MY FRIEND HAROLD HAYES

john singer sargent

 

My old buddy, Harold Hayes, continues in my mind after hearing him mocked for his failure at political correctness. The old boy is of a generation that doesn't even know what it is. His mind has been gone for at least ten years. He still has enough mind to drive his pickup and go to town every once in awhile to get out of the house and see some people. He's very difficult to talk with. Talking to him, he misses almost everything. When he talks, it's the same thing every time I see him. This does not bother me, I've known Harold a long time, since before his mind went away. Several times in the coffee shop, Harold has come in for a cup of coffee and to see if anyone was in there he could talk to. His head wobbles and his eyes are kind of far away, but Harold is there. Mind out of control, about all that is left is the fine human being that he is all the way to the soul. He was always welcome in the time Selma had the shop. It was in Selma's time I would see him in there. He always embarrasses me when I see him, wherever it is, Farmer's Hardware, any of the places he drops by to visit. He feels compelled to tell everyone in the place, calling their attention, to tell them what a great friend I am. He wants to tell that I took care of his closest friend in his life, Jr Maxwell, in his dying. He stumbles around with words and few know what he's talking about but me.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold used to be a bluegrass bass player, and a guitar player. I say "used to" because he sold his bass. No point keeping it when he couldn't play it any more. For much of his adult life he made music every weekend for dances. He played bass with Jr Maxwell's band, The Green Mountain Boys, with fiddlers Art Wooten, Johnny Miller, Ernest Johnson, and some others. He learned the bass from Jr's wife, Lois, who was the band's bass player, and took her place. She taught Harold in order for him to take her place. He and Jr were probably each other's closest friends throughout the rest of their lives. In my time of taking care of Jr, which lasted about six months intensive, and a year of looking in on him twice a day and spending time with him. He was lonesome and simply needed some company. His home with nobody else in it was a void for him. Lois died of cancer, and his wife after Lois was a woman from Away who took him for having money, a farm, and left him when he didn't die soon enough. To take Jr for having money, her sights were not set very high. She ran through everything he had in twelve years and left him when he had nothing left and in debt to a degree he'd never been in his life. Then she left him and tried to take his house and his business, which, fortunately, the judge saw through. Everybody in the county abandoned her and she had to leave the county. Nobody would have to do with her. She'd speak to people she knew before, and they'd look away.

 

john singer sargent

 

Jr Maxwell was one of the better respected men in the county. Not that the people who call themselves society had anything to do with him. The people of the county, outside a closed circle of climbers in Sparta, all respected Jr for legitimate reasons, for his character. Outside Sparta, the people of the county have their own culture that interacts not at all with Sparta, but for hardware stores, groceries, gas and bank. In the world of the people of the county, everyone of his generation knew each other. Among the mountain people, they know each other for who they are, not their assets or stylish appearance. Among the mountain people, humility is regarded a virtue. Among the white suburbanites coming into the mountains and taking over, arrogance is a virtue, humility regarded stupid. Mountain people do not take to arrogance in any form or from anybody, and do not tolerate it among their own. I have a bad case of it too. Somebody comes at me from an arrogant place, I absent myself. I've found the best way to get rid of them is to drop some hillbilly grammar. The one I like best is saying them for those. Once is all it takes. They look at me askance and they're gone. I don't even have to go for a walk. Every year, Jr Maxwell would take a day and go around with his tractor to plow the gardens for the widows of Whitehead and the old people past able to do for themselves. Every snow, he took his tractor and blade around to the people of Whitehead who could not do for themselves and scraped their driveways. When Jr became unable, himself, somebody cleared his driveway.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold Hayes was one of Jr's friends who dropped in on him periodically, sat and talked with him awhile about whatever they talked about. It wasn't a matter of what they talked as much as that they talked. Jr was Harold's closest friend. He looked up to Jr actually as if on a pedestal, regarded that well. I knew Harold before the time of Jr's inability to take care of himself. Every time he visited Jr in the time I was staying there, he made it a point to be sure I understood how much he appreciated what I was doing for Jr. A deep love ran between them, the love between friends of many years. All of Jr's friends became my friends in that time. The day his spirit left the body, one said to me, "Now Whitehead knows who you are," and another, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." Those were the most valuable sentences ever spoken to me in my life. I value those sentences, the people of Whitehead, the ones who said them in the core of my heart. Harold Hayes would embarrass me when he came into the coffee shop with all the praise from his heart that I'd helped his friend. It never ended when it started. His mind was gone, though his heart wide awake. I am Harold's connection with Jr now that he's gone. And likewise, when I see Harold, I see Jr. We have a bond we both value. My face automatically lights up in a big smile when I see Harold. I don't take kindly to my friend being dismissed by the people who value arrogance. It reminds me why I love the mountain people so deeply.

 

john singer sargent himself

 

 

*

 



HILLBILLY DJ

the carter family

From social moments I've engaged in over the last weeks I'm seeing I don't know how to talk to anybody anymore. Never did, really. Consciously worked at learning to be witty and entertaining, but it never took. Something like taking a chemistry class when I never wanted to know anything about chemistry. I couldn't learn those letters with the lines between them. It was opaque as trying to learn to read music. It never took. I understand what people who cannot read see when they look at a page of words, same thing I see in a sheet of music. At piano concerts I've been to, Peter Serkin, Artur Rubinstein, some others with familiar names and some without, I see people reading music and playing really fast, I'm in awe, even knowing they've practiced it ten thousand hours and don't need the written music but for emergency moments, like somebody coughs and distracts the musician for a tenth of a second. I'm in awe of anybody who can read music and play at the same time, even make music of it. A musician is someone who likes to play the same thing over and over working on nuances, smoothing the finger work, learning the tune so well it's automatic. Playing old-time mountain music of no written notes and no written words, passed from musician to musician, is a matter of subtle musicianship as subtle as more "serious," school educated music that is indeed more advanced for having been written over hundreds of years, studied and played by serious musicians. Years and hours of mastery of an instrument matures with age in hillbilly music as in classical. Jascha Heifetz's violin is the only classical violin that has made tears run down my face like hillbilly fiddling does when it's by Tommy Jarrell or Fred Cockerham or Howard Joines sawing the strings.

