He Taught Hanover What "Hoot" Means

Ahootenanny, by the proverbial definition, is a community gathering and folk song festival where everyone comes to have, as the saying goes, "a howling good time." Today the expression is generally shortened to "hoot," and until recently it was a term rarely heard outside the mountainous areas of the American southland. However, since the day that Bob Coltman '59 arrived at Dartmouth four years ago, the word has been heard around the campus almost as frequently as it might be in Snake Gulch, Tennessee.

For years Bob has made a hobby of collecting and singing American folk music, and now in his senior year it has become so much a part of him that he is seriously considering taking it up as a profession after graduation. Just within the Hanover area he has stimulated so much interest in folk songs that his original Tower Room performances for a few curious people have been expanded into full-scale hoots and concerts that have been enthusiastically attended by students and townspeople alike.

Bob became interested in folk singing when as an eighth-grader he happened to hear some folk music on records and tried to pick up the tunes on an old ukulele he found lying around the house. A while later he surprised his parents by asking for a guitar, and his father, Bob Coltman '32, decided that his son's interest was not just a passing fancy and helped him buy it. Young Bob took to the instrument like an old-timer and within six months he had a repertoire of over a hundred songs.

By his junior year in high school he had progressed to the point where he was doing research into folk music and searching for unpublished and almost forgotten songs. Living not too far from Washington, in Perkasie, Pa., he made a few trips to the Library of Congress and found that this institution had a very complete file of folk singers living throughout the country. That summer, armed with these names and addresses and a portable tape recorder, Bob took a trip through the mountain districts of West Virginia, Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky in search of new songs he had never heard before. His pleasant and soft-spoken ways soon won over the mountain folk who were impressed with his sincere interest in their songs; and many of them, besides singing for him the songs that they knew, gave him the names and addresses of many more folk singers who had previously not been on his list. Bob was greatly impressed with the warm hospitality of these simple people who would often invite him to local songfests and into their own family circles. Sadly, he found that the old-fashioned hoots are a slowly vanishing institution. This is due partly to the encroachments of radio and TV, and to a large degree, Bob suggests, to the increasing popularity of bottled whiskey over the original barrelled corn product, which was one of the chief attractions of the hoots.

Exploring the history of his folk songs, Bob has found that most of them stem from old English ballads brought over in Colonial days, with a strong injection of African flavor introduced by the slaves. As an English major, Bob has discovered a great deal of similarity between some of his folk songs and early English poetry. The songs have been carefully preserved by .these rugged mountain people, many of whom are direct descendants of the original Anglo-Saxon settlers.

However, Bob makes it clear that what is today flooding the airwaves and is known, often disparagingly, as "hillbilly" or "country" music is not authentic folk music at all, although it often has some overtones of it. Folk songs, he says, are rarely heard over the radio because they are usually too austere and lacking in the wide range and scale of notes such as are found in modern progressive jazz and popular ballads. Most stations feel that authentic folk music does not appeal to a broad enough audience and is therefore not really suited for commercial media.

Bob keeps a regular file of the folk songs he has collected and, although he knows nearly a thousand by heart, he has twice that number on file, many of them never having been published or collected previously. Locally, he has found a group of Dartmouth students who share this enthusiastic interest in folk music, and they have formed a loose organization that gathers occasionally and also meets with groups from other schools to hold a good old-fashioned hoot.

Bob isn't sure that he can make a go of it as a professional folk singer, but he feels that it is certainly worth a try, and he is in the process of making some tapes right now which he hopes some of the big record companies might be interested in. Whatever the outcome, Bob will have had some unusual and fascinating experiences to look back upon, and he will have an interest that will give him pleasure and satisfaction for the rest of his life.

Bob Coltman '59