THE CIRCLE OF THE HEART

agnes

 

Pictured here is Agnes Joines, head knocker of our BROC group. That's Blue Ridge Opportunity Commission. BROC is involved with three counties, Wilkes, Ashe and Alleghany. Our branch is the Alleghany Planning Committee. Unfortunately, the county government started a totally unrelated committee called the Alleghany Planning Commission. It seems to me pointless to go on keeping the name we have, because it has been rendered meaningless. Commission or committee, which is it? Whichever. The group is partial to the name, because we've always used it and we had it first. It never meant much of anything before; we don't advertise, self-promote or appeal for money. Not high profile. The lowest of profiles. Stacy, our "secretary" (the S-word in the ABCs of forbidden words---I don't know of another word for her position---office person?), investigates sources for operating money, grants and such, and she helps the people who come through the door seeking assistance, like needing an electric bill paid in the winter when usage triples, firewood, needing repairs on a house, like replacing a window, fixing a leaking roof, and whatever else the need. This is among the poorest counties in the state. North Carolina has never been known for a money state. Our present republican government is consciously pushing the citizens of the state deeper in Depression, supplementing the national government's intent. I didn't realize the extent of poverty in the county until involvement with BROC. I prefer to call it BROC; it's easy to remember and specific to what it is. I, myself, am unable to remember if it is commission or committee. At the same time, I really don't care what it's called. What we do is my reason for being there.  

 

 

stacy

 

Stacy is one of my favorite people in my world. This picture doesn't show her face well, but her attitude comes through clearly. Stacy has a brilliant mind, she just doesn't know it yet. She's on her way, though. Ten more years and she'll be blowing her own mind. She'll be saying, Ten years ago I wouldn't have dreamed I'd be where I am now. I don't think it's exaggeration. Stacy is serious. I mean serious. She is of a mind that life is serious. She takes it seriously. In fun, I have called her Stasi, which is all the more fun because she knows what it is, East German secret police, and doesn't hold it against me as an insult. From my perspective, it's a compliment, because I know she knows what it means, and it wouldn't be any fun if she didn't know what it meant. It's not even teasing. It's playing with words, linguistic humor, among my favorite kinds of humor. I only called her Stasi once; more than once it's boring. I can talk about things with Stacy I can't talk with the others about. Like today, I told her I'd just learned last week that all of Russia from the Ural Mountains eastward is Siberia. I'd believed Siberia was a section in the northeastern part of the country. It's the name of Asian Russia. She said she'd recently learned it, too, and told me about a globe her grandmother has with names of countries she'd never heard of. We do not ever talk politics for reasons we both understand. If we did, we would not talk at all. That's how I like to be with everybody I know. Put that old absolutist mind in gear and look out. I know so few people who agree with me politically that I can't talk political nonsense with anybody. How blessed is that? I like to dwell in the color zone between the extremes of black and white. In light, black is absence of colors and white is all colors. In pigment, black is all colors and white is absence of color. It's the rainbow in between. And light is particles that travel in waves.

 

ernest

 

Ernest is Agnes's husband of sixty years. They've been in love since school. Ernest is fresh out of a very long stay in the hospital, where Agnes said he like-to died twice. Agnes is a refreshing spirit! Ernest is 81 and did not look over 65 before the hospital stay. Today he was slow. Today I saw him look his age for the first time. It doesn't feel right seeing Ernest so bereft of his spirit. He plays bluegrass mandolin primarily, banjo, guitar, and bass. He plays old-time and country too, and sings. Agnes is a good singer of the old songs. In my early years in the mountains, they made an LP together singing hymns with preacher Earl Baker. Baker was the step-son of Henry Whitter, guitar picker of old-time music of the 1920s and 30s, of Grayson & Whitter (GB Grayson played old-time fiddle--has the name the best there ever was--and Henry Whitter did some singing). Henry Whitter spent his later years in Whitehead, just down the road. Earl Baker's daughter gave Whitter's guitar to the Blue Ridge Music Center. I don't usually get a kick out of things like Jimi Hendrix's guitar or even Carter Stanley's guitar, but when I saw Henry Whitter's guitar in its Plexiglas case on the wall, I felt it was something special. I can't explain why. I just felt it. Ernest Joines plays mandolin in the local bluegrass dance band, The Rise & Shine Band. They are the house band at the square-dance place, The Alleghany Jubilee on Main Street. It is the only place in Sparta anything is happening. Tuesday and Friday nights Main Street in front of the Jubilee is loaded with parked cars. Ernest and Agnes ran the Jubilee until Ernest fell into the hospital. A new couple have taken it over who have the personality for it like Ernest and Agnes do. They are part of our group, too, Jack and Linda Joines, but couldn't make it today. Agnes looked tired and drawn from half a year of stress. Having her Ernie back is everything to her now. Nobody in this world could have more loving care than Ernest.