the carter family

First time I heard Heifetz play Scottish Fantasy, by Max Bruch, I'd been in the hills a few years, had a few LPs of hillbilly fiddling I didn't listen to much, but liked. I was in the house with a classical station on the radio. Scottish Fantasy came on and the fiddle went straight to my heart like a bolt of joy lightning. I flopped down in a chair and wept throughout the song. It's the same thing that happens to me at a Ralph Stanley concert. The music is so beautiful my heart overflows with joy and tears run down my face. The name Ralph Stanley comes to mind and my eyes dampen. The names of the Carter Family, Sara, AP and Maybelle, dampen my eyes. Can't leave out Carter Stanley who can make you feel a song, like Sara Carter, with a plain voice telling the story, like few other singers do for me. I think I have everything the Stanley Brothers recorded, the Carter Family too, also Uncle Dave Macon, another of the great ones. In the time I had the music store of mountain music, I had speakers outside that played onto Main St, hillbilly music all day long. One day a car parked in front, a middle-aged woman driving. She left the car to pay a bill or something, leaving an old man, evidently her dad of 90+. I noticed the bill of his ball cap bobbing up and down and his fingers tapping rhythm on the armrest of the open window, Dave Macon clucking his banjo. The old boy too feeble to drive could still be moved by good music. Dave Macon used to play in the very building when he came to Sparta to play at the Spartan theater, now the Jubilee, in the 1940s. The building in that time was DC Bledsoe's Ford dealership. Local musicians jammed in the showroom with Uncle Dave and his musicians the afternoon before the show. A fruit jar went  the rounds and everybody got right for the concert. 

the carter family

Had a radio show on Saturday mornings of regional mountain music on the local AM station, until it was sold to a preacher who shut it down and left it. It was a bitter shame for Sparta to lose its station. Every Saturday morning I went to the station from ten to eleven and played mountain music from here in this county, surrounding counties and the Central Blue Ridge. Never had to play the same thing twice, but by choice. I searched for everything I could find from here by local musicians, tapes they made practicing, recordings. Local fiddler, Art Wooten, recorded 9 songs with Bill Monroe, played the first bluegrass song to be played on Grand Ole Opry, Mule Skinner Blues, in January, 1939, with Bill Monroe's band. He forever has the title, The First Bluegrass Fiddler. I often referred to the show as music from home. Art recorded, I think, eight songs with the Stanley Brothers and four with Flatt & Scruggs. Often I'd devote an hour to a given band or artist, an hour of Whitetop Mountain Band, an hour of Alternate Roots, an hour of Big Country Bluegrass. My purpose was to give the people of the county who love their own music a chance to hear it. The radio show was one of my many art forms. It was a creative expression as dj, making an hour of good mountain music to fill the listener's ears with joy. I had no idea how many people listened, who, or anything. I talked to a black microphone. It was my listener. It took a little time to learn how to talk to a black tennis ball as though it were conscious, like Hamlet talking to a skull. I went to Dudley Carpenter at first to teach me how to dj. He was a good teacher. He taught me how to do it right. I didn't want to do it right, but wanted to know how. I wanted to talk no more than to tell who made the music and song titles. Occasionally, I'd tell a little something, but my attention was on playing the music. 

the carter family

It was my favorite hour of the week. Eventually, I got the feel for people hearing it at home, driving, living their lives. I loved the Carter Family so much and knew my listeners loved them even more than I did, people of the same culture as the Carter Family, I could not talk during a Carter Family show. Everybody knew the titles, I didn't need to introduce any song. I sat with tears flowing down my face for an hour loving the music and happy my listeners were loving it too. My style as a dj was more NPR than commercial. I talked reasonably. Mountain people don't like to hear a lot of talk. They want to hear music. I played music. When it was the Stanley Brothers, tears ran down my face the whole hour. They are so of these mountains. The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley and Doc Watson are the voices the soul of the Southern Appalachians chose to sing through. These musicians, in my heart's way of hearing them, are of these mountains to the place they are these mountains. The only Christmas song I never tire of hearing is Ralph Stanley's Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. It tears me up every time I hear it. He can make you feel a gospel song in the heart. I had a good time sharing the beautiful music of these hills with the people whose music it was. I never imagined in earlier life I might one day be a dj playing mountain music on a local AM station in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Backwoods Beat Music Hour. I loved my listeners, even though I did not know who they were. Occasionally, in the grocery store or post office I'd fall into conversation with someone who told me they listen. I've met some wonderful people like that. The radio show was an expression of my love for the people of the county, a thank you for allowing me to live here in peace.        

*

HOWARD JOINES AND OLD-TIME MUSIC

art wooten (left) with the stanley brothers

I've been gone the last six days while being right here. Fell into an obsessive fit of writing a ten page essay on Pine Swamp fiddler Howard Joines and his music world in the county. At the beginning, I wanted to write about his music, to get a feel for the music he played and how he played, his musician friends and accomplices, the time, the place. I had plenty of biographical information, but I don't like something written about a musician or a painter that is answers to test questions only. I wanted to write something that dove into his music and his world of music, attempting to find the musician within, not just dates and data. I wasn't sure I could do that. It looked like a very tall order. I started writing thinking I was taking the biographical way. Then right away I wanted to put him in the context of the music world he was in. That grew and I found as the writing was reaching for the feel of what he did with a fiddle, I was also telling of the time bluegrass came into mountain music. At the Fiddle and Plow show last Friday night, talking with Karl Cooler of Mountain Roads Recordings before the show, he told me he recommends my blog writings on regional music to people looking for something to help them understand mountain music. He said I have an ability to give the sense and feel of the music in a way readers can get. I was happy to hear that. It's one of those things that has to come from outside myself, because I can't see something that subjective.

