PICTURES OF MY WORLD

vada, 2

Day 7 of the blogathon asks for pictures of one's creative space. My creative space is my head and heart. I'll start with the heart. Above is baby Vada, the child I fell in love with the day she was born. Her mother painted a wall flat black and Vada practices her art there.

vada art, age 2yr 2wk

 





Vada drew this image sitting on the kitchen floor. Her mother asked her to draw a picture of TJ and this is what she did. She concentrated such that she never lifted her mind from the image until it was done. She was drawing from her mind. It makes a perfect mask. I could cut out eye holes and wear it for a mask if it were on thicker paper. But I wouldn't cut holes in it. You can see the eyes, nose, mouth and an ear. She filled in the whole face. It is framed now and hanging on my wall. Willard Gayheart framed it. I was tickled out of my mind to get something by her before she evolved into stick figures.

 

 

found art

 

found art

 

found art

 



Found art is a regular feature of my blog. At top is what was left after a bank changed locations and took down the old sign. They left the fluorescent bulbs turned on at night, making this fabulous piece of Dan Flavin art in Sparta. Sparta doesn't have much public art. So I appreciate it where I find it. In the middle is a huge pile of silage (ground corn stalks) for dairy cows. The mound of silage is covered with white tarp held in place by black circles. I see this once a week and love it every time I see it. At bottom is something found in the basement at Crystal and Justin's. Crystal had been spray painting something. While I was getting some pictures of it, she said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Found art." She said, "Oh my God!" (She said God a few notes higher than Oh my, Southern style.) These are examples of art I see everywhere.

 



steve lewis and josh scott

skeeter and the skidmarks

 

scott freeman

edwin lacy and willard gayheart

 

bobby patterson

the crooked road ramblers at the Jubilee in Sparta

 

Above are my artist friends. These are the artists I spend time with and call my friends. At top is Steve Lewis, Master bluegrass banjo and guitar picker, good story teller, and his step-son Josh Scott, who Steve raised as his own, who became his best friend and his bass player. The painting on the wall behind Steve is my portrait of Willard Gayheart, the guitar player with Skeeter and the Skidmarks. Willard is 81 and has been picking all his life. This means he's good. He plays rhythm so well the musicians of the region love to make music with Willard for his near-perfect rhythm. Willard doesn't strum. He hits an upper string and a lower string, individually, each lick. When he has Orange Blossom Special going on, it works him. The pencil drawings on the walls are his. The venue is his frame shop/gallery. Willard has been singing with a Galax bluegrass band, the Highlanders, over forty years. The ones living are all old guys now. Their fiddler, Buddy Pendleton, is one of the great ones. He's near gone now, I hear. Skeeter and the Skidmarks made two cds on Hay Holler label in the early 90s. Then Edwin Lacy, banjo, had to leave the area for several years, so Scott and Willard started a new band, Alternate Roots, an amazing bluegrass band. Steve Lewis played banjo in the band. They made 4 albums and the bass player had to leave the band. Alternate Roots disbanded, Edwin returned and Skeeter started back up. You can hear them on YouTube. I've made hundreds of music videos that are on YouTube. My name there is hobblealong1. The fiddle is Scott Freeman, who also plays mandolin. He is married to Willard's daughter, Jill, a good bluegrass singer who doesn't like the stage. That's Sandy Mason's head sticking up from behind Willard. She plays bass. Oh they have a good sound. Scott and Edwin composed several of the songs they recorded. The song they open shows with is one of Scott's compositions, Groundhog Shuffle. It is mandolin and banjo mayhem. They're putting together a new "project" now.           I put Bobby Patterson's picture in there because Bobby is important in my life. He has a music store in Woodawn, Virginia, and a recording studio in the basement. Old-Time Herald magazine was begun in his basement in the 1970s. Over the last 40 or more years he has recorded old-time bands of Southwestern Virginia, Heritage Records, and has a catalog that is out of this world for music of the region. He played guitar on the finest old-time album my ears have ever beheld, JUNE APPLE, with Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Kyle Creed on banjo and Audine Lineberry on bass. Jarrell and Creed have been dead at least thirty years. Both are legends and were legends while they were living. Bobby is one of the Highlanders and also sings with gospel groups. First time I met Bobby, we'd known OF each other for years, I said, "In my way of seeing, you're the most important man in Southwest Virginia." He said, "Thank you." He knew what I was saying. Thanks to Bobby we have a great collection of old-time music of this region on record and he puts together recordings of the Galax fiddlers convention every year. Plus, he's a terrific musician. His dad was a legend fiddler of his generation. Our bond is our dedication to the music.          At bottom is Kilby Spencer on fiddle with his band the Crooked Road Ramblers. Great fiddler, son of a great fiddler, Thornton Spencer, who is in his later years the great old fiddler of his generation. Thornton's wife Emily plays banjo and sings with their band, Whitetop Mountain Band. In my own personal estimation, WMB is the hottest old-time band in the region right now, and has been for years. They are most characterized by their drive and their musicianship. Kilby knows so many songs he's become a living encyclopedia of the music of the Central Blue Ridge. Kilby's aim in life is to be a great fiddler. He is well on his way and has a momentum going that will take him there. His band has good drive too.   

