HEARING THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS

l to r: fiddlin art wooten, pee wee lambert, ralph stanley,
carter stanley, ray lambert. the stanley brothers. 1948

I know what I'll be playing this coming Saturday morning. Art Wooten's fiddle with Jr Maxwell's banjo, 15 songs by the Green Mountain Boys. This collection came to me through Kilby Spencer, who said his dad, fiddler Thornton Spencer, bought it from Art, 8track. It opens with Art playing Cricket On the Hearth solo. Then Jr's banjo comes in on the next tune, Flop-Eared Mule. After that one is Sally Goodin, one Art can tear up. At the end of the documentary of Tommy Jarrell, Sprout Wings And Fly, Tommy finds Art Wooten at the Galax fiddlers convention. Has him play a tune for the camera. Art complained about his ticker being weak. Tommy Jarrell slapped him on the knee when he finished Sally Goodin and said, You aint near dead yet!

The county library has the dvd of Sprout Wings And Fly. Wonderful film. Full of old-time music at its best, old-time singing and old-time talking. My own personal most unforgetable moment was when the female interviewer from California asked a woman I took for Tommy Jarrell's sister, "Have you ever worked?" Sister's eyes got big for a second. She said, "Worked? Yes, I've worked." I thought, I know you have, sister. I don't know of a woman in these mountains who hasn't worked. All day at the factory, the rest of the time in the garden, in the hay field, in whatever comes next. The split-second look in her eye that said, What kind of a question is that? Of course I've worked. I've never done nothin but work. Pulls herself back together for the woman from another world, remembering, this is her first time in these hills.

I'm sitting here doing something I never dreamed I'd be doing, hearing the Green Mountain Boys when Art Wooten was the fiddler. Lee Highway Blues. Art took it and went with it all the way, Jr's banjo clucking along with him. It becomes a duo of fiddle and banjo for a long period of time like Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. A Grayson & Whitter tune composed by GB Grayson playing fiddle in the car with Whitter driving down Hwy 11 (the Robert E Lee Highway) on the road to make music at a dance, The Lee Highway Blues.

Jr laid it to it on Home Sweet Home and I'm enjoying now hearing him play lead with Bob Caudill playing guitar with him. They played well together, now I hear it. Bob was quite a picker. This was quite a band. Never dared hope for so much. Art's working on a solo Fire On The Mountain. Awesome is the word. The man can play a fiddle. He's not called Fiddlin Art Wooten because he just fiddle faddle's around. He takes charge and gets it done. Jr said Art could find every note that was in a fiddle. I feel blessed. I've thanked God multiple times a day this last week for these samples of Jr's music that are surfacing and keep on surfacing. For the musical heritage of Alleghany County, they are supreme. It's curious that these examples of his music are turning up now that he's gone. Jr was indifferent to whether his music continued. It was about making the music. It was the moment and a recording does not carry all he entered and went through the moment with. Just the sound. The music. I don't have any feelings like I'd like for Jr to hear it. He already has heard it. He was there. There's no way around it, he would enjoy hearing it, by himself, to remember playing whatever tune it was and the musicians with him, to remember the joy. I often thought of the way he visits a grave. Walks up to it, sees the headstone, turns around and goes on. Nary a pause.

Since I've been involved with the radio show, playing music of our county as I find it, always searching, not active searching always, always on the lookout, this has been one of the great adventures in my 7 year search for Alleghany music. Like when I began finding the recordings he'd made with Monroe, Stanley Bros, Flatt & Scruggs, and found what I take to be all of them, and put them on a cd to play at the radio station, it was one of the great discoveries of my life. The Bill Monroe cd, Legends of Country Music/RCA, has everything. So does The Essential Bill Monroe & The Monroe Brothers, RCA 67450-2. It has a couple songs with Charlie Monroe too. All that Art recorded with Monroe are there. Except Muleskinner Blues live at Grand Ole Opry. I find it curious that such a high percentage of the songs have Art on fiddle, 25%, when the percentage of songs Art recorded with Monroe on the scale of the collected fiddlers with Monroe over time would probably be no more than a single percent. I can't help but think that has something to say to us about Art Wooten's place in bluegrass.

