Leonard Bowles and Irvin Cook
I heard about Bowles and Cook first on the Smithsonian Folkways “People’s Pick’s” playlist series that got kicked off by my friend Daniel Bachman in 2015. He described their music best in his notes, writing:
It seems appropriate that this is the first song on the playlist because it was the first I ever heard from the collection. They really fire this one out with a heavy, churning fiddle and two-finger banjo that scratches and stumbles for the duration of the song.
The Book “Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities” by Susan Eike Spalding talks in more detail about Square Dance in the Black community and features Bowles and Cook. Music and interviews with Leonard Bowles and Irvin Cook are available in the Digital Library of Appalachia or more convenient here.
Music and dance had an intimate interrelationship in this Martinsville community. Leonard Bowles perceived that “your steps and music work together. If you (a musician) see a good set-caller, and they’re calling, don’t you know you forget you’re playing, you don’t get tired or nothing, play and make music ….
Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities By Susan Eike Spalding (Page 86)
You’re looking at their feet and you play with their feet. You get that step, see what kind of motion they’ve got and you’re just going on. You never get tired.” In years gone by, the heightened effect of two or more fiddles and banjos and perhaps a guitar must have energized the dancers as well. In the 1978 video recording, Leonard Bowles’s fiddle and Irvin Cook’s banjo had a definite drive that was hard to resist. Though each beat of their music had a little percussive accent, the dancers felt an even, underlying flow. Swaying his body side to side on each measure, Ernest Brooks said you must “balance with the music, balance with the music”; Naomi Bowles moved her hands side to side in a fluid undercurve arc, saying of the ongoing promenade step, “Get your feet going like that. Everybody in the same tune.” She went on to say, “The music’s got to get within your feet. You know when to stop and you know when to go on with it.
Now if you don’t have it in your feet, you’re just going to mess the dance up.” As in other old time dance communities, the figures were called across the phrases of the music, rather than mirroring them as contra dance and English country dance do. Instead, the dancers’ stepping feet and patting hands kept a steady ostinato on the beat, while the fiddle and banjo embroidered triplets around them. Soloists and couples tattooed little dance accents on top of that, or groups of four wove fluid curves through them all. Banjo player Irvin Cook sang a verse of the ballad of John Henry, played without singing for a while, then sang some more, and the set-caller shouted out directions as needed, between or on top of the singer’s words.