 



medea by tj worthington

on the side of the house approaching from parking space

donkey jack

 

Closer to home now. The painting above, Medea, I did something like 15-20 years ago. It doesn't leave the house. It is on my wall all the time. I don't put it up for sale because I don't want to lose it. Plus, I'm the one it's important to. I see it a stage with Medea in foreground planning what she has to do, pacing, the rock behind her a Greek rock mountain and the Greek archipelago, the night sky howling its horror seeing what Medea has in her mind. Below Medea is the a little sign I put on the house soon after I moved in. The first one rotted away with time. This is the second one. And here comes Donkey Jack. This is one of the first pictures I got of him. That's my friend Jack the saxophone player. I put hee-haw and braying out of my mind and I hear a saxophone. It is the same sound, low range tenor, a note John Coltrane might have found. The donkeys have been a great source of creative inspiration since they've arrived in my life. I thank God every day in my heart I've lived long enough to know donkeys.

 

 

 

found art

 

 

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A DAY IN THE SUN AT THE WAYNE HENDERSON FESTIVAL

wayne henderson

A one hour drive this morning to Mt Rogers in SW Virginia for the Wayne Henderson Fest. The drive through the western part of Alleghany, through Piney Creek, across the state line and river to Hwy 58, "The Crooked Road." 58 goes to Highlands Park where the road goes up, up, up, then down into a hollow full of new cars parked on grass. It looked like a new car commercial for all the new cars at once. I tend to get uneasy when a parking lot is full of new cars. It tells me none of my people are there. No pickups. My car was by far the rattiest looking car in the parking lot. Helped make it easy to find later. Driving home I figured out a way to stick a ping-pong ball on the antenna. A few decades ago it became a hot thang to have something on the top of the antenna to find one's car in a mall parking lot. Fast food joints were giving them out and parking lots filled up with these little things on top of the antennae until it became ridiculous. They all went away almost overnight. Now that nobody does it, a ping pong ball would be the only one in the parking place. Of course, to have one now would identify me as one who doesn't get it that the trend is over and has been over for a long time. Then they say, Oh, it's TJ. That's WHY he's doing it. Yeah, like why not?

henderson fest audience

At the Wayne Fest I took my time, stopped by Willard's tent and spoke with him, Scott and Dori a little bit. Went on and found a place to sit. I chose a spot near a dog. The Crooked Road Ramblers came on soon after the band that was playing, Cabin Fever. Crooked Road Ramblers was the band I wanted to hear of all the bands playing. In their third tune I stepped to a place I could get a good stage shot. Took the picture. Camera told me to insert the card. It was at home in the computer. Oh well. Camera in pocket, out of mind. No more composition thinking. I was glad to be free of it. Kilby Spencer has come quite a long ways in his fiddling. He has been a really good fiddler all the time I've known him, but as I hear him now about once a year I hear immense improvements telling me he practices a lot in his mind, with or without fiddle in hand. Kilby is becoming a great musician. He's always been a good musician, but he's transcending that. He's going off into a zone of the great fiddlers down through time. He played GB Grayson's Lee Highway Blues with as clear a tone as I recall ever hearing it. It's one of my favorite fiddle tunes, so I pay attention hearing somebody play it. Kilby brought it to life. Gave it breath.

kilby spencer plays at the jubilee in sparta

When they were finished I went back to the car to get the camera out of my pocket. I saw a few people I know, most of them among the volunteers in the parking lot. John Sherrill gave me a start when I entered the parking lot. He was at the road directing cars to a lane to get into for parking. He has a beard now and I am slow getting used to it enough to recognize him on sight. He got down in my face at the car window and told me to step out of the car, cop style. I must have wrenched up my face in a busted look and he broke out laughing. I recognized his laugh. This is a retired prosecutor. He knows how to put on that authority of the law voice. I thought it was funny. At the moment I thought: What? Just a couple days ago I was driving up the gravel road to the Richardson farm and a big white dually pickup came around the blind curve in the center of the road. It was John. I wasn't alarmed, because I used to it. On sight, each one steers a little to the right and there's no problem. It is the same feeling, surprise. Surprise is fun. Kittens love to play surprise on each other and their humans too. Not only does it make us laugh to see cats jump, but cats get a laugh out of seeing cats jump, too.

black cat laughing

In my walking about I felt a good feeling in the air. I thought of all the news we're getting, how much it looks like everybody hates everybody to the point it makes leaving the house a scary thing to do. I get out among a big bunch of people and everybody is peaceable and friendly. Makes me want to get out among more people than I usually do. Hanging out at Maxwell Equipment for the rest of the summer will get me out among friendly people. I enjoy the people who drop by and hang there from time to time. All of them knew Jr Maxwell, whose shop it was before it became Ross's. It feels like something on the order of a planet entering a house, bumping me into a more interactive life and art form. I don't want to be the only one working on these sculptures. I want them to be a group effort. I may be the one putting them together, but I want to encourage ideas. One thing I'll be looking for is how to devise a sensuous feminine form out of motorcycle parts. That will be a fun goal to reach toward. Straight lines and circles I'll largely be working with. Seeing that I am moving into a more interactive time, I felt the energy today among a few thousand people in colorful clothes, everybody in a friendly spirit. This is why I feel like it is a good time for me to get out among other people regularly now. For constant reminder that we really are good people who tend to treat each other well. Hearing too much news I tend to walk around in the crowd and wonder how many people in the crowd are carrying concealed weapons. I figured about a dozen.

