LUCAS PASLEY TALKS ABOUT OLD-TIME MUSIC AT THE LIBRARY

lucas pasley

Thursday evenings, Alleghany Library features a music show or a talk on a given topic, a presentation. This week, old-time musician, local music historian and high school English teacher, Lucas Pasley, played the fiddle and talked. He talked about songs with stories in them. He used examples of songs that were favorites of the musicians in the county past and present, all of them common songs people who listen to the music know well. He talked of one told by a man without remorse, the story of the time he shot little Sadie down, never tells why, never mentions regret. Story songs are abundant in old-time music. One of my favorites stuck in the front of my mind the whole evening, the Stanley Brothers' Come All Ye Tender Hearted. Carter Stanley loved those old mournful story songs of extreme sorrow. This song was tattooed in the front of my mind the first time I heard it. Sometimes I like to listen to it for hearing Carter sing it as only he can in his hyper-emotional dispassionate voice. Sara Carter of the Carter Family had that quality in her voice. In the time before electricity, before the modern world, the people in the old way appreciated other songs besides love songs. Love song was one of the genres Lucas covered last night in his talk, the first of a series. The people before pop culture and advertising liked love songs, too. They also liked songs that made you cry. The people of that time honored all the emotions in their songs. Before marketing. Marketing changes things. Contemporary Chinese writers are not afraid of sorrow. A Chinese writer can wade you through some deep, wrenching, painful sorrow. They write about the other emotions too. Artists tend to like to appeal to all the emotions. There is still a niche in pop culture for sad songs, every once in awhile when it's a feel-good story. I still remember the popularity of the Country Gentlemen's, Taking Mary Home.  

 

with daughter Lenke

with daughter hazel

Lucas brought up the story in the Wreck of Old 97, pointing out the line, Scalded to death by the steam, a notable line. I can't think of any song I've ever heard with so graphic a climactic scene. The song is told visually. Lucas unveiled the story behind the event itself, the engineer an hour behind schedule when it was imperative he arrive at the next stop on time. It seems unrealistic now, but this was the time before safety regulations. A few years ago we had a news story of a commuter train engineer in a northeastern city who took it into a curve way too fast, absent minded out of control. In the old days they sometimes wrote current events into a song. Pop Stoneman sang a classic song about the Titanic. Bob Dylan sang a classic song about the Titanic. There were several songs in the old days of a guy killing his girlfriend because of a roving eye or she was pregnant. We still have plenty of stories of guys killing girlfriends. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend and later himself. In this time we have so many songs of every variety that most of them we never know about. There is not enough time to know about all of them. We hear pop radio and figure that's it. I see mention now of bands from the Sixties that were supposed to be the Best, and I never heard of them. And I see mention of bands from the 70s, the punk era, that were supposed to be the Best. Never heard of them either. These were bands you'd have to be a New York dj in that time to have heard them. I've caught myself again making out like we people were different in the old time way. We were different then from what we are now, but culturally, the nature of our education about the only difference mentally. In the old days education was learning how to figure things out. Education now is largely memorizing details for the test. I see education making that big a change again. Emotionally, we're not much different, except now we inhibit emotions as a rule. We still live by our emotions and interpretations. The same things still happen, though in a greater variety of ways. Looking at movies in our time as songs, the variety is endless, and we have more songs recorded now than movies. The major difference between the music before electricity and after is the changes were slower then and songs people heard were far fewer than now. It cannot be said the songs were better then or now.

 

 

lucas pasley

lucas and hazel

  

Lucas invited his two girls, Lenke and Hazel, one at a time to accompany him on the fiddle with their guitars. Both girls have been holding guitars since before they could pick the strings or make chords. They liked to hold the instruments and feel a part of the music as tiny kids. They live in a world of old-time music, daddy practicing, musicians coming by to jam, both parents participating in jams, going to fiddlers conventions in the summer, daddy collecting field recordings of music in the county. It's fairly predictable that both girls will be good musicians of whatever music they want to play. Lucas will have a family band in his near future. He has been collecting old tapes made of local musicians at jams since the late Forties, early Fifties. He has uncovered some treasures. Clifton Evans went around visiting musicians in the county he knew, banjo and fiddle players. He took his guitar and reel-to-reel recording machine. Lucas came into his tapes. A man named Dick Finney was known to have made tapes at jams. Somebody has his tapes. From what I've heard they are loaded with treasures. Lucas is putting the songs from these tapes into his computer and from there he can put them on a website he has created. He's told me he has been putting together a collection of Alleghany fiddlers and another collection of Alleghany banjo pickers. He's looking at the label, Field Recorder's Collective, a non-profit label that is making old-time mountain music available by people who have never recorded commercially. Lucas's collections will be a major contribution to archiving the music of our county. Lucas keeps his archiving activities ongoing through his life as husband, father, musician, teacher, home repair handyman who restores his house while living in it. And he's teaching his kids to make music. He's taking care of the county's music, present, past and future.

lucas and hazel

 

lucas

Lucas is so busy keeping everything going he's engaged in, he doesn't have time to seek publicity for himself. Few people know of his involvement with making the music of this county accessible on cd, both commercial and homemade. People in the county not connected with the school system have never heard of him. He strikes me a case of somebody doing something important for the county, its history and its future, and not many know what he's doing. Then we have the clique of people patting themselves on the back taking credit in the name of "gonna" and nothing happens of any value beyond cosmetic. Lucas is a teacher his students never forget. Going by the way he gives a talk at the library, I get a feel for how he functions in the classroom. Lucas takes passionate interest in whatever is holding his attention at a given moment. His interior excitement shines through when he talks. It doesn't make him an obnoxious missionary, it makes his talking fun for him and interesting to the listeners. He gives pertinent information when he's talking about a song's history and interpreting its story, conversationally, information that amounts to stepping stones he puts down one at a time to help us follow his interest. Lucas doesn't need praise for his contributions to the community. He believes the county's music needs archiving. He's somebody who does what he sees needs doing instead of talking about it. There was a time I believed the county needed a weekly radio show of its own music on the local AM station. There hadn't been one in probably fifteen years. Rather than try to talk other people into doing it, I went to Dudley Carpenter to teach me how to dj, learned as I went and put on a radio show for seven years until the station closed. Lucas and I are like-minded in the way that we would rather do what we see needs doing and go on than tell somebody about it, You-know-what-you-oughta-do? Lucas has a deep interior life. I don't know his spiritual beliefs, but it appears to me he is guided by real values. He doesn't fold and quit, like me, he keeps on a-keepin on and gets er done.     

lucas pasley

 

 

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JEANETTE AND JOHNNY WILLIAMS AT FIDDLE AND PLOW

scott freeman, edwin lacy, jeanette williams, johnny williams

 

 

Johnny and Jeanette Williams returned to the Fiddle and Plow Show Friday night. Scott Freeman played with them some of the songs from their album FREEMAN & WILLIAMS, available from Mountain Roads Recordings. Edwin Lacy played banjo. He and Scott played some songs from their album 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING, where they call themselves the Siamese Cousins. The music was clear and crisp. Sometimes I closed my eyes to hear better. That's when I heard the clarity of Scott's mandolin especially. Edwin's banjo rang out nicely, as always. Jeanette had an electric bass with her, something she "can throw in the back of a Toyota." Johnny played his guitar and all sang. All are good singers. For me, it is a powerful feeling being in the presence of such superb musicians. Hearing their music is where the powerful feeling comes from. These people play music. I took a mess of pictures of all of them. Thought I'd put up pictures this time.

