THE END OF A NEVER-ENDING PROJECT

eula rae cook, mary jane ciraco, linda edwards, the golden girls

My blues over the last two months are fading. The sample dvd of the Hillbilly Show, in October, arrived in the mail today. Next step: email approval back to the people making the dvd. Done. Next, wait for the box to arrive with the dvds in it ready to go. When the box arrives, I'll pick one randomly to put in the dvd player to see if it took. Only then will I be satisfied this never-ending project is over. Two months of frustration to the max. I know the ones who put it onto disc are happy to be done with it, probably happier than I am. They were patient with me. My patience broke at a certain point, but it came back. I pitched a fit over something that was my doing. LOL. Not funny then. My gratitude is heightened by their patience with my ignorance. It started with me taking on a project I believed I could handle. Another one of those learnings of our own limitations. They're good to know. They make boundaries. I know not to cross that line again. The other side of the line was where I took the first step, deciding to make video of the Hillbilly Show. I've made video of so many old-time bands, bluegrass bands, rock bands that I felt like I had enough experience making videos of musicians making music. For what I had in mind to approach the project, I needed somebody to operate a second camera, to take turns with video and making still pictures. I hadn't yet talked with Crystal about helping me out--she's a studio photographer--when I was told by another, "You don't need to get somebody. I'll be with you the whole show. I got a new video camera. It'll be fun to use it." Error number one, not asking Crystal for help anyway. I know I can count on Crystal.  

david nichols guitar and joe irwin

At the beginning of the show, promised helper never turned up. I was stuck with self and two cameras, one for video, one for stills. It's not easy doing both at once. It's even beyond difficult. The pictures here were taken the night before at rehearsal. It took some powerful self-control to put my rage aside so it would affect camera wielding the least for the next three hours. Later, when I saw promised helper, I was told, "I hadta...I hadta...had so much stuff to do." I had to shift mind into hyper-drive, a mind that doesn't even have over-drive anymore. The beginning of a two-month long downhill roller coaster run on a ride of emotion. I talked by phone with one of the people who makes the dvd. We had good, clear conversation of understanding both ways. He suggested emailing the video to their computers. I spent a week attempting to email them at 57 hours a try. The upload jumped track after about 38 hours, every time. I could not use the computer during uploading. When the upload gave out, I set it in motion again. For a week. This step contributed to the blues a very great deal. Another talk on the phone. He suggested I break it up into several short sections and email them by some shrink process I had to write down instructions to follow. Couldn't even do that. Took laptop to Crystal. She figured out the process and set up several packages to send. I brought laptop home and sent them off. They went through, but the place didn't receive good enough quality from the transfer to use. Thanksgiving vacation came and went. I waited a couple weeks. Asked what was up. Oh, it fell through the cracks over Thanksgiving. When they returned they'd forgotten about it, which I took for totally understandable. They operate in big volume. This redneck on the phone that don't know nothin about digital anything was taking up an awful lot of attention and time for something they probably will not even make expenses on. Why wouldn't they forget it?

dr jack cahn, mississippi sawyer

Next, they asked me to send the chips from the cameras. Unconsciously, I sent one, not thinking to send the other. They processed it and sent the sample. It was missing everything on the second chip I'd failed to send. Email again. In my mind, I was blaming them. It turned out I was the one messing things up. Sent the second chip a week ago and the sample arrived in today's mail. The sample disc was the only thing in the mailbox. It was almost a joy to see it, but I reminded self, haven't seen it yet. Carried it into the house in a guarded happy condition. Don't be setting off fireworks yet. I slipped it into the dvd player and ran through the whole show to check out sequences on fast-forward. Stopped it a few times to listen to how the sound took. All the way to the end it looked good. I called Agnes and left a message on her phone the sample is good and I've emailed the go-ahead. Not in time for Thanksgiving, not in time for Christmas, not in time for New Year's, maybe in time for Valentine's Day. Gotta be. Like Agnes reminded me a month ago, everything works out for the best. I walked to the mailbox after the mail carrier's car passed, suspecting the sample might be there today, but without hope. Hope died over a month ago that this never-ending project might someday end. These last weeks I've abandoned hope. Even after I emailed the go-ahead, I still don't feel satisfaction it's done. I've lost concern that it may never end, and lost concern that it might come to completion eventually. I did not want to write about it through the course of the process. Now that it's close to over, if the light at the end of the tunnel is not the light of an oncoming train, I can let it all out, only one future unknowable left. It's almost a joy to see this crazy-making time just a few days from finished. The end in sight is not the end.

