SEVEN YEARS WITH MOUNTAIN MUSIC

      jr maxwell by tj worthington

Tonight I'm going to Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's cd release party at the Fiddle & Plow show in Woodlawn. The album is 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It will be a knock-out show. Steve Lewis will be there with guitar and banjo. Butch Robins will be there with banjo. Willard's rhythm guitar will be there. Probably Mike Gayheart playing bass, or Sandy, or both. I'm hoping Dori will be there. It's going to be some music in the real sense of the word as music. Yesterday I saw Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale dance a waltz in THE LEOPARD. It was a dance, not just moving their feet the way I "dance." This is the difference between music and music the way these guys make it. Their music itself is a dance. They pluck the strings with the same grace of Lancaster and Cardinale swirling over the floor. Their music flows. I'm not saying this makes them better than any others. Only that this is what draws me to be there every Friday night I can make it.

First time I listened to this project, I felt a wringing and twisting inside longing to play it on the Saturday morning radio show that went away when the station was sold out of the community. This is an album I know my listeners would love, and I would love playing it for them. It brings to mind the time I found a cd from a mid Sixties lp of a Galax bluegrass band, Larry Richardson And the Blue Ridge Boys. Buddy Pendleton plays fiddle. He is one of the great fiddlers of the region. Worked at the Floyd post office for 40 years. First time I heard the album was just a few weeks after the radio station shut down. My longing to play it for my listeners was so strong it hurt. I'd have played the whole album straight through. When I play it now it still pains me that I never had a chance to play it for the listeners. Those seven years of the radio show, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour, were part of a seven year cycle that were happy years, which doesn't mean without sorrow. In childhood I was afraid of sorrow, but have come to embrace sorrow the same as joy, a legitimate human emotion that has a hidden joy in it, like joy has a hidden sorrow in it, like light has darkness hidden in it and darkness has light hidden in it. On a scale where joy is at one end and sorrow at the other, I like to think I waver somewhere toward the middle, sometimes wavering all the way over to one side or the other. When I'm in joy I know it's short lived. In sorrow I know it's short lived too.

I have no way of guessing even close to accurately how many people listened to the show. Over the seven years about twenty people spoke to me in the grocery store, here and there, saying they listen. They were the faces I played the music to in my mind's eye. I didn't know if it was two hundred or twenty. It didn't matter. I think of times in the Regular Baptist church meetings when it was only two or three people, Millard Pruitt would quote a verse from the pulpit, when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst thereof. He preached the same as if the house were full and people standing. That made a lot of sense to me. It's not about bigness. It's about the thing itself. I've adopted that thinking for everything I do. In the beginning of this "blog" were three or four views a day. I was ok with that. I wasn't going to advertise. It wasn't about how many. It was about doing it. I wanted to make myself write something every day worth reading. If 3 people find it worth reading, I'm fully satisfied. After three years it's up to over 200 views per day. I am no more satisfied with 200 than with 2. Yet, I felt a mild sense of thrill when it passed 100, then again when it passed 200. It's a thrill because it was unexpected --- a hundred times 2. I don't know who they are except for a few who have contacted me. Now I love my readers like I loved my listeners to the radio show.

The first year with BROC and involved in the Hillbilly Show, Agnes wanted me to be a comic hillbilly mc. I did it one more time, but it was too unsettling having 800 people looking at me. I was not born for the stage. But I had a very strong feeling that all the people looking at me knew me and I only knew a few of them. It told me that perhaps most of the people in the audience have heard the show at least a few times. That's what unsettled me most. I was not prepared for an auditorium full of my listeners. Had no idea that many people listened, at least sometimes. The people in the audience listened when I spoke and I was not ready for that. Yet, it gave me a measure of my listeners and gave them faces. In the beginning, the black mic I spoke into at the radio station seemed as far as my voice went. I was talking to and playing music for the mic. Beyond that I had no clue. Then I stand in front of an auditorium of people and they know me. It blew my mind to smithereens and I did not know how to handle it. Practice night in front of empty seats was comfortable. When the seats had faces, that was another deal. I tend to see people as oceans of consciousness that are really complex from one individual to another. I get 800 oceans of consciousness looking at me like they know me and I'm too overwhelmed to be able to function. After two shows of being freaked out, I asked Agnes to let me pull the curtain ropes, involvement less the freakout.