 

 

jeanette williams

 

 

scott freeman and edwin lacy

 

 

jeanette williams and johnny williams

 

 

edwin lacy and jeanette williams

 

 



scott freeman and jeanette williams

 

 

edwin lacy, willard gayheart and jeanette williams

 

 

jeanette williams and johnny williams

 

 

*

OLD-TIME MUSIC RAMBLE

found art in Sparta

Monday was a good time for parking in front of Food Lion. A lot of parking spaces to pick from. The store was not crowded at the registers. I thought I may as well grocery shop on Mondays since it is inevitable that I need to drive to town for one reason or another every Monday. It is the day of the week I'd rather stay home and get over the weekend of staying up late three nights in a row. I'm becoming nocturnal. I really do my best after midnight. It took the whole day to get over waking up and by midnight I'm ready to read, write, paint. The day's obligations are over, the phone is not going to ring unless somebody died. All that I love to do I do best after midnight. If I remember correctly, which I don't, it seems Eric Clapton sang a song After Midnight in his electric rock star years, maybe with Cream. It's a shame how good they were in that time and are good in this time. Then there is Thelonious Monk's tune Round Midnight, one of my favorite jazz numbers and I don't know why, kind of like in bluegrass and old-time Maple On The Hill is about my favorite song and I don't know why. It just vibes with me right. Same with Round Midnight. That just put me in a mind to put on some Monk playing live at the It Club in LA with Charlie Rouse on tenor. One of those magical moments in recording that puts me into a minor bliss like Horowitz playing Schubert, Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle and Fred Cockerham playing banjo, and the other way around, on their album Tommy & Fred. Both are very soulful hillbilly musicians.

At the moment Josh Blevins of Whitetop VA is picking open-back old-time banjo. It's a field recording made available to we who love this music by the label Field Recorder's Collective. A lot of beautiful music from field recordings has been available at this label Field Recorder and the website is self-explaining. It is a dynamite catalog of old-time music. The label is a service to humanity. It is a non-profit so buying the cds helps the label toward the expense of bringing out a new one. All their cds are fine examples of old-time music, some of them having that magical accidental quality that makes them stand out from all the others. I felt like Gaither Carlton's cd of old-time fiddle and banjo was hanging down on a string  from heaven like a fish hook if you want a little taste of heaven. I think I'd like to be bunked on the old-time music corridor with the music of these mountains from before electricity was imagined. I love the old squawking fiddle of Marcus Martin and Gaither Carlton. Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham play that old squawking hillbilly music that makes my heart flutter for the beauty of it. Fred plays on George Pegram's Rounder #001 album. Fred squawked his fiddle and sang with his old hillbilly voice that wasn't about pretty, but was about delivering the words of the songs with music, often while playing the fiddle too.

I went looking for Kyle Creed's Heritage cd, Bobby Patterson's label in Woodlawn, Virginia. I was having to dig deeper than I wanted to go and came upon Kevin Fore's Round Peak, The Tradition Continues. He plays banjo and sings songs with fiddlers like Benton Flippen, James Burris, Kirk Sutphin and Eddie Bond who plays fiddle on some, guitar on several and sings on several. Several Round Peak musicians like Chester McMillan on his rhythm guitar, Joey Burris on guitar, Verlin Clifton on mandolin. It is a kind of all-star album of mostly Round Peak musicians by Bobby Patterson's label, Heritage, Kevin Fore the banjo player. It is a good example of music from this region of the mountains about half way between Sparta and MtAiry off Highway 89. It's some almighty fiddling and banjo pickin. At this moment Eddie Bond is playing the fiddle and singing Rockingham Cindy, Kevin Fore and Kirk Sutphin playing banjos. A good rendering of the Tommy Jarrell great song. To my ear, Jarrell made that song his own. That doesn't stop these guys from giving it a respectable go. Round Peak, the next generation. Almost put on a Clark Kessinger album. May hear it next. I don't know why I play music so seldom. I've come to prefer silence. I can hear myself think when there is no racket. Music holds my attention, clears my mind. Silence lets the mind run until it slows down to a walk.

It was early afternoon when I went into the grocery store. Food Lion has a little space unto itself where they keep the produce in a cooler temperature than the rest of the store. Pushing my cart toward the entrance doorway, a man and woman who looked awfully married were standing directly in the middle of the doorway discussing whatever it was that was important to them. I waited a moment wondering if they'd wake up any time soon. A woman about my age walked up from behind me with a cart. She waited a moment. Then she headed for the exit door and I followed her. All I wanted to do was get a bag of oranges. I dropped them into the cart and exited through the exit, swung back around to get some bananas and the couple had just made a decision that whatever they wanted was not inside the doorway where they stood unconsciousness as people, we and others, lined up and went around them to the exit door after waiting like at a traffic light.

If one of us had spoken to them noting they're blocking the doorway, they'd have exploded in apologies, Oh we're sorry! Explaining and shittin and gittin. It would have brought them into consciousness from a deep cavern in unconsciousness so fast it might have given them the bends. I thought of girls in high school talking in the doorways before and after class. A bunch going in see a bunch coming out and they talk in the doorway while the guys on both sides of the door fume waiting for them to get in motion and unblock the door. They don't do it intentionally. They do it unconsciously. The adult couple in the doorway at the grocery store did not irritate me. They must have reasonable IQs. I just marveled at the unconsciousness. I thought these people actually get around in traffic. Obviously city people, they must drive in city traffic and they drove from wherever to Sparta. I jotted it down in my head as the inexplicable event of the day.


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WILLARD GAYHEART AND BOBBY PATTERSON AGAIN

willard gayheart

Friday night Willard Gayheart and Bobby Patterson picked guitars and sang traditional songs. Sometimes Bobby played old-time banjo and sometimes a bluegrass banjo. Both sing very well. I was telling my friend Justin earlier that I would rather hear them than Doc Watson. Not to throw off on Watson, he draws a huge crowd and it's a good show, but he's so big and famous, that fans cried and waxed emotional when he died. I was asked by somebody same day how I felt about Doc Watson dying. I said, Nothing. Why nothing? I said, I didn't know him. I only know his singing; he has over thirty albums I can listen to any time whether he's living or dead. I saw him in concert once and felt very cool about seeing DOC WATSON in person, live, on stage. Yet it was no different from hearing Bobby and Willard picking and singing when it comes to good music and enjoying what I'm hearing. I enjoy Bobby and Willard more because I know them, which is far from the only reason. I've heard them half a dozen times in concert and declare them Doc's equal when it comes to performing good old songs. Bobby picks a good lead guitar and Willard picks good rhythm guitar.  Together they made some music that makes me happy I'm nowhere else.

