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The Story Behind
Cumberland Gap
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Me and my wife and my wife's
pap,
we're all going down to Cumberland Gap
Me and my wife and my wife's pap,
we're all going down to Cumberland Gap
Chorus:
Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Gap.
Hey! Way down yonder in Cumberland Gap.
Cumberland Gap with its cliffs
and rocks
Home of the panther, bear and fox.
Cumberland Gap with its cliffs and rocks
Home of the panther, bear and fox.
Cumberland Gap is a mighty fine
place,
three kinds of water to wash your face.
Cumberland Gap is a mighty fine place,
three kinds of water to wash your face.
Lay down boys and take a little
nap,
fourteen miles to Cumberland Gap.
Lay down boys and take a little nap,
fourteen miles to Cumberland Gap.
And so the song "Cumberland Gap"
goes.... a bit like the above with a hundred different
varying verses, depending on who you learned it from and
with several different melodies depending on what
instrument is playing a break...
There are so many songs like this that speak about far
away places and old times...but how many of us ever look
a bit closer at the songs and their history?
As it turns out I've been to Cumberland Gap
several times. I love the outdoors and I love hiking,
fishing, hunting, camping and kayaking (did I cover all the
bases?). I grew up in a pretty good state for it and of
course a lot of the stuff of bluegrass songs was based on
places, people and events of the fine state of Kentucky and
surrounding Appalachia. I wanted to share a little bit
about Cumberland Gap and maybe shed a little light on what some
of the lyrics mean.
Cumberland Gap is a break in Cumberland
Mountain. That's what a gap is; a low spot, or a spot
lower than the surroundings. Gaps make it a little easier
to get from point A to B when your A and B is on opposite sides
of the mountain. Pretty much every gap in Appalachia is
named because they were major travel corridors (and they still
are, they are where most of the major roads go over now).
In Cumberland Gap's case its about 1000 feet lower than the east
and west side of the gap and its about the only way to easily
get into Kentucky for several hundred miles in either direction
(especially back then).
Cumberland Mountain isn't a cone-shaped mountain... it's
more like a long, tall ridge (overthrust
fault if you want to get technical) that stretches several
hundred miles along the border of KY, VA and TN. Pine
Mountain is another overthrust fault right behind Cumberland in
KY's border. Then past Pine Mountain coming into KY's
interior you have countless 1500-2000 foot "knobs".
Needless to say if you had a wagon load of vittles, kids and
tools getting a sorry old wooden-wheeled wagon over a 3500 foot
mountain isn't easy work, especially if an old, flea-bitten,
famished nag were hauling it, the kids were coughing and you
were slushing through mud in mid-winter at 25 degrees. If
the conditions weren't rough enough, you'd have to have a road
too. Of course building a road between, over and through
house-sized boulders, over 80 foot ravines, over 200 foot sheer
cliffs and through Chestnut trees as big around as a VW Beetle
isn't child's play. Hopefully I'm getting my point across.
Life in the olden days was hard. There weren't any of
Eisenhower's interstates, chainsaws, or ATVs around. And
for the settlers wanting to find land of their own to plant
their gardens and raise their livestock on, Kentucky could only
be reached through the Gap. I can tell you from experience
that Cumberland Mountain is rugged. I climbed up it one
time... took me about 3 hours with a 50 pound backpack on my
back and on the way back down I tore my knee... lots of fun let
me tell you! Luckily Daniel Boone, Dr. Thomas Walker and a
couple of other folks made it a bit easier to get into
Kentucky's interior. They blazed a trail through the
Cumberland Gap, getting the rocks and trees out of the way, and
then the race was on. That brings us to the song, which
I'd like to look at in depth.
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| Cumberland Gap
from the Pinnacle Overlook |
The Wilderness
Road |
The second stanza of the song mentions panther, bear and fox.
For a long time there weren't any bear or panther in KY.
Kentucky used to be loaded with the creatures but people don't
take to kindly to panthers (or "painters" as local Eastern KY
denizens called them) killing livestock and killing kinfolk...
so they got "laid low". Bear were the same though there
was a lot of tree-harvesting done in the area and bears need
pretty wild habitat so they mostly migrated to TN in the Smokies.
Lately though there has been a resurgence of both. Panther
(cougar, mountain lion, puma, what have you..) sightings are up
in the state of KY. It seems they are migrating back to
the state from out west! There have been more and more
legitimate (fish and wildlife service verified) sightings in the
last several years. I heard they tagged one recently in
Kingdom Come State Park in KY, which is about an hour from the
Gap. Black Bear are also on the rise in Kentucky. I
stayed at Kingdom Come State Park last year (Oct '07) and we got
to see two up close and personal right in our campsite.
One got as close as 40 feet (I stepped it off... it was that
close!). The ranger at the park told me they had about 50
collared in the area. The small town of Cumberland about
2000 feet in the valley below Kingdom Come State Park is host to
the state's first Black Bear festival too. This is the
festival's third year running I believe, learn more
here.
Stanza three mentions "three kinds of water to wash your face".