A NEW FRIEND

my new friend the horse



What a long nose you have. All the better to sniff you with. A vacuum cleaner with two pipes. Mike Love has been keeping a couple of calves in the meadow by the house. They escaped and
went over to the next farm where a bull was. Mike and crew were out on 4-wheelers looking for them for quite awhile. They found them and put them in another meadow. The brought a horse to this meadow yesterday. I went out a little bit ago to see about getting acquainted with the horse. Nothing to it. The horse practically came running when it saw me walk toward the fence. A tame horse. That's nice. Tapo wanted to investigate too. She watched me talking to the horse from afar. She came hobbling along like she does. At a certain distance, 8 or so feet, she stopped and wouldn't go any closer. When the horse leaned it's head down to meet her, Tapo's eyes got bigger and rounder, on the verge of turning to run, but held it and watched the horse from as close as she dared. She'd never seen a horse before. When I saw her shrink from its size, I was sympathetic. I've never believed a horse had to obey me. I'm no match for a horse. If a horse wanted to take me down, it wouldn't be but a few seconds. They don't have to, but they do. They let us tailless monkeys ride them and corrall them, beat them, treat them like they're not at all conscious.



I will never ride the horse. That's not my goal. I walked up to the horse talking to it, complimenting its coloring, its stature, its eyes. I held my hands out open far enough from the horse's nose to give it a choice if it wanted to sniff. When it reached for my hands I approached it and let it smell both hands, above and below. She sniffed my shirt, rubbed the side of her face on my shirt once. Tame horse, I thought. A happy horse living with people who understood it. I thought I'd get a horse brush from Farmers Hardware and start brushing the horse, for the horse and myself. Seems a human dimension thing to do. Until a century ago, thereabouts, we rode horses, worked horses like tractors, We've known horses intimately in the past and now they are a hobby for a few people and that's about it. I have a fair ability for communicating with the 4-leggeds, not psychic, but paying attention. That's all. Pay attention and they tell me what they want. Like with the horse, I wasn't scratching or petting in ernest, because I didn't want to start something I couldn't stop and I didn't know how much she wanted to be touched. I touched her neck, kept my hands off her face. I couldn't help but imagine what I'd think about it if some other species came up to me and rubbed my face. In a little bit, she leaned her head against the top of a fence post and scratched herself behind the left ear. I scratched behind her right ear and her eye flashed me a look that said, Yeah, that's it.



I came to the house and returned with camera. I let her smell the camera and got some pictures of her. When she started acting spooked by it, I put it down and told her it's all right, I don't have to do it if i scares her. She perked up and let me take all the pictues I wanted. I petted her gently, rubbed her sides, making the decision to get a horse brush and keep her coat fresh for her. We'll have a good, friendly relationship. I've wanted to know a horse for a long time. Not as a creature to dominate and ride and make do my will, though I know that's what the horse wants to do, but one to know, to be a friend with, a chance to experience horse consciousness, which everyone who knows horses say is way up there in intelligence. I think of Gulliver's Travels. If my relationship with the horse is a friend who brushes it, brings it grain sometimes, asks nothing but don't step on me, talks to her, only makes friendly gestures around her, I figure we can't help but have a good relationship. Maybe we can walk around in the meadow together. Just walk and talk. Photo shoots every once in awhile. She may start posing when she catches on to what I'm doing with the camera. One of my dogs did and one did not. By the time I'd finished getting pictures, none of them really worth looking at, she wasn't shy about the camera. I was after pictures that caught her eyes without focusing in on an eye. I was wanting a picture of her eyes seeing. Kind of caught it a little bit.