Bobby and Willard have made music together in their bluegrass band THE HIGHLANDERS for 40+ years, they make music together at the Blue Ridge Music Center through the summer months once a week. Bobby has made some cds of them that sell pretty well to people passing through wanting a mountain memory to take home. Bobby plays mandolin in the band, and other places plays banjo and bass, too. Willard came to Galax from Kentucky about ten miles outside Hazard. He managed a five and dime store in Galax awhile, his pencil drawing took off and he opened a frame shop \ gallery, The Front Porch in Woodlawn where the music happens Friday nights. Minnie, the twenty year old white Maine Coon, was with us as always, it being her home. At first she didn't like all the people filling up her space and making such a racket on Friday nights. Eventually, she settled into the routine and by now seems to enjoy having all the people around. I always pet her and talk to her telling her she's a beautiful cat. Being a Maine Coon, she doesn't like much physical attention. She'd actually prefer not to be touched, so I limit my petting to a finger on the top of her head between the ears. She likes that, but only so much. I know not to push her too far, so I stop after a short time. There is a time she likes it, then a time she does not. Keep it up and she'll bite. Not hard, just enough to say, Cut it out! My friend Caterpillar is a Maine Coon, so I have good training.

These two seasoned musicians, Bobby 70, Willard 80, have a relaxed maturity in their music making that lets the music breathe. They know so well what they're doing with the strings that the music flows free of thought about what they're doing. I watched their fingers move with amazement at how freely their fingers of their left hands danced about noting the strings, too fast for thought from chord to chord, never missing a lick with their right hands picking individual strings. To hear Willard tell it, he can't do any better than basic picking. To hear Willard's guitar and see his fingers in motion tells me Willard is quite an advanced guitar picker. After thirty to forty years of his pencil drawing, he has become a subtle artist. Bobby Patterson has a music store in the next building where he sells mountain music cds and he has a recording label, Heritage Records, where he has recorded old-time and bluegrass music of SW Virginia for the same period of time. Alice Gerrard started the magazine Old-Time Herald in the basement of Bobby's shop among all his recording equipment.

Bobby's singing is a good example of good mountain singing that draws no attention to the singer, puts all attention on the song. Where other singers might raise their voices, Bobby goes lower instead of higher. First time I heard him sing, I thought it a little odd, but only because I'd never heard anybody do that before. By now, after hearing him as much as I have, I call it excellent singing. Willard's singing is different from Bobby's and they fit like hand and glove. Willard even seems to get emotional in his singing compared to Bobby. Bobby is straight old Primitive Baptist delivery, where Willard sometimes gets to shaking his head, bending his knees, moves with the music, which is a bit out of the ordinary for his generation of musicians. Such motions used to be frowned upon by musicians and audiences. By now, the younger old-time bands are jumping about like rock stars. How music has changed from Bobby and Willard's generation to present. The young musicians have rock in their growing up and they bring into old-time a new freedom to move with the music. Willard I suppose got it from being lead singer with the Highlanders on stage for so many years. Then with Skeeter & the Skidmarks through the 90s and Alternate Roots in the 00s.

I see in Willard's stage presence an intimacy with the audience like Doc Watson had, though each in his own way. I felt in a Doc Watson concert like he was sending love to everyone in the audience and everyone sent their love to him. It became a big flowing circle of love that I found awe inspiring. Willard addresses his audience with the same loving familiarity as Watson. No matter how many times Willard sings his own songs, they're the ones the audience wants to hear most, especially Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog. Hank Williams' song Mama Tried is one of Willard's songs that to my ear he took away from Williams and made it his own. Willard sings it like he wrote it. Bobby is best known in my mind playing guitar with Tommy Jarrell and Kyle Creed on the classic old-time album, June Apple. To my ear that is one of the great old-time albums with Bell Spur String Band and Whitetop Mountain Band's album Bull Plus 10%. Can't leave out the Laurel Fork Travelers. Hearing Bobby and Willard make music is more than just hearing music. They're the present manifestations of mountain music carrying the flame to the next generation.

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ZAPPED

 

cleve gray, zen garden

Some concern today for the culture in the mountains that has passed away. Not debilitating concern, by any means, but missing it like remembering a friend who died a quarter century ago. The culture has died out in a lot of ways, been processed through the way of natural change. I mourn a natural change in the ways of the people in the mountains, and embrace the change at the same time. Mountain culture has been through a major shift. The shift from old-time to bluegrass was the artistic expression of the change that came to the mountains with electricity. The music will go on from that time. Musicians will go on playing it. Fiddlers conventions will go on. The soul of the culture is in its music. It will live on, something like an eternal flame, a living reminder through the tunnel of unforeseeable changes in the future. As change has been its nature in the past, mountain music will go on changing. I don't know what will become of the word traditional. That word has been blown to tiny pixels since WW2. Bob Dylan appears to be carrying the thread of tradition through this conceptually changing time into the next generation.


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FIDDLIN KILBY SPENCER: SON OF WHITETOP MOUNTAIN BAND

     kilby spencer at rex theater 8.8.2010


Kilby Spencer's band The Crooked Road Ramblers played at the Jubilee on Main St in Sparta Friday night. They have the Friday night slot at the Jubilee every week now for as long as they want it. They kept the crowd dancing. They have a good drive for a dance band. Old-time bands are dance bands. Kilby's mother and dad are Emily and Thornton Spencer of Whitetop Mountain Band, a Grayson County Virginia band with drive that lets you know you're in the mountains. Kilby's sister, Martha, is staying with Whitetop Mountain Band. She plays every instrument, dances and sings. She is looking like the next WMB fiddler. She's been playing fiddle with the band, second to Thornton, for several years, possibly ten years, give or take a few. Kilby has played fiddle with Whitetop Mountain Band periodically since he's been able to carry out a fiddle tune, as Martha has too.


I've seen among older people I've known in the past that one of the aspects of the musical tradition in the mountains is for people who love the music, go to fiddlers conventions and dances, pay attention to the musicians, is to note a young fiddler or banjo or guitar picker who appears to have promise if he keeps on with it, if he chooses to go the way of music. It's not a matter of getting hopes up for one, because anything can happen. In the mid teens is a hurdle where a lot of them put the music aside and don't take it up again. Some take it up again and some don't let the music fall away. Kilby, like Martha, started when he was little. Mother and dad played, uncle Albert played, they played together all the time and probably every weekend. The kids grew up with old-time music. Records and tapes of different fiddlers from the past and regions of the mountains, old-time bands, banjos, that Kilby's mother and dad listened to. Kilby sent me a collection of 22 songs Thornton was either given by Fiddlin Art Wooten or he bought from Art. It was a home-made 8-track recording of Art Wooten playing fiddle, Jr Maxwell banjo and Wayne Henderson guitar.


