HILLBILLY SHOW PRACTICE NIGHT

bill and sonya joines

 

 

 

 

Friday night was Hillbilly Show practice night at the school auditorium. Bill and Sonya are the hosts as they have been for so many years I don't have the exact count. It's something like 15 or 16 years they've been the ones onstage in the rocking chairs talking between acts. I stay backstage and pull the ropes that work the curtains. I can see what's happening on the stage, what's going on backstage, and the audience. I have to pay close attention to Dottie the stage manager. She signals me for opening and closing. Inevitably, every show, somebody tells me with authority, "Close the curtains." I start them closing and Dottie gets frantic signing me to open them. I'm learning to pay attention only to Dottie for those instructions. It's a good time with everybody going through their performance, getting the sound right with George Sheets who operates the sound system very well. I like it because I get to see people I like to see but don't see very often.

 

 

Tonight it was Henry Thorne, 4th grade teacher to about everyone in the county, retired, appearing to play piano for the Red Hat Dancers. I saw Henry hobbling like an old man, and we're the same age. I said, "Are you all right, Henry?" He said he was. I said, "You're hobbling like an old man." He said, "I don't like getting old." He turned his right ear to me when I spoke. Evidently the other ear doesn't function. We talked about forgetfulness and people we know much older than us who have minds far clearer than ours. We talked about how wonderful heaven must be. Both of us have so many we cared about on the other side, we agreed we look forward to being with them again. Neither one of us expressed any desire to get really old, certainly not unto feeble. And we agreed neither of us is anxious to leave our friends here. We're in a kind of middle place, maybe something of a bridge. I had the impression it was Henry's first old-time music experience. After hearing Charlie Edwards play guitar and sing, Ernest Joines playing banjo and Gary Joines playing guitar, Henry said to me of Charlie, "Where did he learn to sing like that? He sounds like he went to school." I said he's a country boy who took it up, adding he played with a bluegrass band in Maryland when he worked in a factory there. Henry did not know mountain boys could make music so incredibly well. It kinda blew his mind.

 

 

The feature of the show for me was Cheri Choate singing an Emmy Lou Harris song, an extraordinarily beautiful song, and Cheri sang it right, not imitating Emmy Lou, but in her own style that sounds like she has many hours of stage experience. She said she hasn't played much on a stage, but from what I saw and heard, she has what it takes. She's doesn't back down from a great challenge, like singing an Emmy Lou Harris song and making it her own. I'd met her a few times before and knew she was involved in country music and songwriting. Seeing that she was to sing two Dotty West songs for the Saturday night show, I figured she'd be awfully good, but didn't dare expect what I heard. The only word I could come up with hearing her was that it was NICE, two syllables Southern style with enthusiasm. I include the delicacy that goes with the word nice. Nice like a lace wedding gown. Nice like Art Wooten's fiddle. Nice like Scott Freeman's mandolin. Grace is what it is I mean by nice. Cheri's grace singing is what I connected with. I noticed her small silver dragonfly earrings had the same grace she has in her singing. I took it the grace comes from within. Her singing put me into full appreciation.

 

 

I don't mean to leave off Bill Joines picking lead guitar with her. Bill did some almighty pickin. He's one of the better guitar pickers we have in the county. I won't call him the best, because if I did, he would tell me there's a dozen better. Not from false humility, but he'd mean what he was saying. Bill has played a lot of bluegrass onstage over his adult life. His dad, Paul Joines, picked guitar and sang too. Paul picked rhythm guitar with the Little River Boys in the 1950s, Cleve Andrews fiddle, Jr Maxwell banjo and Estal Bedsaul guitar. They never recorded, but they could pick some bluegrass music. Every one of them was an excellent musician. I painted the band about 5 years ago and it gave me satisfaction when Bill saw how I'd rendered his dad, Paul. Bill looked at it like he was seeing Paul again. The painting is in the county with John and Deborah Sherrill. Even better, it is in Whitehead. I didn't want that one to leave the county. Didn't want it to leave Whitehead, but thought that a little too restrictive to ask. Bill was a good friend with Jr Maxwell, too. Junior was my connection with Bill. Bill's present band is Alleghany Moon, an interesting band with its own sound. Bill's wife, Sonya was a dj at WCOK for several years, and she co-MCs the Sparta fiddlers convention with Harold Mitchell. Their daughter Taras is playing bass with Bill and Cheri in their performance.