willard plays his henderson guitar

I worked the tshirt tent in the afternoon with Rita Scott, fiddler with Appalachian Mountain Girls, and Trina Varner, old-time bass player. Lynn Worth came by and I spoke with her a minute. She's always a light in my eyes. Lynn is one of my very favorite people, for who she is, a woman of integrity, deep personal integrity. And a terrific musician. I enjoy the momentary chit-chat in a place like that. I recall a conversation with a couple of white haired women from the area. One was looking to buy a couple of Wayne's CDs from a selection of several. I gave her an idea of what each one was like. I picked out two for good enjoyable music to be playing in the house. The others were virtuoso demonstrations of high-powered guitar picking that is impressive, but not so enjoyable to have playing in the house for everyday listening. Mostly I told people that all tshirt sizes above M were sold out. Talked with Rita, always fun. She's an awfully good fiddler. She's light-hearted as somebody who can juggle flaming torches. I like seeing people I know at these events. Hugs galore, good feeling galore, everybody feeling happy having a day off with good music and good weather. I saw an old boy I first took for 80 wearing a Pink Floyd tshirt. That didn't seem right. Saw him a little bit later and he looked more like an old-looking 70, a little closer to the range of people listening to them then. 80 seemed just a little bit over the cusp of the first Pink Floyd listeners. How strange it is now to be speaking of old people in relation to pop culture. My generation.

david long and dori freeman with her henderson guitar

I was happy to see Dori in her heavy with child look. I am happy for Dori with her life now. She has found her man, the one worth waiting for, and next she'll have a baby to love. She's lit up with love right now. Good loving from her man, David, from her family, from her grandpa, and coming up soon, from her baby, and love from her fan base. I'm enjoying knowing Dori through this time of her life, starting the time she left college because that just wasn't it, and she started singing with Scott and Willard on Friday nights in Woodlawn, getting the feel of singing before an audience. At loose ends, wondering which way to turn. By now she has the self-confidence of experience before several audiences. She's writing songs as good as the songs she covers. Last year she wowed the Wayne Fest. This year she is on a new CD of music from the Carter Fold with Wayne and other musicians of the region. I meant to buy a copy today and forgot to. I'll find one soon. At the end of my tshirt tent time, Roseanne Cash was coming on. I was tired. I wanted to be home. I did not want to hear Roseanne Cash. I know she would have been good. I would have enjoyed it. But I preferred to spend her stage time on the road home. The beautiful drive down the mountain this time instead of up the mountain. At the house, I walked through the door straight to the bed, fell down and slept for two hours, got up and saw the Bourne Legacy the second time, only recognizing maybe 3 scenes.

 

 

 

 

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FIDDLIN KILBY SPENCER: SON OF WHITETOP MOUNTAIN BAND

     kilby spencer at rex theater 8.8.2010


Kilby Spencer's band The Crooked Road Ramblers played at the Jubilee on Main St in Sparta Friday night. They have the Friday night slot at the Jubilee every week now for as long as they want it. They kept the crowd dancing. They have a good drive for a dance band. Old-time bands are dance bands. Kilby's mother and dad are Emily and Thornton Spencer of Whitetop Mountain Band, a Grayson County Virginia band with drive that lets you know you're in the mountains. Kilby's sister, Martha, is staying with Whitetop Mountain Band. She plays every instrument, dances and sings. She is looking like the next WMB fiddler. She's been playing fiddle with the band, second to Thornton, for several years, possibly ten years, give or take a few. Kilby has played fiddle with Whitetop Mountain Band periodically since he's been able to carry out a fiddle tune, as Martha has too.


I've seen among older people I've known in the past that one of the aspects of the musical tradition in the mountains is for people who love the music, go to fiddlers conventions and dances, pay attention to the musicians, is to note a young fiddler or banjo or guitar picker who appears to have promise if he keeps on with it, if he chooses to go the way of music. It's not a matter of getting hopes up for one, because anything can happen. In the mid teens is a hurdle where a lot of them put the music aside and don't take it up again. Some take it up again and some don't let the music fall away. Kilby, like Martha, started when he was little. Mother and dad played, uncle Albert played, they played together all the time and probably every weekend. The kids grew up with old-time music. Records and tapes of different fiddlers from the past and regions of the mountains, old-time bands, banjos, that Kilby's mother and dad listened to. Kilby sent me a collection of 22 songs Thornton was either given by Fiddlin Art Wooten or he bought from Art. It was a home-made 8-track recording of Art Wooten playing fiddle, Jr Maxwell banjo and Wayne Henderson guitar.