Kilby is a folklorist from the inside. Something like AP Carter was, in his own time and place. AP gathered songs from the mountains a few hundred miles to the north and to the south of his home in Virginia, just across the NC line northwest of Bristol. Kilby has bought digital recording devises that pick up sound beautifully. He records people who have never recorded, like fiddler Raymond Gentry of Trap Hill, NC. Kilby has passed to me several of his recordings that he collects non-commercially, archiving, collecting samples of mountain music by people never recorded, as well as home-made tapes in boxes in the attic. Some of them actually survive. Kilby has found videos from home-movie cameras and put them on YouTube. His channel is whitetopmusic all one word. He has video of Albert Hash fiddling, Enoch Rutherford picking banjo with Thornton Spencer when Thornton was much younger, Doc Roberts, Thornton and Emily, Huston Caudill. You can hear some mighty fine examples of mountain music at Kilby's channel.


Kilby has been the young fiddler I've been watching grow. That's what he does. He grows by learning new songs, new ways to play old songs, a new instrument to learn and master, and another, until he can play a whole old-time band. His fiddle is Kilby's lifetime emphasis. The fiddle is his art form he has next to no choice about, like vanGogh driven to paint every day in nasty poverty because his art form needed full attention. Kilby is not playing the poverty role. He is a computer tech whiz who kept the computers of the school systems, county offices, the one you call when you're teaching computer class at the high school and something went cuckoo, like a virus or any of multiple million possibilities. He was moved to Ashe County where he takes care of the their computers last I knew. He's not told me he left Ashe, so I figure he's still there. The only news I get on Kilby is from Kilby himself. I like it like that.


Kilby Spencer is so dedicated to his growth as a fiddler I love to hear his new subtleties over time. He knows an awful lot of songs and plays all of them well. Very well. Kilby is a true heir in the line of Whitetop fiddlers, his uncle Albert Hash and his dad Thornton Spencer. Now it's Kilby and Martha, both of them Whitetop fiddlers of the next generation, the ones to keep the sound and the drive going into the next next generation. It's been an enjoyment for me watching Kilby grow from having no band at all to his Haw Orchard Band he made a couple of homemade cd's from. He gave me copies of his different cds he made for play on the radio show I was doing at WCOK in Sparta Saturday mornings. It wasn't for any commercial benefit. It was that I wanted to play every field recording I could find. The radio show's focus was the music of this county, then the first circle around that was surrounding counties, the next circle the Central Blue Ridge, the next circle the Southern Mountains. Kilby turned up with some music by musicians from close to home and let me play an awful lot of them to the listeners in the county. Bertie Dickens, Cleve Andrews, Jr Maxwell, Raymond Gentry, Howard Joines, Wood Blevins and quite a lot more.


I took the camera to the show tonight and made several still shots of Kilby on fiddle and the other musicians in the band, some of the whole band with dancers in foreground. Made several videos, too, of half dozen or so tunes. I was able to sit the camera on a counter next to Ernest's coffee maker in the corner at the back, out of everybody's way. Using the zoom and sitting the camera still I could get sharp focus and closeups on the musicians from the waist up with instrument. When getting a portrait of a musician, I like to get both hands and the face in the picture. Not always---a rule of thumb. My computer is so full that I have to unload much of it before I can put more in (like my house, like my mind). It's a time-consuming job that I don't know what it's going to take to motivate me to dive in and get-er-done. It won't be long. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. I'll do it in my own time. I'll hurry slowly. Slow is good. I'm not working in a factory. Nor was meant to be. 

They have a cd available from cdbaby.com. It is Lost Train Blues by the Crooked Road Ramblers. You can see it at  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tcrramblers. Excellent old-time album. This link will take you directly there. The band has a website that is "undergoing routine maintenance" at this moment, but is subject to change any day or week. For when it's ready to go again, http://www.myspace.com/thecrookedroadramblers.


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NOBODY GOING NOWHERE

As of today I have a GPS for the car. It came in the mail from amazon, a birthday present from friends in Georgia who live on the cutting edge of the modern, have had one for years. Judy said she thought it would be a good assist finding some regional music venues in places I don't know my way around. Like this weekend is MtAiry fiddler's convention. It will be a great assist finding the place. It's in a freaked out place in town that you almost have to belong to a secret society for the key to find it. It is a secret society-- the old-time music community. Secret not because they guard it jealously, but because nobody else is interested. Judy went with me last year to the Albert Hash Festival at Whitetop VA, over hills and dales, beautiful drive up 58 from Mouth of Wilson. Actually, the beautiful drive starts at my driveway. In these mountains it's beautiful everywhere I go. I'm a Taurus whose ruling planet is Venus, meaning a Taurus personality needs the beautiful, in my case mountains and trees, the green world that draws me into it feeling more like home the deeper I go.


Sat in the car reading instructions, assembling it part by part, strictly according to instructions, one step at a time. I'm in a world there completely foreign to any world I know. Not completely foreign. Let's just say I don't know the language. It's familiar, like nearly everybody has one, and simple to operate. It's so simple it's just right. Makes it possible for me to deal with it in my indifferent attitude toward the tsunami of hi-tech gadgets we can't live without now. In Polanski's film, Carnage, the lawyer who has alienated his wife with his cell phone fell to pieces on the floor when she dunked his blackberry in water. "My life is in there!!!" The women fell out laughing and couldn't stop laughing, loosened somewhat by some liquor mid-day, and the man lay on the floor practically in convulsions. I couldn't laugh so hard because I wasn't as mad at him as they were. I just saw him as one of those people I'm glad I don't know. People jumping out of their skin from anxiety and stressed to the max make me nervous. Ambition has never been one of my driving forces. One day many years ago reading in the discourses of Sri Upasni Maharaj it rang the bell within when he recommended living without ambition. I wondered about its meaning for some years, yet at the same time saw it straight-forward and obvious, about as direct as know thyself.


Because I've lived my adult life without ambition, I've got nowhere. The Buddhist ideal: nobody going nowhere. The art of Andy Goldsworthy. A red leaf floating down a stream among rocks covered in moss. Flowing with the Tao, the Way, the way of the birds, the way of the ants, the way of all life on earth in evolution to the forebrain that gave the hairless ape the curiosity to leave the shelter of the trees. From there on, look what we've done. We're in a place in civilization when it's probably as good as it has ever been, yet at the same time gives cause to declare it the worst of times. Along my way working at outdoor labor jobs like caretaking a farm and house painting, I've felt no ambition to be a contractor, hire people to work for me, get big jobs, big money, big office, big name, hotdogs forever in heaven. I have spent my life in a world of people who want to be looked upon with favor by them from on high. The great American smile always makes me see a children's market in China, I'm nice, I'll cook for you, I'll scrub floors for you, wash your clothes, I'm nice. That's what I've come to see ambition reduces one to. Ambition involves selling self, selling time, selling attention.


