NEW YEARS @ DUDLEY AND MUFFET'S ESPOUSAL

 newlyweds about to be

My friends Dudley and Muffet got hitched up last night. Neither one appeared to have any regrets. They spoke their vows just a few minutes before 12. Somebody turned on the big flat-screen tv. It's like New Years doesn't take unless you see it on tv. Of course, this is not what it's about. The tv is the official countdown clock that puts everybody in the country in sync with the atomic clock so everybody blows their whistles at the same time. It wouldn't do for all the parties in the Eastern time zone to go by clocks a minute or two off in either direction. Precision timing. Somebody told Dudley in jest to put on Guy Lombardo. Suddenly, the wedding party became a New Year's party with just a few minutes to go, champagne poured all around, hugging, kissing, people saying Happy New Year to each other. A good feeling atmosphere in the house. It's not in me to take an interest in weddings. I tend to see them as Divorce Part One. It's a jaundiced view. I'm well aware of it. But I still don't like weddings and only go to funerals of friends. Dudley and Muffet are my friends, so it's only right by my own standard that I go to their wedding, especially since invited. It was a small group of thirty-something. Dudley explained to me in conversation before the festivities that given the size of the house they wanted a guest-list of twenty or so, family and closest friends, but they couldn't stop at twenty. There were plenty of others they felt needed to be included. Dudley said, "This is what I love about this place. If you don't invite one of your friends to your wedding, they continue to be your friend." I thought: We'll see.

prenuptial horseplay

 

Muffet I have known mainly through the coffee shop in the Selma era as Dudley's woman when she arrived on the scene. Their bond was already set. I felt like she brought out the stallion in Dudley, a part of himself he'd had to shut down for several years. He and Muffet were high school boyfriend and girlfriend. After school everything changed for them. Each eventually married and went different ways. Dudley's first wife, Caroline, had a long, slow death from MS. Dudley cared for her, like nothing you've ever seen, for several years. He took such care of her it was past commendable. It was Dudley being Dudley. He feels deeply and he thinks deeply. The spontaneity of a child is present with him, ready to pop to the surface like a laugh at any time. Dudley is somebody I can talk with freely and laugh with frequently. And Dudley is, by my own personal reckoning, a true human being. He has a cultivated sense of humor. I don't mean cultivated like sophisticated, though it is that too, but with a lifetime of practice behind it. When we get together, laugh is much of what we do. We talk, though our talking amounts to commercials between rounds of laughter. In our childhoods, we were both characterized by a nerd's bewilderment over the ridiculous world around us, the nutty belief systems, the rarity of the rational, sports, like that. I was able a little bit better than Dudley at camouflaging myself a non-nerd. It never took, but I affected the show anyway, wanting to believe it worked. I didn't get picked on for being a nerd -- the point of the cammo. Then I saw Revenge Of The Nerds, and now I say: Nerd Power! I feel like Muffet's affection for Dudley has much to do with his spontaneity and humor. Dudley is not afraid to care. She knows that too.

 

the vow

 

I enjoyed Muffet from the start. That she was with Dudley opened me toward her, and I enjoyed talking with her. We have been facebook friends for some time, the occasional conversation by way of comment boxes. They went off on a couple of cross country driving adventures, following their flow, weeks and weeks away, keeping in touch by facebook along the journeys. It seemed to Dudley's friends like she was taking Dudley from them, but I could only think: Dudley knows what he's doing. Dudley isn't fickle. They were gone so much on long drives and shorter trips we seldom saw Dudley anymore. I thought of them like Jack and Jenny in the meadow together the first month, each focused so totally on the other that distractions didn't register; the best place for me, the other side of the fence. I saw by way of knowing Dudley that he and Muffet were in that focus and I thought nothing of it. They will be back. I felt like this New Years party with the wedding was an announcement to Dudley's world of neighbors and friends in this part of his life that they're back. They will hit the road again, but they haven't forgotten their friends. Muffet has extended herself generously to Dudley's friends. I don't even question Dudley's good sense marrying her. It's Dudley's life. It's his decision. With advanced gray hair he has a right to live by his own decisions. I take it from Dudley's affection for Muffet there is plenty about her that's worth having around. As I gradually become acquainted with Muffet, I'm automatically drawn to her because Dudley is. We get along very well, talk straight-forward and frankly with each other. She has extended herself to Dudley's friends as openly as though they were her own, and without being put-on and false about it. Like Dudley, Muffet is who she is and if you're looking for something different, well you can keep on looking someplace else.

