Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/134

120 sung out of their natural setting of brushwood camp or half-lighted log church, and reenforced by the vibrant, frenzied voices of exhorters and the high strained singsong of the preacher who has reached what is known as his "weavin' way." I confess that the wild fascination of a mountain revival has a strange power over me; the scene and the music draw me with a charm that I do not understand.

Such a religion has naturally little to do with the moral law. I am far from wishing to imply that they regard no principles of right and wrong, or that their own code of morals is not rigidly adhered to by the majority. The popular idea in this connection is, I am well aware, one of mere lawlessness. But the world at large knows little of the mountain people except as some bloody feud or fight over a raided still finds its way into court. This is as if one judged society by the divorce columns and reports of fraud and embezzlement. It should be remembered that the greater number of the mountaineers never get into the newspapers. Who is there to speak of their hospitality, their independence, their fidelity to marriage bonds? They are really of superior moral fibre for so primitive a race.

But, like most primitive peoples, they are prone to hold brute courage the first of the virtues, and the hero of their ballad is too often the criminal. The bold robber stands to their minds as the buccaneers and marooners of the Spanish Main stood to seventeenth-century England. He is the Man Who Dared—that is all—and if justice overtakes him, their sympathies, of course, follow him all the more.

There are simple dance tunes, such as "Citieo," "Shady Grove," and "Muskrat," to which a mere shuffling step is measured, the couples dancing in an "eight-handed set":

Romantic love as a motif is almost altogether absent throughout the mountaineer's music. It is a subject of which he is very shy. His passion is not a thing to be proclaimed from the housetops. Once married, his affection is a beautiful thing, faithful to whatever end; but he does not sing of it.