HILLBILLY DJ

the carter family

From social moments I've engaged in over the last weeks I'm seeing I don't know how to talk to anybody anymore. Never did, really. Consciously worked at learning to be witty and entertaining, but it never took. Something like taking a chemistry class when I never wanted to know anything about chemistry. I couldn't learn those letters with the lines between them. It was opaque as trying to learn to read music. It never took. I understand what people who cannot read see when they look at a page of words, same thing I see in a sheet of music. At piano concerts I've been to, Peter Serkin, Artur Rubinstein, some others with familiar names and some without, I see people reading music and playing really fast, I'm in awe, even knowing they've practiced it ten thousand hours and don't need the written music but for emergency moments, like somebody coughs and distracts the musician for a tenth of a second. I'm in awe of anybody who can read music and play at the same time, even make music of it. A musician is someone who likes to play the same thing over and over working on nuances, smoothing the finger work, learning the tune so well it's automatic. Playing old-time mountain music of no written notes and no written words, passed from musician to musician, is a matter of subtle musicianship as subtle as more "serious," school educated music that is indeed more advanced for having been written over hundreds of years, studied and played by serious musicians. Years and hours of mastery of an instrument matures with age in hillbilly music as in classical. Jascha Heifetz's violin is the only classical violin that has made tears run down my face like hillbilly fiddling does when it's by Tommy Jarrell or Fred Cockerham or Howard Joines sawing the strings.

the carter family

First time I heard Heifetz play Scottish Fantasy, by Max Bruch, I'd been in the hills a few years, had a few LPs of hillbilly fiddling I didn't listen to much, but liked. I was in the house with a classical station on the radio. Scottish Fantasy came on and the fiddle went straight to my heart like a bolt of joy lightning. I flopped down in a chair and wept throughout the song. It's the same thing that happens to me at a Ralph Stanley concert. The music is so beautiful my heart overflows with joy and tears run down my face. The name Ralph Stanley comes to mind and my eyes dampen. The names of the Carter Family, Sara, AP and Maybelle, dampen my eyes. Can't leave out Carter Stanley who can make you feel a song, like Sara Carter, with a plain voice telling the story, like few other singers do for me. I think I have everything the Stanley Brothers recorded, the Carter Family too, also Uncle Dave Macon, another of the great ones. In the time I had the music store of mountain music, I had speakers outside that played onto Main St, hillbilly music all day long. One day a car parked in front, a middle-aged woman driving. She left the car to pay a bill or something, leaving an old man, evidently her dad of 90+. I noticed the bill of his ball cap bobbing up and down and his fingers tapping rhythm on the armrest of the open window, Dave Macon clucking his banjo. The old boy too feeble to drive could still be moved by good music. Dave Macon used to play in the very building when he came to Sparta to play at the Spartan theater, now the Jubilee, in the 1940s. The building in that time was DC Bledsoe's Ford dealership. Local musicians jammed in the showroom with Uncle Dave and his musicians the afternoon before the show. A fruit jar went  the rounds and everybody got right for the concert. 

the carter family

Had a radio show on Saturday mornings of regional mountain music on the local AM station, until it was sold to a preacher who shut it down and left it. It was a bitter shame for Sparta to lose its station. Every Saturday morning I went to the station from ten to eleven and played mountain music from here in this county, surrounding counties and the Central Blue Ridge. Never had to play the same thing twice, but by choice. I searched for everything I could find from here by local musicians, tapes they made practicing, recordings. Local fiddler, Art Wooten, recorded 9 songs with Bill Monroe, played the first bluegrass song to be played on Grand Ole Opry, Mule Skinner Blues, in January, 1939, with Bill Monroe's band. He forever has the title, The First Bluegrass Fiddler. I often referred to the show as music from home. Art recorded, I think, eight songs with the Stanley Brothers and four with Flatt & Scruggs. Often I'd devote an hour to a given band or artist, an hour of Whitetop Mountain Band, an hour of Alternate Roots, an hour of Big Country Bluegrass. My purpose was to give the people of the county who love their own music a chance to hear it. The radio show was one of my many art forms. It was a creative expression as dj, making an hour of good mountain music to fill the listener's ears with joy. I had no idea how many people listened, who, or anything. I talked to a black microphone. It was my listener. It took a little time to learn how to talk to a black tennis ball as though it were conscious, like Hamlet talking to a skull. I went to Dudley Carpenter at first to teach me how to dj. He was a good teacher. He taught me how to do it right. I didn't want to do it right, but wanted to know how. I wanted to talk no more than to tell who made the music and song titles. Occasionally, I'd tell a little something, but my attention was on playing the music. 

the carter family

It was my favorite hour of the week. Eventually, I got the feel for people hearing it at home, driving, living their lives. I loved the Carter Family so much and knew my listeners loved them even more than I did, people of the same culture as the Carter Family, I could not talk during a Carter Family show. Everybody knew the titles, I didn't need to introduce any song. I sat with tears flowing down my face for an hour loving the music and happy my listeners were loving it too. My style as a dj was more NPR than commercial. I talked reasonably. Mountain people don't like to hear a lot of talk. They want to hear music. I played music. When it was the Stanley Brothers, tears ran down my face the whole hour. They are so of these mountains. The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley and Doc Watson are the voices the soul of the Southern Appalachians chose to sing through. These musicians, in my heart's way of hearing them, are of these mountains to the place they are these mountains. The only Christmas song I never tire of hearing is Ralph Stanley's Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. It tears me up every time I hear it. He can make you feel a gospel song in the heart. I had a good time sharing the beautiful music of these hills with the people whose music it was. I never imagined in earlier life I might one day be a dj playing mountain music on a local AM station in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Backwoods Beat Music Hour. I loved my listeners, even though I did not know who they were. Occasionally, in the grocery store or post office I'd fall into conversation with someone who told me they listen. I've met some wonderful people like that. The radio show was an expression of my love for the people of the county, a thank you for allowing me to live here in peace.        

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HILLBILLY HEAVEN

 

caterpillar lioness

 

I want to sit back with a movie and Caterpillar on my lap, but I want to do this more. Been waiting all day to be here. Didn't get to write yesterday from weariness after being up all night writing about the Wild Goose experience, which I felt was valuable, not just for the spiritual fellowship of the meeting, but the entire experience with Debi, who is valuable to my heart. She's a catbird in kitten britches. True as true is and she don't back down from nothin. A few years ago she was driving in Sparta, just left the traffic light in front of the courthouse. A man was walking across the street in front of her and he turned and made some smart remark to her about not slowing down soon enough. She laid a revolver on her arm resting on the open window and asked him to repeat what he said. He ran. Her life has been a struggle, the cause of the struggle being the men in her life. She's been into everything that could be got into, multiple times. Her heart embraces all the world around her. Such a big heart she doesn't know how to handle it, it gets trampled and beat down. She has something of a contentious personality, too, which is simply mountain. It gets her in trouble sometimes. She doesn't care. She'd say, I am who I am and I aint bein nothin else for nobody. You hear a lot of triple negatives in the mountains. I love it every time I hear one. Once I heard a quadruple negative. It's still in my head, heard it between 25 and 30 years ago. It was so beautiful I memorized it, can't find it right now, but it will rise to the surface in a day or two. The woman who said it was Eura Lee Phipps, wife of John Lee Phipps. Some people called them the Lees. Eura Lee sang in the Regular Baptist church, so fine a hillbilly voice it brings tears to remember it. One of the men would lead, most often Millard, the preacher, Debi's great uncle, who sang with the soul of Ralph Stanley. When he sang a gospel song, you felt its meaning. He and Eura Lee would lead the songs. He'd sing a line and she'd repeat it in her high hillbilly voice, all the way through. She'd sing a phrase after a phrase, sometimes a word after a word. Fourteen years I listened to Eura Lee's beautiful singing that was totally unselfconscious. She just sang the songs the way she sang them since she was little.
 