 

 

Agnes Joines sang a song that got everybody going. Agnes is one of my favorite people in this world. She's somebody who can get in your face and let you have it and ten minutes later she's back to like there was never a problem. She's about the best I know of anybody who can get over something in almost the blink of an eye. I don't mean to say she doesn't sometimes struggle with it, but she gets there. Agnes is up and ready to go, to git-er-done. She makes everything she's involved in fun. You want something done, get Agnes to do it. It will get done. And done right. She's light-hearted and she's serious as it's called for. When it comes to getting down to business, Agnes is there. She's what I call real people. Ernest too. I'll never forget the time I heard Agnes, exasperated with Ernest, say, "I wish you'd get your head out of that music!" I thought: No you don't. Ernest only thinks music. Only. That's a big part of what she loves about him. Ernest without Agnes to keep his spring wound up would have a hard time getting by, because music is the only thing on his mind. When music is the only thing in your mind, you're not fit for much else. It's the music in Ernest that makes him who he is, the Ernest that everybody who knows him loves. Everything else passes him by. Ernest's art for the Hillbilly Show is picking a tenor banjo with a piano where they play as the the Dixie Dew Drops. Ernest made it work. It was beautiful. This is the performance that caused Henry Thorne to ask if they went to school to learn to play like that. Ernest played football in school.

 

 

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PAINTING JOHN BROWN'S DREAM

   

     john brown's dream, tj worthington 2012


There it is. I've been at this thing for four months. Not every day by any means. Long lapses of time between a few touches of the brush in one color. Then another time another color. It stands on a portable easel for light weight carrying with collapsible legs like a tripod. Handy. It stands to the left of the wall I'm facing with the home entertainment unit. Watching a movie, it's there. Reading, it's there. Listening to the news, it's there. Writing, talking on the phone, it's there. I see it all the time, and as I look at it ideas come to me for darkening this, lightening that, getting the hands to look flexible. Hair not too neat, but country men keep their hair neat and in place. I've learned that the more time I spend looking at the canvas while it's being painted upon, the more open I am for visual suggestions. Sometimes, just a touch in the right place can bring quite a lot together. Sometimes it doesn't make any difference at all. I've learned so long ago I forgot I learned it that ideas I get in my head don't look as good on a canvas as they look in my head. I think, Oh, great idea! Yeah, great idea, but it makes a lousy visual image put on canvas. What's interesting visually has to feed with visual ideas in direct relation to context. Green, black, brown and white together in an image looks one way when I see it in my mind and another way on the canvas with paint. It takes time to train the mind to have visual ideas that are not mental ideas. Mental ideas are dead in a visual art form. Anway they are for me.


Picasso's Guernica is not dead because it is made of visual ideas. Made of mental ideas it would be boring. That's what I'm getting at where mental ideas are concerned. Mental ideas, to me, are gray without much texture and variety. Though Guernica is painted in grays, it is not static. I suppose the Spanish Civil War was seen in black and white photographs in the Paris newspapers. A visual idea for a painter, like an auditory idea to a musician, has the light of inspiration about it. I don't know a clearer way to say that. It's that light of inspiration that I go for in everything I paint. Light of inspiration, what do I mean? I've been looking at it 3 weeks without touching it. I'm one to feel colors, so there comes a time after seeing the top of Gary's guitar awhile, something isn't quite right. It needs a very thin coat of white over the yellow to take the flash out of the yellow and set it back. The shade I had on it brought the guitar too far forward from where he was sitting in the back of the picture. Just that thin coat of white softened the intensity of the yellow until the guitar settled down into his lap.


