PAINTING THE LITTLE RIVER BOYS

the little river boys by tj worthington

oil and acrylic on plywood, 5'x3'

Day three of the blogathon, first question: What is my favorite of my creative work? And how would I describe my feelings about it?

That one is easy to answer. I don't even have to think about it. This is it, The Little River Boys. They were the first bluegrass band in this area. I made the image from a b&w polaroid, the old ones that used a squeegee. The polaroid and the narrow ties date it circa 1960. I asked Jr Maxwell, the banjo picker, when it was and he had no recollection. The photo was taken of the band backstage after a show they'd done in Johnson City, Tennessee. My friend Milly Richardson lived in her apartment above my music store in Sparta. I used the back of the store for my painting studio. Painted this in the store, 2006 maybe. One day Milly came through with an old sheet of plywood she'd taken from the barn at the farm and wanted to use it for a temporary table to put paperwork on of some sort. Lumber had been stacked on the plywood, leaving vertical lines stained, 4 vertical panels, like a Japanese screen suggestion. The moment I saw the piece of wood, I fell in love with it. I asked Milly if there was any way I could get it from her. She said she'd be using it for a short time and I could have it when she's done. Great. I wanted to do a four-piece band on it, or maybe the Carter Family with one panel empty. The Little River Boys came to me right away, remembering the photo I'd seen in Jr Maxwell's photo albums. I asked him if I could take it to a drugstore in town to have a print made from it and replace the original. Sure. Milly brought the wood to me when she was finished with it. I needed that sheet of plywood. Initially, I wanted to put each of the figures in each of the vertical rectangles. Right away, that seemed stilted. I like having the banjo player leaning out of his panel over into the fiddler's panel. Jr's banjo played so closely with the fiddle, it seems right to have them shoved up against each other.

 

fiddler fred McBride

oil and acrylic on wood

 

I only knew one of them, Jr Maxwell, the banjo. Cleve Andrews, the fiddler, died several years before I came to the county. He had spent some years in a WW2 concentration camp. Paul Warren, who became Flatt & Scruggs' fiddler after the war, was Cleve's friend in the concentration camp. After the war, Cleve took up fiddle, I suppose from hearing Paul talk about it. Jr told me that years later when Cleve was in the audience at a Flatt & Scruggs show, Paul Warren saw him from the stage and called him to the stage. He asked Cleve to play a couple tunes. This moment was Cleve's self-validation. He could play a fiddle if he could play onstage with Flatt & Scruggs. Jr got his self-validation hired by Jimmy Martin to play banjo with the band. A month on the road, living on coffee and indigestion, Jr went home. Wasn't any money in it. Jr needed to make money, at least enough to live on with a wife. Having his moment in Jimmy Martin's band gave Jr his own credibility that he could pick a banjo with the big league. Jimmy Martin was his favorite bluegrass singer all his life. He liked Jimmy Martin as a man. Jimmy Martin was a coon hunter and used to hunt coons in this county with friends of Jr's. He was a hillbilly from east Tennessee. Jr Maxwell and Cleve Andrews were dynamic when they made music. Since Jr died in 09 I have found two recordings of them together playing at Galax Fiddler's convention as the Little River Boys in early 1960s. It was made as a field recording at the time, somebody there from Germany with a tape recorder. A fiddler friend who is active in making field recordings of musicians around in the hills who have never recorded, Kilby Spencer, emailed them to me after he'd found them. Those two songs are a treasure, all there is of the Little River Boys. I felt immense joy first time I heard the recordings. I never Imagined I would ever hear the Little River Boys.

 

cleve Andrews fiddle / jr maxwell banjo by tj worthington

oil on canvas

 

 

