Chip Bang! Chip Bang! Chip Bang! It is spring on the mountain and there it is- the unmistakable sound of a Scarlett Tanager. A brilliant red bird with stark black contrasting wings. Hard to find in the canopy filled with trees and leaves but that call- I know it is there and I can remember days I have seen this extraordinary bird. It is spring on the mountain and the warblers are back as well- the hooded warbler, Kentucky warbler, Cerulean warbler, and countless others. And I can hear our old friend, the Louisiana Water Thrush, calling and picking his way along Slick Rock Creek. The vireos, the brown thrashers, the phoebes, they are all on the move now, migrating great and small distances- that tiny vireo all the way from the Amazon in South America!!! I went to Warbler Weekend at Pine Mountain Settlement School and our guide said that about two and a half million migrants crossed Harlan County the night before. A satellite spotted them...without visas. Migrants, millions of birds crossing the night sky on their way north. Soon, June 19, we will begin the 25th year of the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School, preserving the traditional music of the mountains of eastern Kentucky. I am the "roving storyteller" for the week of classes, giving context to the tunes that migrated here with the many cultures that make America. This year the subject is Mountains, Migration, and Music. My grandfather said that our people came from Northern Ireland. Probably squeezed by rack renting on their tenuous hold on the land and suppressed by the Church of England, they came to a hard decision- leave their country......forever. The Bridge of Sighs. It still stands in Northern Ireland. Departure point. The last farewell. And when many of them arrived, sailing up the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia, exhausted, hungry, desperate for land, can you imagine the welcome they got? Here is James Logan, land agent in Pennsylvania 1729: "It looks as if Ireland is to send all its inhabitants hither, for last week not less than six ships arrived, and every day, two or three arrive also....It is strange that they thus crowd where they are not wanted. They are "audacious and disorderly". I must own from my experience in the land office, that the settlement of five families from Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any other people." And Pennsylvanians did not save all their ire for Northern Ireland Ulster Scots. Here is a comment about Germans: "Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlement, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens...? Benjamin Franklin 1751 And those enslaved from Africa? Historians from several different countries collaborated to explore the manifests from ships headed to the Americas from Europe and Africa. "Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas-a massive transfer of humans unlike anything before it. In that period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip." 1493 by Charles Mann The contrast is astounding. So are the implications. Like, who built this country? Mountains, migration, music. These are some of the threads of music and culture that wove its way down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to the southern mountains. These are all little parables just to put all this migration and music....and the times we live in.....to put it all in perspective. Sometimes the news is just too much for me-the intolerance, the disinformation, a proliferation of loud and angry voices, a web of distrust and deceit. I take a walk.....and listen to the mockingbird. I am tickled by its persistent, boundless songs. I put on my tick repellent clothing and walk on the mountain. The warblers are back.