George's banjo I wanted to come forward with a fairly intense yellow, it's a yellow wood with the silver hardware of an old-time banjo dancing in black and white streaks. The banjo's yellow draws it forward and at the same time pushes Ernest in his two shades of blue back to where his chair is. I learned that about yellow from Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art after he studied color by scientific method and discovered yellow and red come forward all on their own. The colors have gradations from close to far away. I used these principles he found of colors to give a 3 dimensional sensation on a flat surface. I like to honor the 2 dimensional surface and not try to make silly attempts to give the illusion of 3 dimensional. I like to get a feeling of depth by use of colors. Like this one, there is quite a bit of distance between man in foreground and man in background. It has somewhat of a sensation of depth while at the same time staying comfortably in its 2 dimensional context. It is, after all, paint on a flat surface. I don't want to get involved in that's not enough--I need more,;I want to need less. I don't want to pretend against the nature of the surface, the context that all the colors of paint share. At the same time I like to play with the sensation of depth in a kind of juxtaposition with flatness that gives it a visual tension I like. Even though George stands out, it's size not sleights of hand with the brush. Also, I'd been wanting for some time to make one with blue, white and brown the colors, the brown of wood with instruments. The idea came from blue, white and tan look very good together, and at the same time as bland as the very definition of bland. They are Kingston Trio late 50s Ivy League with button down collars and khaki pants with a crease.


 I wanted to take those colors, breathe life into them and make them dance. They don't have to be dull. They're beautiful colors when allowed to play. Got a kind of diagonal oval going that the lines of the instrument necks and the musicians' arms make a triangle and the movement of the energy around that triangle makes an oval. It looks like it seems to have an oval of flowing energy around it. It's kind of tight in the center, the knees in blue and white and dark brown. To me it looks like a washing machine with the lid up looking at the circular energy in there, the colors in motion. I like the triangle of the instrument necks in relation to the oval of flowing energy in the rectangular frame of the picture itself.


The part I'm enjoying immensely about the paintings of musicians is putting a minimalist composition down for the background. This one I divided diagonally slightly, an ochre with a breath of red in it that makes it almost pumpkin. Above is white. Lower portion ocher, upper portion white. Though under the white are a series of vertical rectangles spaced more or less mathematically across the white. First vertical rectangle on left is 2" wide, very pale peach ice cream. Then a 2" very pale olive green, lime ice cream. The next vertical yellow rectangle is 1.5" wide and the green space the same, then the next yellow rectangle 1" wide, all about the same length coming down from above. Then four coats of thin white over the green and yellow wall softened it down until the design of rectangles behind them is softened down to off-white. At first glance, it's a featureless white. Then it looks like 2 different colors, then they become completely visible.


I had hoped when I did this that the more or less mathematical difference in sizes would give a certain dance to the painting. And it did. It was a visual idea that worked visually. It subliminally suggests movement like the pictures suggest depth. I don't know if anybody else would like my minimalist composition of ochre and white with the subtleties under the white. but I could see it on a wall looking good. Then I paint the musicians on top of the composition. In the picture, the ochre lower part is the floor. In my mind's eye I can divide the composition vertically into four vertical panels like a Japanese screen. If I penciled 3 vertical lines to separate it into 4 panels, I'd be the only one to get it. I don't like putting private jokes in paintings, though sometimes I do,  That's only for my mind's eye. I don't want to make it like I'm pretending it looks like something it's not, like printing wood grain on formica. None of these principles I'm rambling about is a rule or even a rule of thumb. I do them because they come to me as a visual idea, and that only. Like a mountain musician likes to make music for the fun of making the music, I am now enjoying making images for the fun of doing it. There is no better reason than that for just about anything.

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CONCERT THE WORD

found art by justin smith



I missed the July2nd FourthaJuly parade today. Needed to get to the drugstore before one and the parade started at two. Today's traffic in town was about as much traffic as Sparta gets. Already at 12:30 the drugstore parking lot was filling up. Got my prescription and made a bee-line out of town on the road to home. I thought about stopping at Selma's coffee shop and waiting for the parade. Parking spaces both sides of the street were occupied. I could have parked someplace else, but sitting at the red light waiting to make a left turn onto the road home, I talked myself into believing Selma's was full and nobody I knew would be there. I turned left and came home when the light changed. I thought about getting some pictures of the parade for you, but the paper will have several and I'm not really interested in covering newspaper stories. In like manner, I'm not interested in writing about people who's faces and names are in the paper regularly.



