MY TEACHER TOM PRUITT

grandma moses

 

Earlier today I sat with a notebook kept from seven months before the move to the mountains through the first five months in the mountains. I read a few pages, the first time visiting Tom Pruitt in his home, working with Bill Pruitt and getting to know him. It brought memories, but the writing was dull and boring. I have tried keeping notebooks and journals, over and over falling into the same ditch, until I see no point in writing to myself. It has never clicked for me. The writing starts boring and degenerates to brief notes and found quotations, fades out. I thought I'd try an online journal. I would be writing to myself, examining self, but some other people see it, so I can write to people besides myself to inspire writing to myself. You reading these writings give them life. I write much better for you than I do for myself, though I attempt to write to my own higher standard writing to you, more than I do for to self. I can't help but think I already know what I'm telling myself at some future date when I may see it or may not. It feels pointless down deep. When I do look back at it, I'm bored. The best the notebook does for me now is trigger memories. And that's a good thing. I like remembering my early experiences getting acquainted with people I would call my teachers in later years. The notebook helps remember forgotten details. I'd forgotten Bill told me about the hell his wife put him through over the last two years since their divorce.

 

grandma moses

 

I'd forgotten how radically different Tom Pruitt was from anyone I'd ever known or met. Maybe my grandfather's brother, Uncle Frank, was something like Tom, though I only knew Frank in childhood thinking he was an interesting character, but far, far away, another Age, another Time. I wanted to know him, but couldn't. People of his generation didn't talk to kids but to tell them what to do. And this kid, age ten, did not know how to talk to an eighty year old farmer. Whenever I was around him, which wasn't much, I watched him in curiosity from afar. Bib overalls and white hair. I never knew my grandfather Brink's family very well. They were Germans and his wife, my grandmother, did not like them. She said of grandpa's older brother, Herman, he was one of them mean Germans. I was afraid of them. They talked hard to kids, threatening, and the kids my age were feisty and mean. I just wanted to float down the river, like Hiawatha, supine in my canoe. I did not want to fight a bunch of third and fourth cousins I knew could kick my ass and laugh at me doing it. Tom Pruitt was as different as grandpa's brother, Frank, not as distant, though from a place as distant in time from the world I knew as Frank.

 

grandma moses

 

Tom could talk, liked having somebody to talk to who listened to him. Tom was not threatening in any way. He was more like a monk than anything else I can think of. He lived in solitude, could sit in his house days in a row all winter long looking at the wall, keeping the fire going, spitting into a Maxwell House instant coffee jar on the floor beside his chair. In my note about him, I mentioned he looked like he never washed. He wore khaki pants and long-sleeved shirt, and was in his stocking feet. They had holes in the toes. The room he lived in smelled of wood smoke and dried snuff powder. It was not an unpleasant aroma. Three calendars on different walls. None were the same year and none the same month. The most recent one had been there several years. He kept his .38 handgun in a shoulder holster hanging over his bedpost. He tucked it in his belt when he took it into the field after the bull reached a certain age. He said you can have a young bull that's tame and friendly, but after a certain age, you can never be sure about a bull. He told me several bull stories of his experience and people he's known. He carried his gun because no bull was going to run him down. He knew he did not have a chance against a bull without a weapon. His telling was instruction as well as recounting experience. He never steered me wrong in his instruction. Tom was a teacher I could count on.

 

grandma moses

 

He took me to a Regular Baptist church meeting one Saturday night after I'd been here a year, they meet Saturday night and Sunday morning once a month, to hear a preacher from West Virginia to be preaching that night. Over the course of a year he'd told me quite a lot about the church, their beliefs. He'd told me that when the Spirit enters the preacher, the whole house feels it. He said you feel a rush up your spine, you look around and you'll see everybody else felt it. That night, the West Virginia preacher couldn't make it. Four Union Baptist preachers were there, evidently to hear him. It was Tom's brother Millard's church,  Laurel Glenn. Two n's. A mistake that stuck. Four preachers got up, one at a time, talked, hopped about, pretending to be in the spirit, but not there. At the end, Millard stood up to dismiss everybody, talked some and the Spirit hit him. He took off like a rocket. I felt the rush up my spine, looked around and everybody else was feeling it. I noticed while the other preachers were talking, people all over the house were talking to each other in whispers. After the Spirit hit Millard, not a word was spoken by anyone else. Everyone's undivided attention was on what he was saying. The people in the church listen especially close when a preacher is in the Spirit. I went back the next morning, and continued to go back for the next fourteen years.

