Lake Burton near Clayton, Georgia, mirrors the full moon in its still waters, surrounded by the dark masses of the mountains. As twilight deepens, the night chorus begins. Whip-poor-wills start their rhythmic chanting, a pulse that famous folklorist Alan Lomax once described as “nature’s metronome.”
In his 1959 field recordings from Georgia, Lomax captured not just the songs of mountain musicians, but also these ambient sounds – the chorus of frogs from the lake’s edge, the distant cry of a great horned owl, the rustling of wind through mountain laurel.
When Lomax made his landmark field recordings in the southern mountains, he often worked at night. The quality of sound was better then – less interference from human activity, and the natural acoustics of the mountains were more pronounced. In his field notes, he frequently commented on how the music emerged from the darkness itself, becoming part of the natural symphony of night sounds.
The ballad singers he recorded often chose songs that reflected this nocturnal environment. “The Night Visiting Song,” common in both Appalachian and Scottish tradition, captured the soundscape of a midnight journey through the mountains. “The False Knight Upon the Road,” with its mysterious midnight encounter, echoed with the very sounds these postcards capture visually – the rustle of wind through trees, the call of night birds, the subtle splash of water against shore.
The Royal Gorge in Western North Carolina, from Point Lookout, one can gaze into the shadowed valley below. The mountains themselves seemed to be singing. The acoustic properties of these gorges shaped the development of mountain music – the way certain notes would carry across valleys while others were swallowed by the night air influenced everything from the tuning of instruments to the patterns of call-and-response singing.
Lake Lanier, straddling the border between South Carolina and North Carolina, appears beneath a cloud-streaked moon. These mountain lakes created their own acoustics, too. Sound carries differently over water at night, when the air has settled and thermal currents have calmed. Mountain musicians knew this intuitively – lake shores became natural amphitheaters for evening gatherings, where ballads could drift across the water unimpeded.
The high mountain lake near Pembroke, Virginia, at 4,000 feet above sea level, reminds us that elevation changes everything – both the quality of light and the character of sound. The thinner air at these altitudes creates distinct acoustic properties. It’s no coincidence that the high lonesome sound of Appalachian singing developed in these elevations, where the night air carries voices in unique ways.
The materials for traditional mountain instruments came from these same moonlit forests. Spruce for fiddle tops was harvested from high mountain slopes, often selected by ear – woodsmen would tap the living tree to judge its resonant qualities. White oak for banjo rims came from trees that had grown slowly in mountain soil, their dense grain providing the perfect material for shaping sound.
The night forest provided not just materials but inspiration for tuning. The modal tunings common in mountain music – often called “sawmill tunings” for the wind-like sound they produced – seemed to match the natural harmonies of the forest at night. A skilled player could make a fiddle sound like a bird call, or craft banjo runs that mimicked the cascade of mountain streams in darkness.
Today, these same landscapes are protected in various ways – as national forests, state parks, or nature preserves. The night sounds that inspired generations of musicians continue, though now sometimes competing with the intrusion of modern noise.
As darkness falls over these mountains tonight, some musician will likely sit on a porch or beside a lake, picking out tunes that have echoed through these valleys for generations. And in those tunes, if we listen carefully, we might hear what Lomax heard. The music of these mountains is inseparable from the chorus of the night forest itself.
The Posted Past 