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

This is getting close to my heart right about now. People from the past I have loved in community and individually, the people of my heart. So many of them dead now. The very last of the old-time mountain people are dead. May be a few left in the nursing homes. A few are in their nineties, but their minds are largely gone. I had the great good fortune to know some of the most wonderful people of my life in these mountains. In my Charleston years I knew a lot of good people, but here in these mountains is where I found the home of my soul. Today at the doctor's office talking with the nurse taking blood pressure, whose husband is a bluegrass musician, and she's from Fries (pron: freeze), Virginia, we were talking about what fun it would be to go to sleep one night and wake up in Gloryland. I asked if she knew the Ralph Stanley song, Gloryland, knowing she did, and she did. We both had a moment of inner swoon hearing Ralph Stanley. Another version of Gloryland, by the Marshall Family. They own that song. It is totally theirs. I'm going to check YouTube, I already know it's there. It's in a cd in another room, but I don't want to go look for it. Found it on YouTube and now the whole front of my face is wet all the way down the chin. Just now wiped a tear off my chin. Wow. If you want to hear what I mean by hillbilly singing, the Marshall Family do it. They're from the mountains of central Pennsylvania and they do mountan singing right. That song tears me up. The visual with it was big clouds in natural cloud motion. My eyes were closed all the way through and tears of joy running. Hadn't heard that song in some years. There'll be no tears in Gloryland, the moon and sun won't shine, for Christ himself is light up there. There'll be no graves on that bright shore. It's of the Baptist tradition in the spirit of a church hymn. I think it was originally a black gospel song. It has that kind of soul. Ralph Stanley sang it too, and it don't get no better'n Ralph Stanley singin a gospel song.

home sweet home

Went to YouTube again and found Judy Marshall singing I Just Want To Thank You Lord, another Marshall Family song that tears me up. Simple song, soulful. When I was so down and out, you came along and made me want to shout. I just want to thank you, Lord, for always being there. Wow. I'm in the spirit. Eyes are running. Those are the two songs by the Marshall Family that I love with my whole heart, just like I love Caterpillar. It's taking me back to my Saturday morning radio show on local AM station WCOK. Seven years of playing music of the Central Blue Ridge an hour every Saturday. It was my favorite hour of the week, because I was playing what I called Music From Home, emphasis on musicians of this and surrounding counties, to the people of my county. It included gospel. Mountain people love their gospel music. And it's something to love. Emphasis was the Central Blue Ridge, and it included down into Georgia mountains with the Skillet Lickers, the Smokies and up into West Virginia and East Kentucky and  East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, Northwest NC. All hillbilly music. I gave my listeners some good jams. When I played the Carter Family, I couldn't talk for choking up. Just the mention of one of their names, all I had to do was say, "Sara," or "AP," or "Maybelle," and I'd choke up unable to talk. Long silences, not good on the air. None of their songs needed introduction or anything said. When I played an hour of Carter Family there was no talk, because I couldn't talk. I wept through the whole show from knowing how much my listeners were loving the music. The people of these hills LOVE the Carter Family. Playing the Stanley Brothers, I couldn't talk, and often playing Ralph Stanley. These were musicians I loved so much and knew all my listeners loved them even more than I did. I was saying to my listeners what I say to the mountain people in all my art forms: Your culture is valid and good. You are valid and good. When I write articles for the old-time music magazine, I am doing the same thing: your music is valid and good, you are valid and good. For five years I wrote a column in the local weekly paper. I wrote to the mountain people I live among and appreciate as much as I'm able to appreciate anything. My attitude was that I was writing specifically to the mountain people of this county. All others had permission to read if they wanted to.

stay away from important people

 

Writing that column was tremendous fun. When I wrote about somebody, it was always country people like I like being among, never any of the "important" people. My attitude was they get enough press. They don't need my attention too. Anyway, they're sure as hell not going to get it. I had the attitude before Jr Maxwell gave me the maxim, Stay away from important people. One night an elderly woman who believed herself Sparta Society, which I took for an oxymoron, she called me at home to tell me I needed to write more about the important people and less about these people who are nobodies. The next piece I wrote celebrated the janitor at the courthouse, told about his life, introduced him to the community, told about who he was, a friend of mine, humble old hillbilly, told the work he does. I concluded that the courthouse is the most important building in the county and Roy maintains that building, making him one of the more important men in the county. Roy couldn't read. One of the women in the Clerk of Court office read it to him with all of them standing around listening. Judges were talking to him after reading it and the lawyers spoke to him as if he were a man. The people around him celebrated him. Every day for a month afterward somebody would mention to him having seen it. It brought him a month of very positive attention and even gratitude for all that was taken for granted. The coffee pots in the break room always had fresh coffee in them. When they were low, suddenly they were full again. A few years later he didn't show up for work one morning. A deputy went to the house and found him in the bed, gone to Gloryland. The county had a plaque made in his memory for his service that hangs on the wall in the courthouse hallway. Somebody so unappreciated he was invisible. My work kept me in the courthouse every day for six years. I came to know Roy pretty well. The day any graffiti appeared on the men's or the women's rooms walls, it was gone same day. He kept the walls painted white, so all he had to do was go over it one time with the brush. Roy was a good man. I was grateful to that old woman for inspiring me to look for the most humble individual I knew. These, for me, are the people worthy of attention.

water in a white bucket

At the doctor's office I talked some with another nurse I know there, Julie, who was telling me about where she lives, just down the road and in sight of the little church I went to that is now closed and locked up, dust on the benches. They called them benches, not pews. Pews wouldn't sound right to the hillbilly ear. Sounds like you're trying to be up there with the big shots that talk perfect English. Any sign of uppity behavior was, and is, dealt with immediately by anybody nearby. Parents, friends, relatives, anybody you know or don't know. It's the culture. You don't act like you think you're somethin special. Sure as you do, you'll be shown right away you are not, whatever method it takes. Very strict code. My city background and college education are something of a wall between me and the working mountain people. It's a low wall now, easy to step over, no higher than a curb. To them, that puts me in the class of the people they work for. And teachers. First thing I have to do when I meet someone new of these hills is just show them by my behavior, the attention I pay to them when they talk, and laugh when they say something funny, kind of like in a secret society without saying it let them know I don't feel I'm better than anybody around me. I look up to them. I appreciate them. I am one of them, naturalized and in the heart. They learn I live by their code, appreciate them, love them, by asking around, You know this feller? What have you heard about him? What kind of a feller is he? Soon they'll find somebody who knows me and get the country equivalent of, he's cool, or, he's an arrogant piece of shit, or whatever suits the individual speaking. I've earned the trust of some hard core people, which I value as much as a medal of honor to wear around my neck. When I can earn the trust of people who don't give trust without years of experience (hillbillies), I feel like I have accomplished something important in the experience of being human. I've become that way about trust, too, and like it. It serves. Everyone I know has learned I don't talk about them behind their backs and don't tell their business. Took the car to my mechanic today. He went for a drive with it to get the feel of what I'd described to him. He keeps the radio on WPAQ in Mt Airy. They played an outa sight old-time fiddle tune, a great hillbilly fiddle tearing it up with banjo a-cluckin so good it made me listen close. It set me to flatfootin on the cement floor in the garage with nobody a-lookin.    

my blue ridge mountain home

 

 

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EVERYDAY LIFE AS SPIRITUAL PATH

michael heizer

My friend Carole and I were talking on the phone this morning, as we do every morning, and, as usual, we talked freely in a free-flowing way, whatever comes up. We have nothing to hide from one another, no hesitations about trust, and where our belief systems are concerned, she is the only one I know with mine, and I'm the only one she knows with hers. I believe I can say I know her higher self and she knows mine. I use higher self because it is even hard to find in oneself, let alone somebody else. Our spiritual interior lives are both educated from the East, India in particular. Yet India is only the present location of ancient wisdom that goes all the way back to Neolithic times. I point out that our higher selves look to the East, noting there is nothing in the West to look to for anything having to do with one's interior life, like wisdom. I once told a zealous fundamentalist baptist that I looked to the wisdom of the East, even had a guru. It was all over the place next day that I'm a devil worshipper. That's no big deal. Anybody who knows me, knows it's not so, and people that don't know me, I don't care. Just another anonymous name to gloat in self-righteousness over. I knew that would be next, and said it just to see. He was not somebody I have ever spoken to with anything near the word trust, a preacher's husband, and my respect for this guy is an empty bag. I do things like that to amuse myself when a moment arises. When my buddy Justin was in high school running with a rowdy bunch, more like a crowd, he told everybody to stay away from that old man at Air Bellows, "He'll shoot your ass! He don't care!" Justin didn't tell me what he'd done until a decade later. His dad and I were friends, and Justin had been my friend since he was his baby's age. He said he told them this to keep them from doing shit to me. He said, "I knew the shit they got into, I wanted to keep them away from you." I thanked him, sincerely. I knew the kind of shit they got into, too, though not from the inside like he did.