 

grandma moses herself

 

 

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PATTERNS OF CHANCE

four quartets: the universe

by tj worthington

This new project has been finished a couple days. Original intent was to see it sideways. It was ok, but I like vertical better. Original vision was vertical. Sideways, I liked how it looked like an open book. Vertically, I see a beaded curtain. I turned it often while applying the dots. Did not want to fall into patterns. This one was slow to take with me. I'd never done anything like this before. It was totally new to my experience. I've learned the material object does not always accord with the hologram vision in the head. The idea of it drew me to do it. Some ideas are best left to fade away, so I don't trust all my ideas. Some need to be tried before I see they don't work. And some do work. The finished piece tells me if the vision, itself, worked. I've noticed from writing about the recent projects, when I vary from the original vision, I usually return to it. It's helping me trust original vision more. All dots were applied consciously avoiding patterns. It's hardly chance, though the color arrangements in each line fell by chance. The dots were applied in a quarter section at a time. I wanted each quartet to have its own energy. In dim light across the room it looks like four pages of Chinese writing, white on black. I like the regular rows of colors arranged by apparent chance, like words on a page. If I were to go over a page of any writing in English and mark a color on every occurrence of the word the, the order of the markings would appear to be absence of order, though reading it, the words occur in perfect order.  Brings to mind a quotation from Henry Miller's, Big Sur, Confusion is an order which is not understood. I call it, The Universe, because we do not understand the universe, which has its order. We don't even understand ourselves, in which we have much order we're not aware of. 

cy twombly

I see in it a visualization of my view of the individual in the whole of humanity, or the whole of any group of people, herd of donkeys, school of fish, flock of birds. In winter, I see dozens of snowbirds pecking the seeds I throw on the ground. On first sight, the birds all look alike, slate-gray with white bellies. Watch awhile and one hops a little differently from the others, one has a wing that doesn't fold to its side just right, one has a lighter gray than the others, another has a darker gray. They vary in sizes. I go on watching and it's not long before I recognize a the same ones every day. Each one is uniquely individual. If I were small enough to see their faces, I'd see they have individual faces. Among themselves, each one is as radically unique as individual humans, like in a classroom at school, where all know each other, have their favorites and the ones they don't like. I see in the birds, too, they have individuals they're partial to and the ones they stay away from. I see in a herd of cows they have their friends they stay near much of the time and the ones they avoid. The cattle, like the birds, have no laws and they live in peace. Occasionally, two cows will have a disagreement and settle it however it suits them, a butting of heads or a head in the side, and that's it, a body language argument. We have perpetual war, but in most places on earth people are living in peace. In this county, we have peace. In the next counties, north, south, east and west, they live in peace. It is only in huge population centers where certain people are kept in poverty because their pigmentation is not acceptable in the world of business, gangs and gang wars occur. In the country, two guys get into it and they fight. After they fight, they're friends. 

alberto giacometti

In these almost daily writings, I see patterns running through them while each one is uniquely itself. I go into each one blank with no intentions or ideas. Start with one sentence, follow it with another, then another. Most often, after a few sentences, and in some cases several sentences, I see a line of thinking, then follow it to see where it goes. I learned from an old hillbilly preacher in the Regular Baptist church, to allow lines of thinking to come forward. In the old-time way of preaching, the man steps up to the pulpit with nothing in mind to say, an empty vessel, as they called it. Often, they'd apologize for having nothing to say, then it hit them and it was on. A strict part of the tradition is that the preacher go into his talking with nothing in mind to talk about, the spirit comes in and away he goes. I don't think of my writing as preaching in any way I look at it, though I like the process of allowing whatever is floating around inside rise to the surface and spell itself out. I start with what is in the front of my mind when I put down the first sentence. A flow of thought occurs and I follow it. I think of it as organic writing, a term coined by poet Denise Levertov, whose collected poems have recently been published. Organic in that it grows from inside itself. In the almost-daily writings, I'm recording the thoughts and experiences of one individual, in one place, in one time. It doesn't matter that it's me. I've cut out half the possible viewers by being so freely anti-republican politically. Republicans have become marionettes of the super-rich, power by money. I'm more inclined to honor the working class man and woman than the ruling class. I know how dispiriting working your ass off every day for very little return can be with no end in sight but death.

