From the Mountains to the Sea is a two-hour multimedia/live presentation about Anne and Frank Warner’s folk music collection in North Carolina. It features the voices of the singers, photographs of the tradition bearers and their land, and the insights gained by the Warners as they traveled through rural North Carolina from 1938-1966 in search of old songs. It’s crafted together and performed by the Warner’s two sons, Gerret and Jeff, who are career filmmakers and musicians. The brothers created and toured an earlier version of the show that highlighted their parents’ field recordings from across rural America. The North Carolina-focused version of the performance was commissioned by the North Carolina Arts Council for the 2019 Year of Music Campaign Come Hear North Carolina.
This iteration explores the story of the Warners’ relationship with Frank Proffitt, who they recorded singing “Tom Dooley,” in 1941. In 1947 Alan Lomax published the lyrics from that recording in “Folk Song USA,” and 10 years later The Kingston Trio’s recording of the song became a hit, sparking the folk revival movement.
From the very beginning of the 2019 Year of Music, Come Hear North Carolina has sought stories that reveal how landscape, community, and context shape the music made by North Carolinians. The field recordings and photographs from the Warner collection capture a tremendous period of traditional music and life from rural North Carolina. Today the Warner collection is housed in the Library of Congress.
“They realized very early on that the songs were inseparable from the people who sang them and the land that created it,” says Jeff Warner in a recent interview with Come Hear North Carolina.
“I think it’s just remarkable that the two of them had such complimentary skills. My father was a great performer. He was a good photographer. All self-taught,” says Gerret Warner. “But our mother was an archivist with a great passion and literary flair. She took down everything, unimaginable detail in shorthand because she was a professional secretary.”
“With the two of them together it became something that happened, something that was created, something that made rural people feel comfortable giving…and it was recorded for posterity,” said Jeff.
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