 

 

todd smith and his wife jo ellen watch the vow

 

Dudley and I have known each other right at ten years. It was summer of 1993 I contacted him about teaching me to be a dj at the Sparta AM station WCOK for a radio show I was starting with regional music. He was new to the county from DC where his career was in radio. At the time, he was making commercials for the Sparta station and helping out the station in supportive ways. We started with his computerized sound equipment making a cd for each week's show, commercials, songs in place. He had a computerized setup that was impressive in what it could do, esp to somebody who only wants a computer for a glorified typewriter. Dudley could make an audio play of the Three Bears, speaking the role for every character and they all be different. I mentioned that one only because it was first to come to mind. I'd guess he could do Winnie The Pooh as well with different voices. All I'm getting at is Dudley has a trained and practiced vocal talent for radio talking. He taught me how to plan a show down to the seconds. I wanted to learn the rules of the studio, wanted to do the show live, spontaneously as possible, though without it being so loose it falls apart. The main thing was that Dudley put me at ease with the studio. I understood it before I started and from there on learned by doing. Dudley sings choral music with the local Camerata, likes choral music, opera, Broadway, and I like mountain music and rock. We've often laughed over how our musical tastes cancel each other. Guy Lombardo and Rage Against The Machine. In my small world of people I call my friends, Dudley matters. Now Muffet matters too.

 

12 o'clock: whistle and selfie time

 

 

*

  

PRIVILEGED LIVING

     air bellows gap road



I was just now reading what I'd written yesterday on fundamentalism. It carried me through those early phases of the life in my mind, the sentences triggering memories. It concluded with hearing the birds all day and the katydids and tree frogs after dark. Finishing that sentence, I felt overwhelmed by privilege. I've lived my life in poverty, my greatest ambition being to stay out of prison. That's something to pay attention to in America. The legal system gets a sadistic kick out of putting people in prison with long sentences. I don't think it's right, but I can't change it, so I walk the line. The legal system also knows what American prison is like. It's like throwing people to the gladiators. That's the dark side. So I do my best to keep on the sunny side of life, even though it's not always daylight. The sunny side doesn't mean I can't be saddened that American boys like me just out of high school, dumb as a rock, can't find a job, got no experience, and military is the American male right of passage. Go to Afghanistan, WoW, gonna kick some ass. Boom. Your legs are blown off. VA hospital. Home with mom and dad taking care of you the rest of their lives, them keeping themselves in poverty paying for an expensive insurance policy to keep you when they're gone. Then, of course, you have to take the insurance corporation to court because they refuse to pay unless you sue for it. That kind of intimidation is part of the plan.

Back to the privilege of hearing birds and insects. I feel privileged because none of the above has happened to me. I feel privileged that I live outside the maelstrom that civilization has become. In the words of an Alternate Roots song that Willard sang Friday night, A Million Miles From The City. Even though the interstate runs nearby and and it's a straight line to the city, a crooked line to another city, cities in all directions, it's the same as a million miles to the city, because I don't even like to cross the county line anymore. I love where I am so much and don't have a great deal of time left, I'm jealous of time here on this spot on Waterfall Road. And Caterpillar is the last of my lifetime of pets. I want to be here with her all the time. Every day is precious. I'm privileged to have learned through the course of my adult life to communicate with the "dumb" animals, dumb only in that they can't speak verbally. It is a privilege to be able to know an individual cat or dog as the "person" within, not just something you feed and clean up after. I like their uncluttered minds. I feel privileged for my experience in the community of the mountain people, privileged to be received as a naturalized citizen.

Another problem I had with Kansas was its scant and boring history. Cowtowns, Jesse James and killing Indians. A Kansas historian would go apeshit reading that summation and call me retarded. He'd be right. They didn't teach Kansas history in any school I went to. I don't think there are many states that teach the state's history in the public school. It's one of those subjects that is automatically dismissed like art history. So we memorize names of generals and dates of wars to pass the history test. I liked about South Carolina and North Carolina that they had histories. They were Southern states, the Confederacy where my heart pulled me ever since third grade when I read a child's biography of Robert E Lee. It woke up something in me that must have been sleeping inside. The South had a mystique for me that grew with time until it was time to bale out of Kansas. Where to? The South. It was like coming home living in South Carolina. In high school I liked Duane Eddy's song, Mason Dixon Lion. The South I fell in love with was not the South as it is, but an idea, a fantasy, a place where I felt one with its history that I knew nothing about except losing the Civil War.

