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The Songs of Norris Dam
Norris Dam, the first-born child of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was attended by praises and curses as it came into the world.
Government had rarely been so bold in the name of social change. About 3,000 families were displaced by the project. World War II forced a new perspective on the arguments, requiring much greater sacrifice, while justifying the need for power development.
The drama of the development of the Norris Dam project inspired films, books, theatrical productions, and songs. The songs excited, especially, a small, but increasing cadre of scholars and enthusiasts who loved American folk songs. To a 1930s folklorist, the discovery of these items was somewhat comforting-it proved that "the folk" were still composing and singing ballads, as they had done for hundreds of years. The art was still viable and relevant, and could be called upon to express deep feelings and document events, just as they were happening.
To become a folk song, most scholars agree, a song must be shared with a lot of people, enough to separate the text from its composer. In an almost Darwinian manner, passing a song around changes it, as singers add, delete, or invent new lyrics and bend and swap melodies. Edwin C. Kirkland, a professor of English at Knoxville's University of Tennessee from 1931 to 1946, and his wife, Mary Neal, collected a handful of Norris Dam songs soon after their composition, and saw in them a fascinating opportunity for future scholars. If "taken up and transmitted by the folk of Tennessee we shall see what students of ballads and folk songs have long wanted-the original version," he wrote. "If we are able to find, some time in the future, various versions... we shall have the material for an interesting study on the oral transmission of ballads and folk songs."
None of these Norris Dam songs passed into common currency, but
each is important for other reasons. There is more authentic emotion, more wit and honest
opinion in these verses than in hundreds of journalistic accounts and many documentary
studies. With vivid enthusiasm or with gentle anguish, these words strike us with the
power of a first-hand account.
By 1939 the Kirklands found three more songs inspired by the
Norris Dam project.
Two years later, Tennessee, A Guide to the State, published by the Works Progress Administration, included three verses of "The TVA Song" in the music section. Although the source was probably from Power, it was craftily implied that it was a Tennessee folk composition: "Government activity in the Tennessee Valley has called forth many new verses for the old-time tunes. One of these, set to an old English tune..."
The only Norris song released as a commercial record had a very different message. Early country music was filled with warnings-don't drink, don't marry a drunkard, don't marry a scolding woman-but "She Sleeps Beneath the Norris Dam" was the only warning song about the dangers of speed boats. The text presented a cruel twist of fate, the loss of a sweetheart to the very dam that the singer had built with his own hands. The Cope Brothers of Bean Station recorded it in 1946 for King Records, a very respectable label based in Cincinnati. They often performed the number on Cas Walker's famous Knoxville radio show in the 1940s. Clay Cope helped a young friend compose the song, which was not based on a real tragedy. The Cope Brothers brought their ballad back to the shores of Norris Lake in 1982, performing it again at the first Big Ridge Music Festival, (an event that continues to present fine Norris area musicians each August at Big Ridge State Park.) The Cope Brothers have all now passed away.
Kirkland learned nothing else about Burnett, and later used a
high school student to sing the piece for recording purposes, but Kirkland's lectures soon
included the song as an example of contemporary topical compositions in the folk style. He
commented, "it has the possibilities of becoming what I should call a folk song.
[Burnett] is speaking for the folk of his community; yet he is sadly lacking in metrical
skill, good taste and other qualities which are necessary for a first-rate folk
Folklorist Charles Wolfe called the song "powerful," in
his notes to The Kirkland Collection album. Duncan Emrich, who managed folk lore
collections at the Library of Congress for decades, included it in his 1974 anthology,
American Folk Poetry, and it was adapted for the soundtrack of The Electric Valley, a
major documentary film about TVA that premiered in 1983.
"He never did have worldly goods, because if they'd of had it, and seen someone else needed it, that's where it would have gone. He'd give a person the shirt on his back if they needed it worse that he did," said his daughter-in-law Anna Burnett, of Sharp's Chapel. Ruble Cleatus Burnett was 37 years old in 1935 when he wrote the "Song of the Cove Creek Dam." He had just purchased 50 acres of land, after having apparently rented it for some years, when the TVA land appraisers looked it over. He supported his wife and three children, his older brother, and mother in a three room house by the sale of chickens, eggs and a tobacco crop. His income in 1933 was $180, and his expenses on the farm just $30.75. He fed the family with two milk cows, two hogs, 50 chickens and 17 ducks, by TVA's count. The TVA interviewer also noted: "House is a small boxed one, and is equipped with very little furniture," indicating no car, radio, piano, phonograph, sewing machine, floor covering, or dining or living room furniture in the home. The interviewer considered Burnett "suspicious," and noted, "He said the T.V.A. was a bad thing for the people of this section," and, optimistically, "his conversation leeds altogether along the line that he believes the government will jip him But began to gather a different idea before I left him [sic]."
"I believe what hurt him most was moving the graves," says Aundra Ditmore of Maryville, Burnett's daughter. He was hurt by the removal of his infant daughter, who died from meningitis, and his father's remains to a new cemetery, and he grieved for the families whom he felt would not be able to recover their loved ones in poorly marked or unmarked graves.
As it turned out, Burnett did not have to move his family's home. TVA leased a right of way from him, but did not force him to a new location. For a couple of years he owned a guitar, and, rarely, sang for friends and neighbors. His son, Milus, remembers hearing him sing the Cove Creek Dam song only three or four times, but learned a number of the verses himself.
Norris Dam continued to affect his life. His daughter, Bonnie Sanford, remembered, "Someone asked Dad, 'what good are the C.C. boys?' He said, 'For son-in-laws.'" Both daughters married C.C.C. members from the nearby camp. He finally got electricity, around 1950, 14 years after the promise of it. He fished in Norris Lake occasionally, but more often scouted the banks for fishing tackle abandoned in the brush, which could be reused or resold.
In 1980, at a family gathering, a granddaughter asked Cleatus to sing the Cove Creek Dam song again for her tape recorder, probably the last time he performed the piece. He spent his final two years in a nursing home in Maryville in poor health, and died in 1984, the same year his song was reintroduced on the Tennessee Folklore Society's record album, The Kirkland Collection. Though none of his children or grandchildren had a complete version of the song he wrote in 1935, his daughter, Aundra, kept an envelope with the shredded remains of one of the old printed ballets. Like the copy Kirkland purchased, it shows handwritten corrections that Cleatus must have made on each sheet, to set straight the only song he ever wrote. The outside of the envelope is marked in Cleatus' own hand "a True Song of the Col Creek Dam by R.C. Burnett." Inside is a most eloquent account of the sacrifice called for by the creation of the Norris Dam.
July 1, 2000; Send comments to Department of Environment and Conservation.