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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DONKEY JACK'S BIG ADVENTURE

jenny and jack

 

This morning I woke with the old-time song playing in my head, Rabbit In a Log, Arnold Spangler singing it with the Laurel Fork Travelers. There's a rabbit in a log and I aint got my dog. How will I get him, I know. I'll get me a briar and twist it in his hair. That's how I'll get him, I know. The song has been in my head all morning. I love it when a good song gets in my head and sticks around. Ralph Stanley and Jimmy Martin recorded together Rabbit In a Log in the late 1960s, Ralph's second album after Carter died. But Arnold Spangler owns the song. He does it the old hillbilly way playing his squawking fiddle and Melvin Felts clucking his banjo. Makes me wet-eyed just to remember them. Lord have mercy, how I love old-time hillbilly music. It's the only music I've heard in my life that makes me cry for the beauty in it. I wept all the way through a Ralph Stanley concert, start to finish, for the beauty in the music. I can't play Stanley Brothers or Ralph Stanley much, their singing is so in line with my vibration, or something, that I weep. Carter Family too. When I'd play Carter Family on the radio show, I couldn't talk between songs for weeping and choking up at the mention of the name of any one of the three. My eyes are damp now just thinking about them. I didn't need to say anything about the Carter Family to any of my listeners. All loved the Carter Family, knew a great many of their songs. Never had to introduce anything. Just let it play, the more songs the merrier. And I sat in the chair and wept. It was the same when I played the Stanley Brothers or Ralph. Baptist hymnals have a considerable number of songs attributed to AP Carter. AP was a severely nerdy mountain boy in the time before WW1, who never got into fights, didn't run with the boys, but took all day long walks along the railroad track singing. He had a tremor in his voice the other kids made fun of and he quit school to get away from them. It's the tremor in his voice that makes his vocals AP Carter's alone.  

 

 

jack

 

Their story is told in a wonderful biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?, told in such a way that when it's over you feel like these are people you have known. Somehow, it brings them to life. And a wonderful autobiography by Ralph Stanley, Man of Constant Sorrow. He took that old, old forgotten song, recorded it and it, too, was forgotten. Then that silly movie about hillbillies, O Brother, and Dan Tyminski's version of Man of Constant Sorrow made the song immensely popular. Then it was discovered that Ralph Stanley has been singing it all along. Ralph Stanley, in his old age, began to get attention and big royalties since the movie made his song so popular. A rock version of the song has been made by the Charm City Devils. They have a great hard-metal version of it on utube that makes me want to see them in concert so bad I may find a way to drive to Johnson City, Tennessee, Aug 26, to see them the closest they'll come to here. I'm ready for another concert. I need a good rock concert every now and again. Looks like a two to two and a half hour drive, same as to Charlotte, Roanoke or Greensboro, the places I have to go to for a concert anyway. But it is so great to drive less than twenty miles to see Ralph Stanley in a place where only hillbillies go, the people who love him in their hearts, and bring out the people homebound in wheelchairs, the people whose bodies are out of control twisted up in knots, strapped into a wheelchair, faces glowing with joy. And the people around them regard them the same as if they're ok. His voice is the voice of the soul of these mountains. He sings in the old Primitive Baptist style like Aretha Franklin sings in black gospel style. I'm not an autograph seeker, don't care about them, but I carried my copy of his book to a concert and asked him to sign it. Only his name. It is one of my book treasures that will not leave this house as long as I'm living. Loaned books never come back. I love that book from my soul. Books are too easy to find on amazon for me to be a lending library. Most recent one I loaned had with it the stipulation I really do want it back. I'll never see it again. It's gone forever. Nobody knows what happened to it. It just went poof, vanished into infinite space. I've found a used copy on amazon to replace it, but would prefer my own copy. The book, itself, doesn't matter as much as the trust that was broken. Trust has a way of not coming back when it's broken, like fine china. Glue doesn't fix it.

 

jenny and jack

 

Talking on the phone this morning with Carole, I saw Jack walk by the windows exploring my territory. I jumped off the phone in a hurry, picked up 4 carrots from refrigerator, went out the door calling to Jack. I did not know what to do. I thought carrot might be an attraction for him. Not. He was on an adventure. I followed him talking to him like I do, called him by name, keeping him knowing I'm behind him and aware of him. He was walking along my rock walkway to the parking lot for one, sniffing every rock. I let him take his time, have his adventure, hoping a car would not drive by and scare him. He was smelling my footprints, Caterpillar's and the possums that walk around here at night picking up bird feeder leavings. He was exploring my meadow he sees across the fence, knows it's the meadow I live in like I see the meadow he lives in. I walk into his meadow. Why not Jack walk into my meadow? I was a bit anxious, because a car always goes by when you don't want it to, even if only three cars go up the road in a day. I didn't want Jack to feel my anxiety. I wanted him to feel that I was walking with him, having a stroll. He sniffed his way along, pulled up some jewelweed and snacked on it, tried some grass, pulled up some plantain, chewed it some and spit it out. He was in a place he'd only seen from the fence. He was up close to the car he sees me ride by in. I honk at them when I drive by the meadow and holler out an open window, Donkey. Today was Jack's first experience with the car up close, to walk by it, smell it, smell the ground around it. He put a front hoof on the pavement and I thought, Oh no, let's not go walking on the road. The new surface, asphalt, his first time feeling it, he pulled his hoof back and would not step on it again.

 

jack

 

Jack made a turn toward the grass in the tracks that lead to the gate to the other meadow. I thought maybe he was heading that way. No. He turned around and walked back to the stone walkway with intent, walked past me holding a carrot, taking no interest. He walked back to the gate like he was in a hurry. He walked to the gate and it didn't move as easily as the other way. It spooked him. He walked a ways to the left and grazed in a jewelweed patch. I gave Jenny some carrot. I went through the gate, left it open and walked out into the meadow along their trail with Jenny following. Jack watched us go away into the distance. He stepped through the gate and came running, ran by us with a big smile on his face like he was having a great time. I gave carrots to Jenny, Jack came around for a carrot. Jack got too close, Jenny swung her ass end around on me, quick as a cat, and I hollered, Jen! She calmed down, I stepped out of her range and said, I'm going to my barn. They went at each other, slinging their heads around each other's necks, donkey martial arts sparring. They even raised their front legs high off the ground, standing on their back legs like pictures of rearing horses. It was beautiful. Their teeth were bared, they came down and Jack went into domination mode. Jenny ran, Jack behind her with his chin on her rump, her kicking him in the chest and neck, running. She came to a flat place by the creek and he ran up, took hold of the back of her neck and walked her where he wanted her to go. She broke free and he took hold of her again, took the fire right out of her. He let her go, they pretend tussled a short bit and both went to grazing. I replaced the baling twine I use to hold the gate closed. It was from last winter and is getting rotten, breaks easy. No problem. Easily replaced. I love the ratty old gate too much to put up another one. The wooden frame is all rotted, none of it would hold a nail, but the wire mesh holds it all together. It looks like it would fall apart from just touching it. I like about it that it's a soft gate, a gentle gate. It was old when I was new.  