lynn worth, moon over sparta

At last, I feel free of the burden, a lesser version of how the god Prometheus felt when he was unbound from the rock he was chained to for eternity by order of Zeus, his brother. It's not quite that kind of release. The end of a long frustration is more a release like setting a dog free that's been chained for two months. It's like a cluster of helium-filled balloons of different sizes and colors let go at the same time. Cares and troubles sail away to tiny specks in the sky, then nothing. As of today, only one is still a visible pixel. This part almost over, next part starts now. I've been aiming to write an article for Old-Time Herald magazine on the Hillbilly Show, this year its twentieth annual. I've been so out of heart over the project, I'd put writing about it on the shelf of maybe I will / maybe I won't. My mood was so dark over this project, I could not have written an essay from that mental dungeon the project put me in. I feel now like a submarine surfacing. I can breathe. It's all over now Baby Blue. I feel so good around this dvd and the Hillbilly Show experience, now that it's done, the original intent to write about it came up first thing. I will sit with the dvd and watch it all the way through as a memory aid. The one thing I can say to the good of what I see in the video is emphasis on the people involved, very personal emphasis. Some of the video is bad and some is good. Mostly, it wavers in between. I told Agnes when anybody complains about one thing or another being wrong with it, just say, "TJ done it." All that's bad about it is my doing. The people who put it on disc did a beautiful job. 

bobbie and gary parlier, tennessee waltz

*

     

  

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.

 

 

 

 

*

 

SKEETER AND THE SKIDMARKS DO IT AGAIN

scott and edwin

willard

edwin

sandy and willard

skeeter and the skidmarks



Another Skeeter and the Skidmarks show at the Front Porch in Woodlawn. A full house tonight. Extra chairs had to be brought out. Minnie the cat was perplexed not having a seat of her own. All the regular people were there and about a dozen that have not been there before. Before the show I was talking with the man with the bald pate on the left in the picture above. He and his wife have been coming to the Fiddle and Plow shows from the beginning. He said, "There's not been a bad one." They work the concessions at Fairview Ruritan sometimes. The entire audience was enthusiastic throughout the show. The music was predictably terrific, had feet tapping throughout the audience. We who have been going there a couple years now, that's around a hundred times, are so tuned to Skeeter music that we all listen enthusiastically. New people are taken by the music just as much as the rest of us. A boy who looked to be about 15 I took to be one of Scott's mandolin students. His feet were about to jump off his legs they were going so fast. Young guys playing bluegrass want to play fast. I imagined him in his private practice place making his mandolin ring as fast as he can make it go. He was loving the music. It seems odd to see a teenager there loving acoustic music so much. He was a country boy wearing a tshirt with a picture of a buck and a big rack.


I always sit in the back so I can stand up when I need to for photographs. I can see people swaying and moving their feet, moving their hands, bobbing their heads. Almost everybody was in motion in their seats. I'd say everybody was in motion within at the place where music moves us. Faces were lit up all over the place. The music flowed with the band and flowed with the audience. It was one of those times when the music clicks with the band and clicks with the audience, such that the band and the audience become one with the music. Their approach to the songs tonight was relaxed, at home, this perhaps the sixth time they've played at the Fiddle and Plow series. Tonight, Edwin's banjo was featured. He tore the banjo up. He has an instrumental banjo tune of his composition called, Monkey Fingers. Like when he plays Groundhog Shuffle, the fingers on his right hand look like a big spider running in place. It looks like his fingers are doing one thing, and the sound that comes out of the banjo is a lot more complex than what it looks like his fingers are doing. There were times he'd be plucking the fire out of it and a melody occurred inside the wild picking his fingers were doing. I looked and looked at his hand trying to find it working the melody. I think he was doing it with the noting fingers of his left hand. Those fingers danced all up and down the strings.


Possibly Edwin's artistry is in the way both his hands dance while they're making the music. The fingers of his left hand dance on the strings, quite literally. He does some really fast finger work on the strings that looks spontaneous and free, though it's very carefully controlled, and sounds spontaneous. The fingers of his right hand, his "monkey fingers," go completely wild on the strings. It looks like his hand is out of control, like a kid frailing a banjo to make noise, pretending he knows how to play. But the sound that Edwin's monkey fingers makes is banjo pickin to behold. I close my eyes when he's playing and I hear Edwin's banjo pickin as articulately noted as Murray Perahia on a piano, I open my eyes and he's frailing the strings, hand hopping to the music with lightning control. I understood why banjo picker Lynn Worth loves Edwin's pickin so much that she said to me, "I don't want to just play like Edwin, I want to be Edwin!" Of course, she didn't mean she wanted to take over his life. She meant she wanted to be able to pick with his apparent abandon that is controlled by the music, so free and so apparently effortless. I know there is more to it from her point of view. This is just my projection of her point of view. When Edwin plays, it is like he is controlled by the music, is able to get himself, mind, out of the way and let the music tell the fingers what to do. He stands in place and gives his fingers the freedom to dance to the music.