In this seven year cycle I've been making videos of the music at the Fiddle & Plow to put on youtube, painting mountain musicians and writing here. These are my art forms in this cycle. Yes, I regarded the radio show an art form. I wasn't much at talking, so I kept it brief. Emphasis was totally on the music itself. There is no talking I could do that would be better to listen to than anything recorded in these hills. I'd rather my listeners groove to Gaither Carlton's banjo or fiddle than to put them through anything I'd say other than identifying musician and title, and to mention he was Doc Watson's father in law. I couldn't even do that playing the Carter Family. I love them so much that just mentioning their names choked me up. None of their songs need an introduction of title or anything. I'd play one after the other with tears of joy running down my face, knowing that everyone listening loved what they were hearing at least as much as I did. Carter Family songs have been played and recorded countless times, though I've never heard a version of one of their songs that reaches all the way into my heart like Sara, AP and Maybelle do. Sara's and AP's singing was entirely without emotive expression, like old time church singing, yet the emotion is so powerful that even screaming rockers can't get there. After hearing the Carter Family's Wildwood Flower, there is no other Wildwood Flower. And then there is Ralph and Carter Stanley. Legends of the Clinch Mountains.

This music, mountain music, makes me glad I am where I am every time I hear any of it. The more funky old-timey it is, the more I love it. Tommy Jarrell with his fretless banjo and his fiddle. Fred Cockerham with banjo and fiddle. One of the great albums of all time is Tommy and Fred picking banjo together. It's called Tommy and Fred. It was out of print for a long time. But I'd think by now it would be back in print. It's too good not to be available. And that was the motivation for opening the music store, an outlet for mountain music in the area. Floyd, Virginia, was the closest place. It was a great adventure. I met a lot of wonderful people. Met some new friends. Took up painting mountain musicians. Discovered Old-Time Herald magazine. Discovered a lot of incredible music. Sometimes I get called an expert, but I always remark that I am not an expert, just someone that loves the music. I've learned so much from mountain music and musicians that I can't imagine myself before the learning started. One of the great joys of my life has been playing mountain music to mountain people on an AM station in the mountains, the next county over from WPAQ, the ideal.

*

THE HIGHLANDERS BLUEGRASS THE FRONT PORCH

     the highlanders

     scott freeman, fiddle; jimmy zeh, banjo

     jimmy zeh, banjo; marvin cockerham, bass; willard gayheart, guitar

     scott freeman, fiddle; jimmy zeh, banjo

       bobby patterson, mandolin; scott freeman, fiddle



The Fiddle and Plow show happening at Willard Gayheart's Front Porch Gallery, Woodlawn, Virginia, featured tonight the Highlanders, a Galax bluegrass band of almost 40 years. Willard plays guitar and sings with the band. When the World's Fair took place in Knoxville, Tennessee, back in the 80s, the Highlanders played there for a week. Buddy Pendleton was their fiddler. Pendleton recorded an album playing fiddle with Larry Richardson & the Blue Ridge Boys, a classic mountain bluegrass album recorded in 1965, http://www.oldbluerecords.com/. Buddy was a youngun then. He had a great career started as a fiddler with Bill Monroe for awhile and then the Greenbriar Boys, a New York City folk revival old-time band. From there he returned home and worked to retirement at the Floyd, Virginia, post office. He's a frail, honest, thin, seemingly weightless man now with gray hair. Oh, but he can play a fiddle. He played at Fiddle and Plow a year or more ago. I spoke with him a few minutes before the show, asking permission to make video of him playing, and wondered what this frail little guy would do with a fiddle. It didn't take long to find out. Once he started playing, I knew this was a master.

