SCOTT FREEMAN, EDWIN LACY AND WILLARD GAYHEART

scott freeman

 

The Fiddle & Plow show in Woodlawn featured the Siamese Cousins. They are Scott Freeman, mandolin and fiddle, Edwin Lacy, banjo, and Willard Gayheart, guitar. Scott and Edwin call themselves the Siamese Cousins, joined at the fret. The Siamese Cousins is what they called themselves on their Mountain Roads recording, 2 Chairs No Waiting. Willard is on the cover picture with them, and plays guitar on some of the songs. These three are the core of the music at Woodlawn on Friday nights. Scott and Willard open every week with two songs. They then turn it over to the guest band or duet or individual. They play with some of the people who play there. When Dori is featured, Scott and Willard, and sometimes Edwin make music with her. When bluegrass banjo artist Butch Robins is the guest, Scott and Willard accompany him. Scott and Willard are ideal accompanists. They support musically whoever they're making music with. They do not upstage them, out-play them, none of that. Scott, Willard and Edwin are respectful of each other musically, as in conversation. In conversation, they talk about whatever subject at length, neither one talking over the other. They ride the flow of the music together. This is part of what makes them such excellent musicians. No one of them outshines the others, yet they're all so good they can play all out showing their stuff, keeping up with each other like race cars going side by side around a curve, three-wide, and they make it. Whiskey Before Breakfast.

 

edwin lacy

 

I've got bad in that their music satisfies me so much that I can't think of any other music that satisfies me as much. Scott and Willard's band, Alternate Roots, satisfied my musical ear completely. So does their band Skeeter & the Skidmarks. They are two very different bands, though both have Scott and Willard's sound. Their sound is a fusion of Scott's sound and Willard's. By their sound, I mean the way they approach a tune, their flow together that blends their individual sounds like the natures of the two parents become the nature of their child. They sing duet well together, vocally and with their strings. When Edwin is with them, it's a blend of the three, the sound of Skeeter & the Skidmarks, minus Sandy. Skeeter is the sound of these four people. No one of them is replaceable for the Skeeter sound. When it's Steve Lewis's banjo, it's the Alternate Roots sound. Driving to the show, I took the Parkway, was cruising along thinking about my love for the band, Alternate Roots. I think I saw them 14 times, the last show at the Carter Fold, my only time there. It takes a lot for me to drive 3.5 hours, one way, to hear some music. It was a beautiful night with my friend Jean, who loved the band as much as I did. I recall standing outside with Jean during intermission smoking cigarettes, talking with other people outside smoking. In front of me was the night silhouette of the Clinch Mountains under a half moon. The Clinch Mountains of the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers.

 

willard gayheart

 

During second half of the show, the man sitting in front of me had moved his chair back a ways. I tend to lean forward when listening to music or to someone talking. It's unconscious. I just notice I do it. I also tend to sing along muttering under my breath. I know the words to all Willard's songs, Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog, My Henderson Guitar, A Turn Toward The Light. I've heard them so many times they've become a part of who I am. Like in my teenage years when I knew the words to all Little Richard's and Chuck Berry's songs listened to on 45rpm. Later, I knew the words to Rolling Stones songs and Bob Dylan songs from playing them so much. Then it was Patti Smith lyrics I sang along to, and Nina Hagen, the Cars, Jane's Addiction and Mazzy Star. Then I discovered mountain music and loved it so much I dove in head first. Mountain music is the only music I have ever heard that can make tears run down my face from the beauty of it. At one Ralph Stanley concert at Fairview Ruritan, tears ran down my face the entire show. Ralph Stanley's artistry is that his singing is not just from the heart, it is his heart singing. He is the voice of these mountains. I won't make such a big fuss over Willard, but he has the soul of the mountains flowing through him, as do Scott and Edwin. To my understanding of mountain music, they are playing in the tradition, playing their own sound that in some cases is new to the tradition, advancing the tradition.