bill day

I used to have hopes about the fate of the working man and woman, but hope has long gone from my list of desires. I crossed the line from living with hope to living without hope after seeing the Civil War movie, Glory. Drove to Winston-Salem to see it. Friends I share movie interests with liked it. It tore me up more powerfully than almost any move has. I recall walking to my truck, then a crayola blue 78 Toyota pickup with a red door driver's side. I sat down and couldn't turn to key to start. Sat there, hands on steering wheel, unable to come down out of my head enough to drive. I told self with full meaning to give up hope, give it up now, be done with it permanently, prayed as much from the heart as ever to have hope removed from my life, meaning it enough to commit. I still have automatic hopes to some degree, but give them little attention. I watched the regiment of black men, all of them enlisted in the war motivated by belief they were helping their black brothers and sisters, wives and children, mothers and fathers. Intelligent people, uneducated, seeming naive. In the story, I saw black man in relation to white man. In my own case, it was working class man in relation to corporate man. In either case, the little man doesn't stand a chance. If I were to protest and demonstrate, I'd only get beat up by cops, hospitalized or killed. The black men in the regiment dreamed they could one day live a free life. In the end, they were all killed in a suicide attack, a lesser version of Gallipoli. The most symbolic moment of the film was one second long, a head exploding hit by a cannonball. The film exploded my head. I drove home in a new mind. Living it, I've come to see the illusion I suspected hope is, strongly enough to jump in and see. Result, mind calmed way down. Don't worry~Be happy.  

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A DEAD BATTERY AND HILLBILLY PREACHING

joel shapiro

The car is driving me wild. Dead battery again. I'm thinking I've found the source of the drain on the battery. I have thought it was the gps plugged into the lighter hole. But it was there for a long time not draining the battery. A few days ago I pulled a fuse thinking it might help the door latch that was locked up to operate; the door locks and interior lights work on this one fuse. The door latch started working again after the temperature rose above freezing. The battery was fine. I put the fuse back into its slot when the door latch started working. Dead battery. Whatever is draining the battery, I suspect, is in the realm of that one fuse. I can get along without interior lights and without door locks. The door locks annoy me anyway. The doors lock automatically when I take the transmission out of Park. I don't like that. If I need out of the car in a hurry, I don't want to be fooling around trying to get it unlocked first. I carry a small flashlight in a pocket. Around here, there is no need to lock a car, unless it's near Christmas and the car is full of boxes and bags in a parking lot at night. There is an old country saying that locks keep an honest man honest. They don't stop thieves with intent. I never keep anything in my car to tempt somebody walking by. When I leave camera in car, I bury it under papers, trash, a jacket, a hat. I pulled the fuse again today, this time to stay out, at least long enough to see if the battery will keep a charge without it. First thing I checked this morning was the water level in the battery. It was fine. Tomorrow morning, neighbor Allen will drive over and let me jump my car from his battery. Come to think of it, that won't work. He's borrowed an old Studebaker pickup from a friend for hauling in some firewood. His car is not here. So much for that. The Studebaker battery is probably a 6 volt, and mine is 12. I'll figure something out. The battery can't get any deader. Late afternoon, my friends Lucas and Judy will be arriving for a few days. Their car's battery will accord with mine.  

joel shapiro

If all my neighbors were country people, I could stop any car driving by. My neighbors are city people, Republican exurbanites. They don't like to be bothered. And I don't like to bother them. I'll work it out. The county changed after 1980 when the farms went away. The old people who kept their farms died out and the heirs divided the farm into lots, making subdivisions and a lot of money. Some sold the farms to Christmas tree growers. Much as I regretted the Bush-Cheney economy, it put a stop to suburbanites getting away from the enwords. They watch so much tv they think the enwords are lurking in every shadow to rob and kill them. They can't sell their houses in the city to pay for their mountain houses, and they can't sell a mountain house. Several of them have gone back to the city. It's rough on the contractors and carpenters and the town merchants who had begun to count on people coming in here from Away. They stopped coming and the town is now languishing, just short of plywood on the windows. It's not mine to wish it was one way or another. It's mine to go on about my life and let the world around me change as it will. It's mine to do, because that's how things are. I like it or don't like it is neither here nor there. What matters is that I have peace in my heart. I don't have a great deal of time left and am glad of it. My house is one of the last original houses in Air Bellows. Allen, my next door neighbor, lives in a little old farm house he's restored. Old man Tom Pruitt's house has been let go down since he died. The owner won't sell it and won't fix it up. It was twenty-four years ago he died. The house has been empty ever since with a poacher staying in it during hunting season until he stopped hunting. He hunted anywhere he pleased, on anybody's land, on Parkway land. The law knew about him, but never caught up with him. The beautiful old house, built a year or two after 1900, made of oak, now looks like a haunted house and is past restoration. 

