RETURN OF ALTERNATE ROOTS

 

alternate roots

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

 

alternate roots

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

 

katy taylor, tony testerman, willard gayheart

 

katy and tony

 

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

 

willard gayheart

 

willard  a-pickin and a-singin

 

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

 

katy a-pickin and a-grinnin

 

katy a-singin

 

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

 

scott freeman and mark freeman

 

scott and mark

 

 

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ALTERNATE ROOTS THE BAND

 

scott freeman and willard gayheart

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

 

scott freeman

 

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

 

willard gayheart

 

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

 

scott freeman

 

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

 

scott and willard between songs

 

 

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PICTURES OF MY WORLD

vada, 2

Day 7 of the blogathon asks for pictures of one's creative space. My creative space is my head and heart. I'll start with the heart. Above is baby Vada, the child I fell in love with the day she was born. Her mother painted a wall flat black and Vada practices her art there.

vada art, age 2yr 2wk

 





Vada drew this image sitting on the kitchen floor. Her mother asked her to draw a picture of TJ and this is what she did. She concentrated such that she never lifted her mind from the image until it was done. She was drawing from her mind. It makes a perfect mask. I could cut out eye holes and wear it for a mask if it were on thicker paper. But I wouldn't cut holes in it. You can see the eyes, nose, mouth and an ear. She filled in the whole face. It is framed now and hanging on my wall. Willard Gayheart framed it. I was tickled out of my mind to get something by her before she evolved into stick figures.

 

 

found art

 

found art

 

found art

 



Found art is a regular feature of my blog. At top is what was left after a bank changed locations and took down the old sign. They left the fluorescent bulbs turned on at night, making this fabulous piece of Dan Flavin art in Sparta. Sparta doesn't have much public art. So I appreciate it where I find it. In the middle is a huge pile of silage (ground corn stalks) for dairy cows. The mound of silage is covered with white tarp held in place by black circles. I see this once a week and love it every time I see it. At bottom is something found in the basement at Crystal and Justin's. Crystal had been spray painting something. While I was getting some pictures of it, she said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Found art." She said, "Oh my God!" (She said God a few notes higher than Oh my, Southern style.) These are examples of art I see everywhere.

 



steve lewis and josh scott

skeeter and the skidmarks

 

scott freeman

edwin lacy and willard gayheart

 

bobby patterson

the crooked road ramblers at the Jubilee in Sparta

 

Above are my artist friends. These are the artists I spend time with and call my friends. At top is Steve Lewis, Master bluegrass banjo and guitar picker, good story teller, and his step-son Josh Scott, who Steve raised as his own, who became his best friend and his bass player. The painting on the wall behind Steve is my portrait of Willard Gayheart, the guitar player with Skeeter and the Skidmarks. Willard is 81 and has been picking all his life. This means he's good. He plays rhythm so well the musicians of the region love to make music with Willard for his near-perfect rhythm. Willard doesn't strum. He hits an upper string and a lower string, individually, each lick. When he has Orange Blossom Special going on, it works him. The pencil drawings on the walls are his. The venue is his frame shop/gallery. Willard has been singing with a Galax bluegrass band, the Highlanders, over forty years. The ones living are all old guys now. Their fiddler, Buddy Pendleton, is one of the great ones. He's near gone now, I hear. Skeeter and the Skidmarks made two cds on Hay Holler label in the early 90s. Then Edwin Lacy, banjo, had to leave the area for several years, so Scott and Willard started a new band, Alternate Roots, an amazing bluegrass band. Steve Lewis played banjo in the band. They made 4 albums and the bass player had to leave the band. Alternate Roots disbanded, Edwin returned and Skeeter started back up. You can hear them on YouTube. I've made hundreds of music videos that are on YouTube. My name there is hobblealong1. The fiddle is Scott Freeman, who also plays mandolin. He is married to Willard's daughter, Jill, a good bluegrass singer who doesn't like the stage. That's Sandy Mason's head sticking up from behind Willard. She plays bass. Oh they have a good sound. Scott and Edwin composed several of the songs they recorded. The song they open shows with is one of Scott's compositions, Groundhog Shuffle. It is mandolin and banjo mayhem. They're putting together a new "project" now.           I put Bobby Patterson's picture in there because Bobby is important in my life. He has a music store in Woodawn, Virginia, and a recording studio in the basement. Old-Time Herald magazine was begun in his basement in the 1970s. Over the last 40 or more years he has recorded old-time bands of Southwestern Virginia, Heritage Records, and has a catalog that is out of this world for music of the region. He played guitar on the finest old-time album my ears have ever beheld, JUNE APPLE, with Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Kyle Creed on banjo and Audine Lineberry on bass. Jarrell and Creed have been dead at least thirty years. Both are legends and were legends while they were living. Bobby is one of the Highlanders and also sings with gospel groups. First time I met Bobby, we'd known OF each other for years, I said, "In my way of seeing, you're the most important man in Southwest Virginia." He said, "Thank you." He knew what I was saying. Thanks to Bobby we have a great collection of old-time music of this region on record and he puts together recordings of the Galax fiddlers convention every year. Plus, he's a terrific musician. His dad was a legend fiddler of his generation. Our bond is our dedication to the music.          At bottom is Kilby Spencer on fiddle with his band the Crooked Road Ramblers. Great fiddler, son of a great fiddler, Thornton Spencer, who is in his later years the great old fiddler of his generation. Thornton's wife Emily plays banjo and sings with their band, Whitetop Mountain Band. In my own personal estimation, WMB is the hottest old-time band in the region right now, and has been for years. They are most characterized by their drive and their musicianship. Kilby knows so many songs he's become a living encyclopedia of the music of the Central Blue Ridge. Kilby's aim in life is to be a great fiddler. He is well on his way and has a momentum going that will take him there. His band has good drive too.   