Buddy wasn't with them tonight, so Scott Freeman played fiddle in Buddy's absence. I was hoping Buddy would show up, but he didn't. Scott played a beautiful fiddle. Musically, Buddy wasn't missed, but I would like to see him and hear him play fiddle again. His fiddling has an airy quality about it. By airy, I suppose I mean like an apple tree pruned such that birds can fly through it. I put up several videos of Pendleton on YouTube, which I was very happy to do, to make his fiddle playing available to whoever might chance upon it or find it by looking for it, whoever sees it. Buddy Pendleton is too great a fiddler to overlook. I don't mean to imply Scott's fiddle wasn't up to Pendleton's. Scott is so close, it doesn't matter if one is better than the other. I like to hear both of them play a fiddle. I don't know if it communicates a sound to say Scott's fiddle playing has a full bodied sound. He bears down on the strings and makes them work. Visually, I see Scott's manner of fiddling in VanGogh's and Edvard Munch's paintings of women. I can't explain it. It's a subjective feeling. Where Pendleton's fiddle might be of the air, Scott's is of the earth. He uses his bow to dig the notes out of the strings, he takes charge of the strings. Again, I'm not saying one is better than the other. It's different styles of playing a fiddle.

Willard was the lead singer for the band, and such a good singer Willard is. There is quite a number of songs of Willard singing on YouTube. Write his name in the search box and everything with him on it will come up. Willard's singing is good mountain singing. By "good" I mean like Sara Carter was good at mountain singing. Willard is that kind of good at delivering a song. He doesn't dramatize the song with his voice, he delivers the words and lets the words tell the story. He keeps ego out of his singing, out of his guitar playing, out of his performance, in the mountain way. I and several others see Willard as the best kept secret in SW Virginia. Willard doesn't know how good he is. He doesn't promote himself. Scott Freeman married Willard's daughter, Jill. Scott and Willard have been musical parnters ever since; first with Skeeter & the Skidmarks, then Alternate Roots, then Skeeter & the Skidmarks redux. Willard and Scott make a great duo. Willard also plays duo with Bobby Patterson.

Bobby Patterson is a good singer too. He plays mandolin with the Highlanders. He plays guitar and banjo when he and Willard play together. Bobby Patterson is best known, for me anyway, on the album June Apple with Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Kyle Creed, banjo, Audine Lineberry, bass, and Bobby Patterson rhythm guitar. He was young then, playing with the old fellers, the masters. Audine Lineberry played bass with Whit Sizemore's band, the Shady Mountain Ramblers. She sang Ruby the way it was meant to be sung. I personally hold Bobby Patterson as the most important man in SW Virginia, for what he has done for the music of Grayson County, in particular. He has a small label and a recording studio. He recorded local old-time bands and some bluegrass. He recorded the Shady Mountain Ramblers, Whitetop Mountain Band, Otis Burris, Art Wooten, a mess of others and made collections from the Galax fiddlers convention every year for cd. He started with LPs, then cassettes, then CDs. Bobby is a great musician and a noble man. 

Everyone in the band I could say is a noble man. Noble is a word not used any more, and that's a good thing. Now it is free of connotation, and it's meaning can be what I mean without sentiment mixed in. I mean they are noble in that they, each one, is who he is. Each one has worked hard all his life, has raised a family and made music on weekends. They are, every one, what we call here in the mountains good people. Give them a chance to make music and they're happy. Jimmy Zeh came to Galax from West Virginia. Willard came to Galax from a little township 10 miles outside Hazard, Kentucky. Scott is from MtAiry, lives in Woodlawn, Marvin Cockerham from Meadows of Dan. Bobby Patterson has lived at Galax all his life. Willard lives in Woodlawn. Bobby Patterson's Heritage Shoppe and Heritage Records is right there by Willard's framing shop.