The music Friday night lifted me onto a wave that felt like a surfer standing up on the surfboard at Waikiki or some exotic surf place like Durban, South Africa, where you can catch a giant wave and ride it a long time. I'm still on the wave from a week ago. By the end of Saturday I knew I was on a wave and decided to make it productive. It was a new moon. I'd been aiming to write something about fiddler Howard Joines for three years with several pages of notes made from conversation with his son, Richard, plenty of biographical and family information. I set out to start writing a couple times, but it never took. Knowing myself somewhat and how I approach things, I decided to forget about it, keep on reading the information over, absorbing it, getting it into my subconscious where I let it gestate with everything else in my head. I let it swim in the back of my mind with the confidence that when ready it would emerge of its own timing.  On the previous Wednesday I was talking with a local man, asking him about Howard as a fiddler. His one-sentence answer inspired me so much that I started the writing with his sentence. His sentence was the door I needed. When I saw that on Saturday, I knew this was it. I was on the wave, didn't know how long it would last, and went for it. Four days of all day writing fast as mind allowed. Then a day of rewriting, writing new paragraphs to fill in blanks I'd left, then another day of rewriting less extensively, looking to clarity. Made a few phone calls to get accuracy of details since the writing was from imperfect memory.

In the writing, I allowed the writing itself to lead the way. A few times I wondered if I really wanted to go there, but did, followed it and found a much greater place than I had in the front of my mind. Without seeing it ahead, I managed to tell the story of how bluegrass transformed "old-time," then known as music, almost overnight in the mountains. I found mountain old-time and mountain bluegrass so close to the same thing that the differences amounted to next to nothing. A different kind of banjo. A mandolin. The musicians take "breaks," or solos in jazz terminology. I think in the end what came through was mountain bluegrass was the direction traditional music took. What we call old-time is the stringband music pre-WW2. Bluegrass came and the younger musicians jumped on it. It was the same music, just more demanding musicianship, as much the draw of bluegrass as loving it. Early on, I wasn't aware that I wanted to put Howard in context until I started the writing. Two paragraphs about Art Wooten and I wondered if I wanted to get off that page that much, but it worked in so well it belonged. Howard was a great fiddler. Art was a great fiddler. They were friends in youth learning the fiddle together. Art moved to Kingsport; Howard wanted to live at home with his family. Family was important to Howard Joines. Art took his family with him. Then Bill Monroe made Art Wooten "the first bluegrass fiddler" til the end of time. Art is also the only musician to have recorded with Monroe, Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs, all three the first run of bluegrass bands. 

In the course of the writing, I let the reins go, inspired by Karl Cooler affirming that I really am able to give in words a sense of hearing the music, how it feels, where it hits inside. Jr taught me in the years of our conversations that mountain music is all about feelings. You've heard the saying about somebody plays a piano "by heart." We all know that means without reading notes, from memory. It also means by feeling, as the heart is the seat of feeling, or emotion. They play by feel, heart, not by notes, mind. Mountain music is played by feel only. If it aint played from the heart it aint music. I found him to be right, as he always was in everything he said. Because he never said anything without knowing before he said it there was no bullshit in it. I remember a time in his later years a young guy came to him asking Jr to teach him how to play a banjo. Jr said, "If you can't figure it out on your own, you don't want to play the banjo." It wasn't like he passed more test questions than anybody else, but that he didn't bullshit in any way, not even a fart. He was dead set inside himself against saying anything that could be called bullshit. It's not like everything he said was right, but it was correct in his way of seeing or he wouldn't say it. In a way, it can be said I found my heart in mountain music. I have sat through an entire Ralph Stanley concert with tears of joy running down my face. Ralph Stanley does that to me. Carter Stanley wells up the tears of emotion too. The Carter Family fills me with so much joy it bubbles over in tears. They all sing "from the heart." All their music is from the heart. When the music comes from the heart, it goes to the heart of the listener. Music made from the mind goes to the mind.

Howard Joines's fiddle has a dance of joy in it. His bow has an apparent freedom that allows the music to make it move. All the time in the first half of the writing, I listened to Howard making music with his old-time musician friends on one cd made from a reel-to-reel tape in 1953. Oh it was good. He was a magnificent fiddler. Smooth sound---a smooth sound with guts. He has a clarity that makes his sound refreshing, happy to the ear, and his fiddle often sounds joyous. In the second half I listened to Howard playing bluegrass in 1966 with Jr Maxwell playing bluegrass banjo and Wayne Henderson in his 20s. It was the same music, just in another gear. In the bluegrass is where I really hear the joy in Howard's fiddle. There were times, esp playing Dance All Night With A Bottle In Your Hand that it sounded like Howard stepped aside and let the fiddle and bow do everything without his interference. It's the kind of letting go I don't hear a lot of. I believe that's what is meant by let-go-and-let-God. Just step aside and let it happen. That "it" is an aspect of God. I've come to believe that all art forms are doorways to God within. Like Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is within. It's not "just over the clouds," though it's there too. But we don't need to go there to find it, because it's in each one of us, all living beings. It's in our hearts, our innermost selves, where mountain music comes from. I'm not saying they don't play from the heart other places, only that it's the rule of thumb in the mountains.

I came out of the experience surprised at what I have learned about mountain music from Jr first, musicians and the music itself. I've read nothing about it. I'm only interested in the living quality of the music as it is played by today's musicians to today's audiences and dancers. We are very different people today from what we were a hundred years ago, and we're also very much the same. Those people then were no different from us except in the gadgets available to them. In matters of the heart there is no difference between us. We wear bluejeans and tshirts, ride motorcycles and pickups, watch NASCAR and football on tv, listen to Rage Against The Machine, smoke reefer and drink beer, carry guns illegally, take sex where we can get it. In the time when old-time was simply called music, it wasn't like we do it now. It was work like hell all week and get drunk on the weekends. All the men carried guns. About all the men drank white liquor. They fox hunted and made music. Their spiritual life was the same Bible stories we have today without the commercial cartooning of the entire Bible over and over continually. They were the tail end of the Age of Fire. The mountains were overtaken by the Age of Electricity all at once. And bluegrass came with it. The mountain people changed, traditional music changed. And, like the people stayed the same, the music stayed the same. It was the same songs, same tunes, just played faster with more complex musicianship. That's a pretty good description of our minds as they are now compared to how their minds went then. We're cranked way up. So our music would be too.