 



medea by tj worthington

on the side of the house approaching from parking space

donkey jack

 

Closer to home now. The painting above, Medea, I did something like 15-20 years ago. It doesn't leave the house. It is on my wall all the time. I don't put it up for sale because I don't want to lose it. Plus, I'm the one it's important to. I see it a stage with Medea in foreground planning what she has to do, pacing, the rock behind her a Greek rock mountain and the Greek archipelago, the night sky howling its horror seeing what Medea has in her mind. Below Medea is the a little sign I put on the house soon after I moved in. The first one rotted away with time. This is the second one. And here comes Donkey Jack. This is one of the first pictures I got of him. That's my friend Jack the saxophone player. I put hee-haw and braying out of my mind and I hear a saxophone. It is the same sound, low range tenor, a note John Coltrane might have found. The donkeys have been a great source of creative inspiration since they've arrived in my life. I thank God every day in my heart I've lived long enough to know donkeys.

 

 

 

found art

 

 

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IT'S SUCH A PERFECT YEAR

found art

Day 6 of blogathon concerns one's idea of a perfect year in art. I don't have a perfect year for art. I am not one for factory production, nor am I one for perfect. "Art" is not a career, a business, something I worry over and push myself to accomplish and keep on accomplishing. I don't put things in shows or competitions--have a little bit in the past, where I learned not to. I don't pursue galleries. In Sparta some artists who have moved here from other places have socialized into an artist co-op. I've been asked to join, but it's $40 a month and I don't have the money. I could volunteer a day a week and do it for $20. I still don't have the money. I don't want to anyway, but don't have the money, so it doesn't matter if I want to or not. Forty dollars was a tank of gas last year. I've been told in a snippy way by Ms Bizzibodi that it would be to my benefit to pay more attention to that bunch. One of those moments when she was talking with somebody in the coffee shop, time to put on her coat and go out the door, on the way it's, Oh, TJ, It would be to your benefit to pay more attention to these people. All I could think was, My? Benefit? Couldn't say anything, it was such an obvious bitch-slap. Satisfied she had her say, she wiggled her tochas out the door. One day I walked into their showroom and was met by another of them that starts with a B, "How long has it been since YOU'VE been in here!" I about turned and walked out the door, but said casually, "About a year." She said, "That's what I thought!" I said, "Then you'd be right." They talk down to me like that because they think I'm stuck up for not wanting to be a part of them. OK. I'm stuck up. I confess. Besides, I'm not necessarily drawn to company that only speaks to me in wisecracks. If I were to talk to them in the tone of voice they use to talk to me, their ass-ends would be hopping up and down like Donkey Jenny's looking for somebody to kick. Stuck up is the least they'd be saying about me. They'd call me stuck up for a compliment.  

