Entertainment in early twentieth-century rural North Carolina
Spaulding describes the entertainment scene in early-1900s rural North Carolina. His mother quilted, community members came together for corn shuckings, and people gathered to play music, though some religious residents frowned on dancing.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Asa T. Spaulding, April 13, 1979. Interview C-0013-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Did your mother and sisters preserve this food?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
Oh, yes. She liked to preserve. And another thing, she liked to quilt.
It's something maybe some people in this generation
don't know what you mean by quilting. But they would have
their frames, you know, and quilting. And sometimes they'd
have neighborhood quiltings, where there was a rectangular or square
frame. They would get the cloth they were using, or scraps, whatever it
was, that they would baste to it, and use on top. And different ones
would be on different sides, and they would meet in the middle, or start
in the middle, I don't know which. But anyway you would be
stitching. And all of them beautiful quilts, different colors, because
of the different scraps they would be using. I remember that all the
quilts that we used were homemade. When we left to go away to school,
she'd give us a quilt to take with us.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Was this a form of entertainment, in part, as well as a necessity?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
It was a hobby with them. It was both useful—it had utility
and value—as well as hobby. She would give a quilt away.
Another way of how farm people entertained themselves: I remember they
used to have corn shuckings. After the corn was gathered and put in the
barn, or piled in piles before it was in the barns, the neighbors would
come. And, of course, you'd have a feast. You'd
feed them. And then they'd go out there that evening and have
the corn shuckings. They'd shuck the corn in the barns.
People looked forward to it.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Would men do the shucking?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
Men and women. It was just a neighborhood thing, that people would come
together and enjoy themselves helping each other. This matter of
neighborliness is another thing. They were accommodating. They
didn't look for pay. And I remember for years, when people
from Durham would come down there, and they could
go into their gardens, bring back all of the vegetables and all of the
fruit that they wanted, and they wouldn't mind giving them a
ham—I mean a whole ham. And think nothing of it. But you
don't see that today anywhere. A farm life in a way was a
hard life, and yet there were many things in it. It was not exactly
communal living, but certainly the matter of the spirit of sharing.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Do you remember other things that people did as a form of entertainment?
What about dancing?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
The dancing was not so prevalent during the time of my childhood. I left
there in 1918.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Was this because of religious restrictions?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
There were some people that were so deeply religious that if a person
would dance, they'd want to put him out of the church.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
What about music?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
They had music. As a matter of fact, I remember one of the members of the
church had a violin. He'd play at church, a violin selection,
sometimes. And they had the church choirs, and pianos.
- WALTER WEARE:
-
Would there be groups that would ever get together and play music and
sing; and would any of this be distinctly cultural, having to do with
the spirituals?
- ASA T. SPAULDING:
-
No, not at that time. As a matter of fact, we didn't have
music teachers down there as such, except when one of the teachers at
the school or someone had gone away and learned music enough to play it
for the choirs and things of that nature. They had no set-up for music
teachers as such, where the children went to learn music. And many of
them, their singing was by rote, rather than by reading music.