*

THE OLD-TIME OLD-TIMER

     stanley brothers band, art wooton with fiddle

Something is changing inside. I can't see it on the inside, but I see its expression on the outside. I think I'm going through something on the order of what caused me to leave the city for the rural mountain life. I feel a need to withdraw my social relations from people I am not close to, again. It seems I have to do this from time to time. It's not that I dislike certain people, but I find myself talking an awful lot to people who aren't listening. And I hear people talking to me, though it doesn't matter that it's me; it's generic chatter, not individual specific. I came to the mountains in search of solitude. Even bought a new book at the time titled Solitude. It was by somebody who doesn't think like me and we didn't hit it off. I thought his book was filler from start to finish. Or maybe I wasn't ready to receive it. Thoreau's solitude was bogus as his cabin on Walden Pond was a playhouse while he lived in the big house with his mother. He's not a source to go to for help understanding solitude.



First thing I found upon arriving in my Blue Ridge Mountain home was my fantasies of what it would be like were so without substance as not even to be a mist. I saw Walker Evans Appalachian poverty photographs and that was the extent of what I knew of the mountains. That was the same as knowing nothing, or in the minus, less than nothing. By less than nothing, I mean misleading. I have seen bits of Appalachian poverty, but it's mostly out of sight. When it shows up, it's visible. Like this old boy, Kyle Shinault, who lived out at Piney Creek, and probably is still living. He drove an old Chevy Monte Carlo painted black by spray can. He was smelly, dirt tattooed to his hands and face, big gray beard, a cane in each hand. He talked in the old mountain way of emphatic iambic rhythm, and I heard Shakespeare. This is a keyhole peep, I told myself, into how the language was spoken half a millennium ago in London, emphasis on every other syllable. It's watered down, to be sure, by a few centuries this side of the Atlantic. I'd guess the earliest people in these mountains talked with similar emphasis. I've also found the poorest people in the Appalachian chain carry the culture of the old-time ways when everyone else has let them go. You don't see a lot of new cadillacs at a fiddlers convention.



Old Kyle was one I've known who carried the old culture in himself. I call him "old" when he was three years younger than me, looked and talked twenty years older. He was not somebody that people took to. First time I met him, he talked to me for 5 hours straight and I listened to every phrase, every sentence, hearing the music that has gone out of the mountain language. The next time I saw him, I listened to Kyle for 3 hours. I never grew weary. His breath was out of this world, just like in the old days before oral hygiene. When Kyle Shinault walked into the store I had in town, opening the door it was like the door opened to another time. A man from a hundred years ago walked in the door. He played old-time banjo clawhammer style. The tips of his noting fingers had been cut off by a log splitter. He kept rubber tips over the ends of his fingers. Once he got used to it, he could use those rubber nubs about as good as fingertips.



He was one of many I loved to see walk in the door. I've had some really valuable conversations with people in the time of the music store where I sold cds of mountain music. Among the most memorable was a woman whose name I can't recall, in her 80s, telling me of going to the Spartan Theater to hear bluegrass when she was in her teens. Told me of Uncle Dave Macon of Grand Ole Opry, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Charlie Monroe, Reno and Smiley, those early bluegrass bands of the late 40s and early 50s that traveled from town to town, up and down these Southern mountains. She became a bluegrass fan for life. Still, in her 80s, she listened to bluegrass with the same love for it she had then. I've listened to old people talk about the time in the mountains before electricity, heard them talk of the old days like it was the Golden Age. I was slow to come to believe that it really was better then. It was a Golden Age. But nobody is going to give up their plumbing and electricity to get the Golden Age back. It wasn't that good.



I had no idea I had moved to a county that was the home county of Bill Monroe's first fiddler, Art Wooten, the man who has the name of the first bluegrass fiddler. Monroe's first appearance on Grand Ole Opry was not long after Monroe hired Art into the band and showed him on the mandolin how he wanted Art to play bluegrass on the fiddle. First song they played was Mule Skinner Blues, January of 1939, marking the official beginning date of bluegrass. An Alleghany County boy. I had no idea of the musical activity in the area. Once I learned the mountains well enough to get a feel for the music, it crept up on me from behind like a sneakin' dog. Old time mountain music bit me good. There was so much I did not know about living in these mountains, I have spent the whole time here studying the culture. Now that I've learned it well enough to get around in it, it's gone. Poof.

*

TWO MOUNTAIN MUSICIANS

cleve andrews (fiddle), jr maxwell (banjo)

Above is the most recently finished painting. It's waiting for signing. It's in the process now of being looked over, studied minutely looking for something I missed. Like after I put the bow in the fiddler's hand, I thought it looked fine. A couple days later I noticed the end of the bow in his hand came out the other end of his hand at a different angle, like it bent where he was holding it. A couple days I looked at that without seeing it. When I saw it, it was so obvious I almost questioned my sensibilities. But it's something like that in every painting. Easy to fix. Oil paint is wonderfully forgiving. I think I'm about satisfied there's nothing more. That's how I know when they're done, when there's nothing more to be done to improve it. There comes a point when it starts getting worse, and I like to stop before that point.

Jr told me that when he was playing at a dance, he'd keep some liquor nearby and would drink while he played. Liquor greases the joints and helps get the mind out of playing the banjo or anything so the fingers can play without mind. The more you drink, the better you play. Until. There's that point. Beyond that point you play worse and worse. He would drink up to that point and hold it there. Mountain music and liquor go hand in hand. That's changing, but as it changes the sound of the music changes. Drunk driving laws have probably done more to change the sound of mountain music than about any other social change. Fiddlers conventions changed the sound. Every time a new instrument was introduced, like banjo, then guitar, then bass, the music changed. Old-time is a changing music like all other pop musics. Old-time is a slower changing pop than rock or even bluegrass that has changed a very great deal along the way.

