RETURN OF ALTERNATE ROOTS

 

alternate roots

 scott freeman, mark freeman, katy taylor, tony testerman, willard gayheart

 

alternate roots

Friday night, the Fiddle And Plow show at Willard Gayheart's gallery and frame shop in Woodlawn, Virginia, the core of the band, Alternate Roots, played a reunion. Plus Scott's brother Mark, who came to hear the show, had a banjo in the car, and Scott asked him to join the band. He's a good picker, plays in the Freeman brothers band, Pathway, a bluegrass band emphasis on gospel. Alternate Roots started in the 1990s with Scott, Katy, Tony and Willard on their first album, Tales of Love and Sorrow. They added Randy Pasley on dobro, who appeared on their second album and the others following. Steve Lewis came in next with bluegrass banjo and lead guitar for their third and fourth albums. It became a dynamic band. The show Friday night seemed like a combo of the full orchestra that Alternate Roots became. After the fourth album, Planted In Tradition, the band went away, their last show being at the Carter Fold off hwy 58 a half hour or so beyond Bristol, VA/TN. I made several photographs and a few videos of the Friday night show. Caught myself while holding the video camera singing along and had to be conscious of my own unconscious singing. I've not been there in probably seven to eight months. Stopped going in winter when the dark came early and Galax headlights made my eyes crazy at a time everybody is going home from work. I fell out of the habit of going, and missed several shows I might have gone to, but let them go, dreading the drive. When I saw that Alternate Roots was playing, I made it a point to be there. It was good to be back after so long a break to see familiar faces who go every week. My friends visiting from Atlanta, Lucas and Judy, intended to go, but Lucas had a spell of not feeling well, so Judy went along and had a stellar musical experience.

 

katy taylor, tony testerman, willard gayheart

 

katy and tony

 

Katy and Willard did most of the singing. I always like hearing Katy and Willard sing. I know all the songs and sing with them inside my head. Tony plays a bass with quite a lot more going on than just keeping rhythm. He keeps the rhythm so well the musicians don't have to think about the rhythm, and he plays it in such a way it enhances the song flowing with the melody as well as the rhythm. He is not a thump-thump bass player. There were times I would like to have heard just Tony's bass, not necessarily a solo, but to hear better what he was doing with the strings. We tend to think of the people who keep rhythm as secondary to the band. But they are as integral to the band's sound as the banjo or fiddle, lead guitar or dobro. Willard's rhythm guitar playing is amazing picking when I pay close attention to what he is doing. He does not strum. He picks two strings, individually, each swipe of the pick. His noting fingers change chords without thought. He's 81 and been picking since childhood. Katy picks a good rhythm guitar too. Katy's delight was visible having a chance to pick with Willard. She told me some years ago she loves making music with Willard. There were times I saw her watching Willard sing like she was in awe. And for good reason. She hears Willard. Willard's singing and picking do not draw attention to themselves. He sings a song to deliver the words. Pay close attention to Willard's singing once and you'll always pay attention thereafter. Willard has taken the Hank Williams song, Mama Tried, and made it his own. To my ear, he has made The Yellow Rose of Texas his own. Before I heard the words Willard goes by, the original lyrics before it was changed to be the Texas state flower, I wondered why old-time fiddlers of the past liked the song. It makes a beautiful fiddle tune, and with Willard's lyrics it makes a beautiful song.

 

willard gayheart

 

willard  a-pickin and a-singin

 

