Where the Ravens Roost: Songs and Ceremonies of Big Cove

At the time this essay was first published, Michael Kline was a staff folklorist at the Mountain Heritage Center of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. There he produced a cassette tape of ceremonial songs performed by Walker Calhoun that is still available through the Mountain Heritage Center. Kline now resides in Elkins, West Virginia, where he directs "Talking Across the Lines: Worldwide Conversations," a folkloric communications collective, and also continues to produce folk music and audio-history CDs. The following essay originally appeared in the fall 1990 issue of the Old Time Herald and was revised for publication in American Musical Traditions.

As Walker Calhoun raised his gourd rattle and began to sing ancient Cherokee verses in a soft, clear voice to the shaking rhythms, a hush fell over the campfire. Walker then stood to lead 150 children in the Friendship Dance, concluding a daylong gathering of the Cherokee Challenge, a scouting program for boys and girls held throughout the summer months in Birdtown, North Carolina.

The high, lonesome strains of Walker's haunting dance song soon had the children on their feet, snaking single file around the fire. Rhythms from Walker's gourd rattle connected them with a long tradition of dancing and singing that has bonded their people with one another and with this place for centuries.

As we sat under a shade tree at the gathering, enjoying fry bread and getting acquainted, Walker explained that his half-uncle, the venerable Will West Long, had passed the songs along to him when he was just a boy attending dances in his home community of Big Cove. A medicine man with a vast knowledge of Cherokee culture, history, letters and language, Will West Long died in 1947 at age seventy-seven. His elders were men and women who had hidden from the soldiers during the Cherokee removal to Oklahoma in 1838. At the time of West Long's childhood, two generations later, the tiny Big Cove community was still traumatized by that upheaval, as were Native American communities throughout the southeastern states.

By 1891 the Bureau of Indian Affairs had assumed responsibility for Indian education and launched programs of aggressive acculturation. Cherokee children were punished for speaking their own language in local government schools. With the great chestnut blight and the deepening depression of the mid-1930s, traditional hill-farming among the Cherokee gave way to dependency on economic programs administered by white bureaucrats. In addition, the foundations were being laid for a tourist industry that would commercialize and distort Cherokee culture. Traditional values, language, and song fell by the wayside at an alarming rate.

The pervasive influence of Christian mission churches and ten years at white boarding schools could not rid Will West Long of traditional Cherokee beliefs and ancient customs centering on the supernatural. The ceremonies he brought virtually single-handedly into the twentieth century were chanted litanies and dances of thanks honoring the animal life that sustained fragile native communities. And though Cherokee people no longer depend on the flesh and the hides of the beaver and bear for sustenance, their dances honoring these animals satisfy hungers for a sense of identity and connection with the past. The rattle, song, and dance have sustained Cherokee people through succeeding waves of difficult change.

Will West Long was the good shaman, leader of his people, and driver of the dance. A hillside farmer and medicine man, he conjured for Big Cove stickball games and preached peace and love among neighbors. So strong was his gentle leadership that his death in 1947 left a vacuum that resulted in the decline of many ceremonies. Lloyd Sequoyah and Walker's older brother, Lawrence Calhoun, both now deceased, were among the practitioners who followed. Somehow the ceremonies persisted, though they did not always flourish.

Walker's father, Morgan Calhoun, kept an old factory-made banjo around the house, probably ordered from a Sears catalog. (Other Big Cove families had banjos, too, and played mostly from house to house.) His favorite tune was "Shoo Fly," and Walker can dimly remember the drop-thumb style his dad picked.

When Walker was nine his father died, and the banjo passed to his older brothers, Lawrence, Henry, and Lawyer. Henry was

the best banjo-picker in the community. The banjo hung on the wall out of Walker's reach. The younger children (there were ten in all) were not permitted to play it. As soon as the older boys were gone, Walker was up on a chair practicing chords without taking down the banjo. "I could play it, and it hanging right there on the wall," he recalls with a smile. By 1930 the family had a guitar, and Walker joined in playing standards like "Redwing," "Down Yonder," and "Down in the Willow Garden." He subsequently developed a modified three-finger picking style, sometimes using metal finger picks, but is also comfortable with the drop-thumb rapping style he remembers from his father.