Kilby is a folklorist from the inside. Something like AP Carter was, in his own time and place. AP gathered songs from the mountains a few hundred miles to the north and to the south of his home in Virginia, just across the NC line northwest of Bristol. Kilby has bought digital recording devises that pick up sound beautifully. He records people who have never recorded, like fiddler Raymond Gentry of Trap Hill, NC. Kilby has passed to me several of his recordings that he collects non-commercially, archiving, collecting samples of mountain music by people never recorded, as well as home-made tapes in boxes in the attic. Some of them actually survive. Kilby has found videos from home-movie cameras and put them on YouTube. His channel is whitetopmusic all one word. He has video of Albert Hash fiddling, Enoch Rutherford picking banjo with Thornton Spencer when Thornton was much younger, Doc Roberts, Thornton and Emily, Huston Caudill. You can hear some mighty fine examples of mountain music at Kilby's channel.


Kilby has been the young fiddler I've been watching grow. That's what he does. He grows by learning new songs, new ways to play old songs, a new instrument to learn and master, and another, until he can play a whole old-time band. His fiddle is Kilby's lifetime emphasis. The fiddle is his art form he has next to no choice about, like vanGogh driven to paint every day in nasty poverty because his art form needed full attention. Kilby is not playing the poverty role. He is a computer tech whiz who kept the computers of the school systems, county offices, the one you call when you're teaching computer class at the high school and something went cuckoo, like a virus or any of multiple million possibilities. He was moved to Ashe County where he takes care of the their computers last I knew. He's not told me he left Ashe, so I figure he's still there. The only news I get on Kilby is from Kilby himself. I like it like that.


Kilby Spencer is so dedicated to his growth as a fiddler I love to hear his new subtleties over time. He knows an awful lot of songs and plays all of them well. Very well. Kilby is a true heir in the line of Whitetop fiddlers, his uncle Albert Hash and his dad Thornton Spencer. Now it's Kilby and Martha, both of them Whitetop fiddlers of the next generation, the ones to keep the sound and the drive going into the next next generation. It's been an enjoyment for me watching Kilby grow from having no band at all to his Haw Orchard Band he made a couple of homemade cd's from. He gave me copies of his different cds he made for play on the radio show I was doing at WCOK in Sparta Saturday mornings. It wasn't for any commercial benefit. It was that I wanted to play every field recording I could find. The radio show's focus was the music of this county, then the first circle around that was surrounding counties, the next circle the Central Blue Ridge, the next circle the Southern Mountains. Kilby turned up with some music by musicians from close to home and let me play an awful lot of them to the listeners in the county. Bertie Dickens, Cleve Andrews, Jr Maxwell, Raymond Gentry, Howard Joines, Wood Blevins and quite a lot more.


I took the camera to the show tonight and made several still shots of Kilby on fiddle and the other musicians in the band, some of the whole band with dancers in foreground. Made several videos, too, of half dozen or so tunes. I was able to sit the camera on a counter next to Ernest's coffee maker in the corner at the back, out of everybody's way. Using the zoom and sitting the camera still I could get sharp focus and closeups on the musicians from the waist up with instrument. When getting a portrait of a musician, I like to get both hands and the face in the picture. Not always---a rule of thumb. My computer is so full that I have to unload much of it before I can put more in (like my house, like my mind). It's a time-consuming job that I don't know what it's going to take to motivate me to dive in and get-er-done. It won't be long. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. I'll do it in my own time. I'll hurry slowly. Slow is good. I'm not working in a factory. Nor was meant to be. 

They have a cd available from cdbaby.com. It is Lost Train Blues by the Crooked Road Ramblers. You can see it at  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tcrramblers. Excellent old-time album. This link will take you directly there. The band has a website that is "undergoing routine maintenance" at this moment, but is subject to change any day or week. For when it's ready to go again, http://www.myspace.com/thecrookedroadramblers.


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OLD TIME NEW TIME

air bellows outdoor art museum

The crickets and the tree frogs are singing and chirping. Sometimes I wonder what it sounded like back when this was all farms, the night chorus of these critters, and from up the holler a banjo's notes in the air. A lot of the old houses are gone, nearly all the barns. The people are gone, the clothes they wore are gone, the wagons they rode are gone, the guns remain in vaults and on the walls of gun collectors, and the musical instruments continue. Often they stay in the family. Sometimes they're sold. Or they're in museums. Many of them go on making music, are treasured as great great grandpa's fiddle, either hanging on the wall or in its old case with the handle missing, played only on special occasions. The old culture is so gone now it is functionally over but for the values carried by descendants, the ways of believing, the nature of faith. The music is very much alive. About every county in the mountains has a place for local music and dancing. The music corporations ASCAP and the like would have them all shut down if they had their way unimpeded, which they do to a point. They shut down jams too. They're doing their best to stifle creativity outside their control. It's working.