Willard sings in the mountain tradition of, it's the song not the singer. In pop music, like in the Rolling Stones lyric, it's the singer not the song. In hillbilly music the singer delivers the song in his own style of singing. Being true to the integrity of the song applies to vocals as well as to the instruments. Willard sang lead vocals with his Galax bluegrass band, The Highlanders, over forty years. He sang with the bands he and Scott made together, Skeeter and the Skidmarks and Alternate Roots. He likes Texas swing, too, makes good music with Bob Wills songs, Take Me Back To Tulsa, Little Red Wagon. Scott likes Bob Wills, says his dad played Bob Wills all the time he was growing up. Willard and Scott play often and have recorded some Texas swing. Scott does a good version of Bob Wills' Roly Poly, and makes it his own, to my ear. Scott and Willard don't slow the Texas swing down, either. I used to care nothing for Texas swing, then heard Willard and Scott playing it. At an Alternate Roots show in Jefferson, the next town to the west of Sparta, I heard Willard sing Catfish John. They never put it on a recording, but that night Willard brought Catfish John to life for me. Katy's vocals gave Alternate Roots its own special sound. Her first song at the show was the John Prine song, Hello In There. Katy makes that one her own. I've heard John Prine sing it, and it's good. But after I've heard him sing it once, that's enough. I can hear Katy sing it over and over. It is on Alternate Roots first album. She sings it like a gospel song. Come to think of it, Katy sings everything with the reverence given a gospel song.

 

katy a-pickin and a-grinnin

 

katy a-singin

 

I was glad my friend Judy had a chance to hear Katy perform. Judy played guitar and sang in her school years and let it go preoccupied with being a wife and mother while having a full time job. Now that her baby is grown and gone with a baby of her own, Judy has retired from her work and needs something to occupy her attention. She is taking up the guitar again and singing. Katy was an inspiration for her. Judy was appreciating her singing to the full. Judy bought Alternate Roots first album, the combo that played Friday night, and spoke with Katy some about singing. Judy is a good singer. I'd like to see her bring it out in the open again. So what if she hasn't played and sang in over thirty years. Tommy Jarrell and Pop Birchfield, both by different circumstances, stopped playing fiddle for forty years. When they took it up again, they were the great fiddlers of their time. Evidently, not playing for such a period of time must be to the good for the individual musician. I'm thinking of an experiment where one participant threw a basketball at a hoop half an hour a day for a month. Another threw a basketball in his mind at a hoop half an hour a day for a month. At the end of the month, both had improved the same. It tells me Jarrell and Birchfield played the fiddle quite a lot, probably every day, in their minds while working in the fields, making liquor, whatever they were doing. I imagine Judy has continued to play in her mind. Scott played the fiddle and the mandolin. His brother Mark played Scott's mandolin some while Scott played fiddle. They grew up making music together, they play in a bluegrass band together, they know how to flow together making music. It was combo music the band made, relaxed and flowing free, music made by people who have flowed together musically for a great many years. 

 

scott freeman and mark freeman

 

scott and mark

 

 

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ALTERNATE ROOTS THE BAND

 

scott freeman and willard gayheart

Yesterday, Tuesday, I learned the band I love beyond all others will be playing in Woodlawn, Virginia, this coming Friday, Alternate Roots, a regional bluegrass band. Four of the band members live in Ashe County, NC, two live at Woodlawn, VA, and one in Alaska. Like other great bands, Jane's Addiction and Rage Against The Machine, they made four great albums and disbanded due to circumstances. Bands breaking up is as intimate to members as a divorce. It's rough on everybody concerned and they don't talk about it. I learned never to ask why a band broke up, because nobody can give an answer that matters to anyone outside the band. Like after a divorce, it's hard to explain beyond a few words, a nutshell assessment. But the rest of it can't be told. It's too intimate and often too irrational to attest to. The band goes back to my time in the music store, Backwoods Beat Music, in Sparta that lasted four years. It is a rule of thumb in Sparta that if a business lasts three years, it has a good chance of lasting awhile. Finally, downloads happened, gas prices went up appreciably, work became harder to find. My local customers didn't have pocket change anymore and they were half my business. The other half was people passing through, visiting family, touring, driving, new people to the mountains. Gas prices shut down tourism in the mountains and real estate. Then in January of 07, radio and television news told every day for two weeks that the cd business is over. That was it. Shut it right down. Doctor told me I had a heart attack, though I had no recollection of it. He said it could have happened while sleeping. I don't know if that was it, but something changed. I had fallen into a state of watching the store go away, so without humor I was glad to shut down, box everything up and go home. I had achieved my purpose. I'd put thousands of copies of mountain music into the sound systems of a lot of people, spread the gospel of hillbilly music at home. Made it available to the people who love it and people discovering it.

