CROZET gazette
MAY 2013
11
by Phil James phil@crozetgazette.com
Victoria Morris: From Bacon Hollow to Pennsylvania Avenue When Ben and Icy Shifflett’s beautiful baby girl Victoria was born into the highlands of western Greene County in late fall of 1895, the name of everyone’s game was work, and none of it easy. The challenge of surviving the upcoming winter in the mountains was compounded with the arrival of their ninth child, two of whose earlier siblings had not lived beyond childhood. Greene’s Bacon Hollow is contained by Flattop, Wyatt, Hightop and Snow Mountains. Roach River, proceeding from below Powell Gap, runs the full length of this secluded vale. Since the 1930s, residents have exchanged distant glances with the windshield explorers who stop at the hollow’s namesake overlook 1,200 vertical feet above on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It was an apt description that “a woman’s work is never done,” particularly amid such remote surroundings at the turn of the 20th century. Sans electricity and with a water supply that only ran outdoors and downhill, everyday was a tough haul for Isaphrine “Icy” Shifflett simply to keep
Victoria Shifflett Morris with sons (l.) Fred, (r.) Alton, and (front r.) Tim. Early-1930s, near Mountfair, VA. [Courtesy of the Leonard & Victoria Morris family.]
her growing family fed and clothed. Her husband Ben’s lot “from sun to sun” centered on subsistence farming and managing his minimal livestock. Wage paying jobs were seasonal, few and dangerous: stave mill jobs, cutting and dragging timber logs, saw mill work, digging sassafras stumps and roots or stripping tree bark to sell. More often than not, any semblance of diversion from most tasks at hand involved singing ballads, to one’s self or in turn with others. This pleasing distraction was one in which several members of the Shifflett family excelled, and it was a very important part of the family and communities in which young Victoria was nurtured. When Victoria wed Leonard Morris near Christmastime in 1919, song collectors from home and abroad had begun to wend their way into the hinterlands of Appalachia in search of the old tunes. Sometimes referred to as “songcatchers,” these collectors were typically academics. Their passion was to preserve variants of original English and Scottish popular ballads before the singers, along with their songs brought over from the old country, were lost to eternity. Among the more preeminent of the collectors was Cecil Sharp, who made several trips to America from England during the years of the First World War. With his able assistant Maud Karpeles, he traversed the remote mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, noting down the words and tunes of a vanishing art form. Owing to the remoteness and difficult access in certain regions of Appalachia, pockets of singers could still be found who remained uncorrupted by more contemporary musical influences. Nearing the close of his time in America in 1918, Sharp wrote in a letter to one of his hosts, former U.Va. English Professor C. Alphonso Smith, “I have found the tunes in Virginia
extraordinarily beautiful; I think of greater musical value than those I have taken down anywhere else in America.” Smith, a founder of the Virginia Folklore Society and himself an avid ballad collector, had introduced and directed Sharp to traditional singers in central Virginia. Among those local singers, a small handful eventually would be singled out for special honor. Victoria and Leonard Morris moved to Browns Cove in northwestern Albemarle County, and, between 1922 and 1927, were blessed with three boys of their own. Leonard found ample work on the area’s farms, and, in his spare time, shaped wooden handles for all manner of hand tools, selling them through the local continued on page 12 Above left: Victoria Shifflett (Morris), c.1912, at age 17. [Courtesy of the Leonard & Victoria Morris family.]
Victoria and extended Shifflett family members, near Nimrod, Greene County: (l.–r.) “Florence, Victoria, Berti, Johnny Wyatt.” [Courtesy of the Leonard & Victoria Morris family.]