Western North Carolina musical tradition

Cherokee Flute Heritage

A short, sourced overview of the Cherokee river cane flute tradition in the Southern Appalachians, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and how that older tradition relates to what most people today call the Native American style flute.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) is a federally recognized tribe whose lands, the Qualla Boundary, lie in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The EBCI exists because a determined contingent of Cherokee resisted forced relocation during the 1830s. While most of the Cherokee Nation was removed west on the Trail of Tears in 1838, several thousand people remained in their ancestral homelands in the Southern Appalachians, aided by figures including Tsali and William Holland Thomas. Their descendants are the EBCI.

Today the EBCI continues to maintain Cherokee language, dance, basketry, foodways, music, and other traditions on the Qualla Boundary, with revenue from tribal enterprises directly funding language immersion programs, cultural centers, and historic preservation work.

Music and the river cane flute

Cherokee music historically accompanied dance, courting, storytelling, welcoming visitors, and stick-ball games. Traditional instruments include water drums, gourd rattles, turtle-shell rattles, and flutes. The Cherokee flute most often documented in the Southeastern Woodlands is the river cane flute.

River cane (Arundinaria gigantea) is a native bamboo of the southeastern United States. It grows in dense canebrakes along river bottoms, and Cherokee makers used it for flutes, blowguns, baskets, mats, and arrow shafts. A river cane flute is a naturally hollow tube tuned by hole position and node geometry, and the same canebrakes that supplied the rivercane double-weave baskets EBCI weavers are known for also supplied flute stock.

Sources describing Cherokee flutes generally note six finger holes and pentatonic scales, used for courting and to accompany singing or storytelling. The instrument shares acoustic features with the end-blown flageolet found in other Native traditions.

Cherokee music originally was used for dancing, welcoming visitors, courting, and ceremonies. Instruments included water drums, gourd rattles, turtleshell rattles, and rivercane flutes. Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2003 program book, Cherokee Culture

Hardwood flutes in the mountain country

Although cane was the most common flute material along southern river valleys, Cherokee people who lived higher in the mountains also made flutes from hardwoods and from the leg bones of deer. Wood and bone flutes use the same general construction logic as cane: a long air column tuned by finger holes, with a sound mechanism near one end. Many modern Western North Carolina makers, including hobbyists like the one behind this site, work in hardwoods because cane of suitable diameter and wall thickness is harder to source consistently than seasoned cedar, walnut, or maple.

The modern Native-style flute

The instrument widely sold today as a Native American flute, with a two-chamber body and a removable block over the sound hole, draws on a wider Native flute tradition that includes both Plains and Eastern Woodlands instruments. The traditional Cherokee river cane flute is one of the older Southeastern threads of that tradition, and it shares core features with the modern instrument: pentatonic tuning, six finger holes, and a soft, breath-driven tone. The modern wooden two-chamber design now dominates, and many EBCI and other Cherokee makers work in that style.

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