Sometimes when he was alone, Walker would quietly pick some of the Cherokee melodies he knew from his song mentor, Will West Long, but he never played these for anyone else. Walker seldom sings the old mountain ballads, preferring the ancient ceremonial dance songs in his own language that honor the bear, beaver, quail, and eagle. He also sings the "Horse Dance Song," which the Cherokee made when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto brought the horse in 1540. "That's not such an old song," Walker reflects. "The rest of them are old."

The Calhoun family lives high on a hillside overlooking the Raven's Fork River, where Will West Long once led dances around sacred embers of a ceremonial fire built in the center of the cove. Walker Calhoun, whose first language is Cherokee, has been heir to these traditions of thought and song. In 1984, at the first gathering of the Eastern and Western bands of the Cherokee, on the Cherokee fairgrounds, Walker was drafted by a local performing dance group to sing the old songs he remembered from his youth in Big Cove. His first public performance before that assembly launched his career as a ceremonial singer.

He has also kept alive practices of folk medicine locked within the Big Cove community. His wisdom and humility have a charismatic effect, drawing people of all ages to him. Walker's children and grandchildren, raised in the dance traditions of Big

Cove, were charter members of the Raven Rock Dancers, named in honor of a huge outcropping on the mountain high above their home, where ravens once roosted and nurtured their young. The ensemble has fully outfitted itself in traditional regalia and now performs at a number of festivals and powwows around the southeastern states. Members of the community believe the Raven Rock Dancers present the most authentic renditions of traditional Cherokee song and dance.

In recognition of his efforts to perpetuate Cherokee culture and customs, Walker received the first Sequoyah Award (created especially to honor him) at a gathering of the Eastern and Western bands at the Cherokee Fall Festival in October 1988. Less than six months later, in June 1989, he received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award recognizing a lifetime of community cultural achievement. And in 1990, the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts presented Walker Calhoun with a National Heritage Fellowship Award.

New friends and admirers from the Western Band of the Cherokee in Oklahoma have initiated an informal exchange with Walker and his family. The Calhouns have gone to Oklahoma to visit and attend stomp dances, and an Oklahoma contingent has traveled to Big Cove to encourage the Calhoun family in its quest to revive the stomp-dance religion. Working together, they have been clearing weeds from the old dance grounds once cherished by Will West Long. Scattered ashes dug from ancient ceremonial fires around the region have been used to resanctify the Big Cove dance grounds. Oklahoma friends will return to join in the renewal of the stomp dance and share ancient customs surviving in both communities despite more than 150 years of separation.

Spiritual leader Walker Calhoun and his family of dancers symbolize the determined survival of old songs and dances that have brought people together within the hidden beauty of Big Cove for generations. Walker is the last link between the legacy of Will West Long and the cultural development of his own children and grandchildren. His quiet commitment to these traditions assures their place in the lives of those who will come after him.

Afterword: In the decade since this article was published, Walker's sixteen-year-old grandson, Patrick Smith, has begun growing into a songleader and often leads the ceremonial dances with his grandfather's encouragement. The dance grounds are now located in a tiny meadow near the Calhoun home, overlooking Big Cove. Walker, now eighty-three, is the Keeper of the Fires for the Stomp Dance ceremonies each month and teaches a class in Cherokee language for his family and neighbors each week. He and his family of dancers have also been featured at folk music festivals and powwows throughout the region and were scheduled to appear at the Smithsonian Institution's 2001 Festival of American Folklife, held on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

WHERE THE RAVENS ROOST: SONGS AND CEREMONIES OF BIG COVE

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