Receiving that insight into what Lynn said, what it is about his picking that makes her want so much to find the place inside herself where she can let go of her hands and let them dance. I don't know that, just imagining it. Lynn is a good one with a banjo too. I've wondered why she feels so much less than Edwin's playing, but I'm not a picker, I don't know how a picker hears, so I don't want to presume. She hears subtleties I don't even know are there. Like sometimes listening to bluegrass on the radio with bluegrass banjo picker Jr Maxwell, he would mention something about how good the banjo was, and I couldn't even find the banjo. He heard details in banjo pickin so subtle I didn't even know they were there. What I hear when Edwin picks and what Lynn hears when he picks are as different as two different pickers. At the core of what I can feel comfortable projecting, she holds Edwin's banjo pickin way up high unto artistry. I hear him as an ear in the audience. She hears him as someone who can hear what he is doing. Her appreciation of his banjo gives me inspiration to pay closer attention to what he's doing. I can't hear what she hears, but paying closer attention I hear a lot more. Edwin Lacy's playing rewards the ear at every level of understanding, from the thrill of hearing a banjo ring to hearing details only another musician can hear.


*  

LYNN WORTH

It's feeding time for the crows. I sliced half an apple into however many slices that is, a dozen or so, threw them out the front door into the grass where I can see out the window. Every day it's the same crows, the hen and her five chicks. Our friend, the brown-headed one is hard to tell from the others now except that he continues to be the one that walks a certain path close by the porch when all the slices are gone and he's searching for one that might have been missed. He's the one least wary of the house. I can tell the hen by the way she creeps up on the slice like it's about to get her. She approaches it half sideways, reaches out and picks it up and jumps back, then she hops, two feet at a time, to a place in the driveway gravel away from the others. Our friend continues to heckle her about feeding him. I saw her give him an apple slice a little while ago. He's the only one left that pesters her with open beak and the drone of a call the young ones have.


When I was a kid, the word civilization had a great big meaning for me. I knew how to define it for a test, but couldn't imagine the whole thing. When it's something with a definititon, it seems to be a still object, like coffee-table, but civilization is one of those nouns that has a life of its own, like horse. We think we know what horse means, but I sure don't. When I look at a horse I wonder how something that big allows something as puny as me to control it. I don't ever believe I can control a horse. Like I don't believe I could ever control a motorcycle. Or a chainsaw, for that matter. These things have lives of their own that require understanding and respect. A living being has so much complexity to it, I don't believe there is ever any knowing somebody else, knowing a dog, knowing a child, knowing someone old.


People I know seem as vast as the universe to me. I'll take my friend Lynn Worth, like picking a name from a hat, this time a mental hat. I've known Lynn probably 20 years. I call her my friend because I believe she's in my corner, and I'm in her corner. I know what to say not to make her mad, and I know what to say that will make her mad. That says I know her a little bit, but only about 100 billionth of what there'd be to know about her to say I know her. Lynn is at the fiddler's convention in Sparta this weekend and the latter half of the week. She's one of the original organizers and works with it every year. Lynn is the kind of friend who supports her friends. You might say, in that way she's an active friend as opposed to a passive friend.


Lynn has a small camping trailer and a pickup. She goes around to fiddlers conventions all summer, making music with her friends she's known for many a year and has a ball. Lynn is somebody who will be known in her 70s as one of the great old-time musicians of NC, if she's not already. She doesn't see it, but it will be that way. The world of old-time musicians is the world she was born for. She can pick the fire out of a banjo too. She can make a fiddle do its thing as well. She's banjo picker and vocalist with Appalachian Mountain Girls and plays fiddle with the Phoenix Mountain Band. At the Hillbilly Show, she and her feller Eddie sang a couple of Carter Family songs as Sara and AP. She has sung some June Carter songs at the Hillbilly Show and one other, I think it might have been Kitty Wells. She didn't try to imitate their singing, just sang the songs well.