The two guitar players are Estal Bedsaul on the left and Paul Joines on the right with white hair. Estal Bedsaul used to sell used cars in the Choate used car lot across the road from what is now the Japanese restaurant. He is a face I remember seeing in my early years, but I never met him or knew his name. He was the guy working the used car lot. Jr praised his guitar playing. Paul Joines I never met before he died, either. I know his son Bill. Bill Joines is a good guitar picker and singer too. He can flat get-er-done pickin a gi-tar. Bill is a good man. These are good people. The best kind of good. Just who they are. The best compliment I had on the piece when it was done was when Bill saw it. He walked up to Paul and looked at him awhile. He said, "It's just like he's a-standin there." He blew my circuits. The day Jr Maxwell died, Bill blew my circuits again, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." I had taken care of Jr in his last year and round the clock in his last months drifting into dementia, keeping him out of a nursing home. He wanted to die at home. I wanted it for him. The very greatest experience of my life. I had known Jr over thirty years. He was one of the first people I met when I was new in these hills. I was getting Social Security, and I could not allow Jr to waste away in a nursing home staring at the ceiling day and night, eating mush, being treated like lumber. By the time he started getting feeble I had known for a few years that Jr was the only man I had ever known I could call wise without hesitation. Jr had wisdom that he lived by. For five years I stopped by to see him on the way home from work and had a drink with him. We are both sippers. Two drinks over two hours. 140 proof. Then I'd go home. In that time, he told me his entire life. Strangely, I find my fondest memories of him are from the time when his mind was gone, running around the house in the wheelchair in the middle of the night just riding, putting clothes on, taking them off, putting on others, taking them off, putting on others until he ended up with both legs down one leg of the pants and his head sticking out a sleeve hole in a tshirt and an arm through the neck hole. He'd bound himself so he couldn't move. I had to untie the knot he'd made.

 

fiddler howard joines by tj worthington

oil on canvas, 16"x20"

 

A month or so before Jr's mind went away, I told him, "Your county will never forget your name. I'll see to it." Before he died, we did not know there were any recordings of him existing. Soon after he died, old recordings made at jam sessions began to surface. Some of my friends involved in field recordings started finding old reel-to-reel recordings with Jr playing with different local fiddlers. I put together a cd of everything we'd found and had a hundred copies made, which I took around in one week, giving one to each of his relatives and all his friends. It was the best week of my life. I'd drop in on them at home to deliver it and we'd sit and talk for awhile. All his friends became my friends the day he left the body. One bit of wisdom he passed to me: Don't believe what you think. Another he gave me to live with: Stay away from important people. I took that for sound counsel. I had lived by that, but had never put it into words. He chose the path of suffering for this lifetime. He had five major blows, such that would put a charging rhino on its knees. He let all that stay in the past and kept a cheery attitude through it all. I am grateful with my whole life for the opportunity to have Jr Maxwell in my world. He was what I call a true human being. It's hard to explain what I mean. You just have to intuit it. Both Meher Baba and the Dalai Lama have said that helping others is more important than prayer and meditation. I felt it. It took a little while getting back into my life. Momentum in the house was shut down. I took my time and let my new life slip into place naturally, let time take care of it. And it did. I felt like I came into a new level of understanding, have felt like I'm living in my own flow for the first time ever. In the time his mind was going away, he said, "I wish I could pay you for all you've done for me." I said, "You done paid in advance. Five years of sharing with me the best liquor made on this earth is worth something. It's worth a lot to me. I'm paying you back." I didn't know where that came from, just heard myself say it, and meant it more than if I'd thought first to say it.

 

jr maxwell, age 86

 

 

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HILLBILLY SHOW PRACTICE NIGHT

bill and sonya joines

 

 

 

 

Friday night was Hillbilly Show practice night at the school auditorium. Bill and Sonya are the hosts as they have been for so many years I don't have the exact count. It's something like 15 or 16 years they've been the ones onstage in the rocking chairs talking between acts. I stay backstage and pull the ropes that work the curtains. I can see what's happening on the stage, what's going on backstage, and the audience. I have to pay close attention to Dottie the stage manager. She signals me for opening and closing. Inevitably, every show, somebody tells me with authority, "Close the curtains." I start them closing and Dottie gets frantic signing me to open them. I'm learning to pay attention only to Dottie for those instructions. It's a good time with everybody going through their performance, getting the sound right with George Sheets who operates the sound system very well. I like it because I get to see people I like to see but don't see very often.