It also turns out that when traffic in Sparta is like it was yesterday and today, I get anxious like in city traffic. Friends here from Atlanta, we were driving into Sparta for groceries on one of the busiest days of the year. I made a remark about the traffic. They both said, "What traffic?" It gave perspective. After driving in a city, Sparta feels that way to me, what traffic? I've found a way of relaxing myself. I just keep the foot on the brake and talk to myself about being in no hurry. My reflexes have slowed and my visual attention isn't what it used to be. I like to drive at night when the least number of cars are out. One night I drove from Ennice to Whitehead and never saw one moving car, even driving through Sparta. Driving home from Fairview Ruritan I never saw another car on the road until I passed through Sparta and highway patrol stopped me for going too fast in a 35. He asked why I was in such a hurry. I said I wasn't in a hurry, just going home from a Larry Sigmon, Barbara Poole concert. It must have been the right answer. He just gave me a warning.



Last Saturday Ernest Joines asked me what a concert was. I said it was something like a band playing for an audience. I added that his band, The Rise and Shine Band, plays a concert at the Jubilee. He said that wasn't a concert. I guess he was thinking of big auditorium concerts, like Ralph Stanley at Fairview Ruritan. I don't know. Ernest gets a word like that in his mind sometimes and searches meaning until he finds one that answers his question. It may not be the same answer I'd arrive at, but it's Ernest's answer, not mine. That caused me to start wondering what constitutes a concert, like a jam is a group of musicians playing for an audience of half dozen or less, and would fit my definition of concert when it's not a concert. I suppose a concert might be when a band plays that the audience goes specifically to hear. Of course, that applies to a jam too.



Ernest's band is a dance bluegrass band. Evidently a concert doesn't include dancers. Though at a Sade concert in Charlotte with thousands of people, there was dancing in the aisles and dancing in place at one's seat, everywhere. The whole audience was people dancing. But it was a concert. I suppose Ernest thinks of his band as a dance band, not a concert band. Yet, when I go to the Jubilee, which is not a whole lot, because I'm not a dancer, I go for the concert, to hear the band. The dancing even makes the concert better. When bluegrass and old-time bands play a concert at the Rex theater in Galax on Friday nights they invite people to come down in front and dance. The dancers give energy to the band.



I'm thinking perhaps the notion of a concert came about in my lifetime and field of attention in the 60s when white kids quit dancing and the psychedelic bands of the time quit playing music that could be danced to. Then it's a sit down concert. But then, before that I saw Duke Ellington. It was a sit down and dance concert. I saw the two Alan Freed Rock & Roll Shows in 1958 and 59 that were sit down concerts of a dozen or more singers on the pop charts, like Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley & the Comets, Fats Domino and others. Jerry Lee was scheduled to appear for the second show, but was laid out drunk. Larry Williams fell off the piano dancing on it drunk in the 2nd show. They were called shows, not concerts, which leads me to imagine concert came with the 60s sit down music. In the 60s and 70s, concert was a word with a golden glow. Gettin up for the concert.



I have to say it's a mystery to me what it is that makes a music show a concert. A week of wondering about it has made me pay more attention to Ernest's question than I did initially. At first, my response was something to the effect of, everybody knows that. But it turned out not to be so simple. Maybe it would help to look it up in the dictionary, but right now I'm more interested in the everyday life meaning by people using the word. It's not like it makes a whole lot of hair-splitting difference to me. Just one of those things to carry in the mind from time to time, a puzzle to think about driving on the highway.