I feel privileged to have lived in and to be living in the world of mountain music. WPAQ AM radio that Ralph Epperson started in 1948, the radio station in the next county, Surry, that only plays mountain music is as important to my way of understanding mountain music as the Bristol Sessions. I understand WPAQ is online now. My mechanic keeps the radio playing in his shop all day with WPAQ playing. His AM reception was not very good; he had to keep the radio in the window for listenable reception. He plays the station online now with excellent reception. It is only on the air during the daylight hours. Sometimes it is playing gospel, sometimes preaching, sometimes people talking, and mountain music from mostly the Central Blue Ridge. They still play the Carter Family, Emory Arthur, the Blue Sky Boys, Roy Acuff and current mountain music like the Slate Mountain Ramblers, Whitetop Mountain Band, Alternate Roots, Crooked Road Ramblers, Rock Mountain Ramblers, Ralph Stanley and all the rest of them. When a band self-produces a cd, they send one to the station. WPAQ's library of mountain music is extensive. Ralph Epperson used to tape live shows on Saturday mornings at the theater in MtAiry and gave all his tapes to the NC folklife center. What a treasure those tapes are for the future of Appalachian folklife studies.

I don't listen to the station much because I get no reception at the house and occasional reception in the eastern half of the county by car. And always forget it's online. When I want to hear mountain music, I put on a cd. Whatever I put on of mountain music takes over my focus. Earlier I put on some music by Kevin Fore (banjo) and Kirk Sutphin (fiddle). From the first notes I was fixed, couldn't do anything but listen. In the time of the AM stations in the mountains, each one played to its own county, the county lines about as far as reception goes, except for odd things like I've heard Sparta's AM station could be picked up in N Wilkesboro. I'm privileged that I was able to dj a weekly radio show on WCOK AM, Sparta, Saturday mornings, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour for seven years. Theme song was a solo bluegrass banjo playing Billy In The Lowground with a background fiddle drone. I feel tremendous privilege that I had the opportunity to play mountain music to mountain people in my home county, the county next to WPAQ. I love that. I don't know how many listeners I had, maybe a few hundred, maybe less, maybe more. I never talked up the radio show, because it was for people who love mountain music, not for people who say it all sounds like the same song over and over. I figured the people who wanted to hear it would find it. It didn't matter how many. I'd have been as happy with 3 as with 300. It was for people who love the music, not for numbers.

One of the greatest privileges of all, the one where I started noticing the feeling of privilege, and feel privilege every week that I simply know about the Friday night music at Willard Gayheart's gallery and frame shop, the Front Porch. For a couple years seldom more than 20 people in the audience, usually between 12 and 15. We were the ones who went every week we could make it. By now we all know each other. Now that it is a Crooked Road Venue attendance has doubled and tripled ever since. It's between 40 and 60 now. Minnie the cat can't give up her seat if she wants it back. Before, she could jump to the floor and walk around during the music looking at the people, sizing up the crowd, this her home, walking among the legs, then find a new place to curl up. It's not like that any more. When she gets up, somebody sits down. The first privilege is just knowing about it. Then many rings of privilege out from that; knowing the people I've come to know there, having Scott, Willard, Edwin, Dori, Jill, Steve for my friends, people I have heart feeling with, people I respect way high up, every one of them. Basically, it's looking like my entire life in the mountains has been one of feeling privilege, the privilege of living in a really beautiful culture almost nobody outside it knows about. Living among the mountain people as my own is the privilege I value perhaps most.


*

LAST DAY WCOK AM SPARTA

sonya joines


sue utt



Alleghany County's community radio station died today at 2pm. It received a near lethal blow 20 years ago when it was bought away from the people who made it a good community station and turned into a seriously lame version of FM Country. The yoyos working the station only played what they wanted to hear--nucountry--without regard for listeners. It was up to the listeners to accept what they played, not for them to play what the listeners wanted to hear. Indifference to the listeners, indifference to the county made for less and less advertising until management quit actively selling ads and went along by ads called in. Management abandoned the station to the yoyos who then took everything nucountry that had come in over the last 20 years, leaving only bluegrass, gospel and older country, all of which they hated. All of which the listeners loved. When they left and Sue was put in to pick the station up from down and out, off the air for 2 days, they'd left for Sue what the listeners wanted, and took everything that nobody ever wanted to hear again. Alleghany County is burned out on Dolly Parton. The yoyos, believing the station would die when they left, having choked it down to the last molecule of air, left it for dead.