The painting is itself, but its purpose is to honor these two musicians of Alleghany County. Cleve died several years ago, before I could have known him, and I knew Jr for a long time. I know Cleve through Jr, because he told me so much about Cleve, who at the end of his life he assesses as the fiddler he liked making music with the best. Art Wooten is there too. Cleve and Jr played as one. I've only heard two recordings of Cleve, both with Jr, caught at the 1966 Galax fiddler's convention by somebody from Germany visiting with a tape recorder, who got some very good sound quality. These two fiddle tunes, Back Up And Push and Panhandle Country, are the only traces we have left of the Little River Boys---Cleve and Jr plus whoever they can get to play guitar. The full band was with 2 guitars, Paul Joines and Estal Bedsaul. I've already made one rather large painting of the full band. They were the first bluegrass band in the county. An Appalachian music historian called Jr one day and told him that in the conversation---his was the first bluegrass band in the area. That didn't mean any more to Jr than telling him January has 31 days. He didn't care. That had nothing to do with it. 

Cleve spent some years of WW2 in a concentration camp. I've heard German and I've heard Japanese. I don't know which. He was there with Paul Warren, who later became fiddler with Flatt & Scruggs. Paul was a fiddler before the war and in their years together there, evidently Paul inspired Cleve. After the war, Cleve took up the fiddle. They kept in touch over the years. Jr told me of a time Cleve was in the audience at a Flatt & Scruggs show and Paul saw him. He called Cleve to the stage and asked him to play a few tunes. That meant something to Jr. Being first bluegrass band was nothing, but Cleve playing with Flatt & Scruggs was something indeed. Nothing to make a fuss about, but something, nonetheless. One thing it told was the quality of Cleve's fiddling. That's all that mattered.

Jr once was hired by Jimmy Martin, Lois his wife encouraged him to go with the band, but after a month, Jr wasn't making any money, living on a bus, living on hamburgers and coffee. It wasn't in him. He came home, didn't want that life. Got his look into it, was satisfied it wasn't for him and never wanted to play his music beyond locally. He wanted to stay at home. He liked home. Jr was driving a banana truck in Florida at the time. Jimmy Martin was in Tampa. He was looking for a banjo player and Jr auditioned. He got the job. He was like me in the way he got the job, then left it, didn't need it any more. It told him he could do it, and that's all he needed to know. It gave him a measure of his pickin. He'd aimed to be that good and he made it. That's enough. He found he could do it and that was that. I'm the same way. A psychic once told me I will take something up to see if I can do it; when I see I can, I'm done. To see that I could do it was the purpose. I said, That's me.

Jr played banjo with fiddler Art Wooten with Jr's band The Green Mountain Boys for some years. Art is the Alleghany County fiddler who recorded 9 songs with Bill Monroe, 8 songs with the Stanley Brothers, and 4 songs with Flatt & Scruggs. He was Bill Monroe's first fiddler and the only musician to record with all three of those first bluegrass bands. First time Monroe was on Grand Ole Opry, Art was with him and they played Mule Skinner Blues, making Art the first bluegrass fiddler. He was one of the great bluegrass fiddlers. He also played some with Earl Taylor, but I've not been able to find if he recorded anything with Taylor. It was in Taylor's beginning when he was getting a band going in the Baltimore area. Jr and Art made good music together. I think we have about 22 titles found on an 8-track Art Wooten either gave or sold to Whitetop Mountain Band fiddler Thornton Spencer. Green Mountain Boys was a bluegrass band with mountain drive.

These are a few details I know about the lives of these two musicians. Cleve worked at the Dr Grabow pipe factory in Sparta and had an 11 acre farm just outside Sparta. Jr was a sawmiller since he started sawmilling with his daddy when he was 14. He was sawmilling alone at 18. He figured out a banjo at 14 and played dances with his half brother, 30 years older, Welter, who played fiddle. His first wife, Maggie, played guitar. The three of them played a lot of dances. He said Maggie was a good singer too. Both Jr and Cleve made music about every weekend through their adult lives, not always together. Jr had a good life as a musician. He'd played with people like Otis Burris and Jim Shumate at dances. Gene Mead was his favorite guitar player to make music with. Jr was also a heavy equipment operator, esp a "bull-noser," and a tractor mechanic, known around NW North Carolina as the one you took your tractor to when nobody else could fix it. He had an intuitive knowing about tractors.

*

JR MAXWELL & FRIENDS CD

crack



I've decided to play music while writing you tonight. Needed to hear the cd of Jr with Cleve Andrews and Art Wooten. Don't know how long this will last. Art Wooten is playing the fire out of his fiddle. Jr's banjo is keeping a roll going. Wayne Henderson's rhythm guitar picking runs up and down the strings. I find myself going off into listening to the 3 of them together, hearing them individually, together, hearing the music that is seemingly independent of them, though entirely dependent. This music is getting at my heart. I'm going over with myself again my eternal joy that mountain music is all around where I live, that I've found it. It's such an intensely personal music. Listening to Art Wooten's fiddle is a beautiful moment to behold.



If I had never come to the mountains, I'd never have known this music. That I have what it takes to appreciate Art Wooten's fiddle, that I had a brief acquaintance with him and his wife Minnie, that I have painted his image 3 times, is better to me than knowing Elvis. Jr's banjo in there with the fiddle, not taking over, supporting him like a wave the man on the surfboard can hang 5 on all the way to the end of the song. I honestly mean it when I say that until I heard mountain music I had never heard music. Seeing the video of Eric Clapton MTV unplugged playing acoustic, I sat in awe that he was no better than he was. I thought, I know I can name half a dozen guitar pickers inside a 40 mile radius of my house who could pick circles around Clapton. The number is probably more like at least 20. And that's just right here. All up and down the mountains there must be a thousand who can pick better than what Clapton did on the unplugged show. Only listened to it once. Can't do it again. Somebody told me he played a Henderson guitar on it, but he didn't.



I'm happy I've been able to see into the world of mountain music and listen to Jr for 7 years talk of his musician friends, music experiences at fiddlers conventions, at square dances. And Jr was the real deal. The point is not that he was the best there ever was. He'd be the first to make certain you understood he was not to be mistaken for that. He just liked to pick and done the best he could. Now Jr is cutting loose on Home Sweet Home, Wayne Henderson playing rhythm with him. Had to pause with head down and listen. Now he's cutting loose with John Hardy, Wayne's guitar going right along with him. It turns out I know a lot of people who play Henderson guitars. A picker in these mountains, especially a stage picker, one who self-assesses himself good enough to play out in public without embarrassing himself and his family name has to have a Henderson, is willing to wait 10 years for it. I don't know if resonance is the musical term for it, but it's what it seems to me a Henderson has over a Martin. A Henderson puts the sound out there. The sound is exactly right. I don't know the terminology for guitar sounds, but a Henderson sounds to my ear like the texture of honey is in the sound.



