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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HARROL BLEVINS AND WILLARD GAYHEART AT FIDDLE AND PLOW

harrol blevins, mike gayheart, willard gayheart

harrol blevins

willard gayheart

mike gayheart

harrol blevins, mike gayheart, willard gayheart

Harrol Blevins made music with Willard Gayheart in Scott Freeman's absence. Scott is on the road in SC tonight with Johnny and Jeanette Williams promoting their new cd, FREEMAN AND WILLIAMS. Blevins has been making music with Willard on the Parkway on Thursday afternoons in Scott's absence at the Blue Ridge Music Center. Willard and Harrol have not played a great deal together, but it didn't matter. The music was right and they flowed together well. It was the usual crowd of people tonight, most of the ones there every week and and a few who had not been there before. It's become almost a social gathering for the ones who go every week. The one thing we all have in common is the privilege of hearing the music Willard and Scott present every week from northwestern NC and southwestern Virginia. We have in common this music, which we all know is good as it gets. We all have a connection at the Front Porch. Willard announced tonight that the Crooked Road program of hwy 58 crossing southern Virginia had accepted the Fiddle and Plow show at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Va. as a "Crooked Road venue." They had to wait for 2 years for that designation. He said a delegation from the Crooked Road will attend a show in the near future.

Two years it has been that I've been driving to Woodlawn almost every Friday night. Last week I missed it because I didn't feel like going out the door. I call that valid enough reason. For me, I don't want to is as valid a reason as a funeral or an illness. When I feel like I don't want to go, I stay home. Sometimes the hour drive each way and sitting there for 2 hours is something I don't feel like doing that particular day. So I don't. That's not very often, but I allow myself my feelings. I'm not under any obligation to go, nor am I being paid. It is entirely my own volition, so I go on my own terms, like everybody else. I do, however, feel obliged to myself to go there on Friday nights, because I love the music. Scott and Willard's music has become the music of my heart in this time of my life. Willard and Harrol started Take Me Back To Tulsa before I knew they were going to start. I wanted their version of it for youtube, but was too late. It's a beautiful song and Willard sings it just right every time. I like his version tonight, closer to a folk style than western swing. Every time has it's video missed or a good still missed. No problem. When I moved to the mountains, people I knew spoke of all I'd miss being outside a city. I'd answer I miss everything going on in NY, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, everyplace in the world. And I don't miss any of it. I don't subscribe to the New Yorker because I don't want to know what's going on in NY.

It's too frustrating when I know Robert Wilson's Einstein On The Beach is playing somewhere and I can't be there. So I pay it no mind. It's just one of everything I miss. I came to the country because I don't miss everything I miss that's going on in cities. With netflix I have better than a city with an art house movie theater, infinitely better. By this time in my life I've learned what I like and I've learned the importance of going with what I like instead of what I oughta like. The ongoing thoughts in the head have settled down by now. I can listen to music without thoughts in my head putting the music in the background. I can hear subtle differences in Willard's delivery of MY HENDERSON GUITAR from time to time that he plays it. I spoke to him at intermission, told him tonight's version of the song was relaxed, a new way of playing it. He said yesterday he and Harrol were playing at the Blue Ridge Music Center and he played it slower than he'd done it before. He liked it. He said it doesn't have to have drive behind it. The song stands by itself. I agreed, saying it's now a song he can play either way, bluegrass or folk. It will be a few weeks before I'm able to get the video online at youtube.

Harrol played his Henderson guitar this evening. He makes guitars, too. I get the impression his guitars are a truly high quality. He made one for Lynn Worth a few years ago and she loves it. Harrell is a man with inner resources. Harrol is an intelligent man with a work history that has allowed him a retirement he can make music in all he wants and make all the guitars he can in what time he's allowed. He has entered the SW Virginia music scene through the jams in Independence, Fries and Sparta. He's good enough guitar player and singer to settle in among the better musicians of the area. Making music with Willard Gayheart is no small thing in my way of seeing. With more practice together, more performances together, they could polish easily the rough spots, the hesitations, which were few and not worth mentioning. They have the potential to become as good a duo as Scott and Willard, though in an altogether different way. As usual, at the end everybody was happy. 