Sue called yesterday to tell me I don't have a radio show anymore, and she had to be out of the station by 2 today. Sue had been told convincingly the station would not be sold to this deceiving preacher intending to buy it, and if he sold it to anybody, she would have a 2 week notice. Instead, she got the 2 o'clock notice. She was going about in tears this morning saying she feels like the rug had been pulled out from under her, her foundation yanked away. She needs work. Now she has to find work in a time when that's not easy. She was building his station up, advertising picked up, picked way up to where the station was paying its own expenses. She was involved heart and soul, made it into a personal station again, a service to its county. She had been misled such that her belief in what she'd been told on various occasions had her believing it mattered that she was helping the station. She was happy bringing his station back for him, like she'd done something worthwhile. Then one day she's told to be out by 2 next day. Sue's head is hanging in sorrow today. It's a deep sorrow of the heart. She had come to love her listeners. She repeated his conviction over the air that this Surry County preacher would not buy the station, as the preacher had been spreading rumor he would. She feels sorrow that she misled her listeners, she loves her listeners, wouldn't mislead them for the world. The answer she was given for why, was he had the money.



All the way along seeing Sue on Saturday mornings, she'd tell me from time to time something that would make me have to say, Don't believe everything you hear. Just because somebody said it does not make it so. I figured some day something would happen to pop her bubble. It did. Like a baseball bat in the back of the head. I felt sorrow for her. She was limp from heartbreak, a Mike Tyson jab to the stomach, a sharp stick in the eye, a learning that what she believed before turned out not to be so. Now she has to adjust her thinking in a major way. Sue is feeling betrayed and the grief of losing a close friend. She's losing the people of Alleghany County she has come to love. You might say she got her Sparta learning. It wipes smiles off faces. It's a learning that you better carry a shield on your left arm round here. It's like an initiation. If you can take it, you're ok. If you can't, it's later for you, gator.



Sonya is broken hearted, too, after several years of involvement with WCOK, the only voice on the station with a personal regard for the people she was talking to at the other end of the mic. A lot of people listened to Sonya's show because she played music they liked. She mostly played from her own collection. Sonya enjoyed her one morning a week show from 7:15 to 1. It was her time of playing good music to the people of the county she loves. She was devastated today. At 10 til 1, we who played music gathered to say good-bye to listeners. Sonya's eyes were dampened by the telling. Mine too, and Sue's. It was an emotional time until 1 when the station was to go off the air. BE OUTTA THERE BY 2. It felt in a minor way something like a corporate hostile takeover. Hostile in a whole lot of ways. Corporate in the indifference to all concerned.



The news when Sue told me on the phone last night was not surprising. I felt nothing but anger. I wrote last night in anger. It was not nice. When I clicked for it to go online, it vanished, deleted. I couldn't find it anyplace. This morning I felt sorrow mixed with the anger. That it's me playing the mountain music is neither here nor there, it's that my listeners have no one to play it for them now. We had 7 years of good Saturday mornings together. I loved that I had the opportunity to play mountain music for mountain people. I liked to call it music from home. That was one of the great joys of my life. I can go on from here seeing it the way DeWitt Hanes taught me, to have done something is the same as doing it now.



The sorrow I carry in my heart is the people of the county have lost their home town radio station. They've lost the music they love. WPAQ is still there for the ones who can receive it. In my car I get half static, half sound. If it gave good sound I'd listen to WPAQ all the time. It's the same at the house. Mostly static. I've always loved living in a county adjoining WPAQ's county, Surry. I never met Ralph Epperson, but have respect way up high for his devotion to mountain music. I felt like I was giving Alleghany an hour a week of what Ralph Epperson gave Surry all day every day. A little mountain music is better than none. That's why I started doing the radio show, because every county around us had a Saturday morning mountain music show, but not here. I believed the county needed one, so I jumped in and swam. I am very happy I've had the opportunity to play this music to the people of the county that wanted to hear it. One of the aspects of the show I loved best was that I knew the people listening loved the music they were hearing in a big way. I loved playing musicians from this county, friends and neighbors.