 

michael heizer

 

Carole and I agree daily that we like not having much future in this world. We tend away from the news and more toward the spiritual, meaning the spirit in everyday life, living in relation to the spirit, the flow of the spirit. Neither of us meditates or goes to workshops or anything to do with "spirituality" and certainly have no involvement with religion. She watches no tv and listens to NPR radio seldom, same as I do. She reads historical novels, mostly, from the library. Every couple weeks she takes home a stack of books. And she reads books having to do with Meher Baba, as do I. My reading is all over the place. I've been interested in contemporary fiction and art films from mainland China over the last decade or more, and the history of China. I like reading American, French and Chinese poetry, as well as American and world fiction. Poetry is the only source I've found in the West that concerns one's interior life, the life we really live. That started changing with the New Age period of the 1980s. I worked in bookstores from 1965 to 1975. Very little spiritual kinds of books were available. What was available was largely out of print and hard to find. Since 1975, spirituality has become a whole new genre of American writing. Some of it is nonsensical and some of it has very practical relevance. It's good to have the whole spectrum to pick from. At the time I fell in with Meher Baba, I was most interested in American poetry, the Twentieth Century, and for the first time realized poetry had been my source for spirituality through the time of the life I rejected all that. Brought up in the belief system of Kansas fundamentalism, which makes Southern fundamentalism look logical, I see the bozo Westboro preacher that died recently from Topeka is a good example of the fundamentalism I came up in. I left that mind like an arrow pulled all the way back as far as it can go and let go. I feel like my life in that time amounted to an arrow being held at full tension until the string almost broke with frustration, anger, confusion, depression, suppression. The arrow took off like a rocket and sent me as far away from that mind inside myself as the full strength of the bow could push it, full speed.  

 

michael heizer

 

The problem I had that I did not know I had in that time of brow-beating religion was not understanding yet that God and religion are about as equal as a flame and a rock. I was rejecting false religion believing it the nature of God. It was fifteen years of peeling away the onion layers of bullshit I'd been fed in the name of God. Getting down to the core of that kind of thinking, it comes from ego, not God. I had to wash my mind of about everything I'd been taught by way of religion, threw the baby out with the bath water. It all had to go. I needed to get myself down to neutral. About the time I had convinced myself to my own satisfaction "God is dead," I learned it is not God that's dead, but religion. Meher Baba taught me that in a very short time, a couple days. God is alive and well and very much active in our everyday lives. That's where God lives, in our everyday lives. Our everyday lives is what all the gospels are about, not wearing a tie to church. God takes a human voice and explains the real thing is in our hearts, our attitudes toward life, extending ourselves to the benefit of others. Not because it's God's commandment. It's simply sound counsel. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is as much a natural law as gravity. What we put out into the world comes back. Donkeys are the first example to come to mind. They return what they get right now, like cats and children. It is automatic behavior in all living beings to return what we receive immediately. You might say it's the nature of life. I feel like Jesus was saying, use this principle to make your life better, use it for a path to inner peace. Be conscious of words and behavior, mindful. Like Melvin told a friend who is on his way to prison, First one that disrespects you in any way, knock him on his ass. That tells everybody you'll fight and they'll leave you alone. In other words, you give back what you receive right now. It works the other way too. Regard others with inner peace, no hidden agendas, respect, and everything that comes back is of the same nature. If you want to be respected, respect the people around you in every interaction. Soon you'll live in a world full of respect and wonder what happened that changed everybody.

 

michael heizer

  

 I'm thinking about  friend I've not seen in a lot of years. She'd been hanging with an odd bunch of people that kept her on the verge of bonkers all the time. Something changed in her. She came to some new understandings of her relationship to the world around her. Friends started dropping away, so fast and so many she became a little bit hysterical. She was telling me about this on the phone, and I felt I had insight into what was happening, because I'd noticed in myself that when I change within, the people around me change, some fall away and new ones come in. I suggested she wait and see what happens. I said those old friends have to go with your old way of thinking; they're interwoven. With patience, you'll see new people coming in and new circumstances. It was the biggest change of her life. Right away, circumstances started changing for her and more reliable people came into her life. At the time, I wasn't sure that what worked for me would work for her too, but it was all I had to offer. I find in myself, I have cycles too. From one cycle to the next, a rather remarkable change occurs in that some people fall away and others come in. My cycles tend to seven years. In one cycle, I did the radio show at the local AM station of mountain music for seven years. In that time, about all my life had to do with the music in the area. Next cycle I started making videos at regional music venues for YouTube and writing articles about the music of the region for an old-time music magazine. Had the inspiration for the next one today. It won't be until October, giving plenty of time to consider how I want to approach it. I want to write about the Hillbilly Show, an annual event in Sparta for the last 20 years, this the 20th. Theme this year will be music of the county.  I will be the one making video of the whole show to put on dvd for sale to the people that want them. The one we've used in the past to make video of the show puts the equivalent of a cell phone on a tripod and lets it run. I will be doing some hand-held and tripod some, move around, different angles, lively images. Use the zoom. This cycle has about two more years. I went into this cycle curious to see if I'd make it through it. Made it this far.  

 

michael heizer

 

 

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SEVEN YEARS WITH MOUNTAIN MUSIC

      jr maxwell by tj worthington

Tonight I'm going to Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's cd release party at the Fiddle & Plow show in Woodlawn. The album is 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It will be a knock-out show. Steve Lewis will be there with guitar and banjo. Butch Robins will be there with banjo. Willard's rhythm guitar will be there. Probably Mike Gayheart playing bass, or Sandy, or both. I'm hoping Dori will be there. It's going to be some music in the real sense of the word as music. Yesterday I saw Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale dance a waltz in THE LEOPARD. It was a dance, not just moving their feet the way I "dance." This is the difference between music and music the way these guys make it. Their music itself is a dance. They pluck the strings with the same grace of Lancaster and Cardinale swirling over the floor. Their music flows. I'm not saying this makes them better than any others. Only that this is what draws me to be there every Friday night I can make it.

First time I listened to this project, I felt a wringing and twisting inside longing to play it on the Saturday morning radio show that went away when the station was sold out of the community. This is an album I know my listeners would love, and I would love playing it for them. It brings to mind the time I found a cd from a mid Sixties lp of a Galax bluegrass band, Larry Richardson And the Blue Ridge Boys. Buddy Pendleton plays fiddle. He is one of the great fiddlers of the region. Worked at the Floyd post office for 40 years. First time I heard the album was just a few weeks after the radio station shut down. My longing to play it for my listeners was so strong it hurt. I'd have played the whole album straight through. When I play it now it still pains me that I never had a chance to play it for the listeners. Those seven years of the radio show, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour, were part of a seven year cycle that were happy years, which doesn't mean without sorrow. In childhood I was afraid of sorrow, but have come to embrace sorrow the same as joy, a legitimate human emotion that has a hidden joy in it, like joy has a hidden sorrow in it, like light has darkness hidden in it and darkness has light hidden in it. On a scale where joy is at one end and sorrow at the other, I like to think I waver somewhere toward the middle, sometimes wavering all the way over to one side or the other. When I'm in joy I know it's short lived. In sorrow I know it's short lived too.

