SKEEETER AND THE SKIDMARKS IN PICTURES

skeeter and the skidmarks

edwin lacy, sandy mason grover, willard gayheart

sandy mason grover and willard gayheart

edwin lacy and willard gayheart

scott freeman and edwin lacy

scott freeman

scott freeman

edwin lacy

willard gayheart

Another show of some very much alive mountain music by Skeeter and the Skidmarks at Willard Gayheart's gallery, The Front Porch, in the Fiddle and Plow series. This was the 5th or 6th, I suspect 6th, show they've played at the Front Porch in the last couple years of the Fiddle and Plow series. I know Skeeter's music backwards and forwards, and especially appreciate that every time they've put on a Skeeter show, each one was unique in the manner of how they played the songs. It all has to do with how and what they're feeling on a given night. Edwin drives a couple hours to get there and Sandy drives about that far too. As soon as the music started tonight I heard a new Skeeter vibe. It was an understated flow tonight. That doesn't say much. It was more relaxed than usual. The second time they played there, it was an assault from start to finish, on the intensity level of a concert in an auditorium. It's been different every time, and I was charmed to hear tonight a new sound I'd not heard from them.

I told Edwin and Scott after the show that they've messed up my mind. I know all the words to I Love You Nelly. I told Edwin, "It's your fault." In good humor. The funny part is I love the song now. It plays in my head, I know all the words. Just like Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon that Scott and Willard play with a western swing like Bob Wills. And Scott sang another western swing, Roly Poly. Skeeter's Yellow Rose Of Texas had a casual swing to it tonight. Maybe that's the word for tonight's music, casual. It wasn't casual like slack. They were right there with the music, making music every minute. When I say they make music, I mean music that's infectious, music that makes you tap your feet or move in whatever ways. It was the way they felt tonight. I love these songs now after hearing Scott and Willard play them the last couple years, as well as from the Skeeter and the Skidmarks cds, Hubbin It and Alternate Roots, both out of print. Scott put together some Skeeter songs from their 2 cds to make a 1 cd collection, a best-of kind of thing, though all songs on both albums are best of. Excellent, classic albums made in the early 90s. As fresh today as then. The Skeeter sound will always be fresh.

My feeling while sitting there in the presence of Scott and Willard's music, was I'm as satisfied hearing Scott and Willard as any music I've ever heard live. I don't need to pay $20 - $30 to hear Ricky Skaggs or Allison Krauss or Rhonda Vincent for some good music. Scott and Willard have a sound together that satisfies my ear for music as much as Ralph Stanley does. They are the equals in musicianship of people in Stanley's band. They're the equals of the professional musicians that run the roads in buses. Scott and Willard don't want to live like that. They want to make music and enjoy it, in the mountain way. Willard's singing is entirely different from Ralph Stanley's, but I love hearing Willard sing as much as I love hearing Ralph Stanley. If you're a Ralph Stanley fan, he's scheduled to play at Fairview Ruritan February 4, a Saturday.  

Toward the end of the show tonight, I was feeling one with the flow of the music. The band was in their groove and everybody in the place was in some kind of motion, especially the inner motion of flowing with the music within where we hear music, the place where we hear truly satisfying music. First, it's music that is music. I believe God sent me to them, them to me. Since I've known Scott, the music he and Willard make, then with their band Alternate Roots, now back to Skeeter, their band before Alternate Roots, back together and recording some tracks from time to time toward a new cd. I feel so privileged to be able to hear their music so much.

I feel like one of the people who lived in Greenwich Village when Bob Dylan was hanging in the Village, saw him all the time, when he wasn't heard of yet. Talented, they said of Dylan. Talented is what I say of Scott and Willard, Edwin and Sandy, too. When they get together, the sound that emerges is not the sound of any one of them. It's the Skeeter sound that happens when these four play together. One of them replaced by somebody else and the Skeeter sound is no longer happening. They're not a widely known band. They self-produce their music. Their musicianship is good as it gets, and their approach to a song is as good as it gets. Scott and Willard are the most actively creative people I know. Every time I drive home from a show at Woodlawn, I feel blessed. 

