But it is not Mozart that makes mountain babies grow up to be smarter, according to Molly McGuire Ratliffe and Dreama Crockett, the co-founders of Hillbilly Mothers in Action (HMA).
"Bluegrass," says Ratliffe. "That's what make mountain babies smarter. Not some Mozart-effect."
The HMA has recently become an advocate of proposed legislation which would present new mothers in Kentucky with a CD containing Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs & The Foggy Mountains Boys recording entitled The Complete Mercury Sessions.
"We think that instrumental bluegrass pieces like Foggy Mountain Breakdown enhance the ability of our young-uns to react quickly," said Crockett, "an' there's research goin' on to find out whether kids who listen to bluegrass grow up with an ability to translate that quicker reaction time into better drivin' on our curvy roads."
According to Ratliffe and Crockett, drivers who were introduced to bluegrass before the age of three are 4.5 times less likely to drive off the side of a mountain than drivers who have never heard bluegrass but still managed to wind up driving on a mountain road somewhere anyway. Started only three years ago, HMA now has almost a dozen branch offices and about 800 members in Kentucky, West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.
The HMA is not alone in its belief.
"Bluegrass music is part of the reason mountain people are as smart as they are," says John Lewis Looney, president of the Norton, Va., based People for the Hillbilly Way (PHW). "The exercise of creativity involved in participating in bluegrass music develops abstract thinking skills and math abilities. And learning how to play a mandolin or fiddle does great things for hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity."
Looney's organization has a history of sponsoring research into the affects of bluegrass music - the bluegrass-effect, as he refers to it. In the past eight years PHW has funded research which has been published in two prestigious periodicals: Hillbilly Genetics Journal and Journal of Ridgeline Intelligence. The two journals have published a total of five studies, the first a 10-year longitudinal study with subjects from northern portions of Alabama through the Ohio River Valley.
"The original study by Davy Hurley and Buckshot Goins was publish in Ridgeline Intelligence back in 1990," Looney said. "It followed 325 Appalachian children - half of them from birth to age 10, the other half from age eight until the second year after they dropped out of high school."
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