my mom lived in Maryland for years on the Chesapeake Bay. My dad played. He knew J. E. Mainer and the Mountaineers, so when they would tour there he would sit in and play with them. He could sing anywhere from baritone to tenor, and he and my mom would sing a lot together. He even built his own guitar at one time. He played some on the old Barrel of Fun radio shows that was broadcast from Elizabethton, Tennessee, at the Bonnie Kate theater.
Bill was four years older than me. I had gone to Washington to go to school there at Marblemount, Washington. When I returned back to East Tennessee to graduate, that’s when I met Bill, and I was sixteen years old at the time. We dated on and off for about five years, and in the meantime, I went away to Marion, Virginia, after high school to go to school there. I acquired a medical secretary degree. My on the job training was at Pulaski General Hospital.
I didn’t know that Bill was as good a guitar picker as he was until my son was three months old. I knew that Joe, his dad was a good fiddler because, when my grandfather would hire him to come help butcher hogs in the neighboring hollow, my dad when he was small would tug on my grandmother’s skirt and say, ‘Get Joe Birchfield to play that Cacklin’ Hen!’ I always knew the Birchfield family could play. They were very talented people, multi-talented—even the grandmothers in that family.
My family knew them. They would come near my grandmother’s home, and they would hear the hear the Birchfields come visit the homes in that community and play. They could hear the banjos and the fiddles and all that. And at that point and time, you’re usually hearing fiddles and banjos. They told me the first guitar that they ever remember seeing was in the early ‘30s. They even remember the African American man who owned that guitar. Because when they would finish their work in timber jobs and go have dances in people’s homes, they would walk for miles—maybe over into North Carolina, maybe down in the Smokies—and they would play all night.”
Janice explains the story of the formation of the band and how they got their name.
“Well every time we would go pick Bill’s dad up, we would ask where he was, and they would say he’s on top of the hill. So that’s where I decided to call us the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers. At one point and time they were playing with the Finley Brewer family, and they were known as the Roan Mountain Apple Knockers, and Bill never cared much for that name. We started touring and playing out in ’76 as the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers. Joe Birchfield was the main man; he was fiddler. But he also played guitar and banjo; played great two finger, double-picking banjo. Creed his brother was a fiddler, and Joe said ‘I became fiddler because I was much better on fiddle than he was,’ so Creed started playing banjo. We started as a family unit. When we started competing at the first fiddlers conventions, it drew a lot of attention because we are all a family unit. And I used to laugh and think, ‘Well, there’s two elderly guys…a picture’s worth a thousand words.’ Real elderly people with a lot of character in their faces. I would tell stories about them and some people would think that I was on stage telling jokes. I’m not really a joke teller. Everything I was telling about their family was true. And some of it was very laughable. There were some great stories about the Birchfields. And a few X-rated ones that I couldn’t tell on stage. So we’d have people like Southern Living show up, NBC, CBS. All these people doing interviews. And it spread from there. Then we started receiving bookings from everywhere.”
Janice describes her playing style and how the members of the band learned music from listening to their family members play.
“[Music] passed down through their family. Their dad made fiddles. Joe’s first fiddle was a wooden cigar box. And he had seen people also learn to play on cornstalk fiddles. They learned to make their own banjos. There’s a lot of tomcats got missing in that community. A lot of tomcats were used as heads of banjos. They tanned their hide out—groundhogs, calf hides.
In a way I think Joe Birchfield was a very, very wise man. Because you know your children very well. Bill was ambidextrous. Joe told him, said, ‘Bill there’s nothing I can show you. You’re left handed; I’m right handed.’ So he laid the guitar down in his lap and he was determined to prove his dad wrong. To Bill that was an enormous amount of time. It took him a year to pick up that guitar. [Ethel] would sing and hum the tunes, and he learned to play the guitar from listening to his mom.