I have no way of guessing even close to accurately how many people listened to the show. Over the seven years about twenty people spoke to me in the grocery store, here and there, saying they listen. They were the faces I played the music to in my mind's eye. I didn't know if it was two hundred or twenty. It didn't matter. I think of times in the Regular Baptist church meetings when it was only two or three people, Millard Pruitt would quote a verse from the pulpit, when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst thereof. He preached the same as if the house were full and people standing. That made a lot of sense to me. It's not about bigness. It's about the thing itself. I've adopted that thinking for everything I do. In the beginning of this "blog" were three or four views a day. I was ok with that. I wasn't going to advertise. It wasn't about how many. It was about doing it. I wanted to make myself write something every day worth reading. If 3 people find it worth reading, I'm fully satisfied. After three years it's up to over 200 views per day. I am no more satisfied with 200 than with 2. Yet, I felt a mild sense of thrill when it passed 100, then again when it passed 200. It's a thrill because it was unexpected --- a hundred times 2. I don't know who they are except for a few who have contacted me. Now I love my readers like I loved my listeners to the radio show.

The first year with BROC and involved in the Hillbilly Show, Agnes wanted me to be a comic hillbilly mc. I did it one more time, but it was too unsettling having 800 people looking at me. I was not born for the stage. But I had a very strong feeling that all the people looking at me knew me and I only knew a few of them. It told me that perhaps most of the people in the audience have heard the show at least a few times. That's what unsettled me most. I was not prepared for an auditorium full of my listeners. Had no idea that many people listened, at least sometimes. The people in the audience listened when I spoke and I was not ready for that. Yet, it gave me a measure of my listeners and gave them faces. In the beginning, the black mic I spoke into at the radio station seemed as far as my voice went. I was talking to and playing music for the mic. Beyond that I had no clue. Then I stand in front of an auditorium of people and they know me. It blew my mind to smithereens and I did not know how to handle it. Practice night in front of empty seats was comfortable. When the seats had faces, that was another deal. I tend to see people as oceans of consciousness that are really complex from one individual to another. I get 800 oceans of consciousness looking at me like they know me and I'm too overwhelmed to be able to function. After two shows of being freaked out, I asked Agnes to let me pull the curtain ropes, involvement less the freakout.

In this seven year cycle I've been making videos of the music at the Fiddle & Plow to put on youtube, painting mountain musicians and writing here. These are my art forms in this cycle. Yes, I regarded the radio show an art form. I wasn't much at talking, so I kept it brief. Emphasis was totally on the music itself. There is no talking I could do that would be better to listen to than anything recorded in these hills. I'd rather my listeners groove to Gaither Carlton's banjo or fiddle than to put them through anything I'd say other than identifying musician and title, and to mention he was Doc Watson's father in law. I couldn't even do that playing the Carter Family. I love them so much that just mentioning their names choked me up. None of their songs need an introduction of title or anything. I'd play one after the other with tears of joy running down my face, knowing that everyone listening loved what they were hearing at least as much as I did. Carter Family songs have been played and recorded countless times, though I've never heard a version of one of their songs that reaches all the way into my heart like Sara, AP and Maybelle do. Sara's and AP's singing was entirely without emotive expression, like old time church singing, yet the emotion is so powerful that even screaming rockers can't get there. After hearing the Carter Family's Wildwood Flower, there is no other Wildwood Flower. And then there is Ralph and Carter Stanley. Legends of the Clinch Mountains.

This music, mountain music, makes me glad I am where I am every time I hear any of it. The more funky old-timey it is, the more I love it. Tommy Jarrell with his fretless banjo and his fiddle. Fred Cockerham with banjo and fiddle. One of the great albums of all time is Tommy and Fred picking banjo together. It's called Tommy and Fred. It was out of print for a long time. But I'd think by now it would be back in print. It's too good not to be available. And that was the motivation for opening the music store, an outlet for mountain music in the area. Floyd, Virginia, was the closest place. It was a great adventure. I met a lot of wonderful people. Met some new friends. Took up painting mountain musicians. Discovered Old-Time Herald magazine. Discovered a lot of incredible music. Sometimes I get called an expert, but I always remark that I am not an expert, just someone that loves the music. I've learned so much from mountain music and musicians that I can't imagine myself before the learning started. One of the great joys of my life has been playing mountain music to mountain people on an AM station in the mountains, the next county over from WPAQ, the ideal.

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MOUNTAIN RADIO

the little river boys of alleghany county, nc, c.1960
wiley maxwell, jr (b), cleve andrews (f), estal bedsaul (g), paul joines (g)



The radio show that folded last May has been in my mind today. It's not something I think about. When I wonder why, I realize a great deal of disappointment accompanies thoughts of the loss of that hour a week when mountain people of the county could hear their own music. The loss I feel has nothing to do with me being involved in it. I started the show because nobody else was doing it, and I believed it essential in a mountain county with an AM station that at least an hour a week go to local music, which is hailed all over the rest of the country as the Source.

At home, management pretended FM nucountry (rock&roll) in a county where the people wanting to hear the new Nashville (Motown) sound were listening to it on FM, not an AM station that can't be picked up very well and nowhere outside the county. The people that listened to the station did not like rock&roll, even if it was from Music City. It was a county specific station that over the last 20 years ran off its listeners, then the advertisers, with its only purpose being a tax writeoff. Everybody associated with the station had zero interest in mountain music. Before that time, WCOK played music to the people of the county, served the county as a center for information and had live mountain music on Saturday mornings, Jeff Michael, fiddle, vocal and songwriter for Big Country Bluegrass, the MC.

I dove in because nobody was playing local music on the station, which I believed was a natural necessity in a mountain town with its own AM station. I spoke with management. "Good idea," and went to Dudley Carpenter, fairly new here at the time from Washington DC, where his career was in broadcasting. He taught me how to operate a radio show. I'm of the belief that when I see something I believe needs doing, it's not right to suggest somebody else do it, but do it myself. I knew I had the love for the music to at least play good music. My own talking I found too boring, and I am not a folklorist. I knew my listeners, mountain people, didn't want to hear talk. They wanted to hear music. I identified every individual musician playing in whatever band, told where they were from and that was all the talk. Never let a song go by without identifying it, was my number one rule. It was from respect for the musicians. And respect for the listeners in that I didn't want to bore them. I wanted to keep it in the foreground that these people, the musicians, live all around us.

For me, personally, the part I loved most about the show was my listeners. Had very little feedback, but when it happened, it was real and it was the best. In mountain custom, you don't be flattering people--it goes to their head. The only thing I wanted from the show was that my listeners connect with the music and love it. I didn't care if there were 5 listeners or 500. I never imagined more than 3 people listening until it had been going about 5 years when I started finding out a relatively large number of people were hearing it and making it a point to listen every week. I sat in the station on Saturday mornings with my listeners. They came to life for me, and in some cases particular people, ones who had spoken to me in the grocery store or someplace about the music. I played their music to the people of the place I call the home of my soul. The musicians were friends, relatives and neighbors of the listeners.

The honor for me was that I had never dreamed I might one day play mountain music to mountain people on a local AM station in a Blue Ridge Mountain county adjoining WPAQ's county in NW NC. That was the greatest accomplishment of my lifetime, and I didn't even see it coming. At first, it was difficult to imagine anyone at the other end of the black mic I spoke into. As time went by, the listeners became my focal point. I knew when I spoke into the mic that at least certain people were listening. I spoke to them, the people in my mind's eye who had told me they listen, 20 or so, thereabouts. They loved the music too. I shed quite a lot of tears of joy in the studio playing songs I knew for a certainty the listeners were loving, like anything by Ralph Stanley, Stanley Brothers or Carter Family. These were the ones everybody loved like crazy. The Stanleys and Carters only lived a 3 hour drive from here in the Clinch Mountains of SW Virginia. In those years my respect for the music grew to adoration.