In a time of wanting to climb the art gallery ladder, I was told in seriousness to paint primitives of nigger kids playing around a school house. That's what people want. She blew my circuits. I didn't know there was anyone in the civilized world that ignorant. It pushed me over the edge. In another gallery situation, I was invited to show things to the top dog who complained that they were too much of a kind, not enough variety. On the wall of the gallery at the very moment was a show of one tree in landscape over and over, same landscape, same tree, over and over all the way through the gallery. I left the place making vows to myself. Before I was out of Raleigh I saw a big pink Buick of about 20 years old with a tag on the front that said Love God. That set me to laughing and my dark mood went away like a hat flying up through a sunroof. Got with a hot dog gallery for a year and brought everything home because I couldn't stand the drive the Chapel Hill once a month, for Christmas parties, for openings, and being treated like the truck driver when I show up. Didn't paint for ten or more years after that.


Scott Freeman set me in motion again, this time on the only track I've found that is right for me. He asked me to paint a picture for the album cover he used on his fiddle album. Working on that picture brought me back. By then I had discovered the artist in the mountain musician, and saw that music was the only art form in mountain culture, and preaching. Preaching the old time way was an art form. The mountain musician isn't ambitious about fortune and fame. The mountain musician makes music for the joy of making music. He likes to get paid, but will make music for gas money. The musicians are more interested in their own skill than anything else. Also, "making it plain." That means make it straight-forward what it is. In music making, it's note for note, no effort to draw attention to the banjo picker, but to the banjo keeping rhythm and playing tenor to the fiddle. The style of playing is to honor the tune not the musician. In my paintings now I want them to honor the mountain musicians. I paint "plainly" in a realism easy to interpret. I've adopted the principles of mountain music for my painting of mountain musicians. It's the best principles I've ever operated by. They are sound principles, like find your own style, don't make a spectacle of self. It's the art the creation is about, not the artist. The artist is about giving expression to the art form, manifesting it.


*

PAINTING FIDDLER HOWARD JOINES

tapo

Back to work on the Howard Joines fiddler painting. Repainted the fiddle, all of it, with colors closer to my satisfaction. Also put in the chicken, a ghostly chicken of the imagination, white on a white roost. She's leaning down toward his ear like she's singing into his ear. I'm happy with it. The hen is white and transparent like a spectre, like a memory, or a thought. I have her singing her note into his ear, because when he plays Cluck Old Hen, Cacklin Hen and Chicken Reel, old-time fiddle tunes with notes in them that are chicken notes, he plays the note of a hen cackling. Howard kept chickens, and you can hear it when he plays those tunes. They have notes that sound exactly like a chicken when old-time fiddlers play them, fiddlers who grew up with chickens. In the old days, about everybody raised chickens. Howard's chicken notes were perfect. Tommy Jarrell played a good chicken note. All the old-time fiddlers found those notes. That's changing now. The new fiddlers don't live with chickens. You can hear it when they play these tunes, it's a note approximating a chicken's note, but there's no chicken in it.


It was a good project to set this one back in motion. Had it going good and then froze when it came time for the fiddle strings and the bow. I finished two others while it waited. Didn't get the f holes perfect, but I don't care. I don't want perfect. I don't even care if it makes it look "folk art." That's what it is, so it doesn't matter if somebody says that. I'd be as happy with that title as any. The fiddle had already been brought up to the final coat of paint, which was applied today. I was ready to go, knew what had to be done, bore down and done it. Something I've not articulated before is the risk involved in painting, the constant need to apply each touch of paint just right, or close.



Years ago, friend Don Smith who liked to climb rock cliffs straight up, loved the risk. He told me I needed to get out and do something that involved some risk. I couldn't ever explain it, so I didn't try, but I set out on an adventure every time I approach a blank canvas. And when it comes toward the end when I have to paint 1/4" slightly curved line on a white shirt, no mistakes, the line having to cross the fiddle too, the line 2 feet long, I get paralyzed mentally and can't start, though I know I can do it, know I will do it, know that when it happens, it will take no more than 5 to 10 minutes. That part just about paralyzes me from knowing I have one chance and one chance only. It can only be done when I'm ready. One day I feel it, and it gets done in just a few minutes. When I start, instead of holding my breath, I control my breathing, keep it going so I don't pass out from lack of oxygen.


And there was getting the chicken right. Again, one time only. It's not perfect, which means it's just like I want it to be. I've put on a cd of Howard Joines playing fiddle with Jr Maxwell playing banjo, and I'm guessing Richard Joines playing guitar. They're playing Bear Tracks, Jr's banjo in the lead. Sounds good. Now I won't be able to write for listening. They are so good their music draws all my attention. Jr is picking something else now, beautifully. If I'd ask him the title, he'd say, "You don't know the name of that?" and he wouldn't tell me. I'd have to ask ask again. It would be in fun, making fun of me for not knowing. Not that he knew the names of all the songs. Howard's fiddle is working with the banjo that is going where the fiddle takes it. I took a risk when I put this cd on of letting the music take me over and it has. It pulls my ears and occupies my conscious mind that shuts down and receives this something that is so much better than anything that runs through my mind.



They're playing Just Because, a song Bill Monroe also recorded. I knew it before from Elvis doing it early when he was on Sun label just before he became a household name overnight. Jr plays well with a fiddler. He supports the fiddler, keeps the rhythm for him, doesn't get in front of him. Dance All Night With A Bottle In Your Hand. Howard plays this one especially lyrically. What a great fiddler. Jr's banjo works right along with the fiddle. Howard was Jr's uncle. Jr's mother came from an especially musical set of Joineses in Pine Swamp township. Oh it feels good hearing this good music. They're bluegrassing old-time fiddle tunes about like Art Wooten did. Art made two albums in his later years, one old-time and one bluegrass. Same bluegrass bands both times. This is how Art played the old-time tunes on his album, bluegrassed them, keeping the dancers in motion.



This rendering of Howard Joines is looking at being finished tomorrow. Just a little bit more to do. Could have done it today, but I wanted to give it another day. Looking at it, the chicken is right. She is present, but not overtaking. She's whispy as a spectre. This is the chicken he's hearing in his inner ear when he's playing the chicken note in Cluck Old Hen and Chicken Reel. I had to listen to him playing his fiddle to remind myself I'm painting an icon of a master fiddler. The chicken is part of the whole. She belongs. Her presence adds a kind of living quality to the whole. She draws attention from Howard's face, when the eye reaches the hen, it's drawn back to Howard's face. It sets up a rhythm like that with the viewer's eye. Unconsciously. The hen became an essential element to the whole as soon as she appeared. A couple of brush strokes, 2 red dots and a tiny yellow dot, the combs and beak, leaning from the roost toward the fiddler's ear, singing her note to his inner ear.



