THE UGLY AMERICAN

The news and facebook are full of Boston marathon bombs to the point it cannot be ignored. I get it, as far as urban terrorism is concerned, we are in that time. Thirty-plus years of divisive hatred being spewed by the republican party, Rush Limbaugh, the party's philosopher, has kept us seeing a possibility of civil war coming, simply because it takes war to burn off mass hatred. We have a civil war going now in the time of terrorism. Our civil war is carried out by terrorism now instead of farm boys standing in rows shooting at each other with one-shot muskets, burying thousands after every battle. They didn't have bulldozers in that time or backhoes. The graves were dug with shovels. That was a time of low-tech. Now, in the time of high-tech, suicidal individuals can make bombs with directions available on the internet. I say suicidal, not because they blow themselves up, but they always get caught. FBI means business. When they bear down on something with undivided focus, there is no getting away from them. I heard a report today that said several bombs go off every day in cities around the world. This is part of what goes with a "free" society. We have it complicated by the republicans who refuse to allow any kind of help or comfort to the American people, the 99%. They will not permit anything that might make the nigger look good. Their racist purpose is so obvious, you'd think they'd have enough self-awareness to see how they look outside themselves. They can't do that. They can't see themselves from afar. They are right. No two ways about it.

You'd think it would get embarrassing for them as their racist purpose is so up front and out in the open. The republicans just don't get it. They are the self-unaware people, the half of the American people below average. Their saying No to everything is a strategy based in a beginners political truth that when you come out against something, you automatically have 50% of the voters with you. From there, you go for the single percentage that wins 51-49. The republicans are staying against the African-American, keeping their percentage steadily at 50%. Though racism has been declared politically incorrect, PC only applies to the part of the population that went to college who were not young republicans. Because children's tv is about diversity, sports is about diversity, sitcoms are about diversity, does not mean racism has gone away or even diminished. Kids go all through school being told diversity is good, black people are equal to white. Get out of school and the world we go into says white people keep the niggers down, do not give them a break, do not give them a chance, put them in prison. It's different out here in the adult world from the world school prepares us for. School has us believing, "Our government wouldn't do THAT!" We laugh at Roman militarism and decadence in movies--in the future they'll be laughing about American militarism and decadence.

After WW2 much fiction and documentary history was written of Nazi atrocities during the war. I see in the time post-American (pre-emptive) invasions, destroying a poor, defenseless country before they destroy us, the middle-east will have a whole generation of historians, documentary film makers and novelists writing about American atrocities all over the middle east. This will happen as surely as after the oceans have risen as far as they will the surveying business will boom remapping the earth. Our government thinks that mind-control of the American people solves all problems before they start without taking into account that the world is watching. The same will happen in South American history and fiction, revealing North American involvement with death squads and the world of drug trafficking. I'm seeing the USA after this time that we're in carrying the name in the future as evil incarnate like the Nazis and Hitler did since WW2. Our Nazi party is the republican party. That will be known in the future, too. It's known now, but not in the mainstream. None of this is new in the American character. We've been a war dependent economy throughout my lifetime. Our greatest export is Xtreme military weapons, sold to be used against the people of the world, anybody. This has been the case since WW2 for sure. It was so throughout the Fifties, the time of the Ugly American. Maybe all of it is necessary because international intrigue is out of control. In that world, there are no laws, only treaties, and nobody pays attention to treaties in America. Not one treaty with the American Indians has ever been honored, unto present day.