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HARROL BLEVINS AT THE FRONT PORCH

scott freeman, harrol blevins, willard gayheart

scott freeman

harrol blevins

scott freeman, edwin lacy, harrol blevins, marvin cockerham, willard gayheart

scott freeman, edwin lacy

willard gayheart

Friday night's guest at the Front Porch was Harrol Blevins. Harrol is quite a good guitar picker and an equally good singer. I knew he was a picker, but didn't know he sang so well. Willie Nelson's Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, Blevins carried beautifully. He did most of the singing with Willard and Scott harmonizing on old, old songs, like Gene Autry's Silver Haired Daddy of Mine, Elvis's When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold, the Carter Family's While The Band Played Dixie. They played a good square dance rendering of Whiskey Before Breakfast. Think of these songs sung with two Henderson guitars and one Henderson mandolin. Harrol played lead and Willard played rhythm guitar. They had recently made some music together and found they like playing the same kinds of songs, both sang, they picked their guitars well together and sang well together. They practiced a couple times toward the show tonight, not enough to get a free-flowing command of the songs, but enough to get a feel for what they wanted to do.

Harrol is a bit like Willard in that just about only other musicians know they make music. Neither one makes a fuss over drawing attention to himself. They make music not as star wannabes, but as people who love the act of making music, doesn't matter if it's on a stage or off a stage. Scott has told me about some musicians we both know who are excellent musicians, but he doesn't like to jam with them because they're always on stage. The part that makes this funny is that Scott is never on stage even when he is on stage. Whatever clothes you see him wearing on a given day, if he's playing a show that night he'll be wearing the clothes he wore all day. Scott doesn't doll himself up in any way when he's on stage. He tells a good joke on stage. We had three musical purists playing music at the Front Porch. All play the music for the sake of making music only. It's the music they love, not their name in lights. When I learned Blevins was playing, I looked forward to the show. The fit of him and Willard musically I saw right away. They picked and grinned so well together after so little practice, they could make a good duo like Willard and Scott, Willard and Bobby Patterson. Willard and Harrol have a good resonance together musically as well as by temperament. Harrol plays a very respectable lead guitar and Willard's rhythm guitar is always right.

At one point, Willard was singing his composition, Ern And Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog. I love the song and know all the words. I was muttering a sing along, unconscious of it, and the guy sitting in front of me, a fiddler, turned to see who was making the racket. I realized then I was audible. I had to laugh inside at myself knowing the words to Willard's songs. The other songs I know are from the 50s, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and early Elvis songs. I could write out the words to all Little Richard's songs now if I felt like it. Long tall Sally, she's built for speed, she got everthing that Uncle John need. I quit paying attention to lyrics, except for Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Lucinda Williams, Patti Smith, but learned none of them except Mr Tamborine Man. I played it so much I couldn't help but learn it. What I'm getting at is I'm paying attention to lyrics again, really liking the songs Willard and Scott sing. As a result, I do my mental sing along muttering out loud. At home, I'm totally unaware that I mutter sing alongs to Skeeter songs and Alternate Roots songs. This tells not only how my musical aesthetic has changed, by which I mean grown, it also mirrors how my life has changed. I feel like my musical interests have advanced as I've grown older and have a backlog of songs heard in my lifetime way up in the hundreds of thousands. The music Willard and Scott make satisfies what I like in music right up there with the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers. Doc Watson, too.  

I've not turned my back on any of the music I've listened to along the way. I can still put on the Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East and love it even better now than then. Patti Smith, the Clash, the Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division, Velvet Underground I appreciate tremendously more now than then, and then it was quite a lot. All the years of listening to mountain music, which is the apex of my music listening life, have trained my ears to exquisite musicianship played from the heart. Mountain music has enhanced the music I listened to before, given me a better understanding of musicianship, so when I hear Mick Jones of the the Clash wringing his guitar strings, I'm in awe. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. No more needs saying after Morello. It amuses me, too, that I can enjoy Willard Gayheart's music as much as Bob Dylan's. Doesn't mean I appreciate Dylan less. It means I appreciate Willard quite a lot. I won't say one more than the other, because they're in that high place where all are equal.

Again, I have to say I feel privileged sitting in the audience at a Fiddle and Plow show at the Front Porch. The musicianship every week is what we go to listen to. For we who go every week we can, Scott and Willard have become the reasons we go. Whoever else is making music with them is good too, but a show of Scott and Willard can't be beat. Harrol Blevins fit with Scott and Willard like Edwin Lacy fits with them. Edwin happened to be in the audience. Marvin Cockerham, bass player of the Highlanders, was in the audience with his wife. Willard asked them to join in for a few tunes. For a time, we had a full band going. A couple of fiddlers were in the audience, Erica Godfrey and Jerry Correll. The place filled up with Harrol's friends from the Independence courthouse jam group, and the JAM group in Sparta. It's not often we get that big an audience. Probably several other musicians there I didn't recognize. And Minnie the white cat was there. She picked her seat at the beginning of the show and stayed in it throughout. It always feels good to sit among a bunch of people listening to good music at the Front Porch. There again, the word privileged comes to mind, privileged every week. I feel privileged to sit among the people who go to hear the music, privileged to be one of them.

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