When I think creativity in America is stifled, all I have to do is go to a karaoke bar and see individual after individual singing their hearts out onstage. These people are good. I went with Jean one night to a place on the highway to Mt Airy called Rock Bottom, a roadside beer place with bands on the weekends. Karaoke night. It was a peaceable place. A friendly place. I saw a guy with a harley tshirt and a bandanna on his head sing like a bird. Women, men, anybody who wanted to. These people, all of them have practiced and awful lot in the shower or wherever they sing. Karaoke uses pop songs of our time for the standards the way jazz in the 50s used Broadway tunes for the standards. Curious, seeing the music I've watched evolve from the start when I was 13 over half a century to the place it's the music of our collective American culture.

In the 50s Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis inspired reaction by the adults. It weakened the kids to Communism. It was Communist propaganda destroying the minds of the kids. Every kind of attempt was made to shut it down. Dick Clark is lauded as the Hot Dog of rock & roll, but he was in the front line of the forces set on destroying rock & roll. He promoted doo-wop black boys and Italian pretty boys, Anita Bryant. Allan Freed was put through all kinds of legal problems promoting the new music. His life was more or less ruined by the reactionary force. Among adults, he was the enemy of the adults from the inside, a virus. All the adults were saying, "It will never last." When my parents said it, all I could think was, I don't care. Among the Andrews Sisters, the Lennon Sisters and the Four Lads, suddenly was Chuck Berry honking Maybellene, "Cadillac rollin down open road, nothin outrunin my V-8 Ford. Cadillac doin about 95, bumper to bumper rollin side to side. Maybellene why caint you be true? Oh Maybellene---why caint you be true? You done started back doin the things you used to do."

Maybellene, Shake Rattle & Roll, Long Tall Sally, Hey Bo Diddley, Heartbreak Hotel, Peggy Sue. All these songs started appearing between the white music that went before. I tended to listen to the black station in KC at the time, because that's where I could hear the black music, like Slim Harpo, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Little Walter, Ruth Brown. When the white station was playing Elvis's Hound Dog, the black station played Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog. She wrote it. Elvis gave her a Cadillac instead of songwriter's royalties. He got off real cheap. I heard people like Ivory Joe Hunter, Bill Doggett, Ray Charles before crossover, Big Joe Turner. It was a rich time in my life for discovering music. Both the black sound and the white sound exploring new sounds with the electric guitar. Duane Eddy, Forty Miles of Bad Road. Electricity was changing music like it changed everything else. Changing it fast.

By 1960, Chuck Berry was in prison, Jerry Lee Lewis disgraced, Elvis in the Army, Little Richard preaching, Buddy Holly dead. Freddie Cannon was about all that was left of rock & roll. It was just about shut down in America when records started coming over from England, Spencer Davis Group, Dave Clark 5, then the Beatles and the Stones and rock & roll was back. There was no stopping it after the British invasion. Bob Dylan went from acoustic to electric, psychedelia spread from San Francisco; Big Brother & Holding Company (Janis Joplin), Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and beyond. Then Led Zeppelin, heavy metal, then punk and it stayed punk until it became mainstream after a quarter century on college radio stations. The 20th century was a renascence in art and it was a renascence in music, all kinds of music. It was a highly creative time in every field of human interest.

What rock has evolved into now, I have very little idea. What I hear and see is telling me it's a time in pop music like the post-modern period in art where everything that went before is given expression in various blends. Fusion from all over the world and every kind of music. Tells me it's evolving really fast right now. It's universal pop now all around the world, every culture, every place. Even in the remotest places on earth. It has pushed to the background traditional musics all over the world, not just here. The traditional musics change, but they don't die. It's looking like Kilby Spencer and his sister Martha are devoting their lives to keeping the Whitetop music tradition alive and moving into the future. Kilby is a computer technician to make a living and a fiddler to make music. He plays banjo, guitar and bass too. They'll pass the music to the next generation like their mother and dad did. Kilby has been uploading a lot of good old-time videos of whitetop music. You can find his videos at whitetopmusic on YouTube. He's uploaded a lot of really good old-time videos. Even with media advanced as it is now making YouTube possible, old-time lives alongside everything else. It's no longer the only music, but it is a part of the whole, and will always be. Maybe.

TWO FIDDLERS

kilby spencer of crooked road ramblers


thornton spencer of whitetop mountain band



At the Rex Theater in Galax a show of 2 old-time bands. Kilby Spencer's band, The Crooked Road Ramblers played first. The band has released their first cd, that is cd produced in large numbers and packaged. Kilby has recorded the band quite a bit. He's been generous to give me copies of cds he's made along the way for play on the radio show. I'd love to be playing this collection of songs. I'd play the whole album in the course of the hour. It has 18 songs, and I could get 18 in the hour easily, weather included. It's a band of good musicians, every one of them. Guitar player John Perry used to be with the New River Ramblers, James Burris fiddler, that evolved into Southern Pride.



