The interweaving of European and African musical styles is perhaps the most significant factor in the history of American music. In the South, particularly, the music of black and white working people mixed, remixed, and blended. Enslaved peoples and their descendants added a fluid and expressive vocal style and a highly developed sense of rhythm to European songs and instruments. As a result, a new African American music was created.

American music is a mixture of these many factors. Foreign songs were planted like seeds in the fertile soil of the New World and grew into varied styles of American music. Each year there are thousands of folks festivals and gatherings throughout North Carolina and the nation. America’s folk music may have its roots in faraway places, but as the nation’s people live, work, and struggle, their music is reborn every day.

Hollering is a kind of outdoor vocalizing common in earlier times in places in eastern North Carolina, the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, parts of Alabama, and probably other sections of the South and elsewhere in the world. Hollering is loosely related to long-documented traditions such as urban vendors’ street cries. These typically have melodic phrases with a few words identifying the items for sale and the seller. Examples can be heard in the film “We Are Arabbers,” shot in Baltimore. Hollering also overlaps with work calls and cries used in many other occupations. Rural blacks mostly sang words in their old field hollers or “arwhoolies.” Currently in the United States the most widespread of the work calls are probably the price chants with which auctioneers stimulate bidding (illustrated in the films “Going, Going, Going,” “Mouth Music,” and “Ray Lum”). Feeding calls for domesticated animals are also common and may summon each kind of animal with a distinctive word and sound. These feeding calls are incorporated into the local hollering as is the yodeling made popular by early stage acts, recordings, radio broadcasts, and films. But much of the hollering in Spivey’s Corner, N.C., is a distinct form of vocalizing that uses few or no words. In the open, flat stretches of tidewater Sampson County hollering was reportedly done chiefly by white men. Their calls were loud, exploiting the carrying power of the male falsetto voice. Women also practiced some forms of it, and in the film “Welcome to Spivey’s Corner” a Coharie Indian, Leonard Emanuel, is the principal practitioner and the person most extensively interviewed. This kind of hollering developed in the silence of a world without constant and competing noises of machines. More particularly, it was a practical response to the isolation of old-time rural life before people had telephones.