Listening to Jr I have been able to see from the inside the world of mountain music. Not as I would as a musician, but that's ok. When anyone asks me if I pick, I say I'm the audience. I do the appreciating. I'm hearing the sample copy Bobby Patterson made to make the other copies from. It is clear. Very clear. Same sound level all the way through. Originally they were 3 different sound levels. The sound is so good I can hear it that he put a lot of time and attention into it. He did with the cd "label" managing to list every song, name every musician and a picture of Jr and Cleve Andrews. Bobby did a beautiful job with it. I'm a hundred percent happy that the quality of reproduction is what I went to Bobby Patterson for. The music is over now, finishing with Jr picking Billy In The Lowground, the radio show's theme song. It's just right. Bluegrass banjo noting the song in an ongoing roll. Plain, meaning clear. I feel happy honoring Jr in this way. There's not a whole lot I can do, but this project feels right. It cost a little bit, but so does everything else. It is my gift to Jr's relatives and friends who are now my friends. It's a little bit of a way to keep memory of him alive and appreciated. And to be sure he is archived in Chapel Hill and probably Boone, Johnson City, TN, other places I can find to send them to. It's music way too good not to be heard.



I don't want Jr forgotten right away. I'll go on keeping his name alive and Art Wooten's name alive, Fred Roupe's name alive. This is one of the ways the radio show is so satisfying for me. I'm keeping a lot of names alive, Sara Carter, Carter Stanley, GB Grayson. I love about playing music of the region that the musicians are of the community I've lived in the latter half of my life. The mountain people have been gracious enough to allow me to live among them for which I'm every day grateful. The music I play on Saturday mornings is my gift to the people of the county I love way down deep in my heart. This is why it is such an emotional experience every week. I close myself up in the studio, turn the sound up loud so all my attention is on the music. I feel the emotions of the songs. I do that to guide my choice for what to play next after each song, keeping a flowing harmony going from song to song through the hour.



Last week in the gospel hour I played 5 songs by Hazel Varner, a petite woman from Wilkesboro, writes her songs and sings them. Her husband plays the church piano. David Johnson, who recorded them at his studio played steel guitar. She has a high childlike hillbilly voice, "When Jesus comes again he won't have to be born in a barn." And it's a soulful voice. "There'll be no wheelchairs in Heaven." Yes, there is soul in white music. Hazel Varner has it. Ralph Stanley has it. Doc Watson has it. Hazel Dickens has it. So do an awful lot of others in these mountains. It's a Suthun thang. I could not have lived my life happily outside the South. The Southern Mountains, the Central Blue Ridge, Alleghany County, Bullhead Mountain, Whitehead, Air Bellows, home sweet home. I like living someplace I love. It feels good all the time. A place with no written history.

ALLEGHANY FIDDLERS

sweet fern



This evening I totally forgot until it was too late that Tim Smith and Eric Ellis are playing at the library tonight. I've circled it on the calendar, though so long ago I forgot why. That would have been a good one. Both are excellent bluegrass musicians. It plumb left my mind. At 6:30 when it started I was sitting with this week's paper, just home from going to town for grocery store, and saw the ad for it. I could have got there a half hour late, but preferred not to. Inertia kept me here. I can't do everything. Home is where I always want to be.



I'm bad like Jr in that way. That's actually what made it possible for me to stay at Jr's when he was down and out. He didn't like to go anyplace. I didn't like to go anyplace. He didn't like tv. I didn't like tv. That's much of the landscape and we saw eye-to-eye that not going anyplace was the best way to go. Like the time my grandmother wanted to go to Hawaii. Grandfather said he aint left nothin there. She went without him. But I do like it at home. With no one else here, I don't have reason to want to be outside cutting the grass, washing the car, trimming hedges. Here, no one is telling me I didn't do adequately, that I oughta do another way, that everybody else knows best about my life. When I have time to be alone, I can see that nobody else knows best about my life. I'm the only one knows anything about it. The bank knows I'm no good handling money. But the bank doesn't know why. I do. You hear talk about the comfort zone like it's not a good place. No pain, no gain. How can you be comfortable when more money is your only goal? It's like wanting to make all As in school. It's anxiety inducing. I've got no problem with my home being my comfort zone. Isn't that what it's supposed to be?



I made it a goal not to leave home this week, to hold out until Friday if I could. Today I had to go to town to get a little bit of groceries. And to get into the other world of my habit patterns, Sparta. It's disheartening missing Tim and Eric tonight. I was looking forward to the music. Tim Smith is one of the respected fiddlers of today's bluegrass. Eric is among bluegrass's better banjo pickers. Tim played fiddle with the Bluegrass Cardinals several years, a popular bluegrass band of the 60s like the Country Gentlemen. Tim chose to live in Kernersville, work a job, live at home, raise his kids. He had enough of living on a crowded bus, his life someplace else. He has a recording studio in his house. A band needing a fiddle track in a few songs on an album would mail a tape to him in the past, probably done digitally now by email, and he put in the fiddle part. In that way, he's recorded with a large number of bluegrass bands. Outside the world of bluegrass musicians, Tim Smith is not well known. In the world of bluegrass he's respected by all.



Our humble county has produced 2 of the great fiddlers in bluegrass. Maybe Harlan County, Kentucky, could say the same, but not many others, if even Harlan. Two of bluegrass's fiddlers with names that will never be forgotten as long as there is bluegrass came from Alleghany. They weren't the only good fiddlers around here, either. Jr Maxwell on the banjo was in their league, he just never wanted to live the life of the professional musician. It didn't pay worth a shit. He auditioned for Jimmy Martin in Tampa, Florida, when Jr was driving a banana truck. He got the job. A month of living on "hamburgers, coffee and indigestion" was all he could take. It didn't pay nearly enough to make it worth it. Lois encouraged him to stay with it, but it wasn't for Jr. Jr loved home too much. He loved Lois too much. He loved the mountains too much. He wasn't driven to it. It was something he saw he could do. It was affirming, at least. It showed him he had what it took.