 

jenny scratching on the gate

 

 

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FEELING IS EVERYTHING

australian aboriginal art

Sometimes a picture I see in facebook or someplace else will be a problem for my visual interpretation. Just now I saw one of a white man in a black uniform pushing a corpse wrapped in white on a gurney into the back of an ambulance, at night, seen from the side, light source inside the ambulance, a red light. I had to look at it for a long time before I could see anything but an abstraction. I'm so used to seeing abstractions in art that when I can't make out the subjects in a photograph, it automatically looks like an abstraction of colors. Just before that I saw a thing on facebook of an animated woman turning on one foot like a dancer. If I'm right-brain dominant, I'll see her go clockwise. If I'm left brain dominant, she'll go counter-clockwise. First time I looked, she was going clockwise and I could not see her going the other way. I looked away at something and when I looked back, she was going counter-clockwise. Then I could get her to change direction by looking away and looking back at her. Evidently that means I've a fair balance of left brain / right brain. Under the twirling image was a list of what constitutes right brain and what constitutes left brain. I read them both. Right brain tends toward intuitive and left brain toward reason. I feel like it's true to say that I live by a fair balance of left and right brain. I imagine anyone who reads these writings more or less regularly can see it, and possibly it is your base reason for reading them.

alex katz

I'm recalling a conversation with a lawyer friend a few months ago when he said of somebody we were talking about, "That's not logical!" It stunned me to hear someone say that. In a nano-second I processed in my head, he's been a lawyer all his adult life, he knows humanity, and in his sixties believes logic has something to do with human behavior. I blurted out a little too much in my shock to hear it, "Logic? Logic only matters in math." We don't do no logic round here. It caused me to reflect that the only place I've seen logic apply in adult life is in court, or somebody deciding not to kill somebody for pissing him off, the logic of considering what's next. He spends his time in court where logic matters. I was looking at it from outside court where logic doesn't have much of a role, except maybe sometimes making a given decision when you have to weigh the odds. I found it interesting that logic was a given for him in his world, and barely anything at all in the world I live in. In my world, emotion still plays a large role in someone's life, people who live by the heart. It's when we live by the mind that logic becomes an issue. Urban living is more of the mind than country living. In the country we're not on the climb for more money and status, and we're more relaxed to live our lives completely illogically if we can get away with it. It's like the law takes care of logical thought for us and we do our best to stay out of trouble with the law. That takes care of our need for adherence to logic.

morris graves

I remember in my first years in the mountains being astonished by logic having little to no importance. They were still living by the heart when I went off to school and the urban work world where logic sometimes has value. What I'm getting at, it's been a long time since I've thought that way, the urban, college-educated way of using logic. I do, but I don't use the word. I've seen in the mountain people I live among the value of living by the heart. I felt I was heart-deficient when I came to the mountains, too much emphasis on mind, reason, logic. People who live by the heart are often guided by their emotions making a rollercoaster ride of everyday life. I was struck in the beginning years of observing mountain culture that emotion played such a leading role, even in tone of voice and rhythms of speech. I've talked with a very few old-timers who continued to talk in the emphatic every other syllable iamb like in Shakespeare, Elizabethan rhythms. Old-time fiddlers used to keep the rhythm while playing melody from the days when the fiddle was the only instrument for square dances, before banjo and guitar came along to take care of the rhythm. The iambic emphasis carried emotion very well, could be used for emphasis of emotion behind the content spoken. The oldest time old-timers I met years ago sounded like song when they talked.

plum tree japanese

I grew up in urban culture schooling where reason has come in to replace emotion as the next step in our collective development. In the mountains, I found that the people still valued emotion, didn't mind talking with hearty emotional emphasis. I loved hearing people talk with emotional emphasis. I had shut down emotion in myself in childhood, except of course, for anger. By mid thirties when I arrived in the mountains a year after engaging myself with the Divine Will, whatever that is, which I set to find out, my spiritual path was about opening my heart to love. My parachute landed me in a world of people who continue to live by heart, a subculture. Living among the mountain people I have found my heart among people not afraid to flare up in rage, get drunk and be stupid, fight, cuss, threaten, and on the other hand help, support, love, care for, look after with generosity of heart. Mountain men like to act like they're hard-hearted, but when their women leave them and take the kids, they break, they break all the way down, and many pop a cap in their heads to quiet their agony. From the outside, that looks kind of pathetic to be such a slave to emotion, but from the inside, from inside the culture, it's how a man feels. Jr Maxwell of Whitehead, banjo picker, welder, tractor mechanic, told me at the table over a dram of good mountain liquor with emphasis, "Feeling is everything."

christo

Mountain music is not music when it is not played from the heart. Almost every Saturday morning after my radio show on the local AM station of mountain music I'd stop by Jr's to visit with him for a few hours on the way home. I almost only played musicians of the mountains born in the mountains playing mountain music as it is played in this region, the Central Blue Ridge. That would be northwestern North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. It's a fountain of music all up and down the Appalachians, each region with it's own sound, or personality as I've come to see the differences. One Saturday morning I decided to play an old-time band from Durham that seemed to have a pretty good mountain sound. The fiddler played well, banjo too. Jr would usually tell me what he thought of the music I played that day. He leaned more to bluegrass than old-time and I leaned more toward old-time than bluegrass. It kept me reminded this was the case among my listeners too, people who liked both, so I didn't want to make one dominant over the other. After playing the Durham band he didn't say anything. I asked what he made of it. He said, "Weren't no music in it." I said, "I know," at that moment understanding for the first time after wondering for some years what he meant by the word music. Music comes from the heart. The urban old-time band from the flatland was playing from mind. I never played another band from outside the mountains on the radio show. It's not that their music is invalid, just that I called the show "music from home," from the heart. My listeners knew the difference too.

