April 10–July 12, 2003

Reception with Live Music: Wednesday, April 30, 6–9 p.m.
Artist's Talk and Book Signing at 7 p.m.

In the early 1970s, photographer Rob Amberg moved to the isolated mountain area of Madison County, North Carolina. Seeking to establish a home in what he saw as a simpler place, Amberg, who had been raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., searched for a subject for his photography. He found what he was looking for in Dellie Norton and her adopted son, Junior. At the age of seventy-six, Dellie was a hardscrabble mountain farmer still growing and selling tobacco. She was also a ballad singer and storyteller in a tradition that had been handed down for two centuries among families in these remote mountains.

Although Amberg at first believed that Dellie and Junior represented a form of rural purity, as he photographed and interviewed them, he began to understand that their lives were much more complicated than he had originally imagined.

"Dellie and her farm didn’t fit my image of mountain life," writes Amberg. "She wasn’t romantic or historic in her look, but somewhat rough and coarse. The place was going downhill. Fences needed mending. It was being overtaken with weeds. Junior bothered me in some indefinable way. He was loud, with an opinion about everything. But he was also fearful and insecure. When it was time to leave, I said I would come back, but did I mean it? Dellie looked me directly in the eye and said, "You’ll be welcome as the flowers in May."

Gradually, the photographs that Amberg took began to reveal the shape and form of a changing culture and people who wrestled with modern social and economic questions even as they remained firmly rooted in the past.

The exhibition includes a companion book, Sodom Laurel Album, published by the University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, including excerpts from Amberg’s journal, oral history interviews, and a CD of old-time ballads. The book traces the growing relationship between Norton and Amberg across two decades. Amberg’s written and photographic observations are intimate, yet they reflect a growing recognition that his perspectives remain colored by his position as an outsider in the Sodom Laurel community. Amberg’s richly evocative images explore the cycle of tobacco production, the demanding nature of an almost self-sufficient life, and the importance of family ties.

The twenty-track CD, which plays in the gallery during the exhibition, includes rare recordings by Dellie Norton, Doug Wallin, Sheila Kay Adams, and other singers of traditional Appalachian music, featuring such well-known ballads at "Shady Grove," "Conversation with Death," and "Black Is the Color." The inclusion of this sixty-three-minute CD was made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rob Amberg is an award-winning photographer and writer who does assignment work for nonprofit organizations, foundations, and publications. He lives in Madison County, North Carolina. Dellie Chandler Norton (1898-1993) was a much-loved storyteller and ballad singer whose songs were recorded by Alan Lomax and John Cohen. In 1990, she received a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award.

For a sample of the book, check http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-6230.html.

RELATED EXHIBITION EVENTS

Thursday, May 15, 7 p.m.
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium

Voices from the Fields, Voices from the Factories: Performances and Conversations about Tobacco in North Carolina with Gary Gumz, Beverly Washington Jones, Lu Ann Jones, and Bill Mansfield.

Come and experience the voices and sounds from North Carolina’s tobacco past, and learn how tobacco farms are facing the future. Join us for an evening of performances and presentations on women and tobacco farming and manufacturing, tobacco auctions and music, and sustainable farming.

Gary F. Gumz is Director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, a western North Carolina community-based coalition of farmers, rural leaders, agricultural groups, educational institutions, environmental organizations and government agencies that are working toward sustainable agriculture, community-based farming and food systems, and rural community sustainability. He is the President of Smart Growth Partners of Western North Carolina and a board member of Western North Carolina Tomorrow, the North Carolina Land Loss Prevention Project and the Mountain Area Information Network, a unique non-profit Internet service provider serving western North Carolina.

For ten years, Mr. Gumz was a professor of Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State University School of Design. He also lectured at major universities throughout the east coast. Before teaching, Mr. Gumz served as Research Associate for the American Society Landscape Architects Foundation and as Project Director for OVERVIEW, an environmental planning and consulting firm founded by Stewart L. Udall, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Mr. Gumz received his education in landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin and at the Harvard Graduate School Design.

Dr. Beverly Jones is a native of Durham, North Carolina and attended the public schools in Durham. She received her B.A. and M.A. in history from North Carolina Central University. She is the first African American woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in American History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of four books including the most recent, Durham’s Hayti, which she co-authored, and 30 articles. Her publications depict the lives of working class women, and the economic, political and social development of black communities in North Carolina. She has been a reader of the National Endowment for Humanities and Southern Education Foundation grants. Jones has participated in the following projects: Jim Crow: Behind the Veil, North Carolina Oral History, Factory to Work Project, and North Carolina Women’s History.

Lu Ann Jones is the author of Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (UNC Press, 2002) and co-author of the award-winning Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (UNC Press, 1987; revised edition 2000). Between 1986 and 1991 she directed "An Oral History of Southern Agriculture" at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and she is now an associate professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville. She is an active member of the Oral History Association and has served as a consultant for a variety of community-based oral history projects sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council. Lu Ann is a native of Gates County, where her parents farmed.

Born and raised in Raleigh, Bill Mansfield began playing music at age eleven when his mother showed him how to play the "juice harp"; he soon moved on to harmonica and banjo. He was awarded an NEA grant in 1979 to study banjo under renowned folk artist Fred Cockerham. Mansfield received an MA in folklore from UNC-CH in 1992, writing a master's thesis on tobacco auctioneers. He is currently working for the National Park Service's Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. He is the author of the award-winning book. Song of An Unsung Place: Living Traditions by the Pamlico Sound (Coastal Carolina Press, 2001). Mansfield is married to historian Lu Ann Jones.

Friday, July 11, 7:30 p.m.
Closing Celebration
On the Porch at the Center for Documentary Studies
Rain location: CDS Auditorium

With musical performances by Sheila Kay Adams and Denise O’Sullivan, descendants of ballad singer Dellie Chandler Norton

Sheila Kay Adams comes from Sodom Laurel and is the great-niece of Dellie Chandler Norton. For seven generations her family has maintained the tradition of passing down the English, Scottish, and Irish ballads that came over with her ancestors in the late 1700’s. She is well known for her award winning accomplishments on the 5-string banjo. Denise O’ Sullivan is Dellie Chandler Norton’s great-granddaughter, and a singer of gospel and traditional ballads.

CAPTIONS:

top:
Singing at the annual Rice Cove Cemetary grave decoration, 1977.

bottom:
Dellie and Junior, 1978 (left); A field of cut burley tobacco, Upper Brush Creek, 1993.