joel shapiro

Yesterday, riding with Melvin on the way home from watching tv football at Justin's, we passed Laurel Glenn church, where I went regularly fourteen years and left twenty-three years ago. They locked the door and turned off the electricity twenty years ago. It was one of the beautiful mountain churches of an architecture so simple it had Japanese style. No steeple, no cross, a plain white wooden building with a silver tin roof. It had an outhouse among the trees out back. Seeing it go by in the foggy night, white in the darkness, I felt again my fondness for the building itself and what I know went on inside. I stopped one day to look in the windows. Everything was lined up like when it was living, covered in a film of dust. I loved that place in a deep heart-felt way. Much love energy flowed inside those walls and beautiful hillbilly singing. Originally, it was the church in the Glade Valley region the black farmers of the area went to. It was the black people, the Choates, who built the church in the 1920s. Their cemetery was the other side of what was then a dirt road. The door faced the cemetery, south, where it could be seen from the pulpit at the opposite wall. In the 1950s, white Regular Baptists bought it after the black population thinned out so much they had to shut the church door. Most white kids leave here after school. All black kids leave, with rare exceptions, the exceptions that prove the rule. And some kill themselves. The white people changed the door to a wall facing east where they put their own cemetery the other side of another dirt road. They built a pulpit area on the opposite wall and covered the old walls with wood paneling. The floors were pine with so many knots I sometimes thought of it as the night sky with stars. It never failed to amuse me when I thought about the little church with the most vehemently racist man I've ever known preaching in what used to be a nigger church. 

joel shapiro

In the old Regular Baptist way, the preacher was just a man like everybody else. No collection plate. He worked, had his own ways, beliefs, temperament. He did not have to be educated, not even able to read. The old-time preaching way works best with the least education. It's a matter of opening up to be "a vessel" for the Holy Spirit to flow through, a voice for the spirit to talk with. I found in all the different preachers I heard that education past sixth or seventh grade inhibited the freedom to open up and allow the spirit. Millard Pruitt, the preacher, grew up in old-man Tom's house up Waterfall road. He was Tom's youngest brother. I felt like they were each other's favorite brother. They were the last two to die out. Millard was a man braced against everything and everybody. He'd make me think of William Blake's line, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He was all about condemning, punishment, overseeing with the most judgmental eye I've known. And an ego that was outta sight. He had a loving heart, told me hundreds of stories from his life, stories of the people that lived in Air Bellows, Whitehead, the county. He was adamantine in every part of his mind, unyielding. It even embarrassed his wife how much he hated niggers. It bothered me for quite awhile until one day I realized I am not here to change him. I appreciated him as an intelligent man in many ways, a brilliant mind in a Sixteenth Century theology that goes back to medieval and perhaps neolithic. Would not entertain any notion that the earth was round. The Bible says it has four corners. I had never known anyone like Millard. I found him fascinating all the years I knew him. I respected his theology as John Milton's. I wasn't there to judge, but to learn what the old-time religion was like, to see what was there for my own spiritual path. He gave me the best education I could ask for. In the pulpit, Millard had a facility for receiving the spirit that made other preachers jealous. When the spirit o'ertook him, only love flowed on his voice. The only subject I ever heard him preach was love. This was my evidence that what was coming through had no part of his mind in it. It was such beautiful preaching I never allowed myself to make a tape of it. It was too spontaneous for the moment, for the moment only. 