 

barnett newman

 

The evidence convincing me that mountain music is played from the heart, is that mountain music is the only music I've ever heard of any kind of music that can make me weep for the beauty of it. I have sat at the radio station, tears running down my face, unable to introduce songs or talk at all while playing the Carter Family or the Stanley Brothers. They bring up my tears I love their music so much. Sara Carter sings in as plain a voice as there ever was, yet her singing goes straight to the heart, because she is singing it from her own heart. It's the resonance of the heart that makes mountain music mountain specific. It is that something in mountain music the people from outside the mountains tend not to be able to put a finger on or even hear. By now, after half a century of television and more years than that of radio, of city people moving their culture to the mountains, that old thing about the music needing to be from the heart is not necessarily a rule anymore. Through school, television and work, reason, logical thinking has been coming to the mountains. Being cut off from the coastal cities until the age of technology, the mountains were slow to pick up the next step in our collective development, from emotion to reason. Our next step is intuition, which age we have already entered. Intuition somehow transcends reason and emotion, mixes them up in a special blend, shakes them good like a martini and serves a new way of tasting the ingredients. Feeling and reason work together, one balancing the other, letting go and allowing the flow.

robert ryman

 

 

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SEVEN YEARS WITH MOUNTAIN MUSIC

      jr maxwell by tj worthington

Tonight I'm going to Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's cd release party at the Fiddle & Plow show in Woodlawn. The album is 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It will be a knock-out show. Steve Lewis will be there with guitar and banjo. Butch Robins will be there with banjo. Willard's rhythm guitar will be there. Probably Mike Gayheart playing bass, or Sandy, or both. I'm hoping Dori will be there. It's going to be some music in the real sense of the word as music. Yesterday I saw Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale dance a waltz in THE LEOPARD. It was a dance, not just moving their feet the way I "dance." This is the difference between music and music the way these guys make it. Their music itself is a dance. They pluck the strings with the same grace of Lancaster and Cardinale swirling over the floor. Their music flows. I'm not saying this makes them better than any others. Only that this is what draws me to be there every Friday night I can make it.

First time I listened to this project, I felt a wringing and twisting inside longing to play it on the Saturday morning radio show that went away when the station was sold out of the community. This is an album I know my listeners would love, and I would love playing it for them. It brings to mind the time I found a cd from a mid Sixties lp of a Galax bluegrass band, Larry Richardson And the Blue Ridge Boys. Buddy Pendleton plays fiddle. He is one of the great fiddlers of the region. Worked at the Floyd post office for 40 years. First time I heard the album was just a few weeks after the radio station shut down. My longing to play it for my listeners was so strong it hurt. I'd have played the whole album straight through. When I play it now it still pains me that I never had a chance to play it for the listeners. Those seven years of the radio show, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour, were part of a seven year cycle that were happy years, which doesn't mean without sorrow. In childhood I was afraid of sorrow, but have come to embrace sorrow the same as joy, a legitimate human emotion that has a hidden joy in it, like joy has a hidden sorrow in it, like light has darkness hidden in it and darkness has light hidden in it. On a scale where joy is at one end and sorrow at the other, I like to think I waver somewhere toward the middle, sometimes wavering all the way over to one side or the other. When I'm in joy I know it's short lived. In sorrow I know it's short lived too.

I have no way of guessing even close to accurately how many people listened to the show. Over the seven years about twenty people spoke to me in the grocery store, here and there, saying they listen. They were the faces I played the music to in my mind's eye. I didn't know if it was two hundred or twenty. It didn't matter. I think of times in the Regular Baptist church meetings when it was only two or three people, Millard Pruitt would quote a verse from the pulpit, when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst thereof. He preached the same as if the house were full and people standing. That made a lot of sense to me. It's not about bigness. It's about the thing itself. I've adopted that thinking for everything I do. In the beginning of this "blog" were three or four views a day. I was ok with that. I wasn't going to advertise. It wasn't about how many. It was about doing it. I wanted to make myself write something every day worth reading. If 3 people find it worth reading, I'm fully satisfied. After three years it's up to over 200 views per day. I am no more satisfied with 200 than with 2. Yet, I felt a mild sense of thrill when it passed 100, then again when it passed 200. It's a thrill because it was unexpected --- a hundred times 2. I don't know who they are except for a few who have contacted me. Now I love my readers like I loved my listeners to the radio show.

The first year with BROC and involved in the Hillbilly Show, Agnes wanted me to be a comic hillbilly mc. I did it one more time, but it was too unsettling having 800 people looking at me. I was not born for the stage. But I had a very strong feeling that all the people looking at me knew me and I only knew a few of them. It told me that perhaps most of the people in the audience have heard the show at least a few times. That's what unsettled me most. I was not prepared for an auditorium full of my listeners. Had no idea that many people listened, at least sometimes. The people in the audience listened when I spoke and I was not ready for that. Yet, it gave me a measure of my listeners and gave them faces. In the beginning, the black mic I spoke into at the radio station seemed as far as my voice went. I was talking to and playing music for the mic. Beyond that I had no clue. Then I stand in front of an auditorium of people and they know me. It blew my mind to smithereens and I did not know how to handle it. Practice night in front of empty seats was comfortable. When the seats had faces, that was another deal. I tend to see people as oceans of consciousness that are really complex from one individual to another. I get 800 oceans of consciousness looking at me like they know me and I'm too overwhelmed to be able to function. After two shows of being freaked out, I asked Agnes to let me pull the curtain ropes, involvement less the freakout.