So what do we do? What do I do? I'm the only one I can make decisions for. I don't know what to do but keep on keepin on. That's all I can see. When it comes to power in America, I have none and never wanted any. Money is power in America. I've never wanted money either. I've never wanted to be involved in any level of power intrigues. I want people who strategize for power to look at me as too insignificant to even count as one to notice. Oh, he's nobody. That's right, Nobody, the name Odysseus gave for himself to the Cyclops. I want all the players to see me as one not on the playing field. I'll watch the game, let the players slam bang into each other, fool each other, rob each other, do all the competitive boasting they want, and I'll go on about my business feeding the birds and liking Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and David Pakman. I see over and over in my mind over the last several years that movie INDEPENDENCE DAY starring Jeff Goldblum. It concerned gigantic space ships from someplace else taking up all the minerals from the surface of the earth. What was left of earth was threatened. This was symbolic of the corporate rape of the earth's surface going on even more since that film than before. Goldblum tried to defeat the big takeover by hi-tech and failed. The mothership was finally destroyed by an alcoholic crop-dusting pilot. And the world was saved. Monsanto, Halliburton, etc, must be stopped if the earth is to have a future. It will happen.


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EDWIN LACY AND JIMMY ZEH BANJO RAMA

scott freeman, edwin lacy, jimmy zeh, willard gayheart

 

 

Last Friday night at Willard Gayheart's Front Porch Gallery, the Fiddle and Plow Show featured the banjos of Jimmy Zeh (bluegrass with resonator) and Edwin Lacy (open-back) with Scott Freeman's mandolin and Willard's guitar. Everybody did vocals. Jimmy Zeh plays with the Highlanders with Willard and Bobby Patterson, a Galax bluegrass band of 40 years. Jimmy is an easy-going kind of guy it takes a good bit to incite a problem with. I've an idea if Jimmy were threatened he'd come out of his corner doing some serious damage. Give him a banjo and Jimmy Zeh is about making music. Both he and Edwin were asked to tell how they started playing banjo. Jimmy told a story similar to mine, in that he had been listening to rock and other music when one day he went to the Galax fiddler's convention without much anticipation. When he heard the music it was a question for him similar to mine: where have I been? This music has been in the world all my life and I'm just now hearing it! I heard my first mountain music at the Independence fiddler's convention. I remember hearing Kyle Creed, Albert Hash, Ernest East, The New River Ramblers (James Burris fiddle) and a fun old character from Zephyr NC, Melvin Slaydon. He danced while he played the fiddle. Sent the crowd into a roar. Slaydon later became mentor to Jacob Bowen of Zephyr Lightning Bolts, who grew up next door to Melvin. Jimmy's response was to start learning how to play a banjo. Mine was to put my mountain music interest on hold because punk had just started in rock and I was following its progression.

 

 

edwin lacy of skeeter & the skidmarks

 

 

I knew if I started paying too much attention to mountain music it would swallow me whole. So I stayed focused on rock for the music I listened to. The late 1970s. Patti Smith was happening, Nina Hagen, The Clash, Siouxsie & the Banshees for the start of a very long list. What I heard first time I listened to mountain music (old-time) was acoustic punk. No kidding. In punk there is no lead guitar. No long solos. Punk is everybody in the band playing all out. Few of the old-time tunes were familiar to me, so they were as fresh to my ears as a new punk album by the Ramones. In every band I heard at the fiddler's convention, acoustic, everybody in the band played all out. It was hard driving mountain music. Punk is hard driving. The only difference I was hearing was acoustic and electric. Also, in punk, the bands write their own songs, whereas in old-time they play traditional songs, each band in their own way. I was seeing pop music coming full circle, starting with old-time, then country, then bluegrass, then rock, then punk, then old-time. I can go to a Papa Roach concert or a Thrice concert with the same enjoyment I get at a Crooked Road Ramblers show or Skeeter & the Skidmarks. To my ear, it's all the same. In late Seventies I mentioned to a few people in conversation that I saw a link between punk and old-time. No Way Ho Zay! A quarter century later punk rockers around the country were discovering old-time, acoustic punk, and put away the electric guitars, took up acoustic instruments and became very respectable old-time bands. It's been something of a trend ever since, electric rockers taking up acoustic traditional music, even jazzing it like the Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show.