By the time I came back to the house, I was comfortable believing we can get along very well. Already we've communicated. She has noticed I pay attention. When she taught me to scratch behind the ear, I knew we were connecting. We pay attention to each other now, so we can get to know each other well. This could help salve what I miss most about TarBaby, our communication. I like communication with 4-leggeds. They are not far from us except a major leap of consciousness, like the leap between them and bird consciousness. When I had a dog and chickens, I saw the dog could commnicate with the chickens about like I could with dog. The chickens were two great leaps away from mine, and it's a chasm to cross. But I still was able to
understand to some degree their consciousness in their behavior, how automatic it was. It's that automtic behavior they survive by. A horse to know, to have a mental communication with, will go a long way toward salving the loss of TarBaby. Their minds are gentler than ours by so much it's unimaginable. Earlier today I was typing at the computer and Tapo was hunkered down beside me on the paper to the left of the computer. She was dozing quietly, being nearby.



Things started happening I wasn't expecting and couldn't control, from striking the wrong key with little finger. I set to cussin and Tapo's ears went back. It wasn't like she was afraid of me from tone of voice, but it was like it literally hurt her ears and it wasn't loud. That really gave me pause. I know Tapo has an extensive vocabulary of my words she understands the meaning. She knows the difference between "I love you Tapo" and "Get out of the way." She responds to each according to my words, also tone of voice that aids the meaning. They're very attentive to tone of voice. It made me laugh that I started cussing and Tapo shut her ears down. In advanced Eastern teachings, they say such words carry vibrations that are harmful to the ears of the truly righteous. I've never known a 4-legged, or bird, that wasn't truly righteous, as innocent of human folly as the Savior. The way I see it, is where they are, the Garden is, because they're still in it. We're the ones put out of it, not them. We think too much for our host planet's good. It's the Garden. Our minds want to go off into space, when I figure we're already in space. Right here is the planet that nurtures us. It's home. Why not treat it like home. All the Amazon rivers are mud. The Mississippi is mud. The rivers in Asia are mud. How do fish live in relentless peasoup fog? Catfish that scoop off the bottom are about all that can make it.



I have a horse friend now. A new friend from inside the Garden. Communication is what I find I miss with Jr. We had very different expriences, similar foundational ways of thinking and seeing. Even when his mind was gone. At about the same time as the picture in yesterday's entry, he said out of the blue, "I need to go to the hospital." I asked what for. He said, "Something's wrong with my mind. I want to find out what it is." The main reason I couldn't allow the lumberyards for the old have him, was because they didn't know him. I knew him. I knew how to communicate with him with mind gone. I knew that even though he didn't have mind, he understood. Maybe for a second only, but that was the only second it was for. The moments I had to face doing the dirty work, I reminded myself, "I fought for this," and that set me in motion without regret.

GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS FOUND

jr when his mind was clear as a baby's

Another big day. An email from Kilby Spencer with downloads of 17 songs with Art Wooten playing fiddle. One of them was recorded in 1938 at the Whitetop Festival. It was spectacular fiddling as only Art could do. Arkansas Traveler. He was rubbing right up against Bluegrass. In January of the following year Art played Muleskinner Blues at the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe. The rest of the download was 16 songs. When I heard the banjo, it sounded a lot like Jr. I put on a cd of music Green Mountain Boys made on cassette practicing around 1990. It was the same tone in the banjo and very similar picking. I listened to some more tunes and they had banjo with the same tone of the 2 songs with Cleve Andrews. I started thinking that if Home Sweet Home is a banjo solo, it's Jr for certain. I played it.