From the moment the band started they played straight ahead mountain bluegrass and they never let up. Scott's fiddle came forward from time to time and raged for us. I think it might have been Katy Hill he cut loose on. I wasn't prepared with the camera when he started up, I missed the beginning, so I used the time to get still shots, wishing I'd got that fiddle on video. Then I always tell myself it is not at all necessary to have it all on video. It is not necessary at all. Enjoy it raw, straight from the fiddle to my ear. It gets to be like a Warhol fixation to want to record everything. I do it to archive this moment in time in the evolution of mountain music. I believe it needs doing. Nobody else is doing it. Then it's mine to do. I get to do things like this because I don't do it for money. I don't care about copyrights. I just want to share this mountain music with anyone around the world who wants to hear it.

*

LARRY RICHARDSON AND THE BLUE RIDGE BOYS

flow

This evening the jukebox is playing some bluegrass from 1965 by Larry Richardson, banjo and vocals, and the Blue Ridge Boys. I took an interest in the album because Buddy Pendleton played the fiddle with the band. Ordered it and it came in the mail yesterday. It's the same period of bluegass as Jr's band The Little River Boys when he was with fiddler Cleve Andrews. Richardson's banjo is right there with Jr's. He plays a similar style to Jr's, plain and articulate. I know he and Jr surely knew each other. They might have even competed at fiddlers conventions. It's some mighty satisfying bluegrass. Mountain bluegrass. The same league of musicianship as Wayburn Johnson and Cullen Galyean, also from that time. Evidently Richardson picked with Bill Monroe a few years, learning the spirit of bluegrass from the master. He learned it well.

They're playing You Left Me So Blue in the spirit of the Stanley Brothers. It's not imitation. They come from the same musical tradition in SW Virginia. These boys have the reminiscence of Primitive Baptist singing in their approach to vocals. Same as the Stanley's, stretching out the syllables in that old mountain Baptist way of singing. He opened with banjo on My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains, his tone is similar to Jr's as is his manner of pickin. They come from the same place and the same time. Lord have mercy, it's a shame how much his banjo sounds like Jr's. Buddy Pendleton's fiddle takes me back to last Friday night hearing his magic fiddle. It's a corny word to use, but his fiddle has a quality of sound he gets out of it, again, articulately and plain, interpreting the tune in his own manner staying true to the notes. His fiddle has an unforgettable something about it. He's a bit of a shy, retiring man absolutely uninterested in the spotlight. Chose to stay in the mountains, work at a post office and make music on weekends with people who play mountain music.

Pendleton plays primarily with his left hand. The fingers of his left hand are noting every note, all 4 fingers going without a pause. It's almost like he uses the bow to almost pluck the notes. His fiddle and Richardson's banjo are playing note for note on Florida Blues. I see the album was reprinted in 2007 by Old Blue Records http://www.oldbluerecords.com/. It makes me mourn for the radio show. We were having such a good time, me and the listeners. They loved mountain music and I loved playing it for them. It has to be all right. Pendleton's fiddle has a fine line to it, like an ink pen that makes a fine line. He brings to mind in the classical world the pianist Murray Perahia, whose fingertips have a similarly subtle command of each note.

It's exciting to find a fiddler I've not heard before, especially one so obviously a master. Makes me feel retarded to know he's been here all along. But he's not been one to record or pursue much playing out away from home. That makes it all the better. I'm still reeling a little bit from what I heard when he put bow to strings Friday night. It was that word magical again. It has suddenly come to mind I have a photograph of Jr and some other unidentified musicians standing around behind the open trunklid of a car. This picture of Pendleton with the cd in that time brings to mind a fiddler in the picture I couldn't identify. It was Pendleton. So they did know each other. Gene Mead was in the picture too. Now another one is identified. Jr said it was at the Independence fiddler's convention. I borrowed the photo from Jr's album, took it to Kerr Drug and had a larger print made of it. I wanted to use it to make a painting. It's about time to think of what's next. Several have come to mind, but this one suddenly grabbed hold.