 

 

willard and his new henderson guitar

 

 

Anyway, that's why it took me awhile to come to mountain music after first discovering it. Later, when punk became mainstream and was no longer interesting, I started listening to mountain music and, like I knew it would, it reeled me in like something I had no control over, like destiny. For the first time in my life I found music that made me weep for the beauty of it. The Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers consistently tear me up. I have wept through an entire Ralph Stanley concert for the beauty of it. On my radio show I wept every time I played Carter Family. I could never say anything. I'd mention Sara's name and would choke up, silence, push the button to play the next song. On Carter Family days I played music without talking except weather at the half hour. Couldn't say anything. Didn't need to say anything. All my listeners loved the Carter Family. At the time I started the music store I became acquainted with Scott Freeman who needed a place to teach in Sparta. He'd been at one place that didn't work out. He offered to pay me for the time spent there, but he wasn't making any money. He made a little bit, but it went to gas. I couldn't take what little pocket change he had left. I wasn't about money anyway at the store. I wanted it to be a place where mountain music could be available. I wanted to give people who love the music a chance to have some for their home sound systems. As it is, to find a cd by the Slate Mountain Ramblers, you have to go to one of their shows. That's not a problem, but they don't play all the time. For my part with Scott, I was honored to have him using my store's space. I felt like we were both doing the same thing.

 

 

scott and willard of skeeter & the skidmarks

 

 

Scott's band at the time was Alternate Roots, to this day my favorite band. He gave me a pass to get in at Alternate Roots shows. I saw them fourteen times, and drove to Hiltons, Virginia, to the Carter Fold to see Alternate Roots' last show. I found a Carter Family tshirt that night, my anti-cool tshirt. Willard played with Alternate Roots. I think of Alternate Roots an art band, like in rock I think of Garbage as an art band or Patti Smith Group or Mazzy Star. By art band, I mean full of truly excellent musicians making original superb music; in Alternate Roots' case, some traditional, some their own compositions. I later came to think of the Alternate Roots sound as another form of "bluegrass," or jazzed old-time. Bluegrass is Bill Monroe's jazzing of old-time, and Alternate Roots was Scott and Willard's particular jazzing of old-time, which doesn't have a name yet. Unless it might be Skeeter. Their band before Alternate Roots was Skeeter & the Skidmarks, a band that was called "progressive old-time." That's another way of saying they were jazzing old-time like Bill Monroe jazzed it, but their own way, which is not bluegrass. The band has a sound of its own that is the composite of each individual in the band. When they take on a new song, they "Skeeterize" it. Skeeter is a high-spirited rhythm and an acoustic sound assault by musicians that blow the mind with their musicianship and the music itself. When the Skeeter sound is happening, it is fully alive. That might be what characterizes Skeeter, makes their sound their own. Their music is the equivalent of a Merriam-Webster audio to define the word music.

 

 

edwin and jimmy

 

 

Edwin Lacy picked banjo with Skeeter & the Skidmarks, an early l990s band. Anyway, that's when their two cds were released. They'd been playing together quite awhile before recording. By the time they recorded they were solidly a band used to playing together. Edwin was called to a Presbyterian seminary because the Presbyterian church needed soul. Edwin is soulful in the pulpit as he is singing and picking his banjer. He's a soulful man. He has a great deal of silence within. Skeeter without Edwin was not Skeeter. No other banjo could be the Skeeter sound. Scott and Willard put together Alternate Roots and took a leap into a new sound that also was their own. They made four great albums and then the band went *poof* and was no more. Soon after, Edwin got himself stationed in Bristol TN/VA. There wasn't much traditional music in the Indiana sea of corn. Edwin ached to be making music with Scott and Willard again, and to make music with other musicians in the mountains where they play the music he loved. Skeeter & the Skidmarks got back together. They've played several shows since Edwin's return. They've played I think seven times at the Fiddle and Plow Show. When it's Skeeter night, the audience is ready. We all love the Skeeter sound. We feel blessed that it's twenty or so of us given the privilege to hear this band we all love as much as we love music itself. It is indeed a privilege to have this music happening an hour's driving distance from home. Scott and Willard's music resonates with my soul in whatever band they're playing in as well as together.