In this seven year cycle I've been making videos of the music at the Fiddle & Plow to put on youtube, painting mountain musicians and writing here. These are my art forms in this cycle. Yes, I regarded the radio show an art form. I wasn't much at talking, so I kept it brief. Emphasis was totally on the music itself. There is no talking I could do that would be better to listen to than anything recorded in these hills. I'd rather my listeners groove to Gaither Carlton's banjo or fiddle than to put them through anything I'd say other than identifying musician and title, and to mention he was Doc Watson's father in law. I couldn't even do that playing the Carter Family. I love them so much that just mentioning their names choked me up. None of their songs need an introduction of title or anything. I'd play one after the other with tears of joy running down my face, knowing that everyone listening loved what they were hearing at least as much as I did. Carter Family songs have been played and recorded countless times, though I've never heard a version of one of their songs that reaches all the way into my heart like Sara, AP and Maybelle do. Sara's and AP's singing was entirely without emotive expression, like old time church singing, yet the emotion is so powerful that even screaming rockers can't get there. After hearing the Carter Family's Wildwood Flower, there is no other Wildwood Flower. And then there is Ralph and Carter Stanley. Legends of the Clinch Mountains.

This music, mountain music, makes me glad I am where I am every time I hear any of it. The more funky old-timey it is, the more I love it. Tommy Jarrell with his fretless banjo and his fiddle. Fred Cockerham with banjo and fiddle. One of the great albums of all time is Tommy and Fred picking banjo together. It's called Tommy and Fred. It was out of print for a long time. But I'd think by now it would be back in print. It's too good not to be available. And that was the motivation for opening the music store, an outlet for mountain music in the area. Floyd, Virginia, was the closest place. It was a great adventure. I met a lot of wonderful people. Met some new friends. Took up painting mountain musicians. Discovered Old-Time Herald magazine. Discovered a lot of incredible music. Sometimes I get called an expert, but I always remark that I am not an expert, just someone that loves the music. I've learned so much from mountain music and musicians that I can't imagine myself before the learning started. One of the great joys of my life has been playing mountain music to mountain people on an AM station in the mountains, the next county over from WPAQ, the ideal.

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WILLARD GAYHEART AND HARROL BLEVINS @ SPARTA LIBRARY

harrol blevins

willard gayheart

 

 

An evening of good local traditional music Thursday nite at the Library in Sparta. Arts Council supports these free shows of regional music at the library. Before, the budget went to the NC Pops Orchestra from Raleigh area. Back in those years I wondered often what mind would spend state funds for art in the region on NC Pops in the mountains where culture is abundant and everywhere, unless you're from Away and don't appreciate mountain culture. Then there's nothing but television, like everywhere else. I'd think, for a whole lot less, a whole lot less, they could get the Whitetop Mountain Band, the Slate Mountain Ramblers, Freeman and Williams and put on a couple of free shows in the school auditorium, one show for all the kids in school, and one for the community. NC Pops is not culture in the mountains. The Central Blue Ridge is a fountain of traditional American music in its own living culture. The band at Mt Rogers school is a mountain string band of traditional music. That strikes me sensible in the mountains. Why make parents who can't afford them buy trombones and saxophones and clarinets, then put them on a shelf in the closet and there they stay for the rest of one's life. Always intended to pick it up again and learn to play it better, but it never happened. When somebody plays fiddle, banjo, guitar or bass in the school string band, they don't lay the instrument down after school. They look for other musicians.

 

The Arts Council now provides these entertainments at the library regularly, good regional music. Willard Gayheart has played there before with his musical partner Bobby Patterson of about 40 years with their Galax bluegrass band The Highlanders. Willard played rhythm guitar in the band and did the vocals. Willard's singing is as good as any, to my ear. I've been listening to Willard's singing since the time of his band Alternate Roots and cds from his earlier band Skeeter and the Skidmarks, since 2003 when I met Scott Freeman who was also with Alternate Roots and Skeeter. Because I let Scott give lessons in my store one afternoon a week and charged him nothing, he gave me a free pass to Alternate Roots shows. I went to fourteen and then to their last show at the Carter Fold. Skeeter and the Skidmarks have come together again and now I hear Willard pick and sing with the band. Every week he and Scott open the show at Willards frame shop and gallery with two songs before they introduce the night's guest. By now I've heard a lot of Willard's singing and a lot of Scott's singing. The music Willard and Scott make together, the particular sound that is theirs has become the music that satisfies my ears totally. I tell them they are my new Rolling Stones. That's not an exaggeration. It's just a subtler time of my life. I drive to Woodlawn every Friday I'm able because to my ear there is no better music playing anywhere, no better to my personal satisfaction that, like everything else, is subjective. By that I mean I'm not trying to missionarize you into hearing music as I do. I'm not saying Willard is better than Ricky Martin, only that I prefer listening to Willard who satisfies my ear better.

 

Harrol Blevins and Willard discovered each other not many months ago. Harrol picks and sings and Willard picks and sings. They take turns singing. They're becoming an interesting duo. The balance each other. They don't yet flow together musically like Willard and Scott, who have been picking together since late 1980s. Scott is married to Willard's daughter Jill. They've made so much music together they're bonded musically. The flow between them is seamless. Willard and Harrol have been making music together a matter of months. The guy sitting next to me said, "They haven't played together much." I told him they'd just met musically a few months ago. It shows that they haven't made music together so much they play as one, but it's because they're new together. They play very well together as two very good guitar players who are getting used to each other's sounds and how the other approaches any given song, like Mid The Green Fields Of Virginia, that beautiful Carter Family song Willard sang. It's one of my all time favorite songs, a homesick song, where I spent life's happy hours in the vale of Shenandoah, mid the green fields of Virginia far away. Willard and Harrol sang another Carter Family song that is one of my top favorites, When The Band Was Playing Dixie. It brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it, like Jimmy Arnold's song, The Rebel Soldier. Evidently an American GI in Europe after possibly ww2 telling of watching a parade with a marching band. When the band was playing Dixie, I was humming Home Sweet Home. It's a love song to the South.