Toward the end of the seven years I found some music by the band in the picture above, which I never imagined I'd ever hear, and put them on a cd with some others of Jr Maxwell, Art Wooten and Wayne Henderson, had a hundred copies made to give to listeners, 23 by call-ins and the rest I gave out individually. Thought I'd do this once a year. Next year make one of Howard Joines, music found by him. Also had a dozen coffee mugs made for the radio show and gave them out on the air. These were gifts to my listeners in appreciation. Then, POOF, it all went away. For myself, it means I don't have to make it to the station every Saturday morning no matter what the weather or my own circumstances. The show must go on. I was relieved of that, which was not a problem. But I miss playing mountain music to the people of the county, and I feel sorrow they have no one playing their music to them. It's like that something-nothing they call Progress.





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MOUNTAIN MUSIC ON THE RADIO

Maybelle, AP and Sara, The Carter Family

This morning I played the cd made from Little River Boys and Green Mountain Boys downloads from Kilby Spencer. Started off with Art Wooten and Jr Maxwell playing Lee Highway Blues. Great fiddle tune every fiddler wants to play the best he can. It has a little trilling note in it some fiddlers do well and some don't even attempt. It's most often the older fiddlers that get it right. Art liked the notes way up high and every kind of difficult thing like that. Jr said there wasn't a note in a fiddle Art Wooten couldn't find. He said that of Earl Scruggs with the banjo. He once said of an Ashe County picker he respected, 'Th'aint more than 5 notes in a banjo that he cain't find.' I felt like Jr would assess himself at about the same place, within himself. If he were to say it out loud, it would be more like 10. His way of saying Larry Pennington was a great picker was to say when he walked into a fiddler's convention, the banjo pickers put their banjos in their cases and went home. Of course, that's not what they did, but it was the picture the exaggeration made that told in one image, like a cartoon, the feeling that went around the place. It's a comical way to say first place bluegrass banjo is took.

Accidentally played Jr's lead banjo doing John Hardy twice. That was ok. It was so good, I don't think anybody minded. Also got to play Jr's Home Sweet Home, his fiddler's convention winning song. The moment he crossed the threshold into his house after I'd liberated him from the nursing home, he said, "Home sweet home." And how he meant it. Home was where his life was. He was as bad a home-body as I am. He never cared about going anyplace. I don't either. I force myself to go places because I want to see my friends. When Jr was taking care of his tractor shop, he could see his friends and stay at home too. Whenever his car was down at the shop, the pickups and trucks would be stopping to visit with Jr. When somebody wanted free advice on how to fix their tractor, he'd say he'd have to see it before he could tell. I had a good time playing Jr for perhaps several people listening who knew him and appreciated his pickin again. Playing Art Wooten's fiddle and Jr Maxwell's banjo started my day off right. Every week it is an enjoyment to play this mountain music to my listeners, mountain people.

Today I stayed an extra hour and played music for the gospel hour. I went to the station's library of bluegrass and picked bands from our region to play. Bluegrass albums most often have at least 2 or 3 gospel songs. I picked out two that each had a gospel album, Black Diamond, a band out of around Princeton, West Virginia. And The Country Boys, a Mt Airy band. Played Doc Watson singing What A Friend We Have In Jesus. He freshened it up by singing it with a harmonica giving it the flavor of a Civil War ballad. It was probably heard many a time around a Civil War campfire, either side, sung probably not far from how Doc sang it. Found Jeff Michael singing one and Herb Key singing one with Elkville String Band. Without intending to, I found the gospel songs by bluegrass bands were plain, without production to attract attention. In all the ones I played, the gospel songs were sung in the simple Baptist way without decorations. Put in a couple of beauties by the Carter Family, Honey In The Rock and When Silver Threads Are Gold Again. What a beautiful song that is. It's not a "gospel" song, but it's a love song to such a degree that I consider it a gospel song, because it is written: God is love. Whoever wrote that song was an advanced poet. It's like a poem by the Indian poet, Tagore.

Hearing Sara's voice again was refreshing. Her voice is plain and sometimes almost monotone. Her voice does no emoting. It's as plain as a song sung in a Primitive Baptist meeting. Somehow, from somewhere she carries across the feeling in the song such that when I remember it, I recall the feeling, the depth of emotion. Sara's voice is calm and plain as if reading the news. Give a country singer the same song to do and it would be full of vocal emoting, attempting to get the feeling on the surface. Sara gets the feeling in the heart and lets the surface be the words, which carry the song's meaning. She was such a mountain singer; emotion is in the heart, not the voice. Plain delivery of just the words. Sara was essentially just telling the words. And at the same time, it's singing like hasn't been equalled since and never will be. The way she was singing was particular to her culture, which is no more. She sang Honey In The Rock like I've not heard anyone sing it but her. She makes no musical production, she just tells the words, which hold their own. It's like she's saying with a straight face, the truth needs no defense.

JD Higgins was the one I played first half and second half. He sings a good gospel song. Using My Bible For A Roadmap, a good old Reno & Smiley hit from early bluegrass time, and Life Is Like A Mountain Railroad. Had to finish with My Only Child, the tear-jerker of tear-jerkers. This one is legit. It's not like a sweater found on a grave. It was the sudden, accidental loss of his 26 year old daughter, his baby. In the song, he's talking to God, the kind of thing we've all done before, I thought we were friends, why did you let this happen? She was my only child. And then it comes to him that God got his heart broken too losing his only child. I can't hear it without tears, like James King's song, Echo Mountain, a song I have a hard time listening to any more. Because I know what's ahead, I agonize over the sorrow at the end from the beginning. It was only a drama the first time I heard it. From there on, it's an ongoing sorrow. A deep sorrow. When a man don't use good judgment, it's the innocent that pay. The cries on Echo Mountain still haunt me to this day. JD Higgins sings his song, My Only Child, at every show. I don't know how he does it. He probably doesn't know either.

Gospel Hour had a regional twist today. I like to play musicians and bands, emphasis on the human dimension. I like to play a selection of a few songs by some, and sometimes an hour of one artist. I always feature whoever it is, naming everyone in the band. Sue has been talking to me about doing my show for 2 hours. I like that, but I didn't want to run out Gospel Hour. I thought I'd keep it gospel and play as much as I can from around here and other places too. Mountain music is half gospel, so I may as well honor it as such and have a 2 hour show that plays the full range of mountain music. I like that. This can be fun. A new dimension. An hour of fiddle and banjo music, then an hour of mountain gospel. That sounds just about right. Not restrict it to the region, but let the region be the emphasis, the rule of thumb. Ralph Stanley and The Stanley Brothers. There is a lot of gospel that is extraordinarily beautiful from around here. I'll enjoy diving into the gospel music world. I think of the Marshall Family singing Glory Land, up there to die no more. Ralph Stanley does that song live at the Smithsonian, one of the finest bluegrass albums there is.

ONE YEAR

elizabeth laprelle--picture borrowed from old 97 wrecords
website. Thanks Steve.


This morning's radio show was a jam from start to finish. I even took it over into gospel hour after shutting out the news for good music. First half hour was Elizabeth LaPrelle from Rural Retreat, a girl still in her teens, 2 albums later, and sings old time mountain songs in a way that's real from the heart. Fiddle and banjo from the Durham old-time band, The Hush Puppies, accompany her on her albums. John Newlin plays the fiddle, an accomplished fiddler with a place of his own in North Carolina music. Amy Davis plays the banjo, and I tell you what, the woman can pick. She has a beautiful sound that is all her own. The Hush Puppies are a North Carolina band of excellent musicians who play very well together. Jim Lloyd plays guitar with LaPrelle. He's from over that way around Rural Retreat and I believe played with Brian Grim (fiddle) and Debbie Grim (banjo), made 2 albums as the Konnarock Critters, 2 excellent old-time albums. Lloyd has a new album of his own, which I'll be getting from County Sales soon. He's a terrific picker and sings a good song too. For more about LaPrelle on her label's website: http://www.old97wrecords.com/elizabeth-laprelle/index.htm


The music was jammin old-time all the way along. After the weather report on the half hour, I played Skeeter & the Skidmarks. That's Scott Freeman, mandolin, fiddle and vocals, Willard Gayheart, guitar and vocals, Edwin Lacy, banjo and vocals, Sandy Grover, bass and vocals. They made 2 albums that are out of print, Hubbin It and Alternate Roots. I played selections from Hubbin It today, not by design, it just happened that way. They made some jammin music too. Since their albums have been out of print for so long, Scott and Willard continue to hear of interest in the band. They've made a new Skeeter & the Skidmarks album that's due available any day. If I can remember, I'll give you a website where it's available. Probably CDBaby for sure. I don't yet know if they made their own label or if they're with the label in Bristol, Mountain Roads Recordings, that is doing Scott's fiddle album, also due any day. Whitetop Mountain Band and Big Country Bluegrass made their latest recordings with this label. http://www.mountainroadsrecordings.com/ Since Hay Holler label in Roanoke shut down, this one has come up in its place.