  

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BRYAN MCDOWELL AND BRANDON DAVIS AT THE FRONT PORCH

dori freeman

scott freeman

scott freeman and dori freeman

brandon davis

bryan mcdowell and brandon davis

Another Friday night of good live music at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Virginia. Dori Freeman started the show singing three songs. Her stage presence is becoming more assured with some experience performing shows as a result of her recent project, the new word for album or cd, called PORCHLIGHT. The people who go to the Front Porch every week, quite a number by now, embarrass Dori by praising her so highly when she sings.  She's a good bit introverted, making it not so easy for her to take being publicly praised, or praised at all. She's a talented young woman who sings beautifully, writes a good song, writes a good short story, and plays a Henderson guitar. Scott accompanied her and sang harmony.

Bryan McDowell and Brandon Davis took the stage with two guitars. They are pickers who make their guitars sing. Both play lead, both play rhythm. They play lead and rhythm back and forth seamlessly. Both are master guitar pickers. Bryan McDowell played virtuoso mandolin and fiddle as well as guitar. He played some clawhammer banjo too. They played tight together. They flowed together making foot-tapping music of continuously articulate picking. It was beautiful to listen to with an amazing edge. The crowd was enthusiastic with applause for each song and a stand-up at the end. They played traditional songs like Cattle In The Cane and Billy In The Lowground, mixed with a jazz tune by George Benson. There were moments I was hearing jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd. Not that they did it intentionally, just the nature of advancing the music with acoustic guitars. They kept the music flowing.

A man speaking to Willard after the show said, 'Where else can you hear something like this for five dollars?' 

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BUDDY PENDLETON AT FRONT PORCH GALLERY

buddy pendleton

It was good old-time fiddle and bluegrass fiddle tonight at the Front Porch in Woodlawn on Coulson Church Road, just off of 58 at Harmon's. I'd seen a few photographs of Pendleton, an older mountain man with beard, longish hair and the hat that puts me in mind of the band of country singers, the outlaws, Hank Jr, Waylon, Willie, Johnny. I don't mean he has it as a professional pose; it's just his natural appearance. Nothing about this man is a pose. The man has played an awful lot of fiddle, and he is of these mountains from the soul outward to the tips of his fingers. He's won Union Grove 6 times. Not to be one-upping him, but to give an idea of his league, I think Art Wooten won Galax 7 times. That's no small deal. Pendleton has played with Bill Monroe for a time. Played with the New York folk group called the Greenbriar Boys for a time. He was a slight man, like Millard Pruitt, Ralph Stanley and Jr. All 3 of them small in size, but not one of them seems so small. They all 4 seemed larger than life in a way. What all they could do said to me they were not small at all. They were big men in stature and presence. And Buddy Pendleton worked at the Stuart VA post office 40+ years.

Willard and Scott accompanied, Willard keeping such good rhythm for him, he commented at one point how good Willard's rhythm was, how it made the fiddling easier for him. He can make his fiddle sing. He uses short bow strokes, mostly 2, 3 and 4 inches, sometimes 6 or 7 inches. That's not my measurement, but guestimations, a system of measurement. The noting fingers on his left hand are dancing all the time. His sound is like no other fiddler I've heard. Very first thing I noticed when he started with the fiddle was his sound that was all his own. He has his own interpretations of the tunes that are true to the tunes and uniquely his own. He made no effort to disguise his delight to be making music with 2 really exceptional musicians. He was lit up the whole time once the music started. During the first song he lit up to the music they were making. This is what I like about Scott and Willard's music, it's music. It's really music. Buddy told me at the end of the show he'd seen my foot tapping. He said that's inspiring to a musician to see people tapping their feet.