FIDDLER

buddy pendleton and willard gayheart

take me back to tulsa

Turned on the radio and there was Ralph Stanley starting Down In The Willow Garden. Had to stop and listen. I'd just finished watching and listening in a row to the songs uploaded to YouTube today, fascinated by Buddy Pendleton's fiddling, Scott's mandolin and Willard's guitar. Seeing what I missed last night operating the camera. I didn't miss it, but it is a bit distracting. There is also an amount of focus involved. Flatt & Scruggs, I Ain't Gonna Work Tomorrow. Judith is the dj tonight. Her ear and mine correspond. I always like what she plays. It's like she's playing specifically to my ear. Some bluegrass is what I needed to perk up. THE NEWS. Eek. Had to turn it off. I'm in too good of a mood to get wound up about kids losing their legs to landmines, which is what I see in the background of what they tell us on the news.

All day long I've been uploading the videos from last night to YouTube. I think I put up 7 music videos and one of Pendleton talking at the beginning. I'd started the recording while he was talking and he talked on and on, it funny and fun to listen to. When he reached the end of telling stories and turned to what to play next, I stopped the recording of the talk and started the recording of the first song, Red Haired Boy. Listening to it today, I thought it worth putting up to be enjoyed by at least a few who will enjoy it. There is so much on YouTube not worth the time to see it, why not put up something worth seeing. Pendleton is still of the old world, despite being at the PO almost half his life. His travels, playing with bluegrass and old-time bands have not weakened the hillbilly in him, much like Ralph Stanley who has worked among people from all over the country and he's still the same hillbilly he was when he and Carter started. I feel like I can see that Pendleton's time in New York and the other places he's been have been interesting to him, but no temptation at all. The mountains were in his heart like they are with Dr Ralph.

Listening to Pendleton's fiddle all day, reviewing what I heard last night, I was happy with technology for making this little camera that makes movies with good sound. I like the things about it that I'd like to be able to correct, but don't know how, like the automatic focusing that changes focus when I pan from one musician to another. It refocuses to the wall and then refocuses to the musician when it gets there. Sometimes it goes through refocusing mayhem like it's out of control, but it's just trying to keep up with all it's reading. I pay it no mind. I let all that do as it does. I just point it where I want it to look and try to hold it steady. There's no holding it steady, esp from the back of the seating area and holding it in two hands while breathing. I like that. It gives it spontenaiety. When the scene is still, it's somehow flat too. The movement of the handheld camera has life to it, gives it dimension, makes the invisible unknown behind the camera, the one making the decisions of where to point, makes the decision making part of the show. It has a gear grinding sound when the zoom goes in or out, but that's ok too. It makes the visuals more personal, more like it's happening now.

I've not arrived at these preferences by intellectual methods such as studying it in books or anything like that. I want my videos to have the spontaneous quality of somebody who is anybody with no knowledge of filming with a point-and-shoot handheld camera that has a lot of gizmos and automatic everything. I put it on automatic and go. I can't fool with measuring the light, fooling with the aperture. It's the mechanism that a camera is that has kept me from taking much interest in what goes with photography the other side of pushing the button. Rough and ragged it doesn't give the appearance that I'm trying to make it pretty. Until one gets really good at that it looks artificial. And I don't care to devote that much time to it to get beyond the looking artificial phase. Somehow, I've come to see that bad acting, bad directing, bad everything in movie making can give the film a kind of realism that a perfect award winning production can't touch. For example: Purple Rain. Beyond a certain point, though, bad is just bad. For example: Under the Cherry Moon.

Jr said of making music and drinking that the liquor greases the joints and allows the music to flow. The more you drink, the better you play. To a point. Jr liked to get to that point and stay there through a show or a dance. Beyond that point you play worse and worse until you just fall out. Jr never did that. One of his fiddler friends couldn't stop the drinking once he started and went past that point and way over the other side to playing embarassingly terrible. Buddy said of Willard and Scott last night that they're gentlemen, they're ones a man can count on to show up to play someplace and not be too messed up to do anything. Buddy Pendleton is not a drinker, and I got the impression, the feeling he is deeply engaged with his Lord. He seemed to me an inward sort of man who as a kid was pretty much unto himself, on the order of AP Carter. Inward. He loves making music and that's what he does. He found young what he loves and has lived what he loves the rest of his life. I've been admiring him in my mind all day, a fiddler in the real sense of it, a man who lives his fiddle. It's like some people play the fiddle and some people are fiddlers. Buddy Pendleton is a fiddler.

