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.        

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BUTCH ROBINS AND EDWIN LACY PICK @ THE FRONT PORCH

     butch robins

     edwin lacy and willard gayheart

Butch Robins played bluegrass banjo Friday night at the Fiddle and Plow show in Woodlawn. Edwin Lacy was there with his open-back banjo playing it clawhammer style. Willard Gayheart played rhythm guitar and Marvin Cockerham, of the Highlanders, played bass. A couple hours of music that reached the ideal of music from the start. Robins is perhaps best known as a banjo picker with Bill Monroe, who lasted probably longer than anybody with Monroe who was ever in his band. Monroe was known as about the most difficult man on earth, confirmed by Robins in his tales of Bill Monroe, evidenced by the continuous turnover of band members. This turned out to be a good thing, however. For Robins' generation of bluegrass pickers, having been a Bluegrass Boy was the best credentials a bluegrass musician could have. Monroe served bluegrass of the future with his ill nature.


Robins talked between songs about Monroe, experiences in the band. He could imitate Monroe's talking so well it was like listening to Monroe himself. He called Monroe, "the old man." And he was when Robins knew him. I felt like it was with respect Robins called him the old man. A parental respect and respect for his experience. I had the impression that it was not a matter of whether or not you liked Bill Monroe. Few were able. But respect overrode feelings. When it comes to a banjo, Butch Robins can pick. Edwin Lacy accompanying him clawhammer made some interesting sound not heard very much, bluegrass and old-time banjos playing together, something like two guitars would play together. They took requests from the audience, which turned out to be all Bill Monroe songs. He played mostly instrumentals. Willard sang a few. First request was for Uncle Pen and nobody knew all the words. All knew some of the words, so they played it through putting in the words they could remember. It was a casual show, the relaxed showmanship working best with a small audience of twenty. I can't say I could pick one or two of the tunes they played for my favorite. Like a good album that you like from start to finish, their music was totally satisfactory to my ears, such that no one tune stood out from the others, because it was all so good it couldn't get better.


The pictures above are not from last night's show. My computer is so full of pictures it won't take any more. My job now is to start putting them on dvd disks and get them out of the computer to make more room. Cheaper than buying a new computer. That would be like trading in your car for a new one because the ash tray was full. The picture of Robins came from his show October 1, 2010. The picture of Lacy was from his show the 29th of January, 2011. I continually feel awe that I have this privilege of knowing about the Front Porch Gallery, Willard, The Fiddle and Plow, Scott Freeman, Edwin, all the people connected with this weekly series of some of the best music in SW Virginia and NW North Carolina, musicians who live inside a couple hours driving time. In these later years in my life, I'm finding myself discovering the world I live in almost like the first time. Perhaps first time with new realization. The new realization may be putting away my mind of everyday familiarity unto boring where I pay less attention. Now, I can be driving down the highway, day or night, looking at my familiar world and say to myself, This is my world. Meaning: Thank God I'm not in some city. And Thank God, literally, for this particular spot on the earth to be my world, the place I call home.


Hearing musicians, who, like Robins, have picked for 50 years, or any number of advanced years, the music is truly from musicians, people who make music and make music only. In the old-time way, music lovers watched young musicians come along, have their favorites they hope to one day see winning fiddlers conventions, paying close attention to see who is coming into the fold next. One thing they know is not to get emotionally invested in one's success, when the kid might go to prison at age 16 for doing something stupid. From a lifetime of experience, the old people knew that anything can happen to anybody along the way. Somebody who was a great fiddler at 20 might be dead before 30, or quit playing, or lost interest in it. One banjo picker here in high school picked with a friend who played mandolin. They were coming along good. The mandolin player died in a car crash. The banjo picker has not been able to play a banjo since then. His family and friends try to encourage him to pick again, but he can't do it. He's tried a few times to see if it might take, but it didn't. This is a fluid world, not a gear-grinding world.


In the old culture where people paid attention to the world they lived in, instead of the television and other tech distractions, they knew that the future is uncertain for everyone, young fiddlers included. The musicians on the stage last night are like salmon that made it upstream, past bears catching them, fish hooks catching them. Like Mamie White said, of Boone County, West Virginia, Only the strong survive. Lots of white in the hair on stage told that these guys are the survivors, musicians who have not died young or quit or become disabled in any of many possibilities. All are musicians serious enough about their art form to master one instrument or more. Everybody on the stage I'd call a master of his instrument without hesitation. I closed my eyes several times during the music to hear it without visual distraction, like on the ideal sound system. That was when I really marvelled hearing their music. I could see in my mind's eye who was making what sounds, hearing it raw, fresh from the source, banjo picking, guitar picking, bass picking that wove together into foot-tapping good vibrations. Like Zen art, the complexities in their picking sounded effortless. I like to watch them play, to see what they are doing to make the sounds they make, the music.


Earlier, after writing the second paragraph I went to YouTube and watched Rage Against The Machine do Testify live in LA. Tom Morello's guitar I respect for musicianship to the same degree as the musicians last night. It puts me out there in orbit by myself as not many people are able to make the conceptual leap from pile-driving rock to masterful bluegrass picking. I don't see it a leap. It's the same to me. From old-time to the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers came country music. From country music came bluegrass. From bluegrass and country came rock and roll mixed with blues. The blues came from old-time, took it's own route to "cross-over" in the likeness of Chuck Berry. I see amazing progression in the evolution of pop music that parallels our evolving way of life. Old-time music changed over time. It was a pop music of the time before electricity. It changed as life in the mountains changed. It started with a fiddle. Then the banjo came in from black musicians. The guitar came in later. And the bass after the guitar. First time I heard old-time was in 1977, after I'd been listening to punk a couple years. There it was: acoustic punk. Where rock is now has evolved from fiddle and banjo tunes. In present day pop culture, it's like the Rolling Stones say, "It's the singer, not the song." In the old-time way, it was the song, not the singer. Both are valid in their own times. I love both in a way that they are not both, but the same. I can groove to the Jim Carroll Band the same as to Bill Monroe. That's something else I'm grateful for, to be able to appreciate the whole spectrum of music as music.

Butch Robins website: www.butchrobins.com



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