A LOT OF GOOD BANDS

lenke pasley

This morning's radio show started with Doc Watson singing the Bill Monroe song, MY ROSE OF OLD KENTUCKY. I'd gone to the station having in mind playing Skeeter & the Skidmarks and the Laurel Fork Travelers. Wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. So I picked up some Doc Watson and Clint Howard and a cd I made once of old-time gospel, like Ola Belle Reed. By the time I arrived at the station I was wanting to start the show with Doc Watson singing My Rose of Old Kentucky. It's a good song anyway, but when Doc Watson handles it, it's brand new. From there, whatever's next. More Doc Watson with emphasis on his music with a band instead of his folk guitar style. Then into Clint Howard, a friend of Watsons who lives near Mountain City, Tennessee, then Hungry Hash House Ramblers with Edwin Lacy banjo and Scott Freeman mandolin. Scott has a website worth visiting: http://www.scott-freeman.com/

Skeeter & the Skidmarks played tonight at the Blowing Rock school house. I wanted to go. MtAiry fiddlers convention was going on too. I'd been wanting for months to go to MtAiry this

year. And Benton Flippen was playing at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway. I wanted to go to all of them. Could only go to one. I was leaning toward driving to Blowing Rock, not wanting to make the drive. Didn't want to drive all the way to MtAiry. It became such a logjam to make a decision from that I threw them all off and said I wasn't going to go to any of them. The phone rang and it was Arnold Clodfelter. He and his wife Sherry asked me to go to the Golden Corral in MtAiry. I said, Yes. Solved. I'd rather spend time with Arnold and Sherry than any one of those shows, so off we went on the road to MtAiry. The shows were entertainments, but Arnold and Sherry are friends.

Arnold is having a rough time. A very rough time. Sherry has become his sustainer and protector. They knew my friend and Jr's, Jean, and they knew Jr. Arnold grew up in Whitehead and knew Jr all his life. Jean and Jr became important parts of my life and they went away. I like spending time with people who knew them, not so much to talk about them, but it creates a kind of presence. This is why I want to keep up with friends who were Jr's friends and now mine, because it brings Jr back to a degree when I'm talking with Jerry Edwards, for example, who has known Jr since he was born, his dad was Jr's closest friend, and since him, Jerry has been. We don't talk about Jr, but the spirit of his presence is with us when we're visiting. I like that. I feel like I need more interaction with friends than entertainment today. There's plenty of entertainment going around. I don't want to get to a place where I expect myself to take in as much as possible. I want to be able to see as much as I want to see and be free enough not to if I don't feel like it. And I want always to be able to hold friends above entertainment.

I'm glad it worked out as it did. I've thought a lot of both of them for several years. We haven't known each other well, but it's always been a good association. I remember when Arnold was working at the radio station in the time when Judy Halsey worked there when the station was an active community station. The station had paid employees and was doing well. Then the station changed hands, out with the old, in with the new. No more community station. It was a small-time attempt to be like big city FM nucountry stations.

It took the station 20 years to die from indifference as all the advertisers went away. Arnold is one of many happy to see the station coming back, Sue bringing it back to the community. And the community is tuning the station in again. I feel a bit of a bond with Arnold through the station. He, too, is appalled at the shamelessness of the 2 djs who believed the station was dead, due to them, and baled out taking with them everything they wanted, cleaning the place out, leaving it with only the music they didn't like, the music the listeners liked. Sue has a good library of bluegrass and gospel and older country to play from, minus Dolly Parton and Rhonda Vincent, particular favorites of theirs. It was like the Bush administration running a radio station. No one wants them back. I'm reminded of Marsha Wagoner telling me about a time her dad, Amos, talked straight with somebody from Away who was running down the county. Amos told him nobody asked him to come here and nobody will miss him when he's gone. Well said.

My Saturday morning show and Sonya's Monday morning show are the 2 threads that went through the station's demise one day and resurrection the next when Sue came in. Ours were the only times of the week the station spoke to its listeners with appreciation for who they are. We want to play music the listeners love. Sue asked people to call and tell her what sorts of music they wanted to hear. Country, bluegrass, traditional, gospel. Not necessarily in that order, but those were the four. That's what Sue plays for the listeners. She fulfills every request she's able. It does me good to know my listeners are loving the music I'm playing to them. Like today playing Ralph Stanley's Rank Stranger with Roy Lee Centers singing lead. I believe with fair certainty that everyone listening loved that song as much as I did. It doesn't get much better than that. It does, but not much. Like Carter singing it.

