Loose Leaf Notes

– The Following first appeared in The Floyd Press on November 13, 2014

“I tell the historians that I’m a musician and the musicians that I’m a historian,” joked Ricky Cox to an admirer after his presentation on Floyd County Folksong Traditions at the Floyd EcoVillage Saturday morning.

Cox is also a talented storyteller and had the full house of attendees in an uproar of laughter on more than one occasion. He told the audience that his mother had ten sisters and they were all singers.  “I think even their sewing machines were singers,” he said.

Co-editor of A Handbook of Appalachia: An Introduction into the Region and co-author of The Water-Powered Mills of Floyd County, Virginia, Cox is a Floyd native and teaches Appalachian Studies and English at Radford University.  He defined folksongs as any song that is circulating among groups in different versions.

Ballads tell a story and help us deal with our anxieties and lyrical folksongs express an emotion and are commonly about love or love lost, Cox explained. He played guitar and banjo and performed examples of types of folksongs, giving historical background information on them.

One of the program’s highlights was when Cox performed a song with dancing puppets that were animated by a nylon line attached to his guitar.  The wooden puppets were made by the late R.O. Slusher (also a Floyd native) and were recently featured in a folk art exhibit at The Old Church Gallery.

The program was sponsored by The Floyd Historical Society and closed with a sing-along of May the Circle Be Unbroken.

Our World Tuesday