 

jeff gordon pit stop

 

Long before these artists showed up from the Flatland suburbs, I'd found my artist friends in musicians. At least my first whole lotta years only a few other visual artists were here. We knew each other. I've found my need for the company of other artists in musicians. I fell into appreciation of mountain musicians for their art. Mountain music is an art form, an art form as pure as Chinese poetry, until recording and money got involved. The people that played the pure art form, fiddler Arnold Spangler, banjo Bertie Dickens, are long dead and gone, and everybody before them. Fiddlers conventions changed the music, recording changed the music, money changed it. I'm not saying it's better or worse now than it was a century ago, only different. The culture has changed. It's automatic that the music changes with the culture. I found in the musicians I became acquainted with some serious artists. Scott Freeman, who is around 40, has composed I can't imagine how many songs in the contemporary style mountain music is played. He's made at least ten cds, every one of them dynamite. His band Alternate Roots played music as art. His other band, Skeeter and the Skidmarks play music as art too. He and his musician friends do not draw attention to themselves, on or off stage. They just make music. Scott is a master mandolin player and fiddler. He's an artist. Back when I had the radio show, I made a cd for a show from every song Scott had recorded to then that he had composed. It had at least 16 songs, just the ones that he had recorded himself. It made a great radio show. I have found mountain music to be an art form I hold as high as any other art form and any other form of music. I have the same artistic respect for fiddler Pop Birchfield as for Jascha Heifitz. There is a kind of joke that goes around, what's the difference between a fiddle and a violin? The answer is, Whoever is playing it. Then I met Tim Smith, who is from this county, bluegrass fiddler with the Bluegrass Cardinals when younger, has played fiddle with several bluegrass bands and has done fiddle tracks on albums by about every bluegrass band recording. Several bluegrass albums of his own. He also plays classical. He teaches classical violin, and he teaches bluegrass fiddle. When Tim plays it, it's both violin and fiddle.

 

bill birchfield, son of pop birchfield

he made the fiddle

it sounds good too

 

Seems to me, this year is as perfect a year for art as I could ask. I mean I'm well into the flow of writing in the blog every day, such that it's become what I do. I usually keep something of visual art going. Have just finished the Sparta courthouse boxes. Have begun a Walt Whitman box. And I have another wooden box with a specific plan. It just needs the doing. It is a square box with a sliding lid. It was made to hold two bottles of George Dickel Tennessee whiskey. I don't know what it is unless it would be bourbon. I can't drink bourbon. Once my palate discovered "mountain spring water," nothing else satisfies. I'm looking at putting a mirror in the bottom of the box so it will be a mirror hanging on the wall, and in the front of the box vertical posts like prison bars. Slide open the lid and there you are behind bars. A surrealist toy. Fun. Today I attempted to paint Donkey Jack in a dark red with blue lines. It was a "sketch" toward something I'm wanting to do next. I'm wanting to find a way to paint Jack and Jenny simply, but it still has to look like them. I'm making pencil sketches of donkeys. The one today showed I'm not there yet. I did it for the experience of it. Next one will be closer to what I'm looking for and the next one closer than that. Donkey proportions are peculiar. Huge head in relation to the body, body like a barrel and thin legs. The big ears are another feature out of proportion. No matter how big I make them, I go back and make them bigger. It is the proportions that are giving me a fit. It doesn't seem like a head that big goes with the body. It is their huge jawbones that make their heads big. I want to make donkey images that are not Hee-Haw humor. An awful lot about donkey falls under slapstick. Might see about bringing out the humor in them, but not the cliché humor associated with donkeys. I want to somehow make them give the appearance of a rubber stamp in bright colors, all colors maybe. Wouldn't a black donkey with white belly and nose be fabulous on a field of just the right green. Blue donkeys, red donkeys, yellow donkeys. That's the direction I'm looking, colorful donkeys suggesting big rubber stamps--if I can get that. It may change before I get there. I'll let it roll and see where it goes. Did you ever see two kittens tear into each other and roll around on the floor like a wobbly bowling ball? Let it roll.