Song after song was as good as the one that went before. It was hearing Scott and Willard with a fiddler who was in their league. Willard took hold of the rhythm from the start. He was acting as the bass, keeping the rhythm loud enough for Buddy to hear it well. Willard knew what he was doing. He was keeping it going so the fiddler didn't have to think about it. Scott kept rhythm going with his mandolin too, both him and Willard holding Buddy up like water holds a boat up, giving him the musical freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. Several times he commented what good musicians Scott and Willard are. Nobody in the place disagreed. I think 17 people were there tonight. I started counting them. About everyone there has been there before several times. The people from around here come back after they've had the experience. Everyone recognizes the music we hear on Friday nights is exceptional. The guest musicians are as good as musicians of mountain music get. We who go regularly are getting to know each other and love the music we hear together. During intermission we exclaim to each other how good the music is.

This music is every bit as good as the Clinch Mountain Boys, and I'm not throwing off on the Clinch Mountain Boys. I pick them because they're a band of really good musicians that play mountain music well. Each one of these guys is good enough to play in Ralph Stanley's band. And, like I said, that doesn't diminish Stanley at all. They are musicians who don't want to live on the road. They want to live at home, have their family lives, the necessary work to make a living, and making music on weekends and jams during the week. Making music as much as possible. Buddy said a few times tonight that something or other was inspiring. Like Willard's good rhythm keeping inspired Buddy. That's how he used the word. I found in brief conversations with him that he h has his own way of talking and thinking like he has his own way with the fiddle. By the end of the concert, I was aware that I was in the presence of a master fiddler. Check him out on YouTube. I'm uploading several songs. They'll be at the top of the list under hobblealong1.

SKEETER AND THE SKIDMARKS REDUX

at the Front Porch



Skeeter & the Skidmarks played tonight at the Front Porch in Woodlawn. Edwin Lacy, banjo, is visiting from Indianapolis, Sandy Grover Mason, bass, came up the mountain from Pilot Mountain area for the get together of the band, Skeeter & the Skidmarks, with Scott Freeman, mandolin and fiddle, and Willard Gayheart, guitar. They made 2 cds called "projects" in the mid 90s. They were called a progressive old-time band. Hay Holler was the label, in Roanoke. After their 2nd album, Edwin Lacy had to move to Indianapolis and that was it. Scott and Willard got another band together called Alternate Roots after the name of Skeeter's first album.



They thought the band was dead and forgotten. But queries started popping up from time to time, fans wanting to know when they'll make the next album. They didn't even know they had fans. Scott told tonight of a Swedish band I think called Black Dog, that recently recorded his composition Jill's Waltz (Jill his wife and Willard's daughter) and sent Scott a copy of their cd. By now, they've had so many requests for a new cd, they're putting one together. Tomorrow they'll be playing I think at Blowing Rock for a music fest there. Last time Edwin Lacy was here they played at Blowing Rock too. They also recorded some titles in Boone for next Skeeter cd. Since they were all together for the show Sunday, they came together to play tonight, good practice. They haven't played together in quite awhile. Though they didn't have a difficult time finding their connection. These are people who not only enjoy making music together, but need to make music together.



This is like the return of rock bands when everybody is grown up with gray hair, like Velvet Underground, the Eagles, Traffic, and a long list of others. The return of Skeeter & the Skidmarks. I made a dozen videos tonight. Several of them will be on Youtube in a few days. Every one was good. My name on Youtube is hobblealong1. Search at Youtube for hobblealong1 and 4 videos will come up of Scott Freeman with Steve Lewis, Willard Gayheart, Edwin Lacy, his brother Mark Freeman. The first ones were jerky and wavered all over the place. I had just learned the camera had this feature. Since then I've been holding camera still. These guys can really make some music together. They started off with a bang and ended with a bang tonight.