Now on the cd Kilby is playing Lost Train Blues. He gets train sounds in it rolling down the track. Kilby has grown quite a bit as a fiddler in the years I've known him. He knows a lot of songs, an awful lot, and knows them well, plays them well. In this concert and this cd I hear nuances entering Kilby's fiddling, the subtle kind of things fiddlers get after much experience, very much experience. I hear Kilby becoming a great fiddler like his dad, Thornton, and his uncle Albert Hash. I'm enjoying hearing Kilby's progress on the fiddle over the years I've known him. His wife, Amanda, plays a very respectable banjo. He just now played the fire out of the old-time fiddle tune Ebenezer. He played it like he owned it, it is his. The band makes music well together. They have good drive. Kilby and Amanda play Johnson Boys together, just fiddle and banjo. They sound good together. They played it just the two of them at the concert earlier. I think I might have got it on video. I don't remember all the songs I got with video. I'll go through them tomorrow.



I don't want to make slick, professional videos. I want them hand held, free to do things like run the zoom too far too fast. That's ok. I like the spontaneous feel of a group of musicians flowing along together, riding the wave, hanging 5. Kilby is playing Sally Goodin now. Fiddlers tend to like Sally Goodin and give it their best. He laid it to it. He learned much fiddle from his dad, Thornton. His wife, Amanda, learned banjo from Kilby's mother, Emily, banjo in Whitetop Mountain Band. I tend to think of Kilby as Son of Whitetop Mountain Band. He's playing Lee Highway Blues, going after it. Every time I hear that tune I imagine GB Grayson in the car with Henry Whitter, Whitter driving, on the road to a show someplace, rolling down Highway 11, the Lee Highway, Grayson playing the fiddle in the car composing a fiddle tune he called Lee Highway Blues. Good old-time fiddle tune.



Whitetop Mountain Band played the second half of the show. They're one of the hottest bands around here. There are several, and Whitetop is one of them, the band with Thornton Spencer's fiddle and Emily Spencer's banjo and vocals. Fiddler Albert Hash passed the band to Thornton. The way things are shaping up, it's looking like Martha could be the next fiddler of Whitetop Mountain Band. She plays a very respectable fiddle with the best for her teacher. Hearing Thornton Spencer play a fiddle is beautiful to my ears every time. He has subtleties with the strings that bear his signature alone. Emily's banjo is hers and hers alone. The two of them play together as one.



Maybe 4 years ago, when Jean had one month to live, we went to Glendale Springs at the Mountain Music Jamboree to hear 4 bluegrass bands and Whitetop Mountain Band. I imagined Whitetop would play first. They played last. I wondered how they could follow 4 hard driving bluegrass bands. They did it. They played such that I forgot all that went before, right away. If it had been a battle of the bands, Whitetop would have won. The Wildwood Valley Boys had Michael Cleveland playing fiddle with them too. None of the bands was laying down on the job. Whitetop Mountain Band took over the show and made it theirs. I tend toward old-time before bluegrass. Much, then, of that was my own personal love for old-time music. My heart lights up when I hear old-time music. Bluegrass gets me going and I do like it, but old-time goes straight to my heart. Tonight's music was all heart music. Masters of the fiddle and banjo going at it, giving us in the audience the music we came to hear in abundance. Good show tonight. Every minute of it.

LITTLE RIVER BOYS AT GALAX

the little river boys c. 1960: l to r, jr maxwell,
cleve andrews, estal bedsaul, paul joines


Skipped a day. The black dog was on my back and I didn't have a mind to be cheerful. I didn't want to take you to the bottom of the swimming pool and hold you there. I'm dwelling too much on loss, need to shake it off, but it doesn't shake off. So I go with it. I feel like the guy in the photograph that goes around the internet of the surfer on a wave and the full length profile of a great white shark in the wave. Whadayado? Ride the wave and don't fall. So I rode the wave, knowing it was temporary. I wanted to, but could not write one word to you. Missing Jean, missing Jr, missing TarBaby, all at the same time. These were friends of the heart. That includes TarBaby. I used to believe I was in tune with mortality, but I'm not. I miss my friends. They were all three wonderful people, the kind I feel graced to have in my life. I learned the stories of their lives over the years, stories that made Faulkner sound about right when it comes to people with hard lives. Jr and Jean and they hardly seemed to notice. It's just how it was. Where they are now (then) is the only place they are (were).

I often question if Jr is the only individual I've known who lived so completely in the present moment. He dipped into the past long enough to tell me his life over 5 years. When he'd told it all, we were back to the present. He didn't like looking at the past, it was past, done, over, like it never was, but went there because he knew I wanted to hear his story, and he wanted someone to tell it to. My heart has opened so much over the last many years I feel now more vulnerable to sorrow than ever before. I don't think I'm "depressed" in the prozac sense. A psychiatrist would laugh at that sentence. I'm depressed. It's grief that hasn't run its course yet, and I'm ok with it. I deal with inner issues in these times and feel like that's productive in my inner growth that I like to believe is ongoing. I'ved found so many things I believed about myself are just plain wrong, so much that now I doubt inner growth being ongoing, just because I said it. I'm doubting about everything that comes up I previously believed about myself. If I was full of shit, finding out can be a good thing. First step to seeing self a little closer to the the real self. I can't help but think God put me through this like Jr said of God, that he puts things down in front of him for him to go through. I was given this to go through to see what I do with it. It's a measure and a step on the ladder to understanding. If I get what is in it for me to get then I get it. It's the kind of thing that when I come out the other end, I'll thank God for the experience. Then I'll be an old turd for sure.