 

Willard sang a couple of his songs, one called Kentucky Memories, and the other, Ern and Zory's Sneakin Bitin Dog. In Kentucky Memories he sang, Take me back to the homeplace of my childhood, to those hills and green valleys I did roam. It's a song I carry in my mind quite a lot. A lot of Willard's and Scott's songs with their bands and them together have taken over the songs that play in my mind much of the time. This is what I mean saying they've become my new Rolling Stones. I don't go around with songs like Honky Tonk Women, Street Fighting Man, Brown Sugar in my mind any more. It's Carter Family songs sung by Willard and Scott that inhabit my mind's airwaves in this time of my life. Willard singing Bob Wills' western swing song, Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon, delights me every time I hear it. He gives it a pep that is just right for it. All of the guys will be jealous when they see my playmate so sweet. It's hard for me to believe about myself that Skeeter and the Skidmarks have me liking I Love You Nelly. Unbelievable. Every time I hear Skeeter play it I love it. Standing in the moonlight by the old garden gate, Nelly my darling.... These old songs are beautiful poetry. Old-time Primitive Baptist songs are powerful, deep and take one through a beautifully worded meditation on a given aspect of life. Mountain people have loved powerful meanings in their music and their sermons. Certain of these old traditional songs bring tears to my eyes regularly, every time I hear them, tears for the beauty in them, just about anything by the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers. Ralph Stanley too. Hazel Dickens singing West Virginia My Home tears me up.

 

These are the kinds of songs I have come to appreciate in my maturity. I hold the Stones' Wild Horses, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, Brian Ferry's Taxi, Stevie Nicks's Rhiannon, as songs I like an awful lot, songs that used to play in my head, the songs that have been a part of my life. Then I discovered the Carter Family. For quite awhile I didn't listen to the Carter Family due to a pre-conceived notion that was based in nothing. Then I heard them one day. I read the biography, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone. From then on I held them in reverence. When I played them on the radio show I sat with tears running down my face for the beauty of the music and knowing that my listeners were in bliss similar to mine hearing those beautiful songs sung by Sara Carter and sometimes AP. If I were to put on a Carter Family cd, I'd stop writing before the first song was over and I'd be sitting back listening with tears running down my face. That's what they do to me. No rock & roll ever made me cry for the beauty of it. The only time a classical piece got to me with tears was hearing Jascha Heifetz play Scottish Fantasy on his violin with orchestra. First time I heard that, I laid down on the couch and bawled it was so beautiful. It was old-time fiddle music with orchestra.

 

Willard has introduced me to a whole new appreciation of singing. Willard, Scott, Harrol and Bobby Patterson, another of Willard's singing partners, sing as naturally as natural can be. It's a mountain characteristic to sing a song natural, without tricks that call attention to the singer. In mountain music it's the song, not the singer, the reverse of how it is in rock. The mountain musician does not call attention to the singer or the picker. All attention goes into delivering the words to the song and the music as natural as it can be done without embellishments that point to the singer. Natural doesn't mean boring and dead. It's a loyalty to the purpose of singing to render a song so others can understand it. And singing from the heart doesn't necessarily mean acting like Janis Joplin. Sara Carter sang expressionless, no movements, no facial or verbal expression of feeling. The only evidence given that she sings from the heart is that her singing goes straight to the heart in the listener. Jumping around and emoting is more of the mind than the heart. Willard and Harrol sat in chairs in a small room without mics and speakers. It was so right hearing them singing folk style in the center of a small room with maybe 30 people gathered round. The music was so good the people standing around talking afterward appeared to feel like I felt, like I'd just heard some good music. The pictures above of Harrol and Willard were made last May at Willard's gallery.

 

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WHILE THE BAND IS PLAYING DIXIE

harrol blevins

willard gayheart

Harrol Blevins and Willard Gayheart played at the Front Porch Friday night. Donna Correll, bass player with the Wolfe Brothers old-time band, wife of the band's fiddler, Jerry Correll, played bass. I've come to think of the times Willard picks and sings with whoever he's with, most often Scott Freeman, tonight Harrol Blevins, as the best music that happens at the Front Porch. Harrol and Willard play very well together. Harrol plays lead guitar with Willard, who plays rhythm. Both sing very well and do good harmonies. Donna kept the bass going good, harmonized some on choruses. I watched with eyes open most of the time, though sometimes I watched with eyes closed, listening with the same intensity I watched with eyes open. It's good with eyes open, but closed, the sound comes through without the visual distraction. Their two guitars sound much better in the dark. It's actually mildly shocking how much the sound is different with eyes open or closed.

 I didn't make any video tonight because the computer is full and I haven't yet figured out what to do about it. What I've found thus far to do costs more than I have at the moment. I'll just have to be on hold in the video department until I figure this thing out. Different people give me different information. I've become indifferent. Maybe I will get it done someday, and maybe I won't. I know what I'll do! I'll talk to Tim (the Techman) Sizemore next time I see him at the coffee shop. He will give me the straight scoop. In the past, other people have told me to do this and that for a given computer problem. I talk to Tim, and he has the answer that is not anything like what I'd been told by the ones quick to know the answer. One time, listening to friends who "know," I spent 3-4 hundred dollars for nothing. Tim's answer: buy a laptop.

The pictures above were taken in May when Harrol and Willard put on a show together. I got some stills, but the computer won't accept them. Ten new people in the audience tonight. Recently, the show has been included into the Crooked Road tourism deal on Hwy 58 in largely SW Virginia. 58 goes all the way to Richmond (I think) and maybe has music venues along the eastern part too. Anyway, the western part is the only part of interest here. It includes the Carter Fold at Hilton's, Virginia, across the state line from Kingsport, Tenn, a ways beyond Bristol. It's close to where Jimmy Martin came from and Earl Taylor, too. Seeing the words Carter Fold bring up nostalgic memories of the time I went there with Jean when Alternate Roots was playing their last concert. That was the night I bought my Carter Family tshirt. It's my anti-cool tshirt. Next time I go to a rock concert, I think I'll wear it. Not that anyone but me would know what Carter Family means. Surely there would be half a dozen others in a crowd of a thousand. I'd never heard of the Carter Family at age 21.

Harrol Blevins sang While The Band Is Playing Dixie, a Carter Family song. At the Albert Hash fest last year at Whitetop, Dale Jett, grandson of AP and Sara Carter, sang the song. I'd heard it before, but heard it the first time when he sang it there. He sang it so right, too. Jett doesn't sing "like" the Carter Family. He sings with a reverence for the song, itself, like he believes it is such a good-worded song he wants to share it with us. While the band Is playing Dixie, I'm humming Home Sweet Home. Willard and Harrol sang it nicely. It's such a good song that just playing it is all it takes to show its beauty. It doesn't matter whether it's done well or not so well. The song is so beautiful, it takes care of itself. Like Leonard Bernstein's Maria. That song cannot be sung poorly. Everyone who sings it, sings it beautifully, because it's a beautiful song that can't be ruined. It's the same with the Band Playing Dixie; It has a feel similar to The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down. Deep, strong Southern feeling, down there in the heart where the South resides in Southerners, where Southerners are kin, where the live oaks are still draped with Spanish moss.  

