This story is part of a series reported by students at the Handmade Music School in Floyd County. The students are compiling a songbook of tunes and songs played in their community and telling the stories behind the music.
When the music label County Records, based in Floyd County, captured Matokie Slaughter’s unique banjo style on an album in the 1960s, her distinctive musical expression was shared with the broader world. Slaughter got invitations to play at festivals in other parts of the country. She even inspired a San Francisco artist named Margaret Kilgallen to make “Matokie Slaughter” graffiti on train cars. And she spent time with musicians who were eager to learn, like Alice Gerrard.
Gerrard has long learned and promoted the roots of traditional music. At 92, she still performs and teaches. In the 1980s, her commitment to learning the music landed her in Galax. That’s where she earned friendships with musicians like Slaughter, who lived in nearby Pulaski.
Recently, Gerrard sat down with Handmade Music School students to tell them about Slaughter’s banjo playing style.
On her laptop, she clicked on a tune that’s often played in local jams: “Buffalo Gals.” Except Slaughter’s version sounded different. A little…off.
“She sharpens one of the notes, and deliberately, it's not a mistake,” Gerrard said to the students. “You might think some of these things are mistakes if you just learned a generic kind of tune without the individuality of different musicians who play in different ways.”
Gerrard taught the students about the life of Matokie Slaughter too. She was born in 1919 and grew up in a musical family.
“She loved to play, and she loved to play with other people. Her sister played, her other sister played, and a lot of her brothers—a big family.”
The family would often attend local fiddlers conventions, where Slaughter entered contests, usually alongside her sister Virgie. She wasn’t formally trained in music but instead learned it on the fly.
“And then, of course, as all musicians do, your self goes into it as well,” Gerrard said.
To make a living, Slaughter and her husband Ennis and many of her relatives worked in the furniture factory in Pulaski. Gerrard said people in Slaughter’s community also had gardens and farm animals, and they raised a lot of their food themselves, which helped them survive tough times.
“If you want to play this music, it’s important to learn how to play it and to learn about where it comes from. You can know people through their traditions, and you can know more about them. In learning the music, you also learned how maybe you can make chicken and dumplings, or what they did for food back in the old day, and how people lived, how they were communities.”
At the end of her visit with the Handmade Music School, Gerrard talked about what makes traditional music worth preserving.
“I think that you play it because you love to play it,” she said. “You listen to the music, you like it. ‘Now what do I do?’ It's not everybody [who] wants to play music, but some people really do want to play. So, they try to figure out places [where] they can learn how to play it, because it's not really a written tradition.”
Instead, it’s handed down from person to person, one tune at a time.
This story was supported by Virginia Humanities.