I only talk on the show to identify the songs and musicians, naming everyone in the bands, give the weather and a commercial. Since I've been writing the blog, my own voice opening up, I find I talk a time or two during the show, a little bit of information in story form. Like this morning I felt compelled after about the 4th song by LaPrelle, by which time it was perfectly obvious this girl could sing an old-time song, to tell an experience of talking with an old-time musician, one not from the mountains, old-hippie musician, a good one too. I mentioned Elizabeth LaPrelle and it pushed a button that got this old gal a-goin. She can't sing. She's no good. I can't stand her nasal voice. I sat listening to this woman, remembering the very first rule #1 every mountain musician learns at the start, you don't talk down about other musicians, ever. All the time she was on her harangue on LaPrelle, I was wondering if we were talking about the same person. We were. I imagined it had more behind it than she was letting on. My imagining is she had issues with the Hush Puppies, another old-time old hippie flatland band that maybe got more attention than her band. Probably not. I don't care.




Anyway, I felt like telling that story briefly, giving no clue to who it was, though I've never played any of her band--flatland, not mountain. Concluded saying I saw then how ugly it is for a musician to berate another. I find I like to talk a little bit now, a brief experience or something, whatever I feel compelled to say. Unless I feel compelled, I say nothing. I can't tolerate jabbering djs, We're Number One!!! They're the reason I never listen to commercial radio, unless it's WBRF in the evenings for bluegrass or WPAQ during the day when the weather is right and I'm in certain places. Can't get it at the house. Cell phones don't work here either. I'm really glad about that. A cell phone dead zone. It doesn't get any better than that.


The sun has set, we're in the gloaming, the light after sunset. Peepers have begun peeping. One is just outside the screen door. Several are nearby. Brings to mind a vocal piece I heard by Meredith Monk on YouTube. Forget its title. But I've never heard anything like it. It was using the human voice, 6 voices if I remember correctly, like crickets in a field, like peepers outside the door, several going from different distances and directions, none peeping in sync with any of the others, yet the whole chorus makes a music like composers John Cage and Toru Takemitsu could hear. I don't have to put on a cd, turn on the radio, use electricity in any way. Analog. If my blog were to have a theme song, it would be peepers as I'm hearing them now. Then there's katydids. When they get going I can't tell if they're outside or inside my head. It sounds like they're all in my head, like ringing ears. I can't tell the difference between ringing in the ears and katydids or whatever it is that makes the long extended notes. It's so much better to hear than sirens and honking horns, the sizzles of thousands of tires, jets arriving at and leaving the airport, mechanical noises by machines we've made for convenience that have made things so complex for us that the way we were before when we wanted conveniences turns out to be way we look to with nostalgia. Wasn't it better walking and riding horses? Evidently not. Everybody that had a choice went for the tv and recliner. Can't leave out the 4wheel drive SUV.


My Blue Ridge Mountain Home. That's the only song by Dolly Parton I really love. Now that the weather is good I want to go be with my mountain more. I'm wanting to put up a tent and stay the night among the trees. I don't want to leave Tapo and Caterpillar. I'd like to take them along, but the 2 of them in a small tent wouldn't do. They could tolerate it, because I would expect it of them, but they wouldn't like it. They can make it through the night. They did it for a few years while I was with Jr. That was hard on the cats for me to be gone so much of the time and for so long a time. It got the best of TarBaby. Caterpillar and Tapo are happy to have me with them round the clock and when I go out the door it will only be a few hours before I'm back. They like having me around. I like having them around. We know each other well, we're good company, and there is very real love between us. I'm not exaggerating or jesting when I say my house is full of love. Inside the walls of my home is love supreme. The safe place. Coyotes can't get the cats. The Alleghany News had a good cartoon this week of coyotes surrounding a house calling for the cat to come out, the cat's face in the window, eyes big and round. It's not an exaggeration. It's an illustration. An awful lot of people have lost cats and small dogs to coyotes.


Today is the one year point in the ongoing blog. Only missed 3 times, if I remember correctly; once because I forgot to, and twice on account of flu, feeling so miserable I couldn't even think. It started as a project to make myself write something every day. I've stuck with it a whole year, which is part of the project, to do it when I don't feel like doing it, to sit down and write when I have nothing to say and find in retrospect those were the times the best was said. The year has consisted of Jr's decline, death, and my grief. I committed and carried through all the way. It tells me about myself that I have what it takes to hold to a commitment to the unknown, whatever happens, to help someone I could not allow to live the end of his life a piece of lumber in the lumberyard for old people. It was a beautiful time, the very best of my life when it comes to doing something I feel in my heart is important. It was not easy to witness his decline unto death and find that my sorrow goes as deep as it does. There is no wanting him back into a skin-draped skeleton. It was time to go home. What I miss is Jr's company, the spirit that was Jr, the soul I have confidence still is.

LOCAL MUSIC

little river boys c1960


The new computer is up and going. It really was easy to get going, just that I didn't know what I was doing, so when I did the last thing, hook up the modem, it was on. Big surprise. I thought I had wire hell before. I was going for the simplicity of one small computer to replace a big 3-part computer that takes up a lot of space and has a lot of wires. Now I have all those wires plus these new ones. It's time to do something about my wiring situation. It's kind of 3rd world. However, I use very little at a time, only one of many plug-in possibilities. It's not as dangerous as it looks, but it still needs some help. The newness of the computer makes it much a mystery. Just about everything that can be done with it I don't know how to do. It might be a thousand room hotel, but I only have keys to about 2 of the rooms. The maximum I'll ever get may be a dozen. Now that it's together and I've an idea how to work it, I forget what it was like when I could only see it a dark swimming pool. Possibly the black rectangle of the closed laptop suggested the dark swimming pool image.



Lucas Pasley's talk Thursday night inspired me to play Alleghany music this morning on the radio. This time I was not playing straight through as I did all 4 volumes 4 times in a row. It took a great portion of last year, a couple shows per volume. 32 weeks in a row. That's a little over half a year. Everything else was on hold. I felt it was historically significant and even moreso for the present. It was finally a chance for the people of Alleghany to hear a good number of the musicians that have lived in this county. This is only the ones who have recorded in one way or another, sometimes cassettes, sometimes reel-to-reel, even a few cds. Played 17 songs in the 55 minutes. Started the show and ended it with Jr playing Billy In The Lowground. I broke down mentioning his name and somehow managed to get it said. It was a difficult moment. I spoke with myself before doing it about getting through it, pretend it's the first you've heard of the name. Nobody you've ever heard of. I thought I had myself convinced, then set out to do it, and I didn't hear a thing. I can't say his name without getting choked up. I reckon that's all right. It has to be. I played all the people Lucas talked about and several more. Started with Dave Sturgill picking Sourwood Mountain solo on old-time banjo. It was beautiful. It had a flow to it like water. I mixed up the banjos and the fiddles looking for a balance of the two, plus some singing.
Cliff Evans's There'll Come A Time Some Day sounded awfully good. Evans did his part. He recorded about every musician in the county who was alive in his time. Lucas Pasley has now put all of Cliff Evans's tapes on cds and catalogued them good with all the different musicians represented. Lucas called the collection of tapes not just a North Carolina treasure, but a national treasure. He said they belong in the Smithsonian. I'm with him all the way.