I just now went to YouTube and found Maybelle Carter and Sara Carter singing While The Band Is Playing Dixie. I wanted a refreshing on the words. Evidently on the other side of the ocean, the songwriter heard a band playing Dixie and caught himself humming Home Sweet Home. It's like some of the old songs of missing the South, or one's home state in the South; Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia. The yellow Rose of Texas beat the belles of Tennessee. Missing home, sweet home. Whatever that home might be, My Old Kentucky Home. Sara sang, "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." My home is this house on Air Bellows mountain, where the Part 2 half of my life played out. Taking liberties with the song East Virginia Blues, I was born in California, to North Carolina I did roam. There was never a time in the first half of my life that I ever imagined living in North Carolina. In college time, I had an unrealistic desire to go to Chapel Hill. Upon arrival in the mountains, I learned Chapel Hill is where the communists were located. Also learned there were 57 communists in High Point.

As usual at the Fiddle and Plow shows, Willard's picking and singing characterize the sound of the place. Willard's persona, his presence, who Willard is, is central to the atmosphere of the place, which by day is Willard's frame shop where he has his drawing shop in the basement, or the ground floor, since the frame shop is actually the second floor, though it seems like first. Like in the Carolina Lowcountry, the basement is above ground. It is a different band or individual guest every week, and Willard is the constant. He's there to introduce the guest and often accompany. He's so personable and at home that it doesn't even figure that he is, in my way of seeing, one of the more important men in the world of SW Virginia traditional music, there with Bobby Patterson, a singing partner. I'm floored every time I hear a long list of Willard's contributions to music in SW Virginia and Galax. It's my buddy Willard, not a bust on a pedestal.  Like I feel privileged going to the Fiddle and Plow shows, I feel privileged knowing Willard, somebody I look up to as a musician and a human being.

mark uzmann, winter oak

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RALPH STANLEY'S LATEST ALBUM



Ralph Stanley IS these mountains.

--Roni Stoneman

Ralph Stanley's new gospel album, A Mother's Prayer, arrived in the mail today. I put it on and played it right away, have played it ever since. Steve Sparkman, the banjo player who came into the band to play like Ralph in the time Ralph's fingers gave out, he left the band after the recording of this album. Ralph is singing the song, Come All Ye Tenderhearted, the story of a mother who left the house for a few minutes, it caught on fire, her babies were inside, she ran into the burning house because she couldn't live another day. Carter sang it before, on an album, An Evening Long Ago. Ralph sings it entirely different from how Carter sang it. His rendering of the song is mournful, but nothing like as mournful as Carter singing it. Ralph's song has less words that suggest the story, and it's every bit as haunting as Carter's telling the full story. Ralph sings it like an Old Baptist hymn with a drone fiddle behind him.  Carter loved those mournful old songs and sang them right. Maybe the song I like best on this new album is the title song, A Mother's Prayer. Ralph can sing a song to make you feel it in the heart. Because he sings from the heart, the song touches the heart of the listener. It's a powerful song and he delivers it with his own power.

In the liner notes, Ralph Stanley is quoted talking on gospel songs. "You have a different feeling in the gospel. I can put more in a sacred song than I can just an ordinary song. I can feel more. I feel like I'm doing myself, and maybe other people too, more good. I always do religious music. I don't ever remember going on stage without doing some hymns, at any appearance I was at. I always intend to do that. I like to sing em. I believe in em, and the people seem to like em too. And I guess if you believe in something you put more in it."

Though the Stanley Brothers were of the first run of bluegrass bands and Carter and Bill Monroe are neck and neck at being the finest bluegrass singer ever, the Stanley Brothers were never able to reach an audience outside the mountains. They were mountain specific. They were so a part of the mountain sound that is inaccessible to ears outside these mountains, as inaccessible as Marcus Martin's fiddle and Bertie Dickens's banjo, their music was rarely heard outside the mountains. All up and down the mountains they traveled by car in the time of inner tubes. Ralph was the driver. This hillbilly sound the Stanley Brothers had is the sound that gives joy to my ears. I love that old mountain sound, the squawking fiddle and clucking banjo, Ralph's extended syllables at the end of a line.

Now he's singing John The Revelator, an old-time hymn, singing it a capella. He's singing it the old-time Regular Baptist way, as only Ralph Stanley can do it. He sings every kind of way of gospel singing; bluegrass, old-time church, folk, a good variety. I call Ralph Stanley an artist the same as I call Edward Hopper an artist. Every album Stanley has made is a gem from first song to last, nary a weak song in the long list of titles he's recorded. He's performed his music so regularly since the end of WW2 that it seems like by now he's become his music. When asked about his voice, he says it's a "gift," the only honest thing he can say about it. He doesn't sing anything like vocal teachers say we're supposed to sing, rounded mouth, big open mouth. His lips seldom separate more than half an inch while he's singing. When Carter was dying, he told Ralph to go on singing. Ralph didn't believe he could sing good enough. He had always sung tenor with Carter and it was time for him to take the lead.

Right away when Ralph started playing with his own band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, his guitar player couldn't make a Cincinatti show. He asked the local promoter if he knew any guitar players who could get there right away and fill in. He called Larry Sparks, who was 17 or 19 according to two different dates I've found, Larry made it to the show. At the end of the show Ralph hired him. He became Ralph's lead singer, a Carter replacement. Larry was with the band 3 or so years. They made some beautiful music together. Then Roy Lee Centers came into the band, the man Ralph called the second-best bluegrass singer there ever was, reserving number one for Carter. That's a fair assessment of Roy Lee's singing. He could sing a mournful song too. One of his great ones was Lonesome Old Song. I've sought all the Ralph Stanley albums I can find with Roy Lee Centers on them and think I may have them. Then Roy Lee was killed by a home town boy who hated him because he sang so good and was with Ralph Stanley. Ralph tells the whole story of the murder in his memoir. It's a story that needed telling.