 

  



roye

 

A few times I caught myself singing along out loud not many inches from the back of the man's head in front of me. He must have hated it. He probably heard me chuckling at myself, too, for being so unconscious. Above, is Roye, Edwin Lacy's wife. That's not a foot-long cigarette sticking out from her lips. It is a line on the wall behind her. This isn't a Forties movie. Again, my unconsciousness failed to notice it while snapping the picture. I didn't want her knowing the camera was taking the picture, so I adjusted the monitor screen upward, put camera on my leg to keep it still, aiming not to catch her attention with the camera, holding it like it was resting on my lap, and got some nice pictures of her profile without her noticing. I was wanting to get her face hearing the music unselfconsciously. Good people. The kind of people I'm honored to be among. Driving home I was thinking of how honored I feel as a member of the Whitehead community. I feel the same degree of honored to have what has turned out to be ten years of friendship with Scott and Willard and their families, eventually Edwin, and now Roye. The five of us went to supper at El Torito in Galax. Edwin bought for everybody with the money he made at the show, and I fell in love with the waitress. These are honorable people, and that's what I love about them. They show me it is very simple to be a true human being. This is part of my learning from mountain people. Many of them, mountain people I have known, a small pie slice, have taught me that it is easy to be a true human being, the simplest way to live.

 

 

across the road from willard's front porch gallery

 



 

 



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BLUEGRASS EXPLOSION

sandy mason and willard gayheart

There must have been a glow in last night's sky over Woodlawn, Virginia, above Willard Gayheart's frame shop, The Front Porch. For two hours the god of music was present. Awesome is the most overused word since Wow in the Sixties, yet it's still a valid word with its own meaning, appropriate to this moment. Maybe better would be the old-time meaning of the word awful. Today it means terrible, of negative interest. In the old-time way it meant full of awe, something so awe-inspiring it's awful. It's still used in that meaning, like, "the music last night got to me something awful." We say, "an awful lot all the time." The word now has two opposite meanings according to use. I'll just say it was awful, but that sounds too much like offal, and it weren't none of that. Awesome is the word. It was the cd release party for Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's new album, 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It's a fiddle and banjo album like no other. You can hear some or all of the tunes at the label's website http://www.mountainroadsrecordings.com and cds can be ordered through the website. All the cds from Mountain Roads Recordings at Bristol, Tennessee, are present moment mountain music good as it gets.

I arrived a little bit early, and even early the parking area looked like a used car lot. Inside, Willard had to bring up more folding chairs. The place was packed with people anticipating some awesome music. A happy spirit was in the air running through everybody, a friendly atmosphere to step into. I knew about half the people. It's a place where you can speak to somebody you've never met and they don't look at you like you're trying to sell them a grave plot on the moon. Right away I saw Willard was not busy for a few seconds. I went straight to him wanting to show the picture in the digital camera of the new painting of Scott and Edwin. Willard and I are artist friends who share insights with each other. I crack up when I think of the time Willard told me he's not really an artist. Willard is one of the greatest artists I know, right there with his musical partner, Scott Freeman. My artist friends are almost all musicians. Willard makes a beautiful pencil drawing and he plays rhythm guitar with a reputation for keeping perfect rhythm such that the other musicians don't have to think about the rhythm themselves. As a bluegrass singer, Willard has a lifetime of stage experience. He can sing the same song folk style or bluegrass and they're equally beautiful. He writes a good song too. Willard is every bit as satisfying to my ear musically as Doc Watson, and I look way up to Doc Watson. I say Doc here to give you an idea of the measure of my respect for Willard's musical artistry.

When the seven-piece bluegrass chamber orchestra indicated they were ready, everybody sat down in a hurry and all attention went to the band. It was the Siamese Cousins + 5 or Skeeter and the Skidmarks +3. Everybody who played a part on the project was in the band, minus Dori. I didn't get to talk with Scott but a minute when the show was over, and he was in that place musicians are still in for quite awhile after jamming all-out for two hours. I didn't ask about Dori. I'd heard something about she went to Nashville a week or so ago. I took her absence to affirm it, though still not knowing. She has a man in her life now who appears to be the one she's been waiting for without knowing who or if. She has two songs on the project that deserve mention, Gold Watch And Chain she sings just right, and a Gordon Lightfoot song, The Way I Feel. I've been hearing Dori develop her singing voice for the stage the last three years. My thinking is if she has her eye on making a shot for it in Nashville, now is the time. She has a charisma onstage something on the order of Sade's, subtle and smooth without being too smooth.