It was good to have Edwin back playing his banjo where I could hear it. I'd never seen Sandy before. She's the bass player. Edwin will know August 1 if he'll be moving to Bristol, confident he will be. With Edwin back, they could be a band again, do shows from time to time, certainly play music together more often. These people are partial to each other to make music with. They have a similar enjoyment of the music, an artist's enjoyment. When I paint now I am aware of what good times they have making music, thinking I want that kind of enjoyment in my painting. I think I have it. With the one I'm working on now, I like the process of applying paint, mixing the colors. I'm not a good mixer of colors, but I manage to find some super beautiful colors to play with. I'm not ever interested in reproducing any colors exactly. Their art form is a social art, and my art form is solitary. Their practice is solitary, which is a great deal of time.



I'm liking my solitary time quite a lot. The time goes by fast. Not enough hours in the day for my projects. I'm on the verge of needing to schedule the days so I'll waste less time loafing about. The sorrow over losing Jr and TarBaby has subsided and I feel able to get going in my own direction. Dipping into solitude I like the people I know in town, like to see them, visit from time to time. Lunch. Drop by the office and talk a spell. I like these small gatherings to hear music at the Front Porch. Last week, it was the big crowd of people at the fiddler's convention that I didn't want to get in among. I like small parties, not big parties. I like a party of 3 to 6, where everybody can talk freely and conversationally over drinks. A big party where people are packed in too tight to move, or even if there's plenty of space between people, I tend to think about anything is better than that. In other words, I love visiting with friends, spending time in conversation with people I know and have known for a lot of years, talking back and forth conversationally. Where it's a whole mess of people interrupting, talking over each other, jabbering nonsense, making sitcom wise cracks for self amusement, where words just fill the gap of silence, are noise to keep silence in the background, I'd rather be at home in silence.



The situation at the Front Porch tonight was ideal. The seats were full. I sat up front because I wanted to get some videos of the band for Youtube and some stills for here and for Scott. Got some good videos. The whole band with Willard singing Yellow Rose of Texas. I have him now on video 3 different times singing Yellow Rose. One was just Willard and Scott, making it a kind of folk song, something like songs Doc Watson sings with just guitar. Then full band tonight, an entirely different way of singing it. This way with drive that keeps it moving along. Beautiful song when Willard sings it. Got video of him sing Robin D, too, the West Virginia river boat song he wrote. Scott playing fiddle and mandolin and Edwin the old-time banjo, Willard rhythm guitar and Sandy's bass made a good full-sounding band. I noticed it especially when they started off Yellow Rose of Texas. A very different singing of it from sitting with a guitar singing it. I never liked the song til I heard Willard sing it. Now it's one of my favorites. Seeing Skeeter & The Skidmarks in concert tonight was as extraordinary to me as paying $150 for the worst seats in the Charlotte mega autidorium to see the Rolling Stones in their 60s, and possibly at their best in musicianship. For me, $5 to see Skeeter & The Skidmarks in a frame shop in Woodlawn is the ideal. The music was fabulous. Four master musicians layin it to it for 2 hours.

NEW BEGINNING

joe shannon, hammer dulcimer, scott freeman, fiddle


At the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Joe Shannon played hammer dulcimer, concertina, harmonica, guitar, banjo and hammer dulcimer. It is a beautiful, angelic kind of sound the hammer dulcimer makes. I thought I noticed that the sound of the hammer dulcimer is Joe's own personal sound. He plays banjo, concertina and harmonica with a similar sound to what he gets from the hammer dulcimer. It's a full-bodied delicate sound and felt like its sound is his own inner sound that guides the sound he pulls out of the other instruments. His harmonica playing was as beauiful as on the hammer dulcimer. It was quite different, but came from the same place within.



I found tonight the first effect of not being a mountain music dj any more. I wanted to buy one of his cds for the radio hour, but didn't buy one because there's no reason to anymore. I didn't care about it so much for myself, but wanted to give my listeners a chance to hear what somebody in Boone is doing with hammer dulcimer. I'll save about $50 a month buying cds to play on the air. Now I'm ready to go through my collection and take some more to the library. I even thought of buying one of the cds for the library. But talked myself out of it. The reason to find new mountain music is over.