 

 

Tonight it was Henry Thorne, 4th grade teacher to about everyone in the county, retired, appearing to play piano for the Red Hat Dancers. I saw Henry hobbling like an old man, and we're the same age. I said, "Are you all right, Henry?" He said he was. I said, "You're hobbling like an old man." He said, "I don't like getting old." He turned his right ear to me when I spoke. Evidently the other ear doesn't function. We talked about forgetfulness and people we know much older than us who have minds far clearer than ours. We talked about how wonderful heaven must be. Both of us have so many we cared about on the other side, we agreed we look forward to being with them again. Neither one of us expressed any desire to get really old, certainly not unto feeble. And we agreed neither of us is anxious to leave our friends here. We're in a kind of middle place, maybe something of a bridge. I had the impression it was Henry's first old-time music experience. After hearing Charlie Edwards play guitar and sing, Ernest Joines playing banjo and Gary Joines playing guitar, Henry said to me of Charlie, "Where did he learn to sing like that? He sounds like he went to school." I said he's a country boy who took it up, adding he played with a bluegrass band in Maryland when he worked in a factory there. Henry did not know mountain boys could make music so incredibly well. It kinda blew his mind.

 

 

The feature of the show for me was Cheri Choate singing an Emmy Lou Harris song, an extraordinarily beautiful song, and Cheri sang it right, not imitating Emmy Lou, but in her own style that sounds like she has many hours of stage experience. She said she hasn't played much on a stage, but from what I saw and heard, she has what it takes. She's doesn't back down from a great challenge, like singing an Emmy Lou Harris song and making it her own. I'd met her a few times before and knew she was involved in country music and songwriting. Seeing that she was to sing two Dotty West songs for the Saturday night show, I figured she'd be awfully good, but didn't dare expect what I heard. The only word I could come up with hearing her was that it was NICE, two syllables Southern style with enthusiasm. I include the delicacy that goes with the word nice. Nice like a lace wedding gown. Nice like Art Wooten's fiddle. Nice like Scott Freeman's mandolin. Grace is what it is I mean by nice. Cheri's grace singing is what I connected with. I noticed her small silver dragonfly earrings had the same grace she has in her singing. I took it the grace comes from within. Her singing put me into full appreciation.

 

 

I don't mean to leave off Bill Joines picking lead guitar with her. Bill did some almighty pickin. He's one of the better guitar pickers we have in the county. I won't call him the best, because if I did, he would tell me there's a dozen better. Not from false humility, but he'd mean what he was saying. Bill has played a lot of bluegrass onstage over his adult life. His dad, Paul Joines, picked guitar and sang too. Paul picked rhythm guitar with the Little River Boys in the 1950s, Cleve Andrews fiddle, Jr Maxwell banjo and Estal Bedsaul guitar. They never recorded, but they could pick some bluegrass music. Every one of them was an excellent musician. I painted the band about 5 years ago and it gave me satisfaction when Bill saw how I'd rendered his dad, Paul. Bill looked at it like he was seeing Paul again. The painting is in the county with John and Deborah Sherrill. Even better, it is in Whitehead. I didn't want that one to leave the county. Didn't want it to leave Whitehead, but thought that a little too restrictive to ask. Bill was a good friend with Jr Maxwell, too. Junior was my connection with Bill. Bill's present band is Alleghany Moon, an interesting band with its own sound. Bill's wife, Sonya was a dj at WCOK for several years, and she co-MCs the Sparta fiddlers convention with Harold Mitchell. Their daughter Taras is playing bass with Bill and Cheri in their performance.

 

 

Agnes Joines sang a song that got everybody going. Agnes is one of my favorite people in this world. She's somebody who can get in your face and let you have it and ten minutes later she's back to like there was never a problem. She's about the best I know of anybody who can get over something in almost the blink of an eye. I don't mean to say she doesn't sometimes struggle with it, but she gets there. Agnes is up and ready to go, to git-er-done. She makes everything she's involved in fun. You want something done, get Agnes to do it. It will get done. And done right. She's light-hearted and she's serious as it's called for. When it comes to getting down to business, Agnes is there. She's what I call real people. Ernest too. I'll never forget the time I heard Agnes, exasperated with Ernest, say, "I wish you'd get your head out of that music!" I thought: No you don't. Ernest only thinks music. Only. That's a big part of what she loves about him. Ernest without Agnes to keep his spring wound up would have a hard time getting by, because music is the only thing on his mind. When music is the only thing in your mind, you're not fit for much else. It's the music in Ernest that makes him who he is, the Ernest that everybody who knows him loves. Everything else passes him by. Ernest's art for the Hillbilly Show is picking a tenor banjo with a piano where they play as the the Dixie Dew Drops. Ernest made it work. It was beautiful. This is the performance that caused Henry Thorne to ask if they went to school to learn to play like that. Ernest played football in school.

 

 

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