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THE IMPORTANCE OF MEETING ERNEST

mayor pro-tem agnes joines



Here is Agnes working the counter at Alleghany Cares Saturday, raising money for Alleghany Planning Committee's projects. After my spell of dread, it turned out to be a memorable and enjoyable day. We started it at the Pines for big buffet breakfast, the kind of breakfast we like around here; scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, grits, biscuit, coffee, butter, jelly, all the good stuff. I think there were 10 of us around three tables put together to make one long table. An hour and a half together at the table we talked with animation, conversationally even, the ones not talking actually paying attention to the one talking, whoever it was, whatever was said. This is something I didn't know I liked so much about our team until just now when the sentence wrote itself. We actually talk with each other. What we are doing is our agenda, so we don't have to talk about our agendas, freeing us to talk about whatever surfaces. At the table was where I learned about Eldon Edwards going over yonder, where we learned how Helen's husband, George R, was getting along.



We talk about politics, no one with an agenda, in mutual agreement that whether or not you like Obama, all that Washington DC mess isn't worth anything but complaining about, so we take care of our little corner of the world where what we do matters. We talk about what's going on in our lives, what's important to us in the realm of our hearts. We can't do anything to make that up there in DC any way we want it, but we can do something in the world we really do live in, at home, to make our world a bit more to our liking. What we do operates on a person to person level, instead of a bureaucracy you can't reach by phone waiting on hold all day long. Washington DC is Kafka world, a maze of bureaucracies. We don't do that. We work with that in a small town way, but we don't do that, nor do we embrace it. It's a 'small is beautiful' way of thinking without self-consciously calling it that. Much laughter runs around the table as we enjoy being together. Sometimes a decision we need to make as a group comes up conversationally and gets settled conversationally. Agnes will ask anyone to make a motion. Somebody does and she says, "A second?" Somebody says, "Second," we go on talking.



All of them are among my favorite people. They're people I feel at home with, people I don't have to smile a lot with. They're not people of the uncertain smile, the smile as self-advertisement. What you see on somebody's face is what they're feeling at the moment, not like they're gazing into an invisible mirror. Like I felt among the people at Millard Pruitt's Regular Baptist Church in Glade Valley, I feel among the people of Alleghany Planning Committee, honored they'll have me among them. Honored is the word. No matter how the word itself is interpreted, it carries my meaning. Every one of them is someone I look up to and enjoy being around. Every one of them would wonder why. It would be like, If he thinks I'm somebody special, then I know he's crazy. Maybe that's why I find them special in this time late in a life of experience with a tremendous variety of people, every race, a lot of nationalities, mean people, happy people, people that love cats, people that think a cat a target, people with fast, brilliant minds, people with slow, dull minds, most of us the rainbow in between the two poles. I like the rainbow.



Breakfast done, the last coffee downed, we filed out the door to the parking lot where we went to our separate cars and entered the flow of traffic on the way to Alleghany Cares. We were given a tour of the place by Jonnie Whitlow, getting us acquainted with the sorting rooms in one building, then to the sales floor in the adjoining building where you walk into a gallery of an infinite variety of stuff. In my childhood, my mother was bookkeeper for a TG&Y dimestore. Daddy and kids would get in the car and go pick up Mommy when she got off work. I got to know the inventory of toys very well, was allowed to pick up and play with toys understanding they're not to be broken or stolen. Even now when I walk through a variety store like that, I have a tactile need to pick things up and look at them. It's largely not allowed, so I go like in a museum, look but don't touch. They have a tremendous variety of knick-knacky little figurine dolls, just a couple inches high, of plastic and porcelain, everything. I'd never seen so many little toys. One that caught my eye was an especially lifelike leopard sitting like a housecat, maybe 3 inches high. Both my grandmothers liked little figures like that.



I went through the tour in amazement at what I was seeing. It was a museum of things. If you need a thousand coffee cups, they have them at Alleghany Cares. Time to start, Agnes sent all the men to the loading dock in back. She put Ted out front to open the door for everybody coming and going. I went to the back with Ernest and Jack. Two guys were working what little there was to do. We offered to help several times and were told there's nothing for us to do. We sat together in some chairs and spent the time talking. We also went around looking at all the items back there. Every kind of thing. Again, if you need a thousand golf clubs, Alleghany Cares is the place. Ernest found a ski without the clamps for boots. He asked what it was. A ski. It didn't compute. Somebody passing through suggested he could use it as a kind scythe to cut weeds with. We agreed that could be it's only possible function.