This doesn't mean I'll stop gathering information for the Alleghany music website with Lucas Pasley. It doesn't mean I'll stop looking for recordings of musicians of our county. It seems like what is happening is I've completed a 7 year cycle that started when I stopped to see Jr to ask how he felt about a music store in town selling mountain music and strings. Every day I went step-by-step toward setting the store into motion. Started the radio show same day as the store's opening. This is the time I started spending time with Jr talking about putting the store together. Then I met Jean Phillips, Jr's neighbor and friend, and the 3 of us stopped at Jr's in the evenings, sometimes Jean making supper for us. We became a gang of 3 who got together almost every evening at Jr's to sit at the table and talk. Jr and I drank from our drams, Jean drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. A lot of the time we listened to bluegrass on WBRF as we talked.



4 years later Jean died. Then the store died. A few years later Jr died. Jean and Jr became 2 of the closest friends in my life. Now that Jr's gone, the radio show is gone. 7 years from start to finish. By the time Jr began needing help, I was ready to assist in every way I could. I had earned his trust, which was valuable to me, and I couldn't leave him to be taken care of by people he did not and could not trust. Trust was important to Jr. He didn't give it lightly. It was through Jr I learned the importance of trust. In that cycle, both my friends found in the cycle died inside the cycle, and now the radio show has died too, putting an end to the whole 7 year cycle. Not only were Jr and Jean two of the most remarkable human beings I've had the good fortune to know, I actually felt like I was sent to them, because God wanted me to know them. There is also the perspective He wanted them to know me. It was like that all the way around with us. We were there for each other. It became a kind of support group among us. Jr didn't talk psychological talk like Jean and I did. He tuned out when we went off that deep end. Jean's years in institutions taught her a great deal about the psychoanalytical process and about herself.



In that time I met a lot of new friends through the store. I met a host of wonderful people in there, many of them friends now. Jr's friends are now my friends. I've found the music world that is something like an underground lake. You don't know it's there until you're in it. I'm acquainted with Old Time Herald, and have a good working knowledge of mountain music I didn't have before this cycle. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next. I can figure the next cycle started yesterday. Like the last cycle, it will be entirely unpredictable. I'd like to go on playing mountain music to the people of the county that love it, but it looks like that's over. I may not like it, but I didn't like Jr dying either, nor Jean dying.



Words from a Bob Dylan song,

Everything passes, everything changes,
Just do what you think you should do.
Who knows maybe, someday baby
I'll come running to you.

STEVE LEWIS MASTER PICKER

scott freeman & steve lewis - 21may10 - woodlawn va

Music again tonight at Woodlawn in Jill Freeman's frame shop, The Front Porch. A big crowd tonight. 25 to 30 people. A little bit crowded. It was Steve Lewis night. Steve and Scott are something like musical twin souls. They play together well. Steve played with Alternate Roots during the time of their last 2 albums. He was a major addition to the band when he came in. I saw Alternate Roots play 14 or 15 times. Went to the Carter Fold at Hiltons VA to see them perhaps the last time. When the band ceased to be a band, I fell into a period of grief as though a close friend had died. They were a good band. If you ever come upon an Alternate Roots album, it's some good music, whichever album it is. Katy Taylor, Scott and Willard Gayheart did the vocals. All equally good bluegrass singers. And good bluegrass musicians. They are a band that will be appreciated in 20 or so years. Like Scott and Willard's band before AR, Skeeter and the Skidmarks, made 2 albums and the banjo picker was taken away. 20 years later they've made a 3rd album, by popular demand. More and more people are wanting something by Skeeter & the Skidmarks. Edwin Lacy, who played banjo with Skeeter, will be playing at the Front Porch June 4. It promises to be a night of good music too. Lacy has a style all his own and he composes songs with good words that sound like old-time songs. I could just about say his banjo style is much like his name, lace-like.