It was a banjo solo. And it was Jr. He told me it was his winning song for fiddler's conventions. He didn't play it like Earl Scruggs, but he learned a move on it he got from Scruggs. Scruggs had special-made tuners that he could twist to bend the sound and they'd go right back to where he had them in tune. Jr didn't have such tuners, so he reached up and pulled the string he wanted to make that special sound. I'd heard him play Home Sweet Home at the house with his banjo a few times when he was able to pick it a little bit. He showed me how he bent the sound. This is

as big a treasure as the 2 tunes with Cleve Andrews. Art Wooten played fiddle with Jr's band, the Green Mountain Boys, several years. Kilby said he believes his dad, Thornton, bought it from Art, that it must have been an 8track Art recorded, possibly at home with an 8track player. Jr had an 8track player in the house that worked and one in his pickup Old Yeller that worked. He had some 8track music of Art that he would go listen to from time to time. He had quite a bit of Art, Wayne Henderson and Jr. The sound quality is terrible. Art Wooten was ingenious about self-recording. He made several one-man-band contraptions. His day job was carpentry, cabinet-making. He made the cabinets in the house Jr built after the farmhouse burned. Larry and Sharon Brown live there now.

Now I have all these treasures in the computer and don't know how to get them out. I had to do a trial run of WinZip to download them, but they didn't go to the Windows Media place, so I can't find a way to make a cd, because this computer doesn't do it. The old one does, the old one that is so slow it will take 2 hours when I set out to do it, if I can. That's tomorrow's all day project. I sent them to Lucas Pasley and he might be able to get them onto a cd. I need a cd to play them at the radio station and to make copies from for Jr's friends and relatives. I probably would do well to take it to Bobby Patterson and have him make a hundred copies and be done with it. Get paper sleeves at Walmart. I know I'll be giving out a whole lot of copies. I don't want to sell any. That gets into ASCAP laws and I don't want anything to do with that mess.

It's important for me to get this music out in the world. It's something I believe is very important in this county. This is why I started the music store. I knew better than to open a business in the Bush2 phase of the Reagan Revolution, when the direction the economy was taking was downward, I thought I'd better do it while it was possible. I wanted to get mountain music into people's sound systems. A lot of people love this music and there was none available this side of Floyd, Virginia. At shows and fiddlers conventions you can get cds from the bands in the parking lot areas. It turned out to be a great big expense to me, but I have never for a moment regretted any loss. That was all right. I got an awful lot of this music out in the world. An awful lot over 4 years. Gas prices steadily going up slowed business down to a crawl, then in January of 07 after a Christmas that went to Walmart, the news announced every day for a week that the cd business was over. That was it. It turned out everybody believed television.

Yesterday I heard some old boy in India talking on NPR news. He was telling how the new technology is taking the young away from their "faith" or religion. I thought, You're next. We've already done that here. See what it did to us and you'll see what it will do to you. Pop culture undoes traditional cultures like a flood, washes them away and we're left with Pop. The old values of humility give way to self-centered arrogance held as the highest value. It's a difficult and confusing time. It's so bad I have moved inward and planted my feet in the values of the past. They may die with me, but they will have lived with me, at least. Turning to traditional music and a traditional culture, one of the last to die out, is where I find values that make living everyday life so easy without conflict. I prefer the values of the old ways to live by. I don't mean to live by like looking down my nose at people that don't, not at all. It's for me to live by. Has nothing to do with what other people do or ought to do. I simply live by the values of the people I live among, of the culture I have embraced with my life.

I don't mean either that the culture is only in the religion or the music. It's in every individual. It's in everyone I know of these mountains. Outsiders tend not to notice, but mountain people have deep, strong values with ethical standards. The first thing I noticed in everyone I met and came to know, they are philosophers. They were philosophers in the same way my grandmother was, which she passed to me. My parachute had landed me in a world of people who think as I think. Not in all ways by any means. We're all individuals, mountain or flatlander. People that think about ethics and morality, and believe they're important. While all the world out there is raging for more money, more money, standing in line to do anything for more money. And I do mean anything. If it can be thought of, it's been done. I like it among country people who still have God for a living presence in their lives. I do too. I don't feel comfortable in a world of people that laugh at the naivete. They can believe whatever they want to. I like living my own life of "faith" among other people who do too. They're all over these mountains. They're everywhere, really, but in these mountains they're like musicians. Jr told me once that in Low
Gap there's a banjo picker in every other house. Exaggeration, of course, but makes its point.