joel shapiro

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ON ART

Sitting here with a blank screen looking at the stack of six wood blocks with a new arrangement of rocks balanced on top, enjoying the beauty of the finished wood. Thought popped up in mind that I put a lot of effort into those blocks of wood for nothing. The other side of my mind protested. Nothing? For not selling and getting my money back? Lord Have Mercy! It's one of those times I have to amend a thought, educate self about it. I did not give the blocks of wood three hours of sanding to sell them. I chose to do it because I wanted to see them smooth and polished, not to put a title and price tag on them. These are the two minds that kick-box in my head where making art objects is concerned. One mind is my self looking at it from aesthetic satisfaction the goal. The other mind is an authority figure from outside self saying: You're not doing it right. You need to make some money. I've given Mr Authority my ear because that's just how it is outside myself. I can't live entirely inside self. Don't even want to. Looking at the blocks of wood, mind got with self and said I'm tired of listening to Mr Authority, who is my own invention, anyway. He's a part of me. Alas, not that easy to turn off. I am so at odds with selling. This is what agents are good for. Also, I had something of an agent once who was selling things then told me to start painting pictures of "nigger kids playing around a schoolhouse, cause that's what people want." That was the end of our arrangement for me. I didn't even want to be associated with that kind of mind. It was the mind of authority from outside self about as extreme as it could be. It's right up there with the time I was asked to change a color in a painting to another color that will go with a couch and she'll buy it. The color stayed the same, she didn't buy it. I didn't want her having it after that experience.

 

Mind has struggled with self over the issue of art and money for so long I'm weary of it. Tolstoy dropped his copyright of his writings, gave them to the Russian people, could not take their money any more. His Mr Authority was his wife who unleashed hell on him for giving up his copyright. It was what the family lived on. Suddenly, they had appreciably less income. It drove Tolstoy nuts, the rage in his head between art and money. His last thing to do was to walk away from his Mr Authority. He walked to a train station and died in the station. He must have said to his self what I was saying to my self about the blocks, I'm of an age I don't have reason or justification to go on with the concern of trading art for money. I remember the old-time Regular baptist preachers, who believed their gift came from the Holy Spirit, said, "What's freely received must be freely given." They did not take money for their preaching. The meeting house was maintained by the members. Given that the Holy Spirit is within, I'm with them all the way. It was one of the first things I appreciated about them. I also appreciated that the meeting house had no steeple or cross. It was architecture so simple it looked Japanese. Wooden benches inside made by members of the church; trees cut, sawmilled, hand-sawed to needed dimensions and nailed together. A wood-burning stove in the middle of the room. I have the same feeling about the art spirit. It is a corruption of the spirit to bring money into it. Mr Authority says, you have to be practical, try to remember you live in this world and money is this world's blood flow. Been there done that. This thinking dampens my art spirit the same as a chamber of commerce meeting. Tolstoy made his decision to go with his spirit and walked away.  

 

What do I do? Make things and put them in storage? Give them away? That's a seeming solution. The hitch in this thinking is few people appreciate something they get for free. It has no value if it didn't cost something. Back to money. Back to this world. I've never found a compromise in myself. It's always been like this. I look at the artists who sell for hundreds of thousands and think, How do you paint something knowing it is going to sell for some wildly unreasonable price, you'll get maybe a quarter of it and even that amount is radically unreasonable? It is ambition that took them there. I don't have that kind of ambition. The art market world is antithetical to my interest. It snuffs out my spirit. Since I don't have storage facilities and can't give things away, maybe I'll just think about it and read Henry Miller. I love about writing in this blog that it is not about money. If money were its purpose, I could not be so free. An editor would be in the picture. Some are good, most are terrible. The worst was when the editor at the local paper declared one of my sentences too long and put a period in the middle of it. It was a perfectly clear sentence he made into two meaningless sentences. When I brought this up to him, he told me I was strange. I thought: Me strange? Take a look in a mirror if you want to see what strange looks like. I said, "Remember this: I am the strangest individual you will ever know." Then it comes to I need to be paid to put up with somebody rewriting in my name.

 

