The descendants of those who drew swords for James and Charles at Preston Pans and Culloden dwell to-day in the dales and valleys of the Alleganies, as their fathers did in the dales and valleys of the Grampians, but their voices are mute.

As a rule the Southerners are fond of music.  They are fond of singing and listening to old-fashioned ballads, most of which have never been printed, but handed down from one generation to the other, like the ‘Volklieder’ of Germany.  They sing these with the wild, fervid impressiveness characteristic of the ballad singing of unlettered people.  Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one is found whose instrumentation may be called good.  But above this hight they never soar.  The only musician produced by the South of whom the rest of the country has ever heard, is Blind Tom, the negro idiot.  No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the borders of Dixie.

It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the war, the passion and fierceness with which the Rebels felt and fought, could not stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars into the production of a single lyric worthy in the remotest degree of the magnitude of the struggle, and the depth of the popular feeling.  Where two million Scotch, fighting to restore the fallen fortunes of the worse than worthless Stuarts, filled the world with immortal music, eleven million of Southerners, fighting for what they claimed to be individual freedom and national life, did not produce any original verse, or a bar of music that the world could recognize as such.  This is the fact; and an undeniable one.  Its explanation I must leave to abler analysts than I am.

Searching for peculiar causes we find but two that make the South differ from the ancestral home of these people.  These two were Climate and Slavery.  Climatic effects will not account for the phenomenon, because we see that the peasantry of the mountains of Spain and the South of France as ignorant as these people, and dwellers in a still more enervating atmosphere-are very fertile in musical composition, and their songs are to the Romanic languages what the Scotch and Irish ballads are to the English.

Then it must be ascribed to the incubus of Slavery upon the intellect, which has repressed this as it has all other healthy growths in the South.  Slavery seems to benumb all the faculties except the passions.  The fact that the mountaineers had but few or no slaves, does not seem to be of importance in the case.  They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their development in all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the Roman Campana finds every sense and every muscle clogged by the filtering in of the insidious miasma.  They did not compose songs and music, because they did not have the intellectual energy for that work.