 

dale junior a-runnin his wheels off

 

I like these points in the daily prompts for each day's writing. I chose today not to go there, because it doesn't apply to me. And when I get right down to admitting what I'm seeing, it seems somewhat academic, though not meaning the standard association of the word, the reason I hesitate. The perfect year sounds too much like a church retreat question to answer in a circle of folding chairs. That's kind of vicious, and not how I mean it, but I think what this is getting at is not something that applies to me. If I were in the city and showing at a gallery, getting set for the next show, I'd have to set goals and so forth to keep myself going. At this time in the life, I don't realistically look too far into the future. I can entertain looking a year ahead. I look forward to Jenny's baby donkey a year away. I can look ahead to something like that realistically, but as for watching my baby friend, Vada, grow up, not practical to look forward to it. Don't feel sorry for me. This is the best time of my life. And given the direction our racist government is going, I don't want to live very far into police state with tanks in the city streets and troops everywhere. I cannot ask for better than what I have. Netflix keeps me in international films three and four times a week. For me, that's the same as heaven. If heaven turns out to be a movie theater with all international films, I'll be at home. I've never been one to look to the future. I figure I'll go on like I'm going now, writing daily and painting some. I'm hoping more frequently over the next year. The DCP group is so inspiring to me I'm looking at new things to do, new ways to approach what I do. I look at this coming year being one of figuring out how I want to paint donkeys by trying different approaches. I see what I want, it's just  matter of getting there. Without it being a goal (gaol) I'll let it roll like a ball of two cats on the floor and see where it goes.

    

the eyes of the blogger, by Cheyanne, age 6

(that's some serious eye bags--it's a new day)

 

 

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SKEETER & THE SKIDMARKS LIGHT UP THE NIGHT SKY

skeeter and the skidmarks

scott freeman, edwin lacy, sandy mason, willard gayheart

 

skeeter and the skidmarks

 

Friday night, Skeeter & the Skidmarks lit up the sky over Woodlawn VA with traditional music Skeeterized. Their music holds the audience's attention and doesn't let go. Sometimes I closed my eyes to hear better and the difference was radical. It's the best example I know for how sight limits hearing. I watch these four people whose music I've listened to long enough that I know all the words, hearing them make music, watching them pick and sing, wowed by every moment, happy to be in the presence of this music as good for the soul as laughing. I close my eyes and the quality of the sound I'm hearing increases what seems like immeasurably. I understand why Doc Watson had such a good ear for playing his guitar and banjo, why blind musicians seem to hear the music they are making more clearly than ones distracted by sight. I get into a grove with my eyes closed, sit flowing with the music, open my eyes and the music changes. Eyes closed, it is more like listening to a cd at home, relaxed, grooving to the sound. Eyes open, it's a bunch of people picking their instruments, it's even social in that I see I am among about forty people and know a lot of them. I might be looking at what Willard is doing with his guitar strings while Scott is tearing up his mandolin. I'll miss much of what Scott is doing because my focus is on Willard's strings. I pay attention to what Scott is doing and I lose what Edwin is doing. Sometimes I focus my attention on Sandy, because that's when I best hear what she's doing with the bass. Eyes closed, everybody's individual sound flows with the other sounds as a unit. I like the concert experience of eyes open awhile, closed awhile. To my ear, it is two different musical experiences in one. A quarter century ago at a Frank Sinatra concert, I was so drunk that I saw two of him through the entire show. I think of it as seeing Frank Sinatra twice.

 

scott and edwin

 

scott freeman

 

I think of Skeeter as the house band at the Fiddle and Plow series. This may be their seventh show there. Not complaining. For my satisfaction, they don't play enough. Several weeks ago, I had to miss a show that was Scott and Willard. Those are the best ones for my ear. I love to hear Scott and Willard pick and sing together. They've made music together for so many years, they move together as one. If I had a big wad of money, I'd want to produce a project by Scott and Willard, Live At The Front Porch, because it needs doing and nobody has done it yet. Like Skeeter, Scott and Willard's sound is their own. To them, it's like nothing because they're so used to it. To my listening ear it is dynamite. Soft dynamite. The kind that blows your mind and makes you happy. Skeeter started the show Friday night with Willard singing Silver Dew On The Bluegrass. It's a beautiful song and Willard brings it to life. Willard likes to take old songs from the 1920s and before, and make them his own. Drifting And Dreaming, I Love You Nelly, Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon, a Bob Wills song. Unfortunately, the audience takes Little Red Wagon for a children's song and discourage Willard from singing it. They laugh at me when I request it, and I think in turn the unspeakable. Scott sings some good Bob Wills songs too. Another of Willard's old songs I like to hear him sing is Nighttime In Nevada. Then there is The Yellow Rose of Texas, a song Skeeter and the Skidmarks made their own, Willard singing it.  