I'm seeing Swedish actor Max von Sydow's character in Woody Allen's film, Hannah and Her Sisters, artist husband of one of Hannah's sisters, Barbara Hershey. He's a grumpy old philosopher artist who threw a fit because a new rich rock star wanted colors to go with the décor. Old man von Sydow went into a rant saying he didn't sell his paintings by the yard and refused to deal with the guy further. I had a good laugh at myself. Thank you, Woody Allen. I said that's what I've become, a grumpy old bastard. What can an artist be but eccentric? What artist would want not to be eccentric? Eccentric means being who you are in a world of people acting like they think they're supposed to act according to the unwritten code adhered to better than any written law. Fashion correctness is overseen the same as political correctness. You don't have a tattoo? How uncool is that? You don't know what a croissant is? You never heard of Harry Partch? I sometimes hope what I've learned in this lifetime will carry over into next. Then I wonder what I've learned in this lifetime worth carrying over. Maybe what I've learned only matters for this lifetime. That's good enough. At least I learned whatever it was for this one. I feel like learning about Leo Tolstoy's life and his writings has been beneficial to this lifetime. Why want it to be more than that? It's ok for it to be important in itself. It's ok for my art forms to be important in the doing and the satisfaction or dissatisfaction upon completing the project. I don't want them to be anything other than important  in the doing. Like my friend, Caterpillar, who just now walked through on her way to the water bowl. She won't always be with me. I appreciate her all the more while she is.

sparta scenes

by tj worthington

 

 

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APPALACHIAN FOLKLORIST RAMBLE

the house tom pruitt lived in all his life

By way of some email correspondence with Sarah Bryan, editor of Old Time Herald, I began to see that we see an awful lot alike. She's a folklorist interested in traditional music and culture from the varieties of early American cultures unto today when it's homogenized by television and radio. Though I'd venture that if the corporate influence of pop culture were to wane, the traditional music would come forward again. It's not that traditional music is gone just because it's rarely on tv except for the RFD channel. I discovered by insight from correspondence with Sarah that I have been a folklorist the entire time I've lived in the mountains. I've not been going by folklore standards with tape recorders and making notes, reading books. I've got my knowledge of the old-time ways from people I have known, people I've listened to for hours telling me their lives. This recent article I wrote for Old Time Herald on bluegrass coming to the mountains, specifically Alleghany County and fiddler Howard Joines, is all from what is called first-hand information, from the people involved. First-hand is evidently the best source, though I wasn't so sure while trying to put things together from different people's memories of their experience. In the writing, I discovered a few times that I'd got conflicting information from different sources that actually cancelled each other. I left those kinds of ambiguities out of it.

It's like a time recently two different men I know were at odds with each other, both telling me the same story, each saying the other was lying. I was to make a decision as a result of what they'd told me. They cancelled each other out and I was left with nothing to go by for decision making. I just told myself, it's their problem, not mine. In the writing, I did not want to put in any inaccuracies. I'm sure there are some, because, like I said, it's first-hand information, subject to imperfect memory, and a culture that didn't think in left-brain ways of details and facts. In a picture I found of Junior Maxwell with his first bluegrass band, The Little River Boys, I could guess the date of the photo better by the clothes, ties, haircuts and the squeegee lines on a Fifties b&w polaroid print, than Junior could guess from memory. He remembered where it was taken, Johnson City, Tennessee, backstage at a bluegrass show, but he had no recollection of when. In the past. For Junior the past was nothing. Only the present mattered to him and the future; the future is where the present is going. He gave no importance to anything in the past. In that way he was not a good source for information about dates. He could remember plenty about making music with other musicians, how they played in their particular styles. It was from Junior I learned the principles mountain musicians live by.

I didn't know anybody in my first months in the mountains. I'd go to town to the laundromat, gas station, bank and grocery store, a stranger in a culture where people don't see anybody they don't know. In the laundromat people stared at me like I was a television. If I spoke to one, they continued to stare at me. It's perfectly natural to them; televisions speak, but you don't speak back. I wanted to know other people like me who came to the mountains from an urban environment, but there weren't many in the late 1970s, and the ones that were here from other places didn't want to know anybody from a city. They were like Americans in Europe; they only want to see natives, not Americans. So in London I meet an American and I'm regarded in the way, spoiling the view. My neighbor Tom Pruitt I visited regularly. He told me the story of his life over fourteen years. I first knew him when he was 72 and he died when he was 86. The odd part about Tom dying is that it seemed like Tom was immortal, would always be the same age and would never die. Then he did. His brother Millard, the Regular Baptist preacher, I knew also for 14 years. I heard him preach often and listened to the story of his life. They were beautiful stories. Both of them went to school in my house.