Lynn told me how her guitar got her through her freshman year in college way off in Chapel Hill alone in the world in the crowd. That year you might say she bonded with her guitar, then started learning other instruments over time such that she can now play everything in an old-time band. And very well. She played bass for a long time with Appalachian Mountain Girls until Amy Michaels, banjo and vocals, left the band. Lynn stepped up to the mic with her banjo and has been singing for the band ever since. "Funniest sight I ever seen / sixteen chickens and a tamborine," is one they have fun with, and Grandpa Jones's Old Rattler.


Lynn is a mountain musician from the inside out. One of her subjects she gets emphatic about is back when the hippies and folklorists came through here in the 70s recording the old boys, Kyle Creed, Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham, Dan Tate, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins, and so on and so on. They were in high awe of mountain music tradition and waxed artfully academic about it, but they paid no mind to the younger generation of mountain musicians, the ones coming on who are carrying the music in their generation. The folklorists regarded them almost the same as pretenders, paid them no mind at all. That told her, and me, they weren't real. It was a style thing. And we both agree it's a great thing they did to get the older folks recorded before they died out. The hippie musicians didn't understand mountain people and mountain people didn't understand them, meaning they only co-existed musically. Each one fueled by very different inebriates. One over here, one over there. Both illegal.


I feel satisfied I've given you a brief outline of Lynn, who she is, though it's next to nothing where the whole Lynn is concerned. When I look at the great vastness of Lynn as a human being, feeling like I know her, I realize if Lynn were a cake, about all I'd know would be a fingertip of icing. There's enough in that little bit to tell me what I don't know abut Lynn is as as good as what I know, or believe I know. One thing I know about Lynn that is in every aspect of her life, is that she's true and doesn't have any time for that which is not true. She's a woman who stands on her own feet firmly. New Agers would say she's grounded. And she likes to watch lift-offs of the space shuttle on the NASA website. She befriends homeless lost dogs.

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN GIRL

Playing fiddle is Lynn Worth, and guitar is Lynn's "feller" Eddie Bakeberg. I got this picture of them at Galax fiddler's convention a couple years ago, maybe three. Lynn plays old-time fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass. She sings too. She's an all-around old-time musician who knows a lot of songs and is good at everything she plays.

She's made music as one of the Appalachian Mountain Girls (AMG) for a number of years. In the beginning she played bass and sang harmony. The banjo player then, Amy Michaels, of Ashe County, had to leave the band for whatever reasons. Amy has a great hillbilly voice. It's her singing that makes the songs SIXTEEN CHICKENS AND A TAMBORINE and OLD RATTLER on the AMG cd they made 5 or more years ago. Amy went to the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers to replace Creed Birchfield's banjo.

AMG found Katherine for bass player and Lynn stepped up to the mic with banjo. Rita the fiddler and Lynn play well together. Amy Boucher, born Worthington, of Charleston, SC, plays guitar with AMG and sings harmony. Amy came to the mountains and took a job at the Alleghany News when Lynn was editor. I knew Amy's family when I lived in Charleston. We were the only Worthingtons in the phone book. We call each other "cousin," though there's no kinship as far as we know. Amy is now the editor of the Galax Gazette, and has been for quite a long time, and Lynn works part-time for the Gazette. It was a blow to Alleghany County when Lynn left being editor of the News. However, Lynn is a woman with a life. A job that takes every minute of your time and mind could not go on without end.

Lynn plays fiddle with another band, The Phoenix Mountain Band. Eddie plays banjo with PMB. Eddie came here from Michigan. He plays accordian sometimes with PMB. He lives by Phoenix Mountain in Ashe County. Old-time with an accordian. Katherine and Amy from AMG play bass and guitar respectively. Stacey Kelley of Whitetop VA plays bass some with PMB. Pictured above she's playing mandolin. Stacey is the band's lead singer. A good one too.

Lynn keeps a camper parked at home to pull behind her pickup to fiddlers conventions for weekends at a time, and Galax for the whole week. She rides a motorcycle too. Not a Harley. It's a practical size for her and gets her where she's going. She also is a part time editor at McFarland press in W Jefferson. Lynn has a full life and a good many friends. She's quiet and friendly, but---if you've ever had a chicken fly in your face for getting too close to her babies, you've experienced Lynn when somebody talks down about mountain people. She will set you straight. Mountain people are not lesser versions of anything. Lynn is a carrier of the mountain spirit, a keeper of it in a time when it is changing fast.