I'm listening to the rain. The door is open, 54 degrees, rainwater falling on rocks. Peepers peeping along Spring Lizard Creek that runs by the house. Caterpillar sits inside the screen door looking out into the darkness at the sounds of the rain. It must be soothing for her. She's been there almost an hour. The relationship between Tapo and Caterpillar is changing a little bit every day. They used to try to be out of sight of each other as much as possible. Now they are in sight of each other nearly all the time. Often, they're close to within touching distance. They don't look at each other the way they used to. It's a friendly look they give each other. I'm thinking they feel drawn to each other with TarBaby missing. They've witnessed all my histrionics of grief. It wasn't a good time for me to have another major loss. It's 2 weeks TarBaby has been gone and I'm still a mess.

I'm in a place where I'm dwelling perhaps too much on my loss. At the same time, it will pass. This is the time when 2 major habit patterns ceased. Both those habit patterns involved with extraordinary friends. Friends not just extraordinary for now, but for my whole life. It tells me I have grown into a place where my friends are treasures to me. And there aren't too many. On the other hand, there is a quite a large number. The number would change per definition of friend. I feel like somebody the bottom has dropped out for. I'm just taking it easy, not pressing myself for anything, giving myself all the time I need to recover. The hard part at this time of the life is to recover to what? I'm understanding the dilemma of old people. The world we had to get used to when we were young to jump into and figure out how to get going changed out from under us when we got it figured out. Not only does what we used to think we know turn out to be nonsense or at least dated, forgotten, not the case anymore, but it's gone forever too. This old body, tired, marked with pains, vulnerable to diseases, stands alone in a busy world, recognizes fewer faces every year, is less involved in what other people are doing every year, outside the circle of urgency where you're behind in whatever you're doing.

This computer is not yet set up to get photos directly from the camera, so I brought one over from facebook to put up here for today. Maybe tomorrow I'll be back in business getting pictures going. The above was painted 3 or 4 years ago. It was my favorite of all I'd done. I doubt I'll ever do another I like so much and put so much into. I wanted it to stay in the county, but didn't dare hope for too much. As it turns out, it lives in Whitehead on the same road Jr's old homeplace was on, just a few miles on. I painted it on a 5'x3' sheet of plywood I got from Milly Richardson, who had brought it from the barn to her place in town to use for a temporary table for a spread of papers to do with commissioner information. I took a great liking to it when she brought it in. By the time she was done with it, I was ready. Evidently 4 stacks of boards had stood on it long enough to stain the plywood into 4 vertical quarters. I saw a 4 piece band, each member in one of the quarters, like standing in a doorway. A kind of plebian Japanese screen. I thought of doing the Carter Family on it. 3 of the panels for them and the 4th for a poster telling of the Carter Family playing someplace, Sparta. But that didn't take hold of me. It didn't have what I wanted it to have. I can't give it a name, but I know it when I see it.



I found a picture of Jr with Cleve Andrews, Estal Bedsaul and Paul Joines taken after they'd been on stage at a show in Johnson City, Tennessee. Jr had no recollection of year or proximity. Going by the narrow ties, the haircuts, the lapels, considering those styles came to the country later than the city, and the streaks of toner on a b&w polaroid, one of those first polaroids, the kind with the bellows, I estimated it to be around 1960. Probably no sooner than 1959 and no later than 1961. Jr thought it was about that time they went to Johnson City. He didn't remember why they were there. I'm guessing it might have had something to do with the University's Appalachian studies program or something like that. I've never been a good guesser, so that's not it. Just a guess. It's a band I can just about hear by looking at them, knowing what I know about them. I know Jr's sound. Jr has pointed out fiddlers to me who sounded somewhat like Cleve Andrews on WBRF. I've heard Paul Joines's rhythm guitar playing. I'll have to assume Estal Bedsaul played a guitar that sounded like a guitar. A 4piece bluegrass band in that time and this place, you can be sure they were layin it to it. I expect they were well received by the audience.




It was in the time when universities were becoming aware of folk music, or the music of the working class, which has no place in society. The guys in the band would not have known that mountain music was of a little bit of interest to some universities and the interest was spreading. It was the time of the Kingston Trio, early Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, about the time Doc Watson was setting out on his tour of universities around the country with 3 musicians from Mountain City, Tennessee, Clarence Ashley, Fred Price and Clint Howard. A couple of guys from my high school in Wichita made an LP in that time of fratfolk, the cool guys in button down collars and trim haircuts, clean and good looking that sing well together. They were a big deal at the school, but beyond the school I don't think too many people heard of them. I have a feeling one of their parents had the means.



That was the time of the picture above, when that first little bit of mountain music was creeping out into the pop music world that got tired of frat pretty boys and wanted something closer to the real deal. It was a time when a whole lot was changing. It was in that time the folklorists were taking an interest, some field recordings made, the mountains becoming more interesting to people outside the mountains who had never thought of the mountains before they heard of the music. People like Alice Gerrard, Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Blanton Owen, and a lot of others were discovering mountain music in the mountains. It seemed kind of funny, city people interpreting mountain people more or less superficially, but made a good many recordings of the mountain people to carry back to the world of commerce. Jr and his musician friends were never of interest to the hippie folklorists of the 70s, because they played bluegrass. Most of the mountain musicians were apprehensive of long haired pot smokers flippant about God, draft dodgers in a place where military service is held the highest, and the women too free with their sex lives in a culture where those kinds of women were called whores. But they were responsible for getting an awful lot of mountain musicians recorded, people whose music we'd have never heard otherwise, like Sidna Shelton, Dan Tate, Bertie Dickens, Hus Caudill, Wood Blevins, to name only a very few.

NEW TALENT

crystal & justin - 17april10

It's the people we know that make us feel blessed or not blessed. Pictured here are 2 people I'm blessed to know. Justin I've known since he was 3. Crystal I've known since she married Justin. Crystal is developing her artist eye in this time in her new career as wedding etc photographer. We were talking this evening about how fast her artist eye is opening. She started making pictures with only the subject and in the middle with blank color or staged background. Just months later she is framing her pictures all the way to the corners. The whole rectangular image is what she works with, the subject in relation to surroundings. She's having a good time. Her images get more and more interesting to look at. Google Flash Back Studio Sparta and that should help get there. She's on facebook too.

The radio show this morning was good fun. Played from all 4 Alternate Roots albums, songs sung by Katy, Willard and Scott, good bluegrass with master musicianship and lively spirit. I talked more than usual today. Felt like saying a few things about the band. Sue left me alone the whole hour. One of the times the phone rang a man asked if I my show as on the air. I said, As far as I know it is. I then scanned the board to see if I had everything in order to have the music playing on air. I asked if he had the radio on. No. Didn't have it on. Ok. Yes. It's on today. That was an interesting exchange. A voice I didn't recognize, someone I don't know, who evidently is partial to the show. It always surprises me when somebody tells me they listen, especially somebody wanting to know about it in particular. I do it all for the black microphone. That's my audience, the only audience I know about for certain. Beyond it, I have no idea but for a few who have told me they listen every week. I have no way of making a guess I could have any confidence in when it comes to how many or who listens. I believe it's mountain people for the most part. Much of the music I play is accessible only to the mountain ear.

I don't expect anybody to listen to it, so I'm not disappointed when somebody doesn't listen. I don't want anybody listening to it who doesn't enjoy mountain music. I want no one to listen out of a sense of duty. It's the people listening I connect with every week. I like to be in the studio by myself without distraction to allow myself to flow with every song and choose the the next according to feeling from the last one and where I want to go from there with the next one. Like after several square dance tunes, a waltz or 2 or 3 carries the rhythm at a more relaxed pace. I've been told more people listen to it than I can imagine, but to me that means 7, one more than half a dozen, which is what I imagine.

It's late and I'm fading.

