The Scots-Irish in Appalachia: Culture, Music, and Memory

The Mountain People

The Appalachian Mountains -- stretching from northern Alabama to the Canadian border -- are the spine of the eastern United States. And the culture of the central Appalachian region -- West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee -- was shaped more than any other single influence by the Scots-Irish who settled there in the eighteenth century.

These were not the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots of clan romance. They were the Ulster-Scots -- Lowland Scottish Presbyterians who had spent a century in northern Ireland before crossing the Atlantic to the American colonies. They arrived in the backcountry with a culture already twice-tempered: formed in Scotland, reshaped in Ulster, and about to be transformed again by the American frontier.

The Appalachian culture they created -- its music, its speech, its fierce independence, its relationship to land and community -- is one of the most distinctive regional cultures in the United States, and it carries the fingerprints of its Scottish origins in ways that are still audible and visible today.

The Settlement

The Scots-Irish settlement of Appalachia followed a well-documented path. Landing at Philadelphia and the Delaware ports, settlers moved first into the backcountry of Pennsylvania -- Lancaster County, the Cumberland Valley -- before flowing south along the Great Valley of Virginia (the Shenandoah) and into the Appalachian interior.

The movement was rapid. By the 1730s and 1740s, Scots-Irish settlers had reached the valleys of southwestern Virginia. By the 1760s and 1770s, they were crossing the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee. Daniel Boone, who opened the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, was himself of English Quaker descent, but the majority of the settlers who followed him were Scots-Irish.

The Scots-Irish gravitated to the frontier for both economic and cultural reasons. Land on the frontier was cheap or free -- squatting on unclaimed land was common -- while established eastern land was expensive and controlled by English and German landowners. But there was also a cultural affinity for the borderlands. The Scots-Irish came from a border culture -- the Anglo-Scottish border, then the Ulster frontier -- and the Appalachian frontier was the next iteration of the same pattern.

The Music

The most enduring cultural legacy of the Scots-Irish in Appalachia is the music. Appalachian folk music -- and its descendants, including bluegrass, country, and the broader tradition of American roots music -- is deeply rooted in the ballad and fiddle traditions of Scotland and Ulster.

The ballad tradition. The English folklorist Cecil Sharp, collecting songs in the Appalachian mountains in 1916-1918, found that the oldest ballads he recorded were versions of Scottish and English ballads that had traveled with the settlers in the eighteenth century. "Barbara Allen," "Lord Randal," and dozens of other Child Ballads survived in Appalachia in oral tradition long after they had faded from popular memory in Britain.

The fiddle. The fiddle came with the Scots-Irish settlers and became the dominant instrument of Appalachian music. Appalachian fiddle style -- driving, rhythmic, ornamented -- is recognizably descended from Scottish and Irish fiddle traditions, though it has evolved its own character over two centuries.

The banjo. The banjo, of West African origin, was adopted by Appalachian musicians in the nineteenth century and combined with the Scots-Irish fiddle tradition to create the instrumental foundation of bluegrass. The marriage of African and Celtic musical traditions in Appalachia produced one of the most distinctive American musical genres.

Shape-note singing. The a cappella choral tradition of shape-note singing, which flourished in the rural South, has roots in the psalm-singing tradition of Scottish Presbyterianism. The Sacred Harp tradition -- still practiced in the American South -- carries echoes of the metrical psalm singing that the Scots-Irish brought from Ulster.

The Speech

The dialect of Appalachian English preserves features of Scots and Ulster Scots that have disappeared from standard American English.

"Hit" for "it." The use of "hit" as a pronoun (as in "hit don't matter") preserves an older Scots form.

"Liketa" for "nearly." As in "I liketa died" -- a construction with parallels in Scots English.

Double modals. Constructions like "might could" and "used to could" are characteristic of both Appalachian English and Scots English.

"Reckon." The habitual use of "reckon" for "think" or "suppose" comes directly from Scots usage.

These are not corruptions of standard English. They are preservations of an older linguistic layer that the Appalachian mountains kept alive while the rest of the country moved on.

The Values

The cultural values most frequently associated with Appalachia -- fierce independence, suspicion of outside authority, loyalty to kin, willingness to use force in defense of honor and property -- have deep roots in the border culture of the Scottish Lowlands and the frontier conditions of Ulster.

The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed (1989), argued that the backcountry settlers of the American South represented a distinct cultural stream -- the "borderers" -- whose values derived from centuries of life on the violent Anglo-Scottish border and the contentious Ulster frontier. Whether or not one accepts Fischer's full argument, the parallels between the border culture of Scotland and the frontier culture of Appalachia are striking.

The Scots-Irish did not arrive in Appalachia as blank slates. They arrived with a fully formed cultural identity -- shaped by Presbyterianism, border warfare, tenant farming, and the experience of being perpetual outsiders in both Scotland and Ireland. That identity found its fullest expression in the mountains, where distance from authority and reliance on kin and community reproduced the conditions that had formed it.

The Legacy

The Scots-Irish contribution to American culture extends far beyond Appalachia. The values, music, and speech patterns of the backcountry settlers diffused throughout the American South and Midwest, becoming part of the baseline culture of rural America. Country music, stock car racing, evangelical Protestantism, and the cult of the self-reliant individual all have roots in the Scots-Irish cultural matrix.

For anyone tracing Scottish ancestry in the American South or Midwest, the Scots-Irish pathway -- from Scotland to Ulster to the American backcountry -- is the most likely route. The surnames, the DNA, and the cultural memory all point back to the same twelve-mile crossing from Scotland to Ireland that began the journey four centuries ago.