The band started off with an explosion. Lonesome Road Blues, the first song on the album, blew the roof off the place in the first ten seconds. And the roof never came back, the reason I suspected the sky lit up over Woodlawn. Butch Robins kicked it off, a really good punt, with his bluegrass banjo. Scott Freeman tore up his mandolin and left it in shreds. Steve Lewis came in with his guitar and did some unbelieveable pickin. Brandon Davis played lead guitar too, immediately commanding respect for the music he could get out of that wooden box. Edwin Lacy cut completely loose on his old-time banjo, left mind somewhere else and let the music guide his hands without any mental interference. Willard kept the rhythm going with Sandy Mason on the bass. Sandy sang Dixie Darlin, a song I love to hear her sing. They rocked our world from the first note to the last. They finished after two hours with a request for Orange Blossom Special. In bluegrass it is one of the tunes they call "war horses" in classical music, tunes audiences love to hear and bands get tired of playing. Rocky Top is another. And Duelling Banjos. They didn't pay that any mind. They got it going so hot that people jumped to their feet clapping. Scott played the train on the fiddle and Steve was right there with him doing all he could to destroy every string on his guitar. I love it when the two of them get together like that. It seems like there is no limit to how far they can go.

Scott is such a master mandolin picker that when I hear a mandolin in a Nashville bluegrass band, I hear it in relation to Scott's sound. I've heard several his equal, but none better. Over the last decade, Scott, Steve and Willard caught my ear when Alternate Roots was a band. I freely call Alternate Roots my favorite band for life. When they disbanded I grieved for six months the same as if a really close friend had died. Steve Lewis and Scott pick together such that you know they have the time of their lives doing things with the strings they can't do with anybody else or very few, intuitionally. It's dynamic every time they get together. Scott and Edwin too. Scott and Butch Robins too. Seven master musicians on the stage, people who play incredibly well together. I say the god of music was there last night, because every one of the musicians had a spirit about them, individually and together, everybody lit up in joy. The second song they played after clearing the roof out of the way was Hang Me, a Skeeter and the Skidmarks favorite. It cranked the music up to the next level. And they kept it there througout. Even the ballads had the joyous energy. After Hang Me was Billy In The Lowground, and it was on from there. Steve likes to call it Goat In The Swamp.

At intermission after the first hour when everyone in the audience stood up and turned around, I saw joy beaming out of everybody's face. I knew I was lit up the same. It was a joyous air in the place. Different ones I see there every week, we'd look at each other big-eyed and make a short statement about the music we were experiencing. The music at the Fiddle and Plow show is always worth driving an hour each way for. I could buy a cd with what it costs in gas, and it's better than buying a cd, because I'm hearing my favorite musicians playing twice as long as a cd. Live. In Concert. Last night was special. One Skeeter and the Skidmarks show a couple years ago reached into that place of a joyous musical experience for band and audience together. All the shows are extra good, but these two stand out in my memory for the joy energy in the music. They know how to let the music breathe and they know how to let it run wild. Everything I've said here sounds like overstatement, but it all is understatement. And for any of the ones in the band who might see this, I don't want to give them the big head. I can't reach with words the place their music took me to. On the way home, I stopped to see some friends. I tried to tell them something about it, but all I could do was emote: awesome, amazing, fabulous, unbelieveable, totally incredible, over the top. It degenerated into babble fast, because I was unable to do anything but blabber. So I shut up after hearing myself fumble for words I couldn't find, enough that I was boring myself. This morning I woke up singing Edwin Lacy's Little Black Pony, a song with a story as good-worded as Catfish John.

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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.

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