 

sandy and willard

 

dori freeman

  

Dori Freeman and David Long opened the show with some of the songs she is singing now. David played mandolin accompaniment to her singing that flowed well with her sound. I was struck again by Dori's new degree of control with her voice. Her singing has become more conscious after some years now of performance and practice. I've seen Dori's singing grow and it brings to mind watching my baby friend, Vada, grow. Both are doing something new each time I see them. This time, Dori's singing was on a whole new level. It is still her, still her voice. She's fine tuning it. She's paying very close attention to it the way a musician pays close attention to an instrument, finding the subtle nuances, listening. I was thinking of Carter Stanley, not that she sings like him; his voice played with its own sound like Dori is doing. This is the first time I've heard her sing since she has become a mother. Her music has improved immeasurably since she has been with David. She was good before, and gets better. By now, her singing commands the hearing of the audience. It always has, but now it's in awe. David playing a mandolin is in the zone we think of as "professional," meaning extra good, and Dori's singing has entered that zone. Together, they are working very well musically. It feels like their life together is making music. Dori has a baby, she has the man of her life. She is in double love now and soaring with her music. It is a good time in Dori's life. I'm happy for her. I was hoping she would bring the baby, but it's not a good idea to be hauling so new a baby around in the cold night air. Mothers know it better than I do.

 

david long and dori freeman

 

edwin lacy

 

Edwin Lacy, the banjo in Skeeter, has begun a new phase of his life, recently married to a woman named Roye. Edwin's demeanor has brightened up considerably. I don't mean he was hang-dog before, but I see in him a new light that tells me he is doing all right. I'm happy for Edwin, too. Edwin has a good woman and Roye has a good man. He was wearing a ball cap with a logo that said Wild Goose. It's the name of a new church idea he has arrived at on Tuesday evenings, rocking chairs instead of pews. People bring instruments and they make music. It's the other side of Hillsville, an hour and a half from home. I want to make the trip every week, but every Tuesday I don't want to drive for three hours at the end of the day. I'm even a little shy of driving two hours on a Friday night. This Friday night was one of those black nights that was opaque but for where headlights fell. I was not comfortable driving either way, going or coming home. Plus, I'm so paranoid about highway patrol now, I drive 45 in a 55 and use a turn signal even if there's not a car in sight. I don't like to drive anymore because of the paranoid feeling, esp in opaque darkness. This is new and I don't like it, but there it is. I had not seen Edwin in several months. I was glad to have a few minutes to talk with him before the show. Sandy too. Had a good visit with her before the show. Dori and David were asked to join the band opening the second half. Driving home, I did not play any music in the car, let my mind flow with a mix in my head of Lucinda Williams singing Ventura, and Dori singing Prairie Song. They flowed in and out of each other all the way home.  

 

dori freeman

 

dori and david with skeeter and the skidmarks

 

 

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ANDERSON, STRICKLAND, BARKER AND FREEMAN AT THE FIDDLE AND PLOW

scott freeman, spencer strickland, gerald anderson, butch barker

 

scott freeman, spencer strickland, gerald anderson, butch barker

 

 

Friday night at Willard Gayheart's Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn VA, five miles past Galax Walmart, behind Harmon's, is the Fiddle and Plow Show. After several years of listening to the music played at the Front Porch, I forget my initial attraction to the music, how much I loved Scott Freeman's music upon first hearing an Alternate Roots project. I have never grown weary of his music, rather appreciate it more every year. It's about the only music I hear anymore, except when I want to rock and put on something like the Clash or Garbage, or want to hear Schubert quartets or Thelonious Monk with Charlie Rouse, Straight No Chaser. If that were the only jazz album in my house, I'd be satisfied. It seems like I appreciate the Rolling Stones more as I get older, for their musicianship as much as for their music. Musicianship has always been important to my musical ear, but since discovering mountain music, in particular the music of Scott Freeman, Willard Gayheart, and the acoustic musicians of their world, SW Virginia and NW North Carolina, a high grade of musicianship has become my norm. Every week, bands or particular musicians are invited by Scott and Willard to play to an audience of most often less than twenