THE GRASSY HOLLOW BOYS LIGHT UP THE FRONT PORCH

scott freeman, willard gayheart, mike gayheart

 

Another night of good music from home, acoustic mountain music by Willard Gayheart, guitar, and Scott Freeman, mandolin and fiddle, with Mike Gayheart playing bass. They are calling themselves the Grassy Hollow Boys, Scott and Willard with whoever they can find available for banjo and bass for a given show. They said Jimmy Zeh plays banjo with them, but couldn't make it for this show. They found a banjo player who might make it, but didn't. No problem. Scott and Willard together make the most satisfying shows I've seen and heard there at the Fiddle and Plow Show at Woodlawn, Virginia, in Willard's frame shop and gallery for his extensive collection of pencil drawings of regional people and musicians of the past and present. A second book of Willard's drawings has recently been published. It's his pictures hanging on the walls. Willard and Scott play together at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway once a week, I think Thursdays, during the summer months. Scott is married to Willard's daughter, Jill. He and Willard have made music together at least twenty-five years. They have had bands together, Alternate Roots, a stellar, first-rate bluegrass band of Scott and Willard's own style of bluegrass. And Skeeter and the Skidmarks, disbanded for several years because the banjo player had to leave the area, and when he returned years later, the band is back together. They have been called a "progressive old-time band," and I can't improve that. It's what they do.

 

willard gayheart

 

 

Willard and Scott have been giving concerts at the frame shop, The Front Porch, where they bring out about forty folding chairs for the show. Excellent sound system Scott keeps at a level where it sounds like there is no sound system, but it's easy to hear everything clearly. Tonight's sound was about the best ever. I think Scott has been working with the sound system, fine tuning it. The audience is often less than twenty, and often full. Last time Skeeter played, they had to bring up chairs from downstairs and still there were people standing against the back wall. Wayne Henderson fills the place up too. Full is about fifty. Everybody is comfortable. The people who go every week to almost every week, of which I'm one, all know each other after something like four years of hearing some of the finest music from the Central Blue Ridge every week. We're spoiled. There is no place any of us want to go to hear better music. There isn't any better music. Some more popular, some more dynamic, some more showy, but to my ear, even Willie Nelson's band doesn't compare to Scott and Willard's bands. Back in May I saw Willie Nelson and was struck by what a good band he had, and struck even more that the band was no better than what we hear at Woodlawn on Friday nights. Not less, but not better either. My respect for Scott's and Willard's music is the fullest of any music I have ever loved. They bring in different musicians of the Central Blue Ridge who play for $5 a seat.

 

scott freeman

 

Jeanette Williams has played there I think three times. She won bluegrass music award for best traditional vocalist twice. Her band, Jeanette Williams band, has made about ten albums. She's Nashville bluegrass and says every time she's plays at the Front Porch with maybe fifteen people in the audience that it's her favorite place to play. She gets no more than gas money when she plays there. Her husband, Johnny, is with her and he's fine bluegrass musician and singer on his own. He's recently played with Big Country Bluegrass, one of many he's made music with. It's some high-powered straight-ahead bluegrass when they play. The VW Boys, from Bristol, have played three times, as well. Another auditorium bluegrass band that likes to play at Willard's place for gas money because everyone in the audience listens. No coughing, no getting up and going to the bathroom. It happens, but rarely. Everyone is there for the music, because they love the music, go when they don't know who is playing. We all know that whoever is playing is music we want to hear. This Fiddle and Plow Show can come under the heading, Best Kept Secrets. They don't advertise. People hear about it in their own ways. Scott and Willard open every show with two songs. Going by my own musical taste, I'd rather hear Scott and Willard than any of the people who play there. It wouldn't do to have Scott and Willard every week. But it's great to have them give a show after ten or so by other musicians. It's always refreshing for me when they give a show. Neither Scott nor Willard take any money from it. All the money goes to the guest musicians. Scott and Willard won't have it. It's not what they're about.

 

willard's henderson guitar

 

I've not been able to go for several weeks due to one circumstance and another, and lately because city night driving through Galax blinds me with the bright car lights. This is a new condition of my eyes. Night driving with other cars on the highway gives me a fit anymore visually. It makes me uneasy and I do it less and less. I missed some really good music. And I was glad the show was Willard and Scott. Scott's mandolin is out of this world. The sound system carried Willard's guitar the best I've heard it. Willard sang the songs he loves that I have learned to love hearing him sing them. When It's Nighttime in Nevada, one of my favorites, the Bob Wills Texas Swing song, Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon. This show was the best Willard has done that song, one of his I love the most. A lot of the people take it for a children's song, but it's not. It's a beautiful love song. They had a good rhythm going, a kind of Forties big band rhythm Bill Monroe used in his bluegrass that has gone out of bluegrass over the years. Willard and Mike kept the rhythm going at a pace that makes you tap your foot double-time. They played another of my Willard favorites, I Get The Blues When It Rains. It rained when I found you. It rained when I lost you. That's why I get the blues when it rains. Beautiful song, a pop song from the 1920s. He sang several songs of his own composition, Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog, one we love every time we hear it. He sang Hank Williams' song, Mama Tried. To my ear, Willard has made that song his own.  And one of his more recent songs, My Henderson Guitar.

 

mike and willard reflected in the window and mirror

 

Scott played several songs of his composition and sang a Bob Wills song, Roly Poly, a good Western Swing song that Scott performs so well he has made it his own. By made it his own, I mean the way Jimi Hendrix made Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower his own. He played an instrumental on the mandolin of Sweet Georgia Brown that was killer. I don't usually use that word, like awesome, but it fits here. It's the only word. My old banjo pickin friend, Junior Maxwell, would say of Scott that he has found every note there is in a mandolin. He has only said that of Earl Scruggs where the banjo is concerned. I believe if he'd heard Scott picking on every song he played he would have come away from it saying Scott has found them all. Scott would not say that. And maybe Junior would not say it. But I do. I've heard Scott smoke his mandolin such that the others in the band looked at him in awe like, What got into you? That was in an Alternate Roots show at the Blue Ridge Music Center scheduled right after Scott won the mandolin competition at the Wayne Henderson Festival. He was playing the new mandolin he'd won made by Wayne Henderson. He tore it up. Steve Lewis standing beside him playing banjo looked at him like he'd found a hole in the stratosphere and went through it. In the mountain tradition, Scott is not a show-off musician. He just plays music so beautifully he doesn't need to pretty it up with flourishes to draw attention to himself. His musicianship is about addressing the song itself as beautifully as he can make it. Scott and Willard satisfy my ear to the same degree Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys give me musical satisfaction. I feel privileged in a very real way to be one of the people who knows the Fiddle and Plow Show is happening. They are my primary source of music in this time of the life. I feel like I have grown into them over years of listening to every kind of music, educating my ear to the place I can appreciate the music Willard and Scott make.

 

 

willard

 

 

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SCOTT FREEMAN, WILLARD GAYHEART, JIMMY ZEH AND MIKE GAYHEART

scott freeman

 

 

 

The Fiddle and Plow show at Woodlawn VA tonight featured guest bluegrass banjo picker Jimmy Zeh, who played banjo with Willard's bluegrass band, The Highlanders. Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart accompanied Jimmy with Mike Gayheart on bass. Good picking like usual from these guys. Scott also plays fiddle. Tonight was Scott's night to my ear. He's evolved into a new place. This evening hearing what he was doing, it struck me right away much of what he was doing was new, approaches he'd not done before, subtle ways of addressing the notes, sometimes playing around the notes in ways that enhance the sound of what he's doing with new approaches to chording around in such a way I'd stare in awe at his hands working the mandolin. Once, Jimmy Zeh stopped picking and just listened, watched what Scott was doing in an awe that he was hearing something from a zone he'd never been in. On Scott's break he set out chording around the melody and picking really fast. Zeh said, "Hey, this is my song!" He was kidding, pointing a finger at what Scott was doing with humor. Like always at Woodlawn on Friday nights, the music was really music. It was music you feel. The humor tonight came when they set out to play St Anne's Reel and Jimmy took off on Whiskey Before Breakfast. The band fell in line with him before he realized what he'd done. When he caught on to what he'd done, he stopped, but it was a shame, because it made a really good beginning to Whiskey Before Breakfast. The band was fine with going on and playing it, but they backed up and did St Anne's Reel.

 

It's been a month or so since I was there. Three weeks were out due to holidays. I skipped last week out of weariness, unable to drive for two hours, and tonight it was good to be back. Seeing my friends there is important. People I know in Sparta want me to do things in Sparta on Friday nights, because they're my friends. The people in Woodlawn are my friends too. Just because they're not in my zip code doesn't mean they can't be my friends. It's become a comedy for me when I tell people in Sparta about how to get there. I tell about the show. Whoever I'm talking to wants to know how to get there. I say, "Do you know where Galax Walmart is?" Eyes light up, "Yeah." I say, "It's exactly 5 miles past the Walmart stoplight. Every time, I mean every time I say that, faces fall, every time, the light in the eyes goes out, and they say, "Oh," in resignation. Like Walmart is the edge of the known universe and anything beyond there is in the uncharted Unknown. It's a look that says, I didn't know there was anything past Walmart. I've got so used to it, since that is always the response, I've quit telling anybody about the show at Woodlawn. I'm neither a missionary nor a commercial. It's not important to me what other people do. It's only important to me what I do. Other people's business is not my own. Other people's business, like a sleeping dog, is best left be. 

 

I get awfully tired of people who are commercials for their own tastes. I don't mean I haven't been there, done that. I got tired of it in myself first. The day I realized I sounded like a commercial talking about something I especially liked, I told myself it's ok that I like it. I don't need to affirm it by pushing it onto others; you gotta, you needta, you oughta, you should. I consciously never start a sentence thus. I've finally come to realize that my own taste is my own. The next person down the road listens to entirely different music from what I listen to. The next person in the other direction has very different taste from mine in movies. No need to convert them to my tastes. They have their own. Talking with Dana Ross in the car driving to Woodlawn and back, we spoke of how odd it is now that Americans have collectively become intolerant of others with opinions differing from their own. Like if you think Rod Stewart is great and I think Rod Stewart sucks (which I don't), where's the problem? It's personal taste. By now the hate merchants have divided we the American people into opposing camps. Conservative and liberal was the initial division, but it has divided on down to simply opinions. Reagan officially sanctioned liberal a bad word. The L word. Unspoken reference to the N word. Not to be mentioned. It shut liberals down by intimidation for several years. Finally liberals are standing up as a sharp stick in the conservative eye. The Revenge of the L Word starring Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. The conservatives have used deception as a strategy to such extremes that they completed the circle, now are fooling themselves and no one else. They don't get it yet. Two things I know Bill O'Reilly was not hired for are looks and intelligence. The liberals elected an African American for president. Those same pesky liberals that halted the genocide of the Indians, the Native Americans.

 

Scott's mandolin playing tonight took me to a new place in relation to his music. I've listened closely to Scott's mandolin for the last decade, hearing his mastery grow, hearing him reach into new zones, like when he and Steve Lewis play Eat My Dust. Check it out on youtube. They git-er done. Scott has been looking, with Steve, for ways "to think outside the box." One day I was at lunch with both of them at Mis Arados in Sparta while they were talking about thinking outside the traditional music box they saw themselves in. Scott said to me, "How do you think outside the box?" It came to me as I spoke it, "Don't have a box." It was all I could think of. I don't know how either one of them took it. It was followed by a pause I couldn't read. This to say that Scott is looking for new ideas on making music, open to whatever comes his way that is challenging. To my ear, he is a master mandolin picker. Period. Then tonight I heard him reaching into places I'd never heard him go. At the end of the show, I spoke with him, initially to ask about Bobby Patterson who is on dialysis now. The conversation went from there. I mentioned he's doing things I've not heard him do before, he's reaching into new approaches to chord progressions, dancing around the melody, revealing the melody in a new way. He said he's been listening closely to musicians like Mark O'Connor, attempting to do what he did, finding it humbling, very humbling. Meaning it's a learning trip for him. He spoke of it with a relief similar to when I pick up a new book and find in the beginning that I love it, it's a page-turner that pulls me through it, like a couple days ago when I started Gavin Menzies' 1421: the year China discovered the world. On the first pages I saw this is my next read! Scott was inspired by his new discoveries tonight, fired up about exploring his new dimension of playing a mandolin

 

I am able to hear Willard Gayheart's guitar very well since some months ago when somebody Scott knows came and adjusted the mics and the amp with the speakers in relation to the space it's in. Willard's gallery is a place where the walls are covered with rectangles of glass. Harsh reflectors of sound vibrations. But it works very well. When they played a show after the tune-up of the sound system, I heard Willard's guitar the first time. Before, his rhythm guitar was lost in the rhythm. Now I can hear his picking. He picks a bass string, then one or two of the lower strings per chord. He doesn't always strike the same strings. He never looks down at the strings, but his fingers hold the pick and dance on the strings knowing exactly where they are from 70 years of picking rhythm. I watch his ease with his guitar; it's like my ease with the keyboard. I learned to type in high school, the most valuable class I had in school, along with drivers ed. Now I can almost keep up with my thoughts writing, like now. I type slowly because I follow the thoughts, pause to listen to them, weigh their tone of voice with what I think I'm saying. Like I really don't want to lose it like Alex Jones in the video with Piers Morgan about guns. The interview wasn't with Morgan as much as at him. Jones embarrassed himself. The humor is that he will never see it like that. He probably thinks he got Morgan told. I like some of his documentaries. He has become so carried away with rant by now that, like I said, he embarrasses himself. It's good comedy, the reason the video went viral. 

 

Willard's guitar comes through the speakers and I can distinguish his notes now. He does not strum. He picks. One string at a time. Per down stroke he will hit 2, 3 or 4 strings, one at a time, in the same amount of time it takes to strum it. The fingers of his left hand move into awkward chords with the ease of a bird taking a drink of water. As I appreciate Scott's musicianship in a continuing and growing way, I also appreciate Willard's musicianship the same. In Willard I see subtleties come to the surface over time. This evening I was noting how he extends the last syllable of a phrase mountain-style that comes out of Primitive Baptist singing, those long slow last words to the lines, often one syllable sung as two. Ralph Stanley sings like that, though in his own way and Willard in his own way. I described Willard's singing to Cheri Choate at the coffee shop today, saying his bluegrass is not Bill Monroe's bluegrass, but Willard Gayheart's. This is why I love Willard's bluegrass so much. It's not the bluegrass you hear over and over with the banjo that sounds like the same picker from band to band. Willard's singing at 80 is the best, to my ear, it's ever been and he's always been an extra good singer. These weekly shows keep his fingers nimble and his wits about him, keep his approach to the music fresh, keep him in such good practice that Willard appears to me to be flowering in his later years. A chrysanthemum. It does my heart good to hear Willard and Scott's music. That's where it feels good, in the heart.

 

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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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