I like rhythm. When I first started walking onstage with them at Union Grove, North Carolina—the big one, the old one—I was playing a tambourine then. And the first year we competed there, we got best entertainers. And I decided instead of a doghouse bass, an upright bass, I preferred to have a homemade instrument. Just as the mountain people had used homemade instruments for years. So we decided to put together a washtub bass. I had heard about them. People tend to forget Red Skelton had one. Red Fox also played one. I met a minister who said he had played a washtub bass in the church for fifteen years.
I like a stick that’s moveable. And when I’m playing higher on the strings, I’ve had sound men with their headphones on, and when they hear this bass, their headphones will fly off and they will say, ‘Janice! Hit that again!’ I’ve been told from different sound crews that this washtub bass will go lower decibel than their store-bought instruments.
We were playing locally at Slagle’s Pasture for a while and first started playing in the old tire shop he had. Then Fin Brewer talked Bill and Joe into going to the fiddler’s convention in Sugar Grove, North Carolina, and they placed first. The ball started rolling from there. They would play for dances locally. Church socials, ice cream suppers, go to people’s homes and play, sit on someone’s back porch and play. Bean stringings, corn shuckings, apple peelings, apple butter making, molasses making—they would have musicians come and play. And other people would join in. And then maybe after the work is done, they would have a dance.
I used to use a cotton clothesline on my washtub bass. And after long concerts, I’d wear them in two. So I went to a string that had nylon in it. We were doing mountain dance tunes. At that point in time you had so many of the younger generations learning and doing research, learning the tunes. Learning how to dance. People were not so interested then in hearing the lyrics. But the old mountain tunes, the traditional tunes, all have lyrics, great lyrics. We were pretty much put in the groove of being an old-time traditional dance band. A lot of times we were booked to do square dances, barn dances, play for clogging groups or flatfooting groups. We played for Green Grass Cloggers, Patrick Henry Cloggers. When you entered that fiddle contest in Galax, people didn’t think an old time band should sing. Creed and Joe, they liked to dance when they were young men. They liked “Walking in the Parlor”, “Old Joe Clark”, “Ragtime Annie,” “Lost Indian,” “Shortening Bread,” “Boil them Cabbage Down”—all those good old dance tunes.
We’ve been described as ragged but right. Dr. Charles Wolfe used to describe us to the country music people down there; he would say, ‘They’re doing hard rock old time music. They’re rocking.’ We had high energy, high rhythm. We tried to never go above what was good flat footing rhythm, because if you get too fast, the dancers can’t fit their steps in. And our rhythm is different than bluegrass rhythm.
Mike Seeger came down to Sugar Grove and did a dancing feet documentary, and it’s still being sold. We also did Chase the Devil. We were attributed with doing devil’s music and snake handling churches were doing religious music. Every once and a while we would do the tune, “God’s Not Dead.” The minister in the snake handling church would really belt that out.
The Birchfields were always a very open hospitable family. Bill and I still carried that on. They would come and want to jam with us. They would come visit us. We’d invite them to stay, we’d entertained people from all over the world. From Sweden, Germany, all over. We’re accustomed to having guests come visit us. Sometimes people would stay two weeks at a time. [We showed them] about our culture, our food. Even herbs in the mountain, ginseng. We showed them something about our way of life. It wasn’t just the music, it was our way of life. It’s very beneficial for people to learn. All their family’s traditions, their crafts, their music, their food, everything that they can learn. Old Crow Medicine show has been in our house. I’ve fed those young men then. We were known as being open. Never closed our jam sessions to anyone. Bill loved it. The more the merrier. The harder he played his fiddle. And you always heard his fiddle, no matter if there were thirty fiddles. Anybody was welcome. We always welcomed everyone.
As the two elderly guys got more feeble—Joe lived to be 90 and Creed 93. Bill could tune his dad’s fiddle, and had been dabbling around learning to play for ten years before his dad finally gave it up. Bill played different than Joe. He wished that he had had his dad’s bowing arm. He admired his dad. I would say to Bill, ‘You’re not Joe, you’re Bill. You play it your style.’ It’s what I always tell anyone, ‘You play that tune how you interpret it. Don’t ever try to be anyone else.’