Going to a Regular Baptist church for fourteen years as an active member taught me a great deal about mountain old-time religion and a very great deal about mountain culture. I wanted to learn as much as I could about mountain culture, because it was the home I had chosen for myself. There was a time in the late 1980s I had the money to move away from here and go someplace where I could make a better living, get paid better and consequently have more living expenses someplace else. Here, we don't make much, but it doesn't (didn't used to) cost so much to live here, either. Like when you cut your own firewood, that saves a lot on the winter's heating bill. All it costs in money is chainsaw gas and gas for the truck hauling the wood from where I cut it someplace nearby to the house. Negligible expense. Good heat all winter. It is physically demanding hauling firewood in from the woodpile maybe three times a day, sometimes four, in every weather; snow, wind, ice, bitter cold. That's part of it. I wanted to live elemental, with the elements, with the cold of winter, the heat of summer, the rain, the snow, the wind, the storms, the sunshine, the sky. I never wanted my house air-tight. I wanted to live in a way that respected the ways the old-time people lived. I don't want to be too warm in winter. I want to feel the winter. I wanted to acclimatize myself to the weather as it is in the mountains, to exist with the weather instead of against it. I wanted to share that with the people of the old ways. I was from a different world and aimed to learn mountain culture, how to get around in it, be comfortable in it, be at home in it.

I've studied the ways of these mountains so long that it's become part of who I am. The culture of these mountains is my ongoing interest. I didn't want to read Appalachian studies books, though I know they'd be interesting, I wanted to get my knowledge from people who live in the culture so intimately they don't know it's a culture. Over 36 years in the mountains I have known several people to listen to at length learning the story of their lives and their philosophies of living in this world. I never made notes, never used a recording device, never wrote anything down of the hundreds of stories I have forgotten. I wanted to incorporate into myself what I learned from the people I knew. I wanted what I learned from them to seep into who I am and educate who I am to the beauty of mountain culture. I felt like making notes and writing about the people around me dampened what I learned from the different ones I knew, devalued it. It was only real when what was spoken to me was mine only. I didn't need to be writing about a culture I knew nothing about. It didn't feel right recording anybody talking or a preacher preaching. Plenty of people did put cassette recorders at the pulpit to record the sermons. For me, that took the spirit out of the encounter. I asked Junior Maxwell once if I could get him to answer questions on tape about fiddler Art Wooten. Nope. Don't even think about it.

I've lived my life in these mountains as a folklorist all the way along. I've been at it so long that folklorist has become my way of thinking. I never lose interest in anything to do with mountain culture. Still, I have not read books. My friend Cynthia is teaching an Appalachian Studies course and has several books that look really good, but they don't appeal to me. I want mine from the people themselves. I want to know the mountain people as my friends, as people I have heart connections with in real, honest ways. In vivo, not in vitro. Subjective, not objective. I came to the mountains on my spiritual path and have walked my path the entire time in these mountains among mountain people. I have learned the value of being who you are under all circumstances. I understand the value of not ratting on anyone for any reason. I understand the value of helping neighbors who need help. I understand the music well enough to write about it with some comprehension, able to pass my understanding to others new to the music. I've learned quite a lot from the people I've known over the last half of my life. It is in these mountains, the latter half of my life, that I have found love in my heart. All my associations with these mountains, the culture, the people, the music, are in a loving vein. It is in these mountains where God opened my heart and brought me to life. I'm grateful to all the mountain people I know for allowing me into their lives.

The bridge between us is respect. My respect for mountain people is automatic. I know the people and the culture well enough by now that I can't help but respect everyone I know and everybody new I meet. My respect allows me entrance to a world of people I find endlessly fascinating. I take the dark side with the light side and see them as one interwoven whole. I don't find somebody who has been in prison fifteen years any less valid a human being than somebody who goes to church regularly. We're all different kinds of people. In the mountains, people know that and receive everyone as who they are, not in relation to a standard of conformity that everybody is "supposed to" adhere to in order to be acceptable, except in some circles. In the mountains, that you exist is acceptable. If you are straight-on who you are, that is all the more acceptable. I was thinking earlier today how wonderful it is that the sweetness of the South is something nobody outside the South ever gets. In like manner, the sweetness of mountain culture is only known from the inside, cannot be seen from the outside. I'm grateful to God from the core of my heart for landing my parachute in Alleghany County. I know the sweetness of mountain culture well enough by now that I can't live without it. I have incorporated it into my soul, the place where I'm most happy I found mountain culture. I can't say my time here has been smooth and straight-ahead as Bonneville Salt Flats. I would never have wanted it to be. I love the hills. I love the winding curves in all the roads. Driving in the mountains has a good flow about it when you find the flow. It doesn't take long in years.


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