SATURDAY MORNING

phoenix mountain band

I just now gave myself a little bit of a laugh. I'd put on the cd of Paul Brown and Mike Seeger, Way Down In North Carolina. I like the energy of it. Good rhythm, but doesn't pull me to want to dance or play air banjo. Last night I listened to the field recorder collective cd of Fred Cockerham, which has some mighty fine banjo picking, fiddlin and singing on it. It has a similar energy to this one. Nearly all old-time music demands that I regard it only in the front of my mind. It won't take back seat. I suppose what I mean by the "energy" of this album and Fred's is the music can play in the back of the mind as well as in the front of the mind. I don't like to play anything that draws my attention to it when I'm writing you. But about every music draws me to it. Music that doesn't draw me to it I don't play. I may have to turn this off. It's pulling my attention as I was afraid it might. They're playing twin fiddles. Then Paul's banjo and Mike playing jaw harp. Both excellent musicians. On every tune they play different instrument combinations. Both love old-time and both play it as well as natives.

The radio show this morning was the Carter Family, the whole hour. Played the songs that are not the familiar standards most associated with the Carter Family; No More The Moon Shines On Lorena, Can't Feel At Home, Evening Bells Are Ringing, He Took A White Rose From Her Hair, Gathering Flowers From The Hillside. Another time I might play all the familiar Carter Family Songs. I tossed in a few today, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, East Virginia Blues, Keep On The Sunny Side, River of Jordan. Whenever there is an East Virginia Blues to be played, I'll play it. I love that song and don't know what it is about the song that takes hold of me like it does. One, I like the title. I like the beginning, I was born in East Virginia, to North Carolina I did roam. It's a narrative song. Good story, good melody, and everybody sings it well. I like the way Spencer Pennington sings it with Whitetop Mountain Band. It's more like he's telling his own story than singing a song.

I don't play the Carter Family enough. I have certain listeners who ask me to play more by them. I always intend to, it's just that over the last few years I'm tending more toward themes and individual bands or individuals, plus the months of playing the Alleghany musicians. They took up several months. I think I played through the set of 4 cds 3 times from start to finish. There are some gems among them. I've been asked to play more gospel songs, so I make it a point to get some or several in each show. Gospel hour follows my show. Sometimes I've thought I would like to dj the gospel hour too. That would be fun. It would be mountain gospel by bluegrass bands, old-time singing, Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley, old-time church singing. There is so much good mountain gospel I think I'd like to jump into that. I believe my listeners would like me doing with the gospel similar to what I'm doing with old-time and bluegrass. About every bluegrass album has several gospel songs on it.

I'd never dreamed I might dj a Saturday morning radio show of mountain music for mountain people. Never dreamed I'd dj anything. This came about because it wasn't happening. Alleghany was the only of surrounding counties that didn't have a Saturday morning show of regional music. It used to, before the 2 djs there for the last 18 years ran off the listeners, ran off the advertisers, and ran off with a great portion of the station's library. I was thinking the station needed such a show. When it started, I stepped into an environment at the station that had alienated the station from the county. In the time before, when Arnold Clodfelter and Judy Halsey worked the station, Jeff Michael hosted a show with live bands every week. Jeff could do that, because he knows all the musicians around.

I'm doing it because nobody was doing it and I believed it needed doing. I'm one who believes if I think something needs to be the case, then I'm then one who needs to see it through. I can't expect somebody else to carry out my own visions. I believed I could do it. In the beginning I didn't know history and lore of the music, but that was ok. The listeners didn't either and didn't want to know it. They only wanted the music. So I give them the music. Played 16 songs in the 50 minute hour today. I don't waste time talking. I despise jabbering djs. I'm no good at it, but I play good music and identify everything played. I believe it's important for dj to identify everything played.

I like to name all the musicians and tell where they live, when I know, like West Virginia, SW Virginia, E Kentucky, E Tennessee, NW NC. That egg-shaped region in the mountains called the Central Blue Ridge is the region I play. Sometimes I reach outside a little, like down into the Georgia mountains for the Skillet Lickers, who used to tour up and down these mountains and more than likely played at the Spartan theater. Uncle Dave Macon came from central Tennessee, like Lester Flatt and the Louvin Brothers. Uncle Dave played in Sparta for several years when he was touring the mountains.

I believed it was important that the people of the county have access to their music. It was ridiculous for a county in a region of the mountains that is a fountain of a music not to have access to it on the local AM station. WPAQ in MtAiry does a beautiful job of serving the community that loves mountain music. That's a lot of people. The mountain people have been good to me, allowed me to live among them, taught me the best of what I know. I say thank you with the radio show. My "give back."

MORE RALPH & CARTER

the stanley brothers

Up this morning with a cup of Kenyan coffee from the percolator, a nice coffee. I think of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, where she, a Danish woman, owned a coffee plantation. She was also a writer and wrote a beautiful account of her time there. TarBaby woke me up early and wouldn't let me get back to sleep, so I got up and read some more in the Ralph Stanley memoir. There's not a weak page in it, to my way of seeing.

Approaching the end and I don't like that. Thinking about starting over on first page again.

It is looking like Ralph talked into a recording device and this writer the publisher sent to him, Eddie Dean, put Ralph's words on paper. I came across some pages where Ralph is by himself on his bus at night unable to sleep, talking about the road, buying the big bus, having his own private quarters. He's sitting beside the window black with night telling stories from the past. It was during that part that I could see Ralph talking about his life to tell us, his fans about a life worth telling.

Ralph said of Carter that he talked about what he was going to do when he was well, up to the day before the day he died. He said Carter liked his life and thought it didn't get better than life on earth in his place and time. It brought Jr to mind; he was the same way. Up to the very end he would think about and talk about what he was going to do when he was better. Jr liked his life, didn't see anything to look forward to in the hereafter when it is fine here. It doesn't get better somewhere else. Both men loved to work. Jr loved sawmilling and tractor mechanicing. Carter loved performing and writing the songs, the band, riding the roads, like that's as good as it gets.

I wanted to play some more Stanley Brothers this morning. Last week I played early Stanley Brothers when they sang in a harmonizing way like the Blue Sky Boys. Later, the Primitive Baptist within came forward and they sounded more like the old way of singing. I wanted to continue that progression, play some more from the later years and then some from when Ralph went on his own. I wanted to span the period of time when Carter & Ralph transitioned to Ralph and see what he did with it. Ralph was apprehensive about taking on the up front singing role. He felt that was Carter's and his was tenor. On his own, Ralph brought singers in to sing lead and he sang tenor to them.

Larry Sparks was the first Carter replacement. Jimmy Martin was on that first album of Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. He sang half a dozen or so songs on it. Larry Sparks sang about that many and Ralph sang lead on several. What a band they had. Curly Ray Cline played fiddle and Melvin Goins rhythm guitar, both of the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, Goins from Surry County. Earl Taylor played mandolin with Jim McCall playing bass, both of them SW Virginia boys. McCall is one of the great guitar pickers of the time. He and Taylor were the foundation of their band the Stoney Mountain Boys. Art Wooten made music with them in and around 1953. They were a high-powered bluegrass band. This was 1967.

Played 11 songs by Stanley Brothers from the album, An Evening Long Ago, and from their later King recordings. Then 6 by Ralph Stanley in his first time out on his own. Ralph and Carter Stanley are the most beloved artists I play on the radio show. I believe I could play nothing but Stanley Brothers and Ralph Stanley and everyone would love it. Since I believe everyone listening is a Ralph Stanley fan, I wanted to get a feel for what he was doing musically in the time of Carter's passing when Ralph had to make perhaps the most difficult decision of his life.

I wanted to end the show today with a 5 minute singing of Amazing Grace by the Primitive Baptists at the Woodruff church house in Cherry Lane. Somebody recorded them and it's on a cd. I don't know how to tell you to get one. Maybe you can ask someone you know who is a Primitive Baptist. Well, it's beautiful. I took up the whole time of the show with the Stanley Brothers. But, Sue let me play it first song of the next hour, gospel hour. Oh, it was beautiful. They sang it so well.