Man Of Constant Sorrow is the title of Ralph Stanley's recent memoir that sold a whole lot better than he, the publisher, anybody thought it would. The one that did the writing, put the hours of interview tapes into book form, deserves mention, Eddie Dean. He did a good job of writing it in Ralph's words, so it reads first person Ralph Stanley. It's in his words. Dean did an awful lot of work putting it together, then polishing it into a jewel. Man Of Constant Sorrow was the song Ralph always sang when he and Carter were the Stanley Brothers. It never made a bigger splash than the other songs they sang. Then the film, O Brother Where Art Thou, had Dan Tyminski, bluegrass mandolin player, sing Man Of Constant Sorrow. For the first time in Ralph Stanley's life he was making good money from royalties from the movie, the album. It had him on the album singing, O Death, which put Ralph Stanley's voice out into the world of better album sales and bigger concert attendance.

The album of O Brother got him awards, Nashville spotlight, and even recognition of the great one still living in the hills of home, the country singer that never moved to Nashville. Bob Dylan holds him up the very highest in American music. As do I. Up there with Bob Dylan, though in his own way, not like Dylan at all except they sing songs on stage. For me, Ralph Stanley is like something I've never heard before. The first principle of making mountain music is that you play/sing from the heart. I've heard it said, If it aint played from the heart, th'aint no music in it. Carter sang from the heart and touched the listener's heart too. It's a powerful thing, singing from the heart. Sara Carter of the Carter Family did and so did AP Carter. In the Clinch Mountains of SW Virginia, the soul of these Appalachian mountains found its voice in The Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, and Dr Ralph Stanley. Thank you, Clinch Mountains.

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INDIANA AINT NO SUTHUN STATE

yo, sambo

Milly Richardson just now brought my attention to what I wrote yesterday about the South. This is one of the bonds Milly and I have, our love for the South, the irrational as well as the rational of it, from the very meanest and worst to the most generous and best, the entire picture in between, like on a Japanese fan. The one thing somebody from West Virginia has in common with someone from Mississippi is they are both Southern, and in that way share the same culture, as people from the West Virginia mountains have in common with people of the North Carolina mountains is the culture of the Southern Appalachians. Above the Mason-Dixon line, old-time music was played a different way. It had no black influence in it, or next to none. The banjo is the fusion of the black people's ways of playing the music and the ways of the white people. White influence came from the British Isles.



The black influence came through white old-time music, filtered through African sensibilities, into music the musicians could play together. More than likely slave musicians played for a lot of white square dances. Uncle Dave Macon, the first Grand Ole Opry banjo comedian, came from central Tennessee. By age 14 he was picking a banjo. He met a black man who picked banjo. They taught each other new licks. This was the case with a number of the early white banjo pickers. Clarence Ashley of Mountain City, Tennessee, learned licks when he was young from a black banjo picker. The banjo, an African instrument, was probably made among slaves by somebody kidnapped into slavery who had been a maker and player of the instrument. It went through changes this side of the ocean, like old-time music went through changes this side of the ocean, which the slaves learned from the white people that were everywhere. Young white boys who had music in them were drawn to it in the minstrel shows of white guys in blackface, the banjo known as the black instrument. I expect the white boys that picked up the banjo, the ones that really got into it, sought a black man to show him how it's "really" played.



And the Yankees accuse us in the South of not liking black people. For every Yankee who would say, I don't think that way about Southerners, there are Southerners who like black people very much simply for who they are, friends. There is at least as much interracial friendship happening in the South as in the North. I can't say there is more or less, because I have no idea, but I do know that in the Southern white middle class, nigger is the most unacceptable word in the dictionary. Even worse than fuck. You don't get lectured and pointed at for saying fuck. And if you're a bred and buttered Confederate redneck of the flag waving variety, whose greatgreatgrandpa fought in the Civil War, that's the password. It's more the shock value and statement of a separate status from the white middle class that looks down on them. It's a working class Southern boy's middle finger to the condescending middle class, the management class, the boss. Fuck you. And the horse you rode in on.



That's it for what's left of Southern racism. To start with, not hardly all Southerners were racists, and there is less racism as time goes by, as older generations die out and younger generations come in. It's going away of its own, because it's simply not practical anymore. It was of another time. And where collective guilt for slavery is concerned, slavery just makes us members of the international community. Slavery is an African institution from Bible times to the present day. An ongoing international slave trade is alive an well. The Bible justified it for the colonists. It was the  European colonists buying slaves from Africans that got the New World slave trade going. When the American colonies broke free of "the Crown," we were left to do with this situation we did not create the best we knew how. There is no rational or irrational to what followed. American history. Bombs from the sky on the Iraqi people. If you're going to blame Southerners for the plight of the black people, remember to blame all Americans, black and white and in between, for the plight of the Iraqi people, for the plight of the North American Indians.  



Later on, you have the Allman Brothers, Southern Rock knee deep in the Delta Blues. In turn, there was white influence in black music, perhaps to the same degree. It's a complex weaving of the ways white people think that are particular to white people, racial arrogance for one, and the ways black people think particular to black people, a minority consciousness. Both are prime in decision-making and make very different cultures based in the same culture, subcultures that share the bigger culture. I get really tired of people from outside the South accusing Southerners of racism and sympathy for slavery. I do not allow that Southerners are expected to feel guilty for being Southern. Yankees had slaves too.



And when it comes to racism, there is plenty of it in the South, to be sure, but it's not universal by any means. And there's plenty of it in the North, Midwest and West. None of the great Southern writers were racist, Eudora Welty, John Crowe Ransom, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and a great long string of others. Elvis was a Southern boy. Before he started recording, he was finding his style as a singer in the black clubs of Memphis. He was as black a singer as any white man could sound. Then you have Chuck Berry of Memphis singing like a white man. Jerry Lee Lewis singing like a black man. Rock and roll. Minstrel shows again.



AP Carter drove around the mountains of the Blue Ridge looking for songs in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, traveling by car for weeks and often months at a time. His companion was a black guitar player and singer, Leslie Riddle. Through Riddle, AP had access to the black homes as well as the white. No distinction is made in the songs of the Carter Family for whether they came from white community or black. The Carter Family, the essence of mountain music, was another fusion of black music and white.



I absolutely reject the notion that a white Southerner is automatically guilty of historical racism. There are aplenty of racists outside the South. The song Billie Holiday sang, Strange Fruit, the story a lynching and hanging of a black man from a poplar tree. The first line, Southern trees bear strange fruit. The lynching the song was about and the writing of the song both took place in the state of Indiana. Google Indiana and see if it's in the South. It's what we call 'round here a Yankee state.