BUDDY PENDLETON AT FRONT PORCH GALLERY

buddy pendleton

It was good old-time fiddle and bluegrass fiddle tonight at the Front Porch in Woodlawn on Coulson Church Road, just off of 58 at Harmon's. I'd seen a few photographs of Pendleton, an older mountain man with beard, longish hair and the hat that puts me in mind of the band of country singers, the outlaws, Hank Jr, Waylon, Willie, Johnny. I don't mean he has it as a professional pose; it's just his natural appearance. Nothing about this man is a pose. The man has played an awful lot of fiddle, and he is of these mountains from the soul outward to the tips of his fingers. He's won Union Grove 6 times. Not to be one-upping him, but to give an idea of his league, I think Art Wooten won Galax 7 times. That's no small deal. Pendleton has played with Bill Monroe for a time. Played with the New York folk group called the Greenbriar Boys for a time. He was a slight man, like Millard Pruitt, Ralph Stanley and Jr. All 3 of them small in size, but not one of them seems so small. They all 4 seemed larger than life in a way. What all they could do said to me they were not small at all. They were big men in stature and presence. And Buddy Pendleton worked at the Stuart VA post office 40+ years.

Willard and Scott accompanied, Willard keeping such good rhythm for him, he commented at one point how good Willard's rhythm was, how it made the fiddling easier for him. He can make his fiddle sing. He uses short bow strokes, mostly 2, 3 and 4 inches, sometimes 6 or 7 inches. That's not my measurement, but guestimations, a system of measurement. The noting fingers on his left hand are dancing all the time. His sound is like no other fiddler I've heard. Very first thing I noticed when he started with the fiddle was his sound that was all his own. He has his own interpretations of the tunes that are true to the tunes and uniquely his own. He made no effort to disguise his delight to be making music with 2 really exceptional musicians. He was lit up the whole time once the music started. During the first song he lit up to the music they were making. This is what I like about Scott and Willard's music, it's music. It's really music. Buddy told me at the end of the show he'd seen my foot tapping. He said that's inspiring to a musician to see people tapping their feet.

Song after song was as good as the one that went before. It was hearing Scott and Willard with a fiddler who was in their league. Willard took hold of the rhythm from the start. He was acting as the bass, keeping the rhythm loud enough for Buddy to hear it well. Willard knew what he was doing. He was keeping it going so the fiddler didn't have to think about it. Scott kept rhythm going with his mandolin too, both him and Willard holding Buddy up like water holds a boat up, giving him the musical freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. Several times he commented what good musicians Scott and Willard are. Nobody in the place disagreed. I think 17 people were there tonight. I started counting them. About everyone there has been there before several times. The people from around here come back after they've had the experience. Everyone recognizes the music we hear on Friday nights is exceptional. The guest musicians are as good as musicians of mountain music get. We who go regularly are getting to know each other and love the music we hear together. During intermission we exclaim to each other how good the music is.

This music is every bit as good as the Clinch Mountain Boys, and I'm not throwing off on the Clinch Mountain Boys. I pick them because they're a band of really good musicians that play mountain music well. Each one of these guys is good enough to play in Ralph Stanley's band. And, like I said, that doesn't diminish Stanley at all. They are musicians who don't want to live on the road. They want to live at home, have their family lives, the necessary work to make a living, and making music on weekends and jams during the week. Making music as much as possible. Buddy said a few times tonight that something or other was inspiring. Like Willard's good rhythm keeping inspired Buddy. That's how he used the word. I found in brief conversations with him that he h has his own way of talking and thinking like he has his own way with the fiddle. By the end of the concert, I was aware that I was in the presence of a master fiddler. Check him out on YouTube. I'm uploading several songs. They'll be at the top of the list under hobblealong1.