In that month, Jr developed a respect for Jimmy Martin that never waned unto the day he died. Any suggestion that I doubted Jimmy Martin was the best singer in bluegrass got a sharp look that said, don't you cross that line. I don't doubt it. Never doubted it. I have to pause a moment when Carter Stanley comes to mind. Jr didn't like Carter, so Carter was out of the running. He said Carter was mean. And arrogant. Jr did not take any sign of arrogance lightly. He could hardly stand it that I liked Carter's singing. We talked it over one day, I told him I don't have the same experience he has where the music is concerned, for one thing. I don't know that much about Carter, and I didn't know him from inside the music world of these mountains as just another Joe. Jimmy Martin doesn't move me to tears. His singing moves me to awe, and so does Carter's. Carter's voice can move me to tears, Ralph's too. As for best, they're all the best.



It's actually a shame that few people in the county have any idea who Tim is. His mother and dad and his kin are here, but he's lived away a long time. There was a time he was winning Union Grove Fiddler's Convention, about the same time I arrived in the mountains. I bought an LP of Tim Smith world champion with AL Lambert's band at Smitheys. His name was all over the place, everybody proud of him for winning Union Grove. By now, I have to explain who he is when I want to mention his name. That's not right. And I'm partly to blame. I have air time and I don't play him enough. I know that. I don't. Don't know why. That will change right now. I'll be bringing his name and his fiddle forward, play him and talk about him some more. He needs to have a fan base in Alleghany and right now there is very little. I don't play Art Wooten a great deal either. Kind of take them for granted. That's changing too. Maybe tomorrow I'll pick up the cds of JR MAXWELL & FRIENDS and be playing that some more. This Saturday will be a good one for Art Wooten and Tim Smith. Tim has a great deal of gospel recorded too. That's it. Tim and Art this week.

HEARING THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS

l to r: fiddlin art wooten, pee wee lambert, ralph stanley,
carter stanley, ray lambert. the stanley brothers. 1948

I know what I'll be playing this coming Saturday morning. Art Wooten's fiddle with Jr Maxwell's banjo, 15 songs by the Green Mountain Boys. This collection came to me through Kilby Spencer, who said his dad, fiddler Thornton Spencer, bought it from Art, 8track. It opens with Art playing Cricket On the Hearth solo. Then Jr's banjo comes in on the next tune, Flop-Eared Mule. After that one is Sally Goodin, one Art can tear up. At the end of the documentary of Tommy Jarrell, Sprout Wings And Fly, Tommy finds Art Wooten at the Galax fiddlers convention. Has him play a tune for the camera. Art complained about his ticker being weak. Tommy Jarrell slapped him on the knee when he finished Sally Goodin and said, You aint near dead yet!

The county library has the dvd of Sprout Wings And Fly. Wonderful film. Full of old-time music at its best, old-time singing and old-time talking. My own personal most unforgetable moment was when the female interviewer from California asked a woman I took for Tommy Jarrell's sister, "Have you ever worked?" Sister's eyes got big for a second. She said, "Worked? Yes, I've worked." I thought, I know you have, sister. I don't know of a woman in these mountains who hasn't worked. All day at the factory, the rest of the time in the garden, in the hay field, in whatever comes next. The split-second look in her eye that said, What kind of a question is that? Of course I've worked. I've never done nothin but work. Pulls herself back together for the woman from another world, remembering, this is her first time in these hills.

I'm sitting here doing something I never dreamed I'd be doing, hearing the Green Mountain Boys when Art Wooten was the fiddler. Lee Highway Blues. Art took it and went with it all the way, Jr's banjo clucking along with him. It becomes a duo of fiddle and banjo for a long period of time like Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. A Grayson & Whitter tune composed by GB Grayson playing fiddle in the car with Whitter driving down Hwy 11 (the Robert E Lee Highway) on the road to make music at a dance, The Lee Highway Blues.

Jr laid it to it on Home Sweet Home and I'm enjoying now hearing him play lead with Bob Caudill playing guitar with him. They played well together, now I hear it. Bob was quite a picker. This was quite a band. Never dared hope for so much. Art's working on a solo Fire On The Mountain. Awesome is the word. The man can play a fiddle. He's not called Fiddlin Art Wooten because he just fiddle faddle's around. He takes charge and gets it done. Jr said Art could find every note that was in a fiddle. I feel blessed. I've thanked God multiple times a day this last week for these samples of Jr's music that are surfacing and keep on surfacing. For the musical heritage of Alleghany County, they are supreme. It's curious that these examples of his music are turning up now that he's gone. Jr was indifferent to whether his music continued. It was about making the music. It was the moment and a recording does not carry all he entered and went through the moment with. Just the sound. The music. I don't have any feelings like I'd like for Jr to hear it. He already has heard it. He was there. There's no way around it, he would enjoy hearing it, by himself, to remember playing whatever tune it was and the musicians with him, to remember the joy. I often thought of the way he visits a grave. Walks up to it, sees the headstone, turns around and goes on. Nary a pause.

Since I've been involved with the radio show, playing music of our county as I find it, always searching, not active searching always, always on the lookout, this has been one of the great adventures in my 7 year search for Alleghany music. Like when I began finding the recordings he'd made with Monroe, Stanley Bros, Flatt & Scruggs, and found what I take to be all of them, and put them on a cd to play at the radio station, it was one of the great discoveries of my life. The Bill Monroe cd, Legends of Country Music/RCA, has everything. So does The Essential Bill Monroe & The Monroe Brothers, RCA 67450-2. It has a couple songs with Charlie Monroe too. All that Art recorded with Monroe are there. Except Muleskinner Blues live at Grand Ole Opry. I find it curious that such a high percentage of the songs have Art on fiddle, 25%, when the percentage of songs Art recorded with Monroe on the scale of the collected fiddlers with Monroe over time would probably be no more than a single percent. I can't help but think that has something to say to us about Art Wooten's place in bluegrass.

GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS FOUND

jr when his mind was clear as a baby's

Another big day. An email from Kilby Spencer with downloads of 17 songs with Art Wooten playing fiddle. One of them was recorded in 1938 at the Whitetop Festival. It was spectacular fiddling as only Art could do. Arkansas Traveler. He was rubbing right up against Bluegrass. In January of the following year Art played Muleskinner Blues at the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe. The rest of the download was 16 songs. When I heard the banjo, it sounded a lot like Jr. I put on a cd of music Green Mountain Boys made on cassette practicing around 1990. It was the same tone in the banjo and very similar picking. I listened to some more tunes and they had banjo with the same tone of the 2 songs with Cleve Andrews. I started thinking that if Home Sweet Home is a banjo solo, it's Jr for certain. I played it.

It was a banjo solo. And it was Jr. He told me it was his winning song for fiddler's conventions. He didn't play it like Earl Scruggs, but he learned a move on it he got from Scruggs. Scruggs had special-made tuners that he could twist to bend the sound and they'd go right back to where he had them in tune. Jr didn't have such tuners, so he reached up and pulled the string he wanted to make that special sound. I'd heard him play Home Sweet Home at the house with his banjo a few times when he was able to pick it a little bit. He showed me how he bent the sound. This is

as big a treasure as the 2 tunes with Cleve Andrews. Art Wooten played fiddle with Jr's band, the Green Mountain Boys, several years. Kilby said he believes his dad, Thornton, bought it from Art, that it must have been an 8track Art recorded, possibly at home with an 8track player. Jr had an 8track player in the house that worked and one in his pickup Old Yeller that worked. He had some 8track music of Art that he would go listen to from time to time. He had quite a bit of Art, Wayne Henderson and Jr. The sound quality is terrible. Art Wooten was ingenious about self-recording. He made several one-man-band contraptions. His day job was carpentry, cabinet-making. He made the cabinets in the house Jr built after the farmhouse burned. Larry and Sharon Brown live there now.

Now I have all these treasures in the computer and don't know how to get them out. I had to do a trial run of WinZip to download them, but they didn't go to the Windows Media place, so I can't find a way to make a cd, because this computer doesn't do it. The old one does, the old one that is so slow it will take 2 hours when I set out to do it, if I can. That's tomorrow's all day project. I sent them to Lucas Pasley and he might be able to get them onto a cd. I need a cd to play them at the radio station and to make copies from for Jr's friends and relatives. I probably would do well to take it to Bobby Patterson and have him make a hundred copies and be done with it. Get paper sleeves at Walmart. I know I'll be giving out a whole lot of copies. I don't want to sell any. That gets into ASCAP laws and I don't want anything to do with that mess.

It's important for me to get this music out in the world. It's something I believe is very important in this county. This is why I started the music store. I knew better than to open a business in the Bush2 phase of the Reagan Revolution, when the direction the economy was taking was downward, I thought I'd better do it while it was possible. I wanted to get mountain music into people's sound systems. A lot of people love this music and there was none available this side of Floyd, Virginia. At shows and fiddlers conventions you can get cds from the bands in the parking lot areas. It turned out to be a great big expense to me, but I have never for a moment regretted any loss. That was all right. I got an awful lot of this music out in the world. An awful lot over 4 years. Gas prices steadily going up slowed business down to a crawl, then in January of 07 after a Christmas that went to Walmart, the news announced every day for a week that the cd business was over. That was it. It turned out everybody believed television.

Yesterday I heard some old boy in India talking on NPR news. He was telling how the new technology is taking the young away from their "faith" or religion. I thought, You're next. We've already done that here. See what it did to us and you'll see what it will do to you. Pop culture undoes traditional cultures like a flood, washes them away and we're left with Pop. The old values of humility give way to self-centered arrogance held as the highest value. It's a difficult and confusing time. It's so bad I have moved inward and planted my feet in the values of the past. They may die with me, but they will have lived with me, at least. Turning to traditional music and a traditional culture, one of the last to die out, is where I find values that make living everyday life so easy without conflict. I prefer the values of the old ways to live by. I don't mean to live by like looking down my nose at people that don't, not at all. It's for me to live by. Has nothing to do with what other people do or ought to do. I simply live by the values of the people I live among, of the culture I have embraced with my life.

I don't mean either that the culture is only in the religion or the music. It's in every individual. It's in everyone I know of these mountains. Outsiders tend not to notice, but mountain people have deep, strong values with ethical standards. The first thing I noticed in everyone I met and came to know, they are philosophers. They were philosophers in the same way my grandmother was, which she passed to me. My parachute had landed me in a world of people who think as I think. Not in all ways by any means. We're all individuals, mountain or flatlander. People that think about ethics and morality, and believe they're important. While all the world out there is raging for more money, more money, standing in line to do anything for more money. And I do mean anything. If it can be thought of, it's been done. I like it among country people who still have God for a living presence in their lives. I do too. I don't feel comfortable in a world of people that laugh at the naivete. They can believe whatever they want to. I like living my own life of "faith" among other people who do too. They're all over these mountains. They're everywhere, really, but in these mountains they're like musicians. Jr told me once that in Low
Gap there's a banjo picker in every other house. Exaggeration, of course, but makes its point.

Of course, there is the balance. It's not all the sunny side of the mountain. And that's part of it. Bird of a feather flock together. For all the good that can be said, an equal amount of bad can be said. Strangely, it took me a long time to get it, because I studied everything that was wrong with the place. Finally, the day came when I figured I knew everything there was to know what was wrong with everything. That day I said to myself, It's time to start looking at what's right with the place. Something like a great illumination came to me. I already knew what was right with the place, so much that what was wrong faded to nothing by comparison. That was the day I fell in love with the mountains and mountain people, the worst with the best, interwoven like warp and woof, just folks living at home. The mountains taught me respect. I believe I'd rather have respect for a guide than just about anything else. The time Jr told me he looks up to everybody, I wondered if he was leaving some out. No. He looked up to everybody. He honestly lived such humility. None of it was studied or for show. I realized by the end that his humility was never self-conscious. He lived what he believed in other ways as well.