 

 ted, ernest, agnes, stacy, helen

 

It's Agnes's love that pulled him through. She thanked everybody for the prayers today. She said it's a miracle and she just wanted to give God the praise he was due. And that was it. No sermon, nothing political about Christian, no self-congratulations for going to church. This attitude is in the spirit of our group. We are about helping people having a hard time at helping themselves in an indifferent economy. We don't pat ourselves on the back for being righteous. Every one of us is one who  believes the poor need help. We are people who believe Jesus had reason for recommending we help the poor. Churches that praise themselves for being Christian seldom do. We are not church affiliated. Individually, we all have our lives and can't do a whole lot. But together as a small group with clarity of intent we get quite a lot covered. Our fundraising event of the year is the Hillbilly Show in the school auditorium. It's a hometown stage version of the tv show HEE HAW, five dollars a ticket. In my Flatland years I hated it. When I moved to the mountains I watched it every week with neighbor Tom Pruitt and learned to love it. It is a very different perspective seeing it from inside hillbilly culture. The Hillbilly Show amounts to comedy skits absurd to ridiculous, and bluegrass, country and old-time music played by local musicians. I think of it as Dada theater. We couldn't put the show on last year due to Ernest in dire straits and Agnes stressed. Agnes is the director of the show. This year we're a whole lot behind and concerned. The local electric co-op came through with a great assist. Everything's gonna be all right. We have our Ernie back. I wanted to introduce you to everybody, but am running out of space. If you don't mind I'll take a little more space for you to meet Gary and Jean.  

 

 

gary

  

Gary Joines, pictured above, is a Marine, retired bank branch manager, fiddler, guitar and bass player, and he's Ernest's cousin. He plays bass in The Rise & Shine Band. A Marine fiddler seems like an oxymoron, but Gary is no kind of moron. He's a humble man with a wide range of talent. He's good at making a living in this world and he's an active artist. Ted Dorsett is here from Winston-Salem. He has a couple of donkeys too. Jean Osborne, pictured below, is the daughter of country singer Del Reeves' brother, Homer. Del Reeves is from here. Just about everybody in the county named Reeves is kin to him to some degree. His full name is Franklin Delano Reeves. Reckon they was democrats? Jean is a woman of a beautiful heart and soul. When I'm around Jean I see (feel) the brilliant light of a woman of true compassion, one who cares deeply. I don't know if that's how she sees herself. She's too humble to have such lofty beliefs about herself. A Jean moment popped into mind. In the time I was looking up titles of land transfers for a lawyer's office, Jean was doing same for another lawyer. I was in the vault at the register of deeds, and Jane, a woman doing same work for another lawyer, was in there. Jane is someone with a sense of humor all her own and she gives you nothing to go by whether it was a knife or fun. You're on your own to make it what you want it to be. Jane doesn't care. Jean came walking through the door, saw Jane first and said, "How you doin, Jane?" Jane replied without looking up from her work, "Me and TJ was doin just fine til you walked in." Jean stopped like Jane had cocked a gun in her face, thought better of it, knowing Jane, and proceeded, smiling forgiveness. They started talking freely. Jane counted on Jean to get the humor and she did. I can't leave out Helen Crouse. Helen took care of her husband in a long, slow decline after a debilitating stroke. Helen has a bright spirit too. I tend to like to sit next to Helen; she's a light-hearted refreshing spirit. I'm honored to have a place among these people.

 

jean and helen

 

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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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THE JUBILEE ON TV

roger stamper

mark handy

the mountain park old-time string band

the dancers

more dancers

Saturday night in Sparta the only cars you see on Main Street are parked along the street in front of the Jubilee. You don't even see cars moving on Main Street on a Saturday night in Sparta. Sparta is as dead a town as there ever was when the after-work traffic has subsided by six. At seven the Jubilee band is hitting its first notes. Dancers run to the floor to get that extra second of dancing in. The Jubilee is a happy place where people who like happy music go to hear old-time music and dance if they like to dance. If they're not dancers, they sit and watch. It's always a good show. Everybody knows each other, just about, giving the place a sense of community where you have several different kinds of people, different personalities, different experience, a sliver of a pie slice of traditional American culture as it lives today. We tend to think, after half a century of television, that American culture is all inside the tv now, but American traditional culture continues to live in the working class.