We used to sing Rank Stranger in Millard Pruitt's Regular Baptist Church, Laurel Glenn. Brother Millard loved the song deeply. The song book had a lot of Carter Family songs in it. Beautiful Star of Bethlehem from the New Baptist song book, that song Ralph Stanley did right, like every song he sings. We sang several songs Dr. Ralph and Carter recorded. As far as I can tell, their voices sing from the soul of these mountains. I'm loving doing gospel time too. Ralph and Carter can be played just as much there as on the other, what I've come to call Square Dance Music Hour, and the next one Gospel Hour. The only change to gospel hour is the songs will be mostly from the region of the central Blue Ridge. There is so much good music in this region that I can play endlessly and never run out of music. Two of the songs played this morning by Hungry Hash House Ramblers had the fiddle of Jim Van Cleve in them. He is fiddler with Mountain Heart. A North Carolina boy. Seems like the next thing would be a show of North Carolina traditional music. We have an enormous number of good musicians in the state as in the central Blue Ridge. Years ago, I told Scott Freeman his band Alternate Roots was "a really good band." He said, "There's a lot of good bands." He was right.

TJ da OT DJ

Here is the cubbyhole I sit in at WCOK on Saturday mornings for an hour of mountain music played like it's the latest rock & roll. No kidding. I crank the sound up good and loud in the studio like I'm at a concert and sit there like Sponge Bob Square Pants soaking it up, soaking it through my skin. Like when I saw the Cars in Greensboro. Didn't need ears. Heard it through my chest and belly.

In my younger years I was carried away with Eric Clapton's guitar or John Coltrane's sax, playing it loud in my apartment, following the notes in the bliss it led me through. At this time in my life I do that with Tommy Jarrell, Esker Hutchins, Thornton Spencer, Benton Flippen, Fred Cockerham. The list goes on.

I listen to an old-time fiddle played by Whit Sizemore now like I listened to Clapton then. Wayne Henderson from just over the county/state line, and half a dozen other guitar pickers I know of within a 50 mile radius of my house, plus at least that many I don't know of, could kick Clapton's ass at Galax, acoustic. Electric is another thing.

I don't know what I'm getting at here unless it's that good-better-best are relative to so many factors they're relatively meaningless. That means not altogether meaningless. I remember a time I reacted with more vehemence than intended, replying to a man who told me with final word from on high that Wayne Henderson is the best. I said, 'He doesn't win Galax every year.' I wanted to say something about these mountains as a fountain of musicians, but said, 'He's among the best,' which pretty much put an end to the conversation. It was like telling a preacher the virgin birth was a hoax. If I'd known he had that much invested in his word as final, I'd have probably said, 'Yeah, you could say that,' just to be peaceable. Some of my friends would tell me that's enabling. It's been so long since I've been among people I don't know that I've lost touch with conversational subtleties.

Sometimes I forget we're a world of egos going about on our feet and hind ends getting bent out of shape over perceived slights. But, I tell myself, there's not much I can do but suspect this happens to him a lot. Fact is, I'd rather hear Jeff Michael play a guitar than Henderson. I don't mean to say he's better. Just 'I'd rather hear.'

I've become so sensitive to these terms of gradation that perhaps I take it too seriously in a cocktail party environment with plastic cup of wine in hand. 'Yes. Right you are,' is more like it. I forgot the first rule: don't mean anything you say. It will invariably ruffle a feather if you do. Defensive Talking 01.

Anyway, pictured above is where I play The Shady Mountain Ramblers, Whitetop Mountain Band, Ralph Stanley, The Stanley Brothers, The Carter Family, Art Wooten, Tim Smith, The Green Mountain Boys, Slate Mountain Ramblers, Camp Creek Boys, Appalachian Mountain Girls, Alternate Roots, Ola Belle Reed, Tommy Jarrell, on and on, to people who love mountain music. It's the greatest privilege of my life to play mountain music to mountain people.

WCOK

This is Sue at the radio station WCOK 1060 AM

Sparta, NC.

Sue is bringing the station back to its listeners. 18 years of nucountry about put the station out of business. Sue came in and started asking people to call and tell her what music they like to hear. Sue now plays bluegrass, country, gospel and regional. No attention is given to charts or the latest in anything. Just hours of music the people listening like to hear. She uses the entire library at the station. Advertisers are coming back. She's making it a home town station again. Sue's tshirts all say something about Jesus. She's a spirit of light.