* 

BUFFALO DEATH RATTLE

lyle

lyle

john and dusty

lyle, josh, ashley

 ashley

dusty, lyle, josh

dusty

josh

These guys are Buffalo Death Rattle. They play old-time and their own compositions in the old-time style. They've been a band less than a year. They're here in the mountains to see what jams they can find and fiddlers conventions. They'll be going to Clifftop in West Virginia. They're from all over the place, and came together in New Orleans. Josh on the bass is from Winston-Salem, grandson of Ben and Agnes Willis who had a vacation farm in Air Bellows, the old Jim Scott Place. Ben and Agnes have been gone quite awhile, and the farmhouse is now a vacation place for the grandkids, Josh the one that uses it the most. Josh has been in New Orleans for some years, went back and forth from Philadelphia a few times, and found this band he's with now is the one he wants to stay with. They are staying at the farmhouse for a few days on their road trip looking for Appalachian music.

They travel in 2 vans and play music all the time. They are together about music and music is what they do. They are at the place now in their development as a band of how to flow with each other's styles of playing, and getting the feel of the whole. I think all they need now is stage experience. They play mountain music like mountain people, and they didn't even know it. They like old-time and they like to play. Josh in the past telling me about the band apologized for them every time saying, "We play fast," as if to say it might be too much. What he calls "too fast" is what's called drive in the mountains. They have drive in abundance. The fiddler can lay it to it, too. They tore up Breaking Up Christmas, Lost Indian, Ed Haley's Indian Ate A Woodchuck, and other such fiddle tunes. I mean tore them up! I told them when they get before an audience and want to get everybody's attention, play those tunes and have everybody on their feet the whole time. The drive they have is on the order of New Ballard's Branch Bogtrotters and Whitetop Mountain Band.

The band doesn't sound like old-time played by people not of these mountains. My perhaps erroneous thinking is the people from other places learn mountain music by the mind. The mountain musicianer learns it by heart and plays it from the heart. The very first rule musicians learn in the mountains is play from the heart. Lyle is such a fiddler. He plays straight from the heart. He plays with his ears and his heart as one. Dusty, the banjo picker, used to play guitar, picked up a banjo a year and a half ago, started plucking around on it, got focused and now he's playing very respectable clawhammer he's taught himself. John, the guitar picker, is one dynamic picker. He plays details and he plays hard, both at once. He can get a rhythm going and he uses his guitar to push the band through the waves of the music. He keeps the rhythm solid and plays melody with the banjo as well.

Before they started making music, I heard them apologize that they're not very good, that they don't have it together yet as a band. I suppose it was all their apologizing before they played that gave me the surprise at hearing them make music, respectable mountain music, the real deal. I want to tell all my musician friends about these people, maybe get a few videos on YouTube where they can be heard. They are just now starting to think about things like that. At this place in their development as a band, this trip is intensive practice, picking every day, finding their flow together. I told them I believe they'd be very well received at the Rex Theater on a Friday night. I believe they'd be well received at any place in these mountains they might play. It was a joy for me to hear them playing Appalachian music in Appalachia the first day, and already having the sound. I believe they have the sound because they each learned their instrument the old-time way, figure it out and how you figure it out becomes your style. Each one has his/her own style of playing that's not like anybody else. Josh the musician continues to blow my mind.  

Ashley is playing fiddle tunes on the accordion with the fiddle. They sound good together. It's even along the line of an autoharp with a fiddle in its sound. Instead of being a separate sound, it enhances the fiddle's sound as if it were coming from the fiddle. She is playing viola too. Sometimes banjo plays note for note with the fiddle and they sound good together. Josh I've known him since he was a youngun playing soccer in jr hi. I knew his grandparents, his parents, uncles, aunts, brother, sister, cousins, over the years of being next door neighbor with the Willis farm. When Josh was at Chapel Hill, he had different bands doing post-punk noise kind of Mercury Rev thing. Band mates he'd bring to the mountains sometimes to retreat and make music. I'd go over and have a concert of some dynamic sounds. Josh is a good musician all the way around. Good songwriter, good singer and a bass player who plays individual notes on the bass, fingers of both hands going. He's played bass for a long time. He plays banjo too, figured it out on his own and has his own style.

It's always been a treat of a concert when Josh brought his present band to the farm. Because all the musicians he's had here in the past have been real artist musicians, I figured these guys would be too. When they started playing this evening just before sunset, I was surprised and not surprised at once by what I was hearing. It was no surprise that they were as good as they were at making mountain music, but it was a big surprise that they are a very respectable old-time band. Their drive is just right. From here on, they learn tunes together, talk about arrangements, live totally in their music, develop their sound with hundreds, then thousands of hours of stage experience, make recordings to sell at gigs. They have a facebook page now with links to a few videos. Write buffalo death rattle in the search box on facebook and you'll be there. I think they have a few things on youTube too. We talked about making some video tomorrow for YouTube. That will be awesome. I like their spirit.

*

INDIANA AINT NO SUTHUN STATE

yo, sambo

Milly Richardson just now brought my attention to what I wrote yesterday about the South. This is one of the bonds Milly and I have, our love for the South, the irrational as well as the rational of it, from the very meanest and worst to the most generous and best, the entire picture in between, like on a Japanese fan. The one thing somebody from West Virginia has in common with someone from Mississippi is they are both Southern, and in that way share the same culture, as people from the West Virginia mountains have in common with people of the North Carolina mountains is the culture of the Southern Appalachians. Above the Mason-Dixon line, old-time music was played a different way. It had no black influence in it, or next to none. The banjo is the fusion of the black people's ways of playing the music and the ways of the white people. White influence came from the British Isles.



The black influence came through white old-time music, filtered through African sensibilities, into music the musicians could play together. More than likely slave musicians played for a lot of white square dances. Uncle Dave Macon, the first Grand Ole Opry banjo comedian, came from central Tennessee. By age 14 he was picking a banjo. He met a black man who picked banjo. They taught each other new licks. This was the case with a number of the early white banjo pickers. Clarence Ashley of Mountain City, Tennessee, learned licks when he was young from a black banjo picker. The banjo, an African instrument, was probably made among slaves by somebody kidnapped into slavery who had been a maker and player of the instrument. It went through changes this side of the ocean, like old-time music went through changes this side of the ocean, which the slaves learned from the white people that were everywhere. Young white boys who had music in them were drawn to it in the minstrel shows of white guys in blackface, the banjo known as the black instrument. I expect the white boys that picked up the banjo, the ones that really got into it, sought a black man to show him how it's "really" played.



And the Yankees accuse us in the South of not liking black people. For every Yankee who would say, I don't think that way about Southerners, there are Southerners who like black people very much simply for who they are, friends. There is at least as much interracial friendship happening in the South as in the North. I can't say there is more or less, because I have no idea, but I do know that in the Southern white middle class, nigger is the most unacceptable word in the dictionary. Even worse than fuck. You don't get lectured and pointed at for saying fuck. And if you're a bred and buttered Confederate redneck of the flag waving variety, whose greatgreatgrandpa fought in the Civil War, that's the password. It's more the shock value and statement of a separate status from the white middle class that looks down on them. It's a working class Southern boy's middle finger to the condescending middle class, the management class, the boss. Fuck you. And the horse you rode in on.