 







 

raymond oakes

 

 

The bell on the door rang not long into the music. In the corner of my eye I saw a man sit in the empty seat with cushions the cat used to nap on. Later, at intermission time I saw it was Raymond Oakes. I'd met him twice at Bobby Patterson's music store in the building almost connected to Willard's shop. I remember my first impression in conversation with him that he talked freely for a man of his generation from the mountains. That was the musician in him. Jr Maxwell, the banjo player could talk freely with people he didn't know. I suppose it comes from stage experience, people you don't know coming to you after the show, having to talk with all kinds of people in the music business, people in bands, a wide range of people. Bobby told me Raymond had played guitar with the Lilly Brothers at the Hillbilly Ranch in Boston for a year, and played on a country music show on tv in Richmond, Virginia, for several years. Raymond told me Everett Lilly asked him to stay with them, but Raymond had to get back to Virginia. That yankee world didn't suit him. Virginia is home and he loved his family, wanted to be close to them. This was what it took to provide for them, and he did. It just meant he had to be away a lot. That's a musician's life. I sat and spoke with him during intermission. He accompanies himself and sings country songs. The Blue Ridge Parkway produced a cd of Raymond Oakes singing some classic old country songs. I hear of him playing every once in awhile someplace in SW Virginia, close to home, like the Floyd Country Store and at Flat Ridge Community Center. I felt like he was the show's special guest. Not because he's a star, because he's not. He's an interesting man of these mountains to talk with who has a lifetime of experiences.

 

 

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ROUND AND ROUND IN TEXAS

 

 

It was a night race at Texas speedway that I think is somewhere near Ft Worth. It was a good race. Only one incident took place, a blown tire that sent the car into the wall then sliding along the wall backwards with the brakes on. Much talk about the new cars this year. The drivers say they are "fun" to drive and "faster." I don't know what has been done to the cars this year that makes them so much better. My thinking is it's in the handling of the cars. Already, their speed is held back by the track itself, so they don't need much faster cars. Maybe they mean faster response to the pedal, like twisting the handle grip on a motorcycle, acceleration right now, which I think is already the case. I see the cars are going around the curves faster than before, especially notable at Martinsville and Bristol. The cars function on the half mile track like it's a one mile track. They go faster on the short tracks than ever before, and they do the same on the 2 mile tracks. I've noticed at 150mph+ they don't lose traction so readily when they touch anymore. I saw one guy pull it back when the rear wheels lost traction. I don't see that often. I've seen Kyle Busch bring the car back to traction after wrestling the steering wheel just right. His ability to bring a car back to traction has made him the driver I follow with the most interest.  

 

 

 

 

Kyle Busch won Saturday night's race with a solid run. He was bearing down on it from the start to finish. He and his brother started the front two, both with the best times in the timing runs the day before. Perhaps one of the aspects of car racing that draws me to it the most is that infinite unknowns lurk throughout the course of a race. Nothing can be predicted until the first one crosses the finish line. Kyle Busch won the race with the best car and the best driving. It's not every race that a driver's car is up to stepping out in front of everybody else. The cars have endless variables in them that can either work right or go wrong. The drivers too. One of them had stomach flu and was unable to finish the race on account of it. From the first green flag to the checkered flag there is no knowing what will happen in between. It's like basketball and football, hockey, any competitive sport in that no two games are anywhere near the same. Jr Earnhardt was creeping toward the front of the pack, coming into being a serious contender, then shit happened and he was set back two laps in time lost getting a repair in the pit.  