It's hard to say what this is talking about. I know that a
beautiful stream "Sugar Run" flows down the east slope of
Cumberland Gap. If you go to the Visitor's Center and
drive up to the Pinnacle Overlook (a neat stone overlook that
overlooks three states and the new tunnel under the Gap's old
wilderness road) in the Spring, Sugar Run is covered in
beautiful flowers. It's usually flowing pretty hard this
time of year. I'm assuming Sugar Run is named because it
is a sweet "branch". We really take water for granted
nowadays. We get it out of the tap, or bottled up in the
supermarket. Used to be you had to rely on nature a bit
more for your water. Spring and creek water might be
bitter, they might be sweet, the creek or spring could dry up
and it might be cloudy with mud if it rained too much.
Some sources of water were much more nutritional than others,
depending on what type of rock layer they came out of, some
might be downright poisonous. They used to name creeks
based on how their water tasted. There is a place north of
where I live called "Chalybeate Springs" and chalybeate pretty
much means "full of iron", then of course there are sulphur
springs, which stink like the dickens but some folks swear by
sulphur's ability to give you health (gives you a nasty yellow
ring under your shirt arm when you sweat too) . I guess
one of those "3 waters" mentioned was sweet creek water
(probably fed by springs up above). The mighty Cumberland
river has a tributary right up in the Gap too, Martin's Fork of
the Cumberland river flows up there. Nowadays its dammed
up and produces Martin's Fork Lake, a fine place to go camping
and enjoy some time outside with your family. Another
branch named "Davis's Branch" flows off the east slope of
Cumberland Gap right through it too. I'm not sure if these
are the three waters talked about (Sugar Branch, Martin's Fork
and Davis's Branch) but its probably something close. I
can tell you I have a fond place in my heart for a spring that
runs on the back of my Dad's farm... where even on the driest of
days you always have a stream of water at least 4 fingers wide
running to moisten your brow or cool your palette with.
It's no wonder the song mentions the water to "wash your face
with". What would be nicer than some sweet water after a
long journey?
UPDATE: I frequent a hiking site and I posted a link to
this article because a lot of those folks have hiked around
Cumberland Gap. One of the site users gave me this bit of
info!
"I was always told that sugar run got its name from
moonshining. the creek runs along side of the road there which
is also nicknamed sugar run. when the hensley family settled in
the cumberland gap in 1904(hensleys settlement) they were
heavily into moonshining as a trade source for things they could
not grow or make on their own. they ran that stretch of road
there hauling moonshine to trade for sugar and other supplies in
middlesboro. i am not sure which is true but would like to know.
maybe i will do some googling later." - "Barefoot"
www.kywilderness.com
contributor.
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| Dan'l Boone leadin' the set-lers thru |
White Rocks from Ewing, VA... only 14
miles! |
The last stanza and the last thing about the song I'd like to
talk about is the line "fourteen miles to Cumberland Gap".
This almost has to be a reference to a little landmark called
"White Rocks". I have a fond place in my heart for White
Rocks. White Rocks is the first place I ever tried to hike
to with my wife. I grew up playing in the woods after I
got my chores done on the farm. I've walked plenty in the
woods around home but I got into backpacking in college and I
got a fool notion to climb Cumberland Mountain. There is a
huge rock outcropping on the very tip called White Rocks which I
wanted to get on top of and look out all over the Powell Valley
of VA. Well we made it up there but I didn't make it back
down all that good. Anyway White Rocks has a lot of
historical significance. It was like a billboard on the
interstate that was the wilderness road. When settlers saw
that huge rock outcropping 3500 feet above them they knew
Cumberland Gap was only a days journey (fourteen miles) away.
That's pretty neat if you think about it. There's no
telling how many settlers turned around to their family upon
seeing the rocks above and said "lay down boys and take a little
nap".
Modern Cumberland Gap is part of the Cumberland Gap National
Historic Park. There is a fine visitor's center, overnight
primitive camping, a 28 mile long trail on top of the mountain
and numerous other hiking trails. There is a historic
settlement you can tour on top of Cumberland Mountain too,
within the park (The Hensley Settlement). The Gap has a
rich
Civil War history (it was the North's "Gibraltar").
The town of Middlesboro welcomes you in KY beyond the gap and
its home to a historic P38 fighter plane
restoration project, the oldest continuously played golf
course in the nation,
Middlesboro Country Club and lots of other neat sites and
fine people to meet (lots more hiking just north of Middlesboro
too if that is your thing). Cumberland Gap, TN sits in the
doorway of the gap, just south in TN and its home to Lincoln
University where the "Doctor" Ralph Stanley got his "Doctor"
from (he received an honorable doctorate of the arts from
Lincoln University). A couple years ago the state of KY
completed a very long tunnel underneath the wilderness road of
Cumberland Gap, rerouting Highway 25 through the tunnel and
returning the wilderness road to its historic state. You
can walk all the way from Middlesboro, KY to Cumberland Gap, TN
and experience the traipse through the Gap much the same way the
pioneers did. I'm sure you can even take your guitar along
and play and sing the song while you do it!
I hope you enjoyed this deeper look at the song "Cumberland
Gap". Its always fun to get a little deeper into this
music we love.
- S.D.
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