That's it for what's left of Southern racism. To start with, not hardly all Southerners were racists, and there is less racism as time goes by, as older generations die out and younger generations come in. It's going away of its own, because it's simply not practical anymore. It was of another time. And where collective guilt for slavery is concerned, slavery just makes us members of the international community. Slavery is an African institution from Bible times to the present day. An ongoing international slave trade is alive an well. The Bible justified it for the colonists. It was the  European colonists buying slaves from Africans that got the New World slave trade going. When the American colonies broke free of "the Crown," we were left to do with this situation we did not create the best we knew how. There is no rational or irrational to what followed. American history. Bombs from the sky on the Iraqi people. If you're going to blame Southerners for the plight of the black people, remember to blame all Americans, black and white and in between, for the plight of the Iraqi people, for the plight of the North American Indians.  



Later on, you have the Allman Brothers, Southern Rock knee deep in the Delta Blues. In turn, there was white influence in black music, perhaps to the same degree. It's a complex weaving of the ways white people think that are particular to white people, racial arrogance for one, and the ways black people think particular to black people, a minority consciousness. Both are prime in decision-making and make very different cultures based in the same culture, subcultures that share the bigger culture. I get really tired of people from outside the South accusing Southerners of racism and sympathy for slavery. I do not allow that Southerners are expected to feel guilty for being Southern. Yankees had slaves too.



And when it comes to racism, there is plenty of it in the South, to be sure, but it's not universal by any means. And there's plenty of it in the North, Midwest and West. None of the great Southern writers were racist, Eudora Welty, John Crowe Ransom, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and a great long string of others. Elvis was a Southern boy. Before he started recording, he was finding his style as a singer in the black clubs of Memphis. He was as black a singer as any white man could sound. Then you have Chuck Berry of Memphis singing like a white man. Jerry Lee Lewis singing like a black man. Rock and roll. Minstrel shows again.



AP Carter drove around the mountains of the Blue Ridge looking for songs in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, traveling by car for weeks and often months at a time. His companion was a black guitar player and singer, Leslie Riddle. Through Riddle, AP had access to the black homes as well as the white. No distinction is made in the songs of the Carter Family for whether they came from white community or black. The Carter Family, the essence of mountain music, was another fusion of black music and white.



I absolutely reject the notion that a white Southerner is automatically guilty of historical racism. There are aplenty of racists outside the South. The song Billie Holiday sang, Strange Fruit, the story a lynching and hanging of a black man from a poplar tree. The first line, Southern trees bear strange fruit. The lynching the song was about and the writing of the song both took place in the state of Indiana. Google Indiana and see if it's in the South. It's what we call 'round here a Yankee state.



*

OLD TIME NEW TIME

air bellows outdoor art museum

The crickets and the tree frogs are singing and chirping. Sometimes I wonder what it sounded like back when this was all farms, the night chorus of these critters, and from up the holler a banjo's notes in the air. A lot of the old houses are gone, nearly all the barns. The people are gone, the clothes they wore are gone, the wagons they rode are gone, the guns remain in vaults and on the walls of gun collectors, and the musical instruments continue. Often they stay in the family. Sometimes they're sold. Or they're in museums. Many of them go on making music, are treasured as great great grandpa's fiddle, either hanging on the wall or in its old case with the handle missing, played only on special occasions. The old culture is so gone now it is functionally over but for the values carried by descendants, the ways of believing, the nature of faith. The music is very much alive. About every county in the mountains has a place for local music and dancing. The music corporations ASCAP and the like would have them all shut down if they had their way unimpeded, which they do to a point. They shut down jams too. They're doing their best to stifle creativity outside their control. It's working.

When I think creativity in America is stifled, all I have to do is go to a karaoke bar and see individual after individual singing their hearts out onstage. These people are good. I went with Jean one night to a place on the highway to Mt Airy called Rock Bottom, a roadside beer place with bands on the weekends. Karaoke night. It was a peaceable place. A friendly place. I saw a guy with a harley tshirt and a bandanna on his head sing like a bird. Women, men, anybody who wanted to. These people, all of them have practiced and awful lot in the shower or wherever they sing. Karaoke uses pop songs of our time for the standards the way jazz in the 50s used Broadway tunes for the standards. Curious, seeing the music I've watched evolve from the start when I was 13 over half a century to the place it's the music of our collective American culture.

In the 50s Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis inspired reaction by the adults. It weakened the kids to Communism. It was Communist propaganda destroying the minds of the kids. Every kind of attempt was made to shut it down. Dick Clark is lauded as the Hot Dog of rock & roll, but he was in the front line of the forces set on destroying rock & roll. He promoted doo-wop black boys and Italian pretty boys, Anita Bryant. Allan Freed was put through all kinds of legal problems promoting the new music. His life was more or less ruined by the reactionary force. Among adults, he was the enemy of the adults from the inside, a virus. All the adults were saying, "It will never last." When my parents said it, all I could think was, I don't care. Among the Andrews Sisters, the Lennon Sisters and the Four Lads, suddenly was Chuck Berry honking Maybellene, "Cadillac rollin down open road, nothin outrunin my V-8 Ford. Cadillac doin about 95, bumper to bumper rollin side to side. Maybellene why caint you be true? Oh Maybellene---why caint you be true? You done started back doin the things you used to do."

Maybellene, Shake Rattle & Roll, Long Tall Sally, Hey Bo Diddley, Heartbreak Hotel, Peggy Sue. All these songs started appearing between the white music that went before. I tended to listen to the black station in KC at the time, because that's where I could hear the black music, like Slim Harpo, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Little Walter, Ruth Brown. When the white station was playing Elvis's Hound Dog, the black station played Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog. She wrote it. Elvis gave her a Cadillac instead of songwriter's royalties. He got off real cheap. I heard people like Ivory Joe Hunter, Bill Doggett, Ray Charles before crossover, Big Joe Turner. It was a rich time in my life for discovering music. Both the black sound and the white sound exploring new sounds with the electric guitar. Duane Eddy, Forty Miles of Bad Road. Electricity was changing music like it changed everything else. Changing it fast.

By 1960, Chuck Berry was in prison, Jerry Lee Lewis disgraced, Elvis in the Army, Little Richard preaching, Buddy Holly dead. Freddie Cannon was about all that was left of rock & roll. It was just about shut down in America when records started coming over from England, Spencer Davis Group, Dave Clark 5, then the Beatles and the Stones and rock & roll was back. There was no stopping it after the British invasion. Bob Dylan went from acoustic to electric, psychedelia spread from San Francisco; Big Brother & Holding Company (Janis Joplin), Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and beyond. Then Led Zeppelin, heavy metal, then punk and it stayed punk until it became mainstream after a quarter century on college radio stations. The 20th century was a renascence in art and it was a renascence in music, all kinds of music. It was a highly creative time in every field of human interest.