 

 

 

 

 

Here is Kyle Busch leading Truex Jr to the finish line. Busch won by simply outrunning everybody else. That's what it takes to win. Talking with the microphone when it was over, first words KB spoke was to point out the crew did it for him. They deserved the coca~cola to take a swig from for the camera as much as he did. The cars this year are beautiful in a whole new style of beautiful. I appreciate the beautiful designs of race cars, cars made to go 200mph+. The body shapes are designed with computer now for the least resistance in air flow. They fly like birds through the air and swim like fish in water, streamlined and light-weight cutting through the elements that become physical at certain speeds. I've noticed they have bigger flaps that turn up to help slow the car down when it needs to in a hurry. Bigger spoiler too, the wing that goes across the back of the trunk lid for better stability at high speeds. The drivers interviewed are excited about how much better this year's cars hold the road. I've noticed this year on the 2 mile tracks where they run between 150 and 200 the cars don't lose traction so much when they touch. It used to be, when one car touched  another, look out.

 

 







 

 

 

"Is that where they drive and turn left, drive and turn left?'

"Yes, that's where they drive and turn left."

 

"Is that where they drive around in circles?

"Yeah, that's where they drive around in circles."

 

Like my grandmother said about merry-go-rounds,

"You get on and go round and round.

When you get off, where you been?"

 

Hey, y'all, it's a race. A circular track is a contained space

to simulate a straight line across Texas. It's simply a race.

 

 

 



 

 

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A WONDERFUL DAY

      white light, by tj worthington

 

April 13, Saturday, I believe will be a date to look back at that pretty much blew my mind all day long. I spent the late afternoon with white middle class people here from other places at the Episcopal church in Sparta. I'd never been in an Episcopal church service. Popping up in my mind is a memory of something old man Tom Pruitt told me 35 years ago. He said a "palin" (paling) was a name for a picket fence. According to Merriam-Webster, the pickets are called pales. Among the old-time people who only knew the old-time Baptist way as the one and only way, no two ways about it, they heard of Episcopalians, but knew nothing about them except they were the next thing to a Catholic. Back then they called Episcopalians, "Pissed over the palin." I couldn't help but think of that driving into the parking lot and walking in the door, pissing over a picket fence. It amused me and put a smile on my face, when in another part of my mind I was involving myself in something entirely outside my comfort zone, surrounding myself by at least a hundred middle class white people from Away. It's not that I have a problem allowing them who they are. Not at all. The years of my working life and entire adult life since the realization that God Is has been among mountain people to the point that mountain culture is mine now. It's the mountain people I'm comfortable among. I had stepped into a house full of people of the culture that used to be mine, but I went native and became a naturalized hillbilly. Among the people of these mountains is where my heart feels at home.

White middle class culture from the Flatland is a very different culture from mountain culture. The only bridge is television, a culture unto itself, a culture both working class and middle class share, though they watch different shows. It's still pop culture. In mountain culture you don't over-enthuse about anything. In Flatland culture over-enthusiasm is the order of the day every day. I stepped apprehensively into the doorway of this place where I was greeted by over-enthusiasm so incredibly false it was over-enthusiasm over-done to the max by a hillbilly middle-class wannabe. I wanted to say, Settle down, I know you better than that. I was looking at what we call in these hills a silver-tongued rattlesnake, a nice way of putting it. She and I have what is called around here "history." I learned long ago, stay out of her strike zone. And there I was, walking through it. It gave me the shivers. I didn't blame the church. It's people like that churches are for. I was glad to see this church was so accepting. And this is what I went there for, what everybody present went there for, "the blessing of a lifelong covenant" between two men. The church bulletin for the service had printed above the picture of the church house, "A home to all sharing God's unconditional love." No kidding, I thought. I know a dozen or more people who go there, and I see in them light of the spirit. It tells me something is going on there that is rare in Christendom, allowing people to be who they are.