Of course, there is the balance. It's not all the sunny side of the mountain. And that's part of it. Bird of a feather flock together. For all the good that can be said, an equal amount of bad can be said. Strangely, it took me a long time to get it, because I studied everything that was wrong with the place. Finally, the day came when I figured I knew everything there was to know what was wrong with everything. That day I said to myself, It's time to start looking at what's right with the place. Something like a great illumination came to me. I already knew what was right with the place, so much that what was wrong faded to nothing by comparison. That was the day I fell in love with the mountains and mountain people, the worst with the best, interwoven like warp and woof, just folks living at home. The mountains taught me respect. I believe I'd rather have respect for a guide than just about anything else. The time Jr told me he looks up to everybody, I wondered if he was leaving some out. No. He looked up to everybody. He honestly lived such humility. None of it was studied or for show. I realized by the end that his humility was never self-conscious. He lived what he believed in other ways as well.

TALK ABOUT BEAR DOGS

bob plott at front porch gallery, woodlawn, 14may10

Another Friday night at Woodlawn at the Front Porch Gallery to hear Willard Gayheart and Scott Freeman pick and sing, and to hear Bob Plott, who has written 3 books on these mountains, hunting stories, dog stories, mountain stories. One of them tells the stories of Plott bear hounds his great-great-great grandfather brought over here from Germany when he was 16, in 1750 or so. Bob is in the family line of keepers of the Plott hounds, raises them, loves them. He sat in the chair and talked to us about bear hunting in the old days, stories of old-timers. Hearing him talk was like listening to old men of these mountains talk of people that used to be. He has listened to many old-timers talk. He's evidently been spending his adult life collecting photographs of bear hunting and Plott hounds. Three books are loaded with old b&w pictures from the old days in these mountains. Bob has the same love for the mountains and mountain people and mountain ways as I do. We kind of recognized in each other lovers of these mountains almost like members of a small spiritual group that worships the god of the mountains. The stories he told of some the old-timers and their stories, took me to all the older mountain people I've known.

Bob recorded them and took a lot of pictures, collected pictures, wrote about them in books. I was never able to allow myself to record different people I listened to frequently. Several people taped Elder Millard Pruitt's sermons, but I couldn't do it. It's common practice to tape about any preacher's sermons, but I've never been able to do it. In Mediterranean Europe, I could never allow myself to walk into a cathedral while people, a half dozen or so, are kneeling in various areas in prayer. I can't walk in and take pictures of stained glass windows, anything. I can only stand at the door and look in. I don't like to walk on graves either. I know it doesn't matter, but it's a matter of respect. That's just my own particular way. It's why I've never put a book together. Visiting with Tom Pruitt, listening to him talk about people from the past with a cassette recorder going, just that makes it artificial for me. I've never recorded any visits with anyone I've known. Once, I asked Jr if I could tape him talking about Art Wooten. No.

I admire Bob for what he's done. I'm glad he recorded people, made notes and collected pictures. I bought one of his books, Legendary Hunters, hunters of the Smoky Mountain region, largely who hunted bear. I've known men who were good hunters, Jr for certain. A lot of men in these mountains are good hunters. There is something about a hunter that's unique to hunters alone. For one thing, it takes a very sharp intelligence, like learning an instrument and making music takes a sharp intelligence. I was thinking a collection of Bob's stories about hunters in the mountains could only be interesing, like John Long's stories of Xtreme encounters with nature. Long's book, Gorilla Monsoon, is wild as wild gets. Stories about mountain bear hunters seem like something that could pull me out of reading about China for a while. Hunters I've known have held my interest talking about it. I remember attorney Lorne Campbell of Independence telling that he felled every sapling in SW Virginia before he learned to hit a grouse.

http://www.bobplott.com