I did all kinds of things to keep from clicking on to write to you. I didn't want to. It's like when I have the flu, stay home, don't spread it. My head was as empty as a glass upside down on the drying rack. I puttered about, unable to sleep, unable to read. Around midnight an email came in from Kilby Spencer, son of Thornton and Emily Spencer of Whitetop Mountain Band, who has been doing serious research into finding recordings of musicians from the days of reel-to-reel. He has a digital recorder and finds people who have never been recorded and records them. Kilby's life is dedicated to old-time music of these mountains. After all the years of field recorders passing through from up north, collecting music we're glad they found, I like all the better having someone field recording from inside the mountain music world. He knows how to find people playing that someone passing through could never find. I'd say the old-time musicians who never played anywhere but home would be more comfortable with Kilby, who is of their world. And son of Whitetop Mountain Band is pretty good credentials for a beginning.

Thornton and Emily have spent their musical lives passing the music on to the next generations. Emily was, maybe still is, band director at Mt Rogers high school. Instead of horns and such, it's an old-time band, music the kids can play the rest of their lives to any degree they want. I've not known too many people who took trumpet or trombone play much after school. Where? Who with? The instruments end up wrapped nicely in the back of the top shelf in the closet. A kid who learns banjo in high school is on his way to making music the rest of his life. Thornton and Emily both over several years taught at the Crouse House on Monday nights. Diane Bowen of Zephyr Lightning Bolts learned from Emily. Linda Mabe of Stone Mountain Old-Time Band, learned from Emily. There are many more. Thornton too. And they do a lot more than that. Kilby and his sister Martha are carrying on the tradition. They're good people.

Kilby found 2 tunes recorded at Galax in 1966 by the Little River Boys, Panhandle Country and Back Up And Push. Kilby said they came to him from a friend in Delaware who got them from somebody in Europe who was here and recorded Galax in 1966. The Little River Boys are Cleve Andrews, fiddle, and Jr Maxwell, banjo. Yes. The only existing recordings of them that are known of. I never believed I would hear Cleve Andrews' fiddle. Jr told me about him many times, told me how well he could play with emphasis, meaning he means it, no two ways about it. I never believed I would hear Jr's banjo before the time the palm of his hand was peeled off at the sawmill. He needed a skin graft. Noting the banjo was good therapy and he went back to picking, but he said he couldn't pick like before. On these two tunes he's picking all out. He and Cleve made so much music together over so many years, Jr's banjo and Cleve's fiddle rode the waves of the music together, flowing together, the banjo right alongside the fiddle note for note, and sometimes playing with rhythms and a time or two they were so close together they sounded like one instrument that was neither banjo nor fiddle, just a few notes.

I never imagined I might get to hear Jr picking. It is exactly like he told me he picked, plain. I wasn't quite sure what he meant, so I thought about it quite a bit until I think I got it. Now that I hear him picking, it is as he said. It's plain. No frills, no flourishes, no showing off. Make the sounds of the notes plain, clear, distinct. The music is number one. I'd like to put the songs on here so you can hear them, but don't know how, if it's possible. His banjo picking is a steady run of notes, 2 fingers and thumb in motion. He was standing perfectly still like he's passing the time of day, looking down at his left hand, picking a storm while Cleve, too, is standing still with fiddle under microphone fiddling his heart out. This was the last year of Cleve's life, but he was right there with it. When I downloaded the first one and listened to it, I wept from start to finish. I never believed I'd hear Cleve's fiddle or Jr's banjo in that time with Cleve. And it was beautiful picking and bowing. I'm remembering Saturday night when Paul Reeves told Jean Osborne's granddaughter, Kevin's girl, who was playing fiddle with JAM, that he and I "had a friend who could really pick the banjo. I mean really pick the banjo." Paul had heard him pick all along the way.

I've put the two tunes on cd to play at the radio station Saturday morning. I think I'll play them at the beginning and then tell everyone who knows anybody who wants to hear Cleve Andrews and Jr Maxwell layin it to it, tune in to the station because I'll play them again in about 20 minutes. This is a treasure to Alleghany County Music. It's a very big event in my way of seeing. I want as many people as want to hear Cleve Andrews be able to. It's too rare not to share as widely as can be done. Lucas Pasley will have them up on his website of Alleghany musicians soon, when he's able. http://sites.google.com/site/tradmusicalleghany/Home

MOUNTAIN FIDDLERS

baja rock

It's Friday night before Saturday morning radio show. Listening to some of the music I'm looking at playing, noting the tunes I'd like to play, hearing the whole albums, enjoying them while my mind is preparing the radio show. Sometimes I preview what I want to play, and sometimes I don't. I like it to be spontaneous, each tune chosen to follow the one that preceded it. I choose by feeling. A tune has a certain feeling. I select what's next according to what feeling I want next. It doesn't do for every one to have the same feeling. I like to move around in the arena of feelings the way a band does in concerts. I believe mountain music is about feeling, emotion. Strong feelings and emotions.