Jack left at 12 with Linda, who was recovering from serious illness and didn't have the strength to last the whole day. Somebody brought in a small roll-top desk, Ernest bought it. We carried it to the house in his pickup. Took a smaller desk out and carried it back to the loading dock. Ernest wanted some water and I did too. We went to the kitchen/break room where they had bottled water in the refrigerator for free. Everybody there is volunteer, so a bottle of water isn't much to begrudge. Johnnie and Barbara were in there talking. They both knew who Ernest was, but neither of them had ever had a sit down shoot the breeze conversation with him. Ernest, a mountain man, is shy of people he doesn't know. I was thinking it best to go on, because they were involved in conversation and I didn't want to break it up. Ernest sat down and opened up like with anybody he knows. He told them some jokes that had them bending over in their chairs. Right away I settled in, thinking, This is a good thing. They were having a moment of discovering the real Ernest Joines behind the blank face people he doesn't know see, the only face they ever see, because he doesn't know them. It was like when Ernest walked in the door a light spirit came into the room and lit everybody up.



It turned out to be a good day for all concerned. Agnes reported that we did very well. It hadn't been figured yet, but we'll know soon. I know she had a ball at the counter. She probably knew at least 100 people that went through there. And probably half the ones she didn't know, she knew by the time they went out the door. Somebody Agnes doesn't know is someone she doesn't know yet. Ernest is fine watching the Beverly Hillbillies or picking a tune on a guitar, mandolin or banjo. He was on a Gary Moore tv show in 1961, one of those every night shows before or after supper, wherever in the country you lived, playing his one man band. He was in early 20s. It was What's my Line or I've Got a Secret. I have a fair certainty I saw it, because at our house we never missed Gary Moore. I recall seeing on b&w tv a one man band played. It may be false memory, but it was from that time that I ever knew there was such a thing, and what it was. Never saw or heard of another one until my parachute landed me in Alleghany County. Ernest has it on video at home. The sound recording of it is on the 4-cd set of Alleghany County music Ernest put together a few years ago. When I say somebody is a true human being, Ernest and Agnes are both illustrations of my meaning.



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ERNEST JOINES

Ran into Ernest today. I'd been at Image Specialists talking with Claire Halsey about getting copies of the Mountain Musicians 4cd set to the Old Time Herald magazine in Durham for review and the NC Folklife Institute in Chapel Hill for the archive. Stopped at Backwoods Bean and had some good coffee treats and visited with Dan Lohr and Dave the coffee bar tender. Dan I've known for several years. He picks a guitar and is a good singer of what I'd guess would be called contemporary folk. He makes some of his own songs. Came here from Winston Salem.

On the way back to the truck I saw Ernest's car parked in front of the Jubilee. I went in and he was vaccuming between the seats preparing the place for the night's dance. I never pass up a chance to talk with Ernest because he puts me in a good humor. When he was gathering the music for the cd set of the county's musicians, I rode to Woodlawn with him taking the tapes and disks to Bobby Patterson at Heritage Records, and picking them up. Bobby would even out the sound from track to track, take out superficial noises sometimes, and deliver the finished product, a stack of a hundred cds ready to go.

He sells cds of regional musicians, so I always buy some from him for the radio show. He has a label, Heritage Records. He has recorded a good catalog of Southwest Virginia old-time since the days of lps. Bobby is something like the hub of Grayson County music. Excellent musician and just as excellent a human being. He loves old-time music of this region. He played guitar with Tommy Jarrell and Kyle Creed on their album June Apple, one of the great samples of the music from this region of the mountains.

Riding to Woodlawn and back, Ernest kept me entertained the whole way. He has a sense of humor that is ON all the time. Ernest is every minute ready to sit down and enjoy a good laugh. He told me he'd worked night and day nonstop getting all this music together. I said, I know you did, it shows. I wanted to tell him, just because it felt important to, and did, that this is something he did, that all of this music is collected together and Ernest Joines did it. It may be the single most important event in the history of the county. The reward is that it is done. It doesn't matter if it sells a lot or a little, or in between, the collection exists, and only Ernest Joines could have done it so thoroughly.