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MOUNTAIN MUSIC ON THE RADIO

Maybelle, AP and Sara, The Carter Family

This morning I played the cd made from Little River Boys and Green Mountain Boys downloads from Kilby Spencer. Started off with Art Wooten and Jr Maxwell playing Lee Highway Blues. Great fiddle tune every fiddler wants to play the best he can. It has a little trilling note in it some fiddlers do well and some don't even attempt. It's most often the older fiddlers that get it right. Art liked the notes way up high and every kind of difficult thing like that. Jr said there wasn't a note in a fiddle Art Wooten couldn't find. He said that of Earl Scruggs with the banjo. He once said of an Ashe County picker he respected, 'Th'aint more than 5 notes in a banjo that he cain't find.' I felt like Jr would assess himself at about the same place, within himself. If he were to say it out loud, it would be more like 10. His way of saying Larry Pennington was a great picker was to say when he walked into a fiddler's convention, the banjo pickers put their banjos in their cases and went home. Of course, that's not what they did, but it was the picture the exaggeration made that told in one image, like a cartoon, the feeling that went around the place. It's a comical way to say first place bluegrass banjo is took.

Accidentally played Jr's lead banjo doing John Hardy twice. That was ok. It was so good, I don't think anybody minded. Also got to play Jr's Home Sweet Home, his fiddler's convention winning song. The moment he crossed the threshold into his house after I'd liberated him from the nursing home, he said, "Home sweet home." And how he meant it. Home was where his life was. He was as bad a home-body as I am. He never cared about going anyplace. I don't either. I force myself to go places because I want to see my friends. When Jr was taking care of his tractor shop, he could see his friends and stay at home too. Whenever his car was down at the shop, the pickups and trucks would be stopping to visit with Jr. When somebody wanted free advice on how to fix their tractor, he'd say he'd have to see it before he could tell. I had a good time playing Jr for perhaps several people listening who knew him and appreciated his pickin again. Playing Art Wooten's fiddle and Jr Maxwell's banjo started my day off right. Every week it is an enjoyment to play this mountain music to my listeners, mountain people.

Today I stayed an extra hour and played music for the gospel hour. I went to the station's library of bluegrass and picked bands from our region to play. Bluegrass albums most often have at least 2 or 3 gospel songs. I picked out two that each had a gospel album, Black Diamond, a band out of around Princeton, West Virginia. And The Country Boys, a Mt Airy band. Played Doc Watson singing What A Friend We Have In Jesus. He freshened it up by singing it with a harmonica giving it the flavor of a Civil War ballad. It was probably heard many a time around a Civil War campfire, either side, sung probably not far from how Doc sang it. Found Jeff Michael singing one and Herb Key singing one with Elkville String Band. Without intending to, I found the gospel songs by bluegrass bands were plain, without production to attract attention. In all the ones I played, the gospel songs were sung in the simple Baptist way without decorations. Put in a couple of beauties by the Carter Family, Honey In The Rock and When Silver Threads Are Gold Again. What a beautiful song that is. It's not a "gospel" song, but it's a love song to such a degree that I consider it a gospel song, because it is written: God is love. Whoever wrote that song was an advanced poet. It's like a poem by the Indian poet, Tagore.

Hearing Sara's voice again was refreshing. Her voice is plain and sometimes almost monotone. Her voice does no emoting. It's as plain as a song sung in a Primitive Baptist meeting. Somehow, from somewhere she carries across the feeling in the song such that when I remember it, I recall the feeling, the depth of emotion. Sara's voice is calm and plain as if reading the news. Give a country singer the same song to do and it would be full of vocal emoting, attempting to get the feeling on the surface. Sara gets the feeling in the heart and lets the surface be the words, which carry the song's meaning. She was such a mountain singer; emotion is in the heart, not the voice. Plain delivery of just the words. Sara was essentially just telling the words. And at the same time, it's singing like hasn't been equalled since and never will be. The way she was singing was particular to her culture, which is no more. She sang Honey In The Rock like I've not heard anyone sing it but her. She makes no musical production, she just tells the words, which hold their own. It's like she's saying with a straight face, the truth needs no defense.

JD Higgins was the one I played first half and second half. He sings a good gospel song. Using My Bible For A Roadmap, a good old Reno & Smiley hit from early bluegrass time, and Life Is Like A Mountain Railroad. Had to finish with My Only Child, the tear-jerker of tear-jerkers. This one is legit. It's not like a sweater found on a grave. It was the sudden, accidental loss of his 26 year old daughter, his baby. In the song, he's talking to God, the kind of thing we've all done before, I thought we were friends, why did you let this happen? She was my only child. And then it comes to him that God got his heart broken too losing his only child. I can't hear it without tears, like James King's song, Echo Mountain, a song I have a hard time listening to any more. Because I know what's ahead, I agonize over the sorrow at the end from the beginning. It was only a drama the first time I heard it. From there on, it's an ongoing sorrow. A deep sorrow. When a man don't use good judgment, it's the innocent that pay. The cries on Echo Mountain still haunt me to this day. JD Higgins sings his song, My Only Child, at every show. I don't know how he does it. He probably doesn't know either.

Gospel Hour had a regional twist today. I like to play musicians and bands, emphasis on the human dimension. I like to play a selection of a few songs by some, and sometimes an hour of one artist. I always feature whoever it is, naming everyone in the band. Sue has been talking to me about doing my show for 2 hours. I like that, but I didn't want to run out Gospel Hour. I thought I'd keep it gospel and play as much as I can from around here and other places too. Mountain music is half gospel, so I may as well honor it as such and have a 2 hour show that plays the full range of mountain music. I like that. This can be fun. A new dimension. An hour of fiddle and banjo music, then an hour of mountain gospel. That sounds just about right. Not restrict it to the region, but let the region be the emphasis, the rule of thumb. Ralph Stanley and The Stanley Brothers. There is a lot of gospel that is extraordinarily beautiful from around here. I'll enjoy diving into the gospel music world. I think of the Marshall Family singing Glory Land, up there to die no more. Ralph Stanley does that song live at the Smithsonian, one of the finest bluegrass albums there is.