 

scott freeman

 

It was during the first months of the store that Scott Freeman came in one day and asked if he could use the space to give music lessons one afternoon a week. I was all for it; this was what I was there for, to advance the music in whatever ways I could. I couldn't charge him rent. He drove from Woodlawn, an hour drive one way, and didn't make much from students. This was somebody giving himself to advancing the music. I felt like we had the same purpose. How could I charge him rent? He was making little and dependent on what he made. I couldn't take anything from him. Besides, he brought life into the place. I felt like I ought to pay him. Scott played mandolin and fiddle with Alternate Roots and sang. He's as good a singer as a musician. Scott I call a master musician without fear of contradiction from any musician in the region. He is an artist more interested in his own musicianship than being popular. He has written so many good songs, really good songs, and recorded them, he could be called a "singer-songwriter," though he thinks of himself more a musician playing in a band, or, in his case, two, three and four bands at a time. Like me, he makes no effort toward self-promotion. No self-advertising. He wants his musicianship to carry him, and it does. In the time of the radio show I had a computer I could make cds with, and made one with I think 18 songs on it, all songs written by Scott and performed by him with his bands and solo recordings. It made a great album. I gave it to Scott, as he had never put them together on a disk. As an artist, he is one who lives in the now. Whatever band he's playing with is where his focus goes. He worked laying cinderblock several years until he hurt his back and couldn't do it anymore. He makes his living teaching kids to play old-time and bluegrass all day every work day. He's as good a teacher as a musician, too. At a certain point in their training, he puts some of them together and teaches them how to play in a band. They give themselves a name and he teaches them how to make a recording by doing it. He also gives them experience playing for an audience.

 

willard gayheart

 

His number of students in Sparta dried up about the same time the store faded away, and soon after, the radio station shut down. I gave my collection of regional music I'd collected by way of the store to the library. Now they have a good collection of regional music. With both store and radio show in the past, the core of what they were about continues for the community. I feel like the store and the radio show were a success while they were happening and continue by way of the library to be a success. Neither one failed. It was circumstances coming in from outside that shut them down. Why did I start a business in a working class mountain town three years into the Bush-Cheney Depression? I did not believe it would get better any time soon, only get worse, as it did. I was jumping on the last chance to do what I felt I had to do and could do: remind the county of its own music, which was being quickly forgotten. My feeling was that people come together in community during hard times, and hard times is a-comin. When the poorest people are unable to pay electric bills or phone bills anymore, the music will thrive. Can't play country or heavy metal cds anymore, but we can make our own music. In the old days it is said on a Friday evening you'd hear a banjo ringing somewhere in a holler and people started walking to it, some with instruments. A band and dancers just come outta the woodwork. The old people I knew who are gone a long time now all said, without exception, the hard times were the best times. They were happy. Early on, I suspected different ones of looking back to the Golden Age, like the past is always better. I became convinced they knew what they were saying after several years of knowing several people, all of them in agreement that the old days of carrying water in a bucket, using outhouses, eating year-round what you grew in the summer, heat from a wood stove, men hunting rabbits and squirrels. A great old-time song comes to mind, Squirrel Heads And Gravy. My favorite title of old-time fiddle tunes, that often have beautiful titles, is Grasshopper On a Watermelon Vine. I can see a fiddler practicing his fiddle on the porch or someplace outside, sitting on a stump where he split wood by the barn, the garden close by, working out a new fiddle tune he had in his head. Having a hopeless time trying to  think of a title that is right, not good with words, eliminating everything that came to mind for one reason or another. Gazing off into space, playing the tune, looking inside his mind, distracted seeing a grasshopper land on a watermelon vine and stand there. The rhythm in the fusion of these words might have sounded just right with his tune as he heard it in his fiddle.

 

scott freeman

 

It was becoming acquainted with Scott that I learned about Alternate Roots. Kept their cds in the store. When they recorded what turned out to be their last cd, Planted In Tradition, I put ten copies in the store on a table. When somebody asked, "What's the best?" I'd hand them a copy. "This is it." To my ear, it is a magical album. Scott said they just threw it together, didn't get anxious about it, just let it happen. He was thinking it was their worst, and I was saying it was their best. I'd put it on now and play it, but I'd never get anything written for listening. It would take me over like Prince or Patti Smith. I checked amazon and found all the Alternate Roots cds are available either new or used. I asked Scott by way of facebook if Randy, the dobro player living in Alaska now would be there. No, he won't be there and Steve Lewis, banjo and guitar, won't be there. That's ok. Willard Gayheart, guitar and vocals, Katy Taylor, guitar and vocals, Tony Testerman, bass, and Scott Freeman, mandolin, fiddle and vocals, will be there. I call Alternate Roots my favorite band and Katy Taylor my favorite bluegrass singer, not exaggerating. A moment came to mind, possibly ten years ago, I had been visiting friend Jr Maxwell after work, was leaving to come home. Turned on the car, the radio came on, WBRF, the Galax station. A song I knew was just beginning, Out Of The Blue. The female voice was familiar. Rhonda Vincent? Almost, but not. Allison Krauss? Almost, but not. I could only think, Who is that? I know the voice, who is it? I couldn't think of any female bluegrass singers it could be. It almost could have been Vincent or Krauss, but it was not. I puzzled and puzzled with it, listening to a song I knew the words to. At the end of the song, the dj said it was Alternate Roots. I knew the song better than I knew any song by Vincent or Krauss. I'd been to fourteen AR concerts, had all their albums, listened to them, played them on the radio show. It was Katy Taylor singing a song Scott wrote. I was looking in my mind for Nashville bluegrass names, never thinking local. Nothing about the band sounded anything short of Nashville musicians. It was that moment I heard Katy and Alternate Roots the first time without associations of knowing them. In that moment I declared Katy my favorite bluegrass singer. Katy, to my ear, was the same as any that might be called the best, though with her own voice, her own way of singing. I so look forward to hearing Katy, Scott, Willard and Tony play Alternate Roots songs again.  

 

scott and willard between songs

 

 

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ALTERNATE ROOTS REUNION

willard gayheart

katy taylor

skeeter roots: edwin lacy, tony testerman, katy taylor, willard gayheart

tony testerman and katy taylor

edwin lacy

Tonight's show at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Va, we decided to call Skeeter Roots. Tony was the one to come up with it while several of us were fishing for a name to call the band that was partially Alternate Roots and partially Skeeter & the Skidmarks. Willard told me a little over a week ago that tonight's show would be Katy and Tony. First thing I thought was Katy Taylor and Tony Testerman, both from the band Alternate Roots with Scott and Willard. I figured it was a little too obvious for it to be them. They had to be from somewhere else getting their mountain creds making music here. I assumed Willard and Scott knew them through the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway, heard them, liked them and invited them to play at the Front Porch. Any way I looked at it, I figured they'd be pretty good. In an email with Edwin Lacy I asked him who Katy and Tony were. He said he would be playing banjo with them. Who are they? Turn up Friday night and find out.

Fabulous surprise. Willard had written on one of those white boards you write on with magic marker that tonight would be Alternate Roots Reunion. Except, Scott was just home today from the hospital where he had an appendix removed. He didn't have the strength to make 2 hours of music. When I drove up, Katy and Tony were getting out of Tony's van, taking out his bass and Katy's guitar. It was good to see them again and to hear them again. The bass wrapped in its carrying case, Tony looked like the vet pulling out the calf that was turned around inside the cow. It wasn't quite an AR reunion with 3 of the 6 missing. Edwin was from Skeeter & the Skidmarks and so was Willard. Katy, Tony and Willard had been in Alternate Roots. While we were looking for a way to name the group tonight, Tony said Skeeter Roots and everyone laughed. Willard was the link to both bands. 

Alternate Roots I call my favorite band. When they disbanded I grieved for 6 months the same as when a friend dies. I loved the band. I heard them in concert I think 14 times. The same number of times I've seen Purple Rain the Prince movie. Just yesterday, I took a time-out and put on Alternate Roots last cd, Planted In Tradition. Listened to it, start to finish, like it was an audio movie. Hadn't heard it in awhile, was refreshed hearing the artistry of these 6 musicians who had their own style of bluegrass. It was bluegrass, but not like charts bluegrass, not like anybody else's bluegrass. They had their own sound. They were not a bombast band to get an audience excited and stomping and hollering. They played for the artistry of playing music well. They were a little bit too much of an art band to attract a big following. They had a following that was increasing in number, but they were not yet very well known. The people who listened them, loved them, but it was a relatively small number of people, considering the band was more interested in the artistry of making bluegrass and old-time music than playing cheap riffs to thrill the crowd. 

Hearing them at the Blue Ridge Music Center in their last year, they played artfully to the max. Scott delivered some mandolin licks with sound that seemed independent of the mandolin. Steve Lewis on the banjo played incredible banjo all the way through the concert, low key, not drowning out the band. Some guy in the audience hollered "Fire Up The Banjer!" He hollered it 2 or 3 more times. Steve just smiled and kept on pickin such that if they guy would listen, he'd hear that Steve's banjo had been on fire all the way along. Last tune, they played I think it was Sourwood Mountain. Steve cut loose on the banjer so it had the old boy that was wanting him to fire it up hollering his satisfaction. Several others were hollering their satisfaction too. A good banjer can get an audience going. 

A lot of memories swirled through my head around Alternate Roots. Like 5 or so years ago when I took a highway trip through ancestral land in eastern Tennessee and all the way to Kansas to see relatives of 3rd and 4th cousin I'd never known in Perry Kansas. I took along ten cds of Alternate Roots album Planted In Tradition. Turned out my relatives there like bluegrass and were happily surprised to find they really liked this band. I've an idea they were expecting a squawking fiddle and clucking banjo hillbilly style. Gave one to a niece's new husband, who liked it a lot. I felt like I was Johnny Appleseed spreading Alternate Roots out into the world beyond their audience. Katy, Scott and Willard the voices of Alternate Roots, good music, a sound all their own with Randy Pasley's Dobro giving long, slow notes, and fast notes, as strong a part of the band's sound as Scott's vocals and mandolin. I learned tonight Randy and his wife have moved to Alaska. He's found bluegrass musicians there. 

I only made video of the first half of the show. Second half, about all the songs they played I'd uploaded more than once on YouTube in various combinations of musicians. I wanted to sit and listen to the last half, get into the applause with the audience, about 15, I didn't count, and hear the music without having my little tech device going. I enjoyed both. First half was visual, second half auditory. It would have been really special with Scott in there vocally and with mandolin. It was really special as it was tonight without him. Either way is good. Edwin filled in for Steve on the banjo, playing it Skeeter style, Willard singing some Skeeter songs. Since we've been having these Front Porch Concerts, a year and 3 months now, I hear the sound of Alternate Roots in the music of Willard's and the music of Scott's. Katy has been there twice now to sing. Steve Lewis has been there a couple times picking banjo and guitar. The full band of Skeeter has played 3 times. Scott and Willard of both bands play every week. They are the sound of both bands. Tony's bass and Willard's rhythm guitar kept familiar rhythm to one who loves every note Alternate Roots picked. 

Just now caught myself drifting off into imagining Scott Freeman, vocal and mandolin, Edwin Lacy, banjo, and Willard playing guitar. Scott singing Rocky Top. It's a song bluegrass bands tend to avoid, because they'd be having to play it every show. The song belongs entirely to the Osborne Brothers, Bobby's vocal and mandolin, his brother's banjo and harmony vocals. I believe Scott could do it his own style and it could be a worthy effort to take on such a high calling. The way he sang Who Stole The Train From The Tracks, that approach he has to singing. if he could deliver it like he'd never heard the Osborne Brothers do it, he could give it the Scott Freeman sound. And Willard, he could go at like he did Hank Williams' Mama Tried. Made it a Willard song. I don't think either one of them would take enough interest in such a project to manifest it. Musicians have to find the songs they want to learn. I'd never suggest it, because I want to leave them the freedom they need to decide what songs they want to learn well enough to play often.  