What rock has evolved into now, I have very little idea. What I hear and see is telling me it's a time in pop music like the post-modern period in art where everything that went before is given expression in various blends. Fusion from all over the world and every kind of music. Tells me it's evolving really fast right now. It's universal pop now all around the world, every culture, every place. Even in the remotest places on earth. It has pushed to the background traditional musics all over the world, not just here. The traditional musics change, but they don't die. It's looking like Kilby Spencer and his sister Martha are devoting their lives to keeping the Whitetop music tradition alive and moving into the future. Kilby is a computer technician to make a living and a fiddler to make music. He plays banjo, guitar and bass too. They'll pass the music to the next generation like their mother and dad did. Kilby has been uploading a lot of good old-time videos of whitetop music. You can find his videos at whitetopmusic on YouTube. He's uploaded a lot of really good old-time videos. Even with media advanced as it is now making YouTube possible, old-time lives alongside everything else. It's no longer the only music, but it is a part of the whole, and will always be. Maybe.

OLD-TIMEY JOY

whitehead

In my search for what is behind my emotional responses to old-time mountain music, I thought I was getting pretty close yesterday. I'm looking now at approaching it by facets. This morning I had an email from Chris Davis that opened another facet for me, that joy down deep within that is constant. I'm seeing that sometimes old-time music will tap into that joy in the soul and that's when it gets me going. Like a well sung gospel song, like the Marshall Family singing I Just Want To Thank You Lord. That song always touches what I'll call my joy center.

Joy is never in our (my) power...you search for why mountain music brings tears to your eyes. For me, my JOY comes from Jesus deep in my soul. Like something just born in me. There for me to leave alone, or embrace. I embrace this Jesus Joy totally. For me, it makes tears come to my eyes when I hear the old time music, see the orphans of Haiti, appreciate my blessings, etc.

Happiness comes and goes. Joy is living in me deep down. Nearly spewing out everywhere, each time I just open my eyes and see this gorgeous place we live, its animals, birds, people, family, friends.

That rang a gong for me. Chris said it with such light in her words, I wanted to reproduce it here, with her permission. She defines that place better than I could. I believe about all of you reading this will recognize that place in yourselves. Old-time music taps my joy place within. I think what it is that opens the joy center is the human dimension. Old-time banjo pickin is such that no two pickers can sound alike. Every picker has his/her own sound that is particular to the individual. It's music from a time when the individual was important. The musician didn't have to have a face without features or a personality without features. None of the mountain musicians had their noses remade by plastic surgery.

The mountain tradition has a beautiful humility in it. Rule number one, you don't talk down about other musicians. A few years ago a young boy of 13 who was getting pretty good on his banjo said something about another kid couldn't play, to Agnes Joines. Finger waving in front of his face, she let him know in no uncertain terms that she will never again hear him say something about another musician like that or she's gonna let him have it. He knew she meant business too. That's how the mountain musicians learn their etiquette. Humility is enforced the same way in youth. Humility is about the most important part of the integrity of a mountain musician.

The music is a living tradition passed from generation to generation. It's a living thing. It's about square dancing and flatfootin. It's about dancing, about motion. It's about making music as good as you can possibly make it. It's about the spirit of music, the flow. I can't help but go ahead and say it's about the fullness of being human. It's about extraordinary beauty being made by just another Joe, a coalminer, a sawmiller, hard working people. I'm listening to Lee Sexton, who's from E Kentucky, old-time banjo and singing. I know if I were to shake his hand, his hand would be hard as stone. A man who has worked hard, fought hard, made his way a hard working man getting paid very little in return.

Number one in a mountain musician's list of priorities is feeling. If the playing doesn't have feeling, it's not music. It isn't working. The fiddler has to feel what he's playing, take the note where he wants it to go by feeling it there. It's the same with all the instruments. Feeling is number one. Possibly this has a great deal to do with why it strikes me so emotionally, the feeling that's in it. When the musician plays from the heart, the music is received in the listener's heart. Musicians know that. Carter Stanley's love for the mournful old songs was from his continuing attention to making music with strong feeling. I believe feeling must be the way to the joy center within. Thinking about it sure won't do it.

Something else about mountain music. It is happy music. It's a lively social music of several people dancing together in square dances. It's about people getting together to laugh and let off some steam at the end of the work week. It was people at home. People entertaining each other. People knowing each other. Actual community. Everybody knew everybody. From where we are now, we're looking at 1984 in the past. We're way past it when it comes to mind control of the masses. The Supreme Court just a few days ago nullified the individual. Up to that moment we were the electorate. Now, we don't even have that, the world's most advanced Democracy. Evidently, advanced right out the other end.

Old-time music came from the time when people believed in Democracy and that old American individualism I was raised in school and church to believe in. Even then it was over. These kinds of sorrowful feelings in our time of seeing the American citizens take it lying down, becoming laughably manipulable subjects and believe the propaganda that it's good for the middle class. A good time to hear Aerosmith scream Love In An Elevator. In the time of old-time music people thought something of one another. You don't see much of that these days. The state of mind we live in during this time is full of anxiety about a long checklist of subjects, tv telling us we don't have enough, we need more. No matter who you know, they're not as cool as people you don't know. No matter who you are, you're regarded at the educational level of the fourth grade. To say something about it is out of order. Fit in. Don't think for yourself. Spend money.

Dark, heavy feelings. So I crank up the volume of the Rolling Stones doing Street Fighting Man. Bob Dylan and the Stones expressed for all the rest of us what we were feeling, an underlying current of anger around our impulses to be full human beings frustrated over and over until the struggle becomes just an ongoing struggle. It's been going on since VietNam. Government does what it's going to do and We The People can take a jump. You don't like it? Get used to it. You will.

Out here in the mountain I don't have to think like that anymore. I've give up the struggle. It's endless and it's counterproductive. It's jumping in and playing the game, starting out the loser. When I hear a fiddler hit the chicken notes in Cluck Old Hen and Chicken Reel, it touches my joy center. Music from the time when people walked everywhere they went. Walking turns out to be a kind of prozac and driving just the opposite. Now we go through several varieties of anxiety getting wherever we're going. We've turned down our emotional natures replacing them with what we call rational mind. Let's just say mind. Not all mind is rational. Feelings are a good guide, but when we collectively push feeling down in favor of mind, an untrained mind is no guide to follow. Feelings that aren't understood are no guides either.

Myself, in this last half of my life, have very little place for the dull thinking about what the dark cabal in control of That Great City is doing to delete Democracy in America, step by step, fixing it all the way so there's no going back, so we the people have no voice. What's done is done. I'd rather stay on my mountain and let all that mind go someplace else, not in my head. It's when I tap in to real humanity in the music of these mountains, the best of what we are, it opens joy within and I feel light. That's what I think Chris is getting at. Let all that stuff, "the world," a dark burden in the mind, go its own way and I go mine. Thank you Chris.