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For
his next book, which will be based on a series of lectures
he will give later this year at the University of Virginia,
Joyner turns to a subject which has been his lifelong
passion: music. As anyone knows who has seen him perform
with the Chosen Sisters, an African-American singing
trio from Pawleys Island, he is more than a scholar
of music - it’s in his bones. 
“I
was into music before we ever had an instrument in the
house,” says Joyner, who plays guitar, banjo, dulcimer,
autoharp and harmonica and can clap out the most complicated
polyrhythmic backbeat in his sleep. He grew up listening
to the Grand Ole Opry and loved the early “hillbilly”
string band music of groups like J.E. Mainer and the
Crazy Mountaineers. As he got older he began listening
to a wide range of music. By the time he became a professional
historian, music was central to his work as a scholar.
Joyner’s
first published article was about the protest songs
which came out of a famous cotton mill strike in Gastonia,
N.C., in 1929. His first book was Folk Songs of South
Carolina, published in 1971, which was partly inspired
by his Gullah research. In the 1960s and 1970s, he traveled
with his portable tape recorder through the Appalachians
and the Ozarks to capture American folk music at its
source, making the acquaintance of Frank Proffitt and
other venerable standard-bearers of the art. He also
made trips to England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and
Newfoundland to study the root systems that fed early
Southern music and culture.
The
story of Southern music is an epic of multicultural
give and take, according to Joyner, a fusion of various
African and European influences which has given birth
or essential sustenance to practically every genre of
American music: blues, jazz, folk, rock and roll, rhythm
and blues, gospel, bluegrass and Cajun.
“Name
any American music that doesn’t have its roots
in the South,” he says, more as an expression of
wonder than a challenge. “The remarkable thing
is that all these diverse musical forms are really more
closely related than is apparent on the surface. They
cross-fertilize one another in endlessly interesting
ways.” Dizzy Gillespie would seem to have very
little in common with, say, Bill Monroe, but jazz and
bluegrass are linked by ancestry and by their ability
to change and grow by borrowing new sounds, according
to Joyner. The ultimate exemplar of this process is
Elvis Presley, whose mixture of “black” urban
blues and “white” country-gospel set off a
chain of events which changed the course of music forever.
For
Joyner, this crisscrossing phenomenon is a metaphor
for the South as a whole. “There is something that
our musicians have always understood, but our politicians
too often haven’t – that whatever differences
might exist between the black and white cultures, there
is an underlying unity that binds the South together.
That’s what this next book is about. I think it’s
the book I’ve always wanted to write.”
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