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KATY TAYLOR IS BACK

katy taylor

katy 

 scott, katy, willard

Katy played at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn tonight with Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart. The three of them are half their band of the first part of the 2000s, Alternate Roots. They made 4 fine albums, Tales of Love and Sorrow, Another Dirt Road, Branching Out and Planted in Tradition. Every album was a fine collection of songs, each one a gem of musicianship and music. These people are not shy about making music, either. When they get together, it's music that happens, not a likeness, but Thereal McCoy. Katy is one of the better bluegrass singers in our region, along with Scott and Willard, who hold their own vocally as well as Katy, such that when the three of them are singing and harmonizing together, bluegrass or country, whichever they're singing, it is music of the Central Blue Ridge as it's played today.



Katy sang mostly songs from their Alternate Roots years together. For me, tonight's show was something on the order of Alternate Roots Unplugged, though AR was never plugged. Unplugged, because the band performed sitting down, casual, Doc Watson style. Perhaps what I'm getting at is they took their bluegrass songs and folked them. I've heard all their albums multiple times, played them on the radio show multiple times, went to 14 concerts, never tire of hearing Alternate Roots music and never will. Their music is the kind you can listen to all your life and never tire of them, even if it's an exceptionally long life. They'll keep you grooving at 100.



I feel fortunate and privileged to have had the opportunity to know about the band. I could easily have missed them. I believe it was the divine hand that set me in the band's orbit. I never hesitate to tell them AR is my favorite band, because I mean it. The musicians are true to the tradition and jazz the tradition as Bill Monroe did, but in their own style of jazzing the old mountain songs and composing new ones in their own way of bluegrass that is also not bluegrass. All the musicians in the band were among the better ones in the region, among the better ones all over the nation, a band of musicians who make music their art form.



Katy's voice is clear as a wind chime. She portrays feeling through her voice, too. She doesn't need to squirm like Madonna to express the emotion in the song. Like Sara Carter, she carries the emotion in her voice. She's used to singing with Scott country duet style and harmonizing. She is used to singing with Willard. For the three of them, it was a memory of good times. They took turns singing lead. Katy told me before the show she'd been through chemo and came through it. She's apparently well now and shows no sign of having once been beat down by such an ordeal. She's a different Katy now from the Katy before, wiser. I felt an impulse to hug her for what she'd gone through, but inhibited it with hesitation to put on a drama when heart-felt words and eye contact are enough. It didn't hurt her singing any. Surely it did for a time, but that time is past.



Scott spotted a musician in the crowd in the second half of the show, Billy C Smith, bass player with JD Higgins country band, and with David Johnson in Wilkes. Scott found an acoustic/electric bass, plugged it in and asked Billy C Smith to come up and join them. He played bass through the rest of the show. He sang a Merle Haggard song, Today I Started Loving You Again. It was a good worded song. Then Willard sang Merle Haggard's Mama Tried, a song Willard sang with Alternate Roots on their 4th album, Planted In Tradition. Toward the end of the show tonight, Katy sang the John Prine song, Hello In There, from AR's first album, Tales of Love and Sorrow. She sings it right. The video camera quit recording near the end of the song. Frustration. I call upon the comfort of reminding myself that shit happens. Get over it and go on. It was toward the end of the show anyway, and my arms were giving out from holding the camera up high over the heads of the audience, standing all the way at the back. It sounds like an effort, but the act itself is effortless. It just starts becoming intensely uncomfortable after an hour and a half. The last half hour I'm mostly sitting down and resting my arms.



Everyone was happy to see Katy out and singing again. Scott and Willard knew of her situation. She's been singing publicly again, getting the feel of it again after her mind has been thoroughly blown. It felt good to see her doing so well, holding up so well. Playing guitar and singing for two hours takes some physical stamina. She sang beautifully right up to the end. She made the audience happy. Everyone loved her singing. Everyone loved the music. It's become a crowd of mostly people who return every week now. Like after a rock concert, everyone has a face lit up with the joy in enjoyment. Standing at the back, I see the people in the audience stand up and turn around. The faces I see are happy they made the effort to get in the car to go hear what Scott and Willard were presenting tonight. I, a tshirt and ballcap wearing fan of Alternate Roots, had enjoyment supreme seeing/hearing Katy with Scott and Willard again.



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