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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TWO MOUNTAIN MUSICIANS

cleve andrews (fiddle), jr maxwell (banjo)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LITTLE RIVER BOYS AT GALAX

the little river boys c. 1960: l to r, jr maxwell,
cleve andrews, estal bedsaul, paul joines


Skipped a day. The black dog was on my back and I didn't have a mind to be cheerful. I didn't want to take you to the bottom of the swimming pool and hold you there. I'm dwelling too much on loss, need to shake it off, but it doesn't shake off. So I go with it. I feel like the guy in the photograph that goes around the internet of the surfer on a wave and the full length profile of a great white shark in the wave. Whadayado? Ride the wave and don't fall. So I rode the wave, knowing it was temporary. I wanted to, but could not write one word to you. Missing Jean, missing Jr, missing TarBaby, all at the same time. These were friends of the heart. That includes TarBaby. I used to believe I was in tune with mortality, but I'm not. I miss my friends. They were all three wonderful people, the kind I feel graced to have in my life. I learned the stories of their lives over the years, stories that made Faulkner sound about right when it comes to people with hard lives. Jr and Jean and they hardly seemed to notice. It's just how it was. Where they are now (then) is the only place they are (were).

I often question if Jr is the only individual I've known who lived so completely in the present moment. He dipped into the past long enough to tell me his life over 5 years. When he'd told it all, we were back to the present. He didn't like looking at the past, it was past, done, over, like it never was, but went there because he knew I wanted to hear his story, and he wanted someone to tell it to. My heart has opened so much over the last many years I feel now more vulnerable to sorrow than ever before. I don't think I'm "depressed" in the prozac sense. A psychiatrist would laugh at that sentence. I'm depressed. It's grief that hasn't run its course yet, and I'm ok with it. I deal with inner issues in these times and feel like that's productive in my inner growth that I like to believe is ongoing. I'ved found so many things I believed about myself are just plain wrong, so much that now I doubt inner growth being ongoing, just because I said it. I'm doubting about everything that comes up I previously believed about myself. If I was full of shit, finding out can be a good thing. First step to seeing self a little closer to the the real self. I can't help but think God put me through this like Jr said of God, that he puts things down in front of him for him to go through. I was given this to go through to see what I do with it. It's a measure and a step on the ladder to understanding. If I get what is in it for me to get then I get it. It's the kind of thing that when I come out the other end, I'll thank God for the experience. Then I'll be an old turd for sure.

I did all kinds of things to keep from clicking on to write to you. I didn't want to. It's like when I have the flu, stay home, don't spread it. My head was as empty as a glass upside down on the drying rack. I puttered about, unable to sleep, unable to read. Around midnight an email came in from Kilby Spencer, son of Thornton and Emily Spencer of Whitetop Mountain Band, who has been doing serious research into finding recordings of musicians from the days of reel-to-reel. He has a digital recorder and finds people who have never been recorded and records them. Kilby's life is dedicated to old-time music of these mountains. After all the years of field recorders passing through from up north, collecting music we're glad they found, I like all the better having someone field recording from inside the mountain music world. He knows how to find people playing that someone passing through could never find. I'd say the old-time musicians who never played anywhere but home would be more comfortable with Kilby, who is of their world. And son of Whitetop Mountain Band is pretty good credentials for a beginning.

Thornton and Emily have spent their musical lives passing the music on to the next generations. Emily was, maybe still is, band director at Mt Rogers high school. Instead of horns and such, it's an old-time band, music the kids can play the rest of their lives to any degree they want. I've not known too many people who took trumpet or trombone play much after school. Where? Who with? The instruments end up wrapped nicely in the back of the top shelf in the closet. A kid who learns banjo in high school is on his way to making music the rest of his life. Thornton and Emily both over several years taught at the Crouse House on Monday nights. Diane Bowen of Zephyr Lightning Bolts learned from Emily. Linda Mabe of Stone Mountain Old-Time Band, learned from Emily. There are many more. Thornton too. And they do a lot more than that. Kilby and his sister Martha are carrying on the tradition. They're good people.

Kilby found 2 tunes recorded at Galax in 1966 by the Little River Boys, Panhandle Country and Back Up And Push. Kilby said they came to him from a friend in Delaware who got them from somebody in Europe who was here and recorded Galax in 1966. The Little River Boys are Cleve Andrews, fiddle, and Jr Maxwell, banjo. Yes. The only existing recordings of them that are known of. I never believed I would hear Cleve Andrews' fiddle. Jr told me about him many times, told me how well he could play with emphasis, meaning he means it, no two ways about it. I never believed I would hear Jr's banjo before the time the palm of his hand was peeled off at the sawmill. He needed a skin graft. Noting the banjo was good therapy and he went back to picking, but he said he couldn't pick like before. On these two tunes he's picking all out. He and Cleve made so much music together over so many years, Jr's banjo and Cleve's fiddle rode the waves of the music together, flowing together, the banjo right alongside the fiddle note for note, and sometimes playing with rhythms and a time or two they were so close together they sounded like one instrument that was neither banjo nor fiddle, just a few notes.

I never imagined I might get to hear Jr picking. It is exactly like he told me he picked, plain. I wasn't quite sure what he meant, so I thought about it quite a bit until I think I got it. Now that I hear him picking, it is as he said. It's plain. No frills, no flourishes, no showing off. Make the sounds of the notes plain, clear, distinct. The music is number one. I'd like to put the songs on here so you can hear them, but don't know how, if it's possible. His banjo picking is a steady run of notes, 2 fingers and thumb in motion. He was standing perfectly still like he's passing the time of day, looking down at his left hand, picking a storm while Cleve, too, is standing still with fiddle under microphone fiddling his heart out. This was the last year of Cleve's life, but he was right there with it. When I downloaded the first one and listened to it, I wept from start to finish. I never believed I'd hear Cleve's fiddle or Jr's banjo in that time with Cleve. And it was beautiful picking and bowing. I'm remembering Saturday night when Paul Reeves told Jean Osborne's granddaughter, Kevin's girl, who was playing fiddle with JAM, that he and I "had a friend who could really pick the banjo. I mean really pick the banjo." Paul had heard him pick all along the way.

I've put the two tunes on cd to play at the radio station Saturday morning. I think I'll play them at the beginning and then tell everyone who knows anybody who wants to hear Cleve Andrews and Jr Maxwell layin it to it, tune in to the station because I'll play them again in about 20 minutes. This is a treasure to Alleghany County Music. It's a very big event in my way of seeing. I want as many people as want to hear Cleve Andrews be able to. It's too rare not to share as widely as can be done. Lucas Pasley will have them up on his website of Alleghany musicians soon, when he's able. http://sites.google.com/site/tradmusicalleghany/Home