Steve Lewis is one of the great musicians of the moment in this region of the mountains. He's mid 40s and plays both guitar and banjo equally well. Doesn't sing much, but when he does, he's good at it, too. Steve grew up at Todd and will most likely always live there. He said he was recently in the recording studio with Doc Watson. Tonight, he played his Henderson guitar. He told some Wayne Henderson stories. When Eric Clapton was considering making the trip to Rugby to meet Wayne, Clapton's publicist called Wayne and asked him, "You think security will be a problem?" Steve imitated Henderson's voice saying, "Well, I don't think so." Security from what? Hillbillies? Not very good. I don't think Clapton made the trip, but he'd have loved it if he had, even though he is an old English urban hippie. I've heard him on the MTV Unplugged dvd and can only say he's got nothing on any guitar picker around here who plays in public. Acoustic. Electric, Clapton rules. I wished I'd never heard him play Layla acoustic.

Perhaps the Clapton I like the best is the studio jam session cd that came with the Blind Faith album when it became a cd with the original cover. It's like hearing Bob Dylan's Albert Hall concert when he first played acoustic, then electric. One of those great moments in time when rock & roll became Rock. There was something spontaneous about Dylan and the Band playing to the Boos and hollering against them. The electric band playing great Dylan music and the audience in all-out vocal resistance. It gave the music a spontenaiety to my ear, a spontenaiety like the jamming by the musicians in Blind Faith. Not that it sounds like it in any way. To my ear, they have a similar spirit. They connect, albeit by the thinnest of threads.

Steve and Scott are good comedians during a concert. They both have enough stage experience that they can work the humor like a stage comedian. They do it in banter. Steve, talking about an old picker said, "A groundhog delivers his mail now." Everybody in the audience set to laughing at that and couldn't stop. Steve went on talking and the people continued to laugh, like peepers, 1 or 2 over here, 2 or 3 over there, going through the audience like that, running through everybody several times. It rattled around in everybody's heads and every time they looked at it, it was funnier than the time before. He handled it well, too, like an experienced comedian.

Scott got a good one on Willard. Willard had just finished playing a couple songs with Scott before Steve came on. Willard said something about Scott being his partner. As Willard got up to put his guitar away, Scott said, "Willard, why don't you ever call me your son-in-law?" Willard bent over laughing. Willard was the one Scott told jokes on in Alternate Roots shows. They were always funny too. Jokes about being old, stage humor. Willard would hang his head like he was humiliated, though he'd be laughing because he didn't always know what Scott was going to say, and it was as funny to him as to the audience. All 3 of these guys have shared a stage for several years, have a good rapport speaking publicly with genuinely funny humor.

I actually got a video of Steve and Scott playing Clinch Mountain Backstep, and Steve talking about Ralph Stanley while he was tuning his banjo for it. The sound came out good enough. I attempted to upload it here for the picture, but it took way too long, so I cancelled it. I don't want to logjam your computer. This little ole camera does surprising things. It took a good visual and the sound was pretty good too, considering it's mic is a hole the size of a paper clip wire and I was at least 10-12 feet away. Again, I'm awed by the nearness of such good musicians, people who are not pretentious in even the farthest corners of their minds. Steve, Scott and Willard, such good musicians for $5.

2 hours of listening to Steve Lewis and Scott Freeman pick and sing in an intimate at-home place where everyone is snug and cozy, all enjoying superb music, and, like me, enchanted that it's right here. You don't have to go to New York to hear them. You don't have to go to Las Vegas to hear them. In the age of tv and pop music we don't tend to think of our neighbors as better entertainment than what is "out there." Out there is always better than where we are. Not so in these hills. I'd rather hear Steve Lewis play the banjo than Steve Martin any day. I can shorten it even further, I'd rather hear Steve Lewis play banjo than anybody. That doesn't mean I think he's better than anybody. His style and tone of banjo pickin suits my ear, and his ability is something to behold.