Fiddlers have been the show's focus the last 2 weeks. Thought I'd keep on with fiddlers this week. So far it's been well known fiddlers, legends. This time it will be lesser heard of fiddlers, which most of them are. Listening now to Kilby Spencer's self-produced cd, self-recorded at home with his wife playing clawhammer and his mother guitar. The Haw Orchard Band. Google it. There are sample tunes on Youtube recorded at Galax Fiddlers Convention. Kilby's mother originally played guitar with Whitetop Mountain Band when Flurry Dowe was picking banjo, when Albert Hash played fiddle. Emily later became the banjo in Whitetop Mountain Band and Thornton the fiddle. Kilby grew up in the band like his sister, Martha. Kilby created the website for Whitetop Mountain Band. He's a computer whiz by profession.

http://whitetopmountainband.tripod.com/

Kilby has discovered digital recording. He bought a hi-tech equivalent of a portable cassette player/recorder. It uses a computer chip instead of tape. Gets excellent sound, is small, and he takes it around to musicians in the area who have never recorded to get their music. The Raymond Gentry recording I aim to play was recorded by Kilby at Raymond's home, and Kilby playing guitar. It made a good album. Raymond Gentry has been playing fiddle a long time. He plays at the Jubilee quite a bit and the Hillbilly show. Lives at Trap Hill. Kilby has become something of a folklorist from within, somebody from inside the music underground with access to nearly every musician in the area. I say nearly to include the exception that proves the rule.

Kilby gave these cds for the radio show a few years ago. I've played from them before, here and there, and thought I'd play a lot, let my listeners hear the younger generation, musicians in their 20s. Haw Orchard Band is Kilby's vehicle for his music. What do you do when you grow up with mother and dad excellent old-time musicians carrying on the tradition of

Whitetop music? Kilby plays fiddle and guitar well. I expect he plays bass too. Don't know about banjo. He probably can play it, but his heart is with the fiddle. He's made cds that are entirely home made, the music from the recorder into the computer, from the computer to cd. When he gets a mail order for one, he makes one. He calls what he's doing with recording, Whitetop Records. Google has a site where Haw Orchard cds can be bought. It says there are 3 of them now.

Shifted gears. Raymond Gentry is playing now. First thing, I hear the difference between a man up in his 70s who has played fiddle all his life at dances. He's a dance fiddler. First thing I heard. Kilby is much younger, much less far along in his path as a fiddler, which is not to make light of Kilby, because it takes a long, relentless effort to master the fiddle. He just finished Cacklin Hen. I thought of the many other renderings I've heard of Cacklin Hen and Gentry's is uniquely his own, as the best ones tend to be. Gentry has drive and rhythm first. He keeps the rhythm going like a conductor. At the beginning of each tune, it's like he takes command first note. A few years ago Raymond Gentry played at the Hillbilly Show with the Rise & Shine band. I think he played something with Lynn Worth too. By then I'd heard Kilby's cd, knew what to expect, and he delivered it.

As they say, he lays it to it. Gentry's drive is really out there. I believe Kilby is playing guitar and his wife Amanda playing banjo. They're up to him. They don't lag behind at all. He just now took off with Ragtime Annie and pulled my mind away from what I'm doing. This fiddler has played many a dance. Kilby made it possible. When I talked with Raymond at the Hillbilly Show, he was humble about his playing. Couldn't believe his music was played on the radio. He'd never been on a radio before. As in the tradition of old-time musicians of his generation, recording is what other people did. They wanted to play for dances. That's where the music really lived for them. Not in a recording studio. First, it costs an awful lot, next, you have to sell them. Too much to do when you got enough to do already.

These projects Kilby has going are the kind that grow over years until by the time he's 60, he's accomplished quite a lot, just doing what he loves to do, make music and record music as a folklorist from the inside. Kilby is an intelligent and well balanced man. He aint much to look at, but he has what it takes to get a fine looking and intelligent woman to marry him, one he can make music with. Seems to me an ideal marriage, 2 musicians who make music together. Rob and Bet Mangum. They made good music together. Kilby and Amanda make good music together. Both are aware that they are carrying the Whitetop tradition in their generation. His mother and dad have both been teaching the music, spreading the music all the way along. A lot of musicians have learned from them. I see Kilby keeping that going too, teaching the next generation, passing it on, aware that this music is the spirit of these mountains.

Gentry really plays fast. I can see when he starts the people run to the dance floor. Good square dance and flat footin music. Keeping rhythm the old-time way, a fiddler as deep in the tradition as they were before recordings. The drive and rhythm make that bow run like a racehorse. He's layin it to Sally Gooden right now. He has a smooth bow that runs sometimes like a rabbit, short bursts of all out bowing. It's become apparent we're going to have another good fiddle show in the morning. WCOK 1060am 10-11 Saturday mornings for some ass-kickin mountain music.