I wanted to be along for the ride, too, because I felt like this was a truly important moment. I wanted to see it up close, see the box of tapes, cds and instructions change hands. The best is that it's the kind of important you can't go around talking to anybody about. You just know it in yourself and there's no need to talk about it, because it's the kind of important that touches the truth center within and that's enough.

Ernest and I sat down at a little table in the Jubilee just inside the door. He offered me a coke, but I'd just had two coffees. He was there cleaning up for tonight and Agnes was at some meeting. "There's an awful lot to do. Did you know that?" We talked about the new outdoor stage going up at Crouse Park. D.W. Miles is funding a great deal of it. The cds are selling pretty well, better than he'd expected. They were made as a fundraising project by the committee for the Sesquicentennial, 150 years of Alleghany County. They've been able to do quite a lot with the money they're getting from the cds.

We talked about the Hillbilly Show, both of us wanting to do the Gong Show again, and talked of maybe doing a Culhane skit from Hee Haw. He told me I'd be Jr Samples. I said, Yeah, I think I can do that. Stand up in a cornfield, forget what I'm supposed to say, break out laughing and squat back down. That's about as far as my acting abilities go. When we got up and shook hands, I went out the door feeling uplifted inside from all the laughing with Ernest.

MUSICIANS OF ALLEGHANY COUNTY

The first quarter of this year, Ernest Joines collected everything he could find recorded by a musician of Alleghany County from back as far as the Red Fox Chasers, the first band of the county to record, 1927, to present. That included cassette recordings made at home or wherever. He wanted everybody included.

Gospel is well represented in the collection. We have some good gospel music in our county, and plenty of it. I'd been through my first winter in the mountains. About this time of year in the spring I dropped in at Liberty Baptist in Whitehead. It turned out there was no preaching that day. A gospel quartet was there to sing, the Walker Family. They'd just made their first and only record. I'd never heard anything like that in my life. It was one of those times when the soul wanted to jump out of the body feeling bound and confined, needing more space.

Ernest collected over a hundred songs by different musicians, enough to fill 4 cds. No one besides Ernest could have done so thorough a job of it. In a couple of cases he used all there was, like fiddler Cleve Andrews. He was not able to find anything, but kept asking around and found something. The recording quality wasn't too hot and Cleve's fiddle was off in the background, but none of that matters. All that matters is it's Cleve Andrews's fiddle, because that's all there is.

This is Ernest in the picture on the left playing the mandolin. He runs the Jubilee on Main Street with his wife Agnes. The band is THE RISE AND SHINE BAND, the house band at the Jubilee. They play bluegrass to dance to, which fairly well distinguishes mountain bluegrass from city bluegrass. Mountain bluegrass is made for dancing, like original bluegrass.

Back in the time before banjos and guitars, the fiddler carried the rhythm to make people dance all by himself. Probably the dancers kept time for him. But he had to get them going and keep them going with just a fiddle. I hear in the older old-time fiddlers that rhythm kept by the fiddle. I believe old man Joe Birchfield of the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers could keep a dance going with just his fiddle. Fred McBride played fiddle like that too. It's something you don't hear much any more, like Bill Monroe's use of Texas swing in bluegrass.

Next to Ernest with the banjo is Billy Dancy of Laurel Springs. Charlie Edwards plays the rhythm guitar and does the singing. Wade Petty is playing the fiddle. Wade and Charlie are two of the Crouse House Monday night regulars in the bluegrass room. Kermit Pruitt is playing the bass. He's been a bluegrass bass player for many a year. He's also the town barber with his shop across from the courthouse. Gary Jones keeps the rhythm going with guitar too. THE RISE AND SHINE BAND. They were playing at the Mountain Heritage Festival, October 06. Every one of them good people. Good musicians too.

Copies of the cds are for sale at Kermit's Barber Shop and next door at Image Specialists. They're at the Jubilee too when it's open, Tuesday and Saturday nights. It's a fund-raising project by the committee about the Sesquicentennial, 150 years as a county.