What's left of people who have not entirely abandoned traditional American culture are looked down on for driving pickups and Detroit cars. Nobody pays them much mind, because no attempt is made by any of them to impress anyone who does not go to the Jubilee, or anyone who does. The Jubilee is no good for tourism, because it attracts the wrong class of people. It doesn't matter that the ONLY thing happening in Spartaritaville is the Jubilee and bowling. The wrong class of people is the wrong class of people on or off Main Street. They wouldn't have anything like the Jubilee in downtown Blowing Rock. Spartaritaville aint nor Blowing Rock, nor was it meant to be. Blowing Rock is where Baptists go to the liquor store. A Southern joke came to mind: Jews don't recognize Christians. The Pope doesn't recognize Protestants. Baptists don't recognize each other in the liquor store.

The Jubilee is where you go to see people who are themselves and they're not for sale. They don't go about with a plastic smile on their faces all the time like children in a Chinese child market. They're country people comfortable with silence, dancing with people they've known all their lives and people they only met in the dance. Their faces are animated and active in among the people they are at home with, their partners in good times at the Jubilee with good old-time dancing music, good fiddle, good banjo, good dancing rhythm, nobody putting on airs. These are the truly rich people in a society, the people who don't make efforts to appear to be something they're not. Their heads are clear of the confusion of living with a head totally involved in the made-up public persona that is as consciously manipulable as the words of a playwright. At the Jubilee you don't see a hierarchy of assets. Nobody can afford to parade their assets as something somebody else could look up to. It's a place where everybody is comfortable with each other as themselves.

By chance I sat at a small table with two chairs at the back of the audience seats and visited with Mark Handy's mother for quite awhile. What a beautiful-hearted woman she was. We talked briefly from time to time. I was sitting there feeling good for Mark having such a supportive mother, one who teaches and supports her kids. She was the kind of woman a child would want for a mother or a grandmother, a woman a man would want for a wife at any age. During the band's break, Mark came back to the concession stand for a bottle of water, looked surprised to see me talking with his mother. He didn't question it, but I did catch at glimpse of surprise. I had the good fortune to receive a dose of her support before my interview. Ernest Joines tapped me on the shoulder and said my interview would be ready to go in a minute. A case of nervous jitters ran over my entire body like a match thrown on gasoline. I noticed it and said to my nervousness, don't get carried away. Everybody is friendly. I'm at home among friends.

A tv crew was there from what I've become convinced was PBS. At first I was told it would be BBC International. Then I heard CBS. Then it came to PBS. I didn't think to ask one of them. I figured CBS would have a big van with logo on the sides, front and back. A satellite dish on top. Didn't see one of them. BBC would have done a big corporate advertising job for itself, too. These people were not talking heads in tv anchor outfits. All were dressed casually. The camera looked like the Hubble telescope. One guy worked it. Another guy carried a mic on a pole. Both looked like they were good at what they were doing. I'd seen them earlier walking among the dancers getting closesups, the dancing feet, and make video of the band. Two women were about the interviewing. They had their organizational work to do. Agnes and Ernest had asked me to bring some paintings and be available for an interview. By the time it was my turn before the camera, I'd come to appreciate the skills of these people involved. I had respect for the camera and sound operators just from seeing the flow of their work together, seeing where they focused their attention. I'd talked with the two woman and had equal respect for their skill at what they were doing.

The very first thing I noted inside myself when I stepped before the camera and mic, I have made so many videos of bands making music, I had understanding for what they were doing. I knew they knew a million times more than I do about making video. While we were positioning ourselves, I remembered I had my hat on. Thought I'd give them a choice for the visual consideration, which I can't see, so I lifted my hat and said, "With or without?" Both agreed, without. I figured it to be the backlight from the front window behind where I was placed and a porch light overhead. That white top of the head might have glowed in that light. Because I had some insight into looking through the camera's eye, it relaxed me knowing what they were doing. It wasn't like I was before a camera to be seen all over the country like a big star or somebody on Big Loser.

I was cooperating with a couple of guys making a video. They knew what they wanted, because this was their career, so I stood where they said, paid attention to them so they didn't have to tell me something twice. Right away, I felt a flow with them. I know what it's like to make video of somebody. The people I make video of, I want them to be relaxed in who they are, which cued me to relax for these film makers, looking at it like they want me to be who I am. The who I am part was easy; it's what we do around here. The two women stood beside the camera, to my right of it, and they asked me questions that were in line with what I was talking about, not changing the subject. It felt like I knew what to say, because this was about old-time music, and I love old-time so much it's easy. In the middle of my time (5 min at most), I noticed this was awfully free-flowing, the interviewer had me relaxed before we started. I told her when it was over she made me feel comfortable at all times. The questions were so good that I relaxed into answering questions I felt were to the point, pertinent to the moment, making it an easy, relaxed conversation. They were as comfortable for me as the Jubilee itself.

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