Though these, for the most part, were not mountain people, I was beginning to see that valuing individuals for who they are, not for what they are or what they're supposed to be according to a severely judgmental, medieval idea of God, is also the most highly valued tenet of mountain culture. In that way, I felt at home among the Sparta Episcopalians. This was what they called a "celebration." Before the service was over I realized the celebration was the acceptance of allowing individuals to be valuable as who they are. At least three times different women I know got in my face with hands flared out on both sides of their faces, "Isn't it a WONDERFUL day!" Of course, that ran all over my old-Baptist side suspicious of enthusiasm. At first, I took what they meant by wonderful was this opportunity to be so politically correct. But I caught on that what was so wonderful about the day was it marks a calendar date in everyone's life present, that a Christian church is actually embracing something as far-fetched as allowing human beings to be human beings. And more wonderful than that was a church house full of people from the church and friends affirming, embracing two guys everyone knew individually and together. I saw all around Gary and Allan the support that God's love, or simply love, is about. It sounds redundant to say God's love. It's the same as saying Love's love. The point is, God = love. The wonderful part of the day was that love was being celebrated by all present.

The air inside had the glow of love about it. I sat kind of reeling from being in a church that thinks unconditional love is something worth honoring with one's life, and actually practicing in everyday life. I was thinking this is more Buddhist than Christian. In Christendom, Peace amounts to a meaningless word over-used on Christmas cards. In Buddhism, peace is something practical in how you live your everyday life. The celebration in the Christian church was indeed of peace. Love = peace. I paused for a moment from the service and went within. I wanted to feel the place, feel if the spirit was in there. It was. Very much. It was a feeling of lightness, both in lightness like the weight of a chickadee in flight and the lightness of sunshine. The sun was out all day after a winter of cold with unpredictable ice, snow and wind. The women who were saying, "Isn't it a wonderful day!" meant it on so many levels that it became a truth to be uttered in awe. It's actually awesome for me to see a Christian church that is enthusiastic about practicing love in everyday life. They were celebrating the love between two guys on the soul level, or the higher self, allowing as love allows, as God allows. It told me things are changing in acceptance of a natural human condition that patriarchal martial religion rejected multiple hundreds of years ago, that aboriginal peoples all over the globe recognized, until slaughtered by Christians. It showed me a spark or even a candle flame of love as a focus of interest happening in Christendom. It's happening in Sparta. It explains to me the loving spirit I feel in the people I know who go to the Sparta Episcopal church. Allan and Gary, the two guys, included.

Fr Lin Walton is the spiritual guide in the church. I can't call him preacher or priest or father. I see him a man with this role. I've had curiosity about him since he was new here. I did the way I learned in the mountains, the way the people I came to know did me, waited and watched, assessed his character by what he does and how people receive him. Over the few years he's been here, I've seen the spirit come into the people I know who go to his church. It's actually been awe inspiring. I called him one evening a year or more ago to tell him that I've seen one friend in particular, Gary, my next door neighbor, begin to blossom spiritually. I attributed it to Fr Lin I've seen other such inspiration from. He is unable to see his influence in the people he sees regularly, like watching a baby grow up is seen more by people outside the house than people living in the house with the baby. I don't see Gary very frequently, leaving a span of time between our visits, so I see the baby crawling one time, and the next time the baby is walking, then the baby is gone and the little person appears. That's how I saw Gary's inner unfolding. He has the spirit. Allan has the spirit too. I've known Allan thirty years and Gary ten, as long as he's been with Allan. I've seen their relationship over the years grow into love, starting off with the spark of love and growing from there, to the point that both shed tears during the vows and Gary, choked up unable to speak, spoke out something he had to say, "I just love Allan." This moment told me the spiritual value of what Fr Lin has done, and I imagine mostly without him knowing what he's doing or how it's being done through him. It was refreshing to be in a church service where unconditional love is not just a pretty Bible verse to memorize for a gold star, but something to practice in everyday life, the fast lane to inner peace. Hooray for Gary and Allan, and hooray for the people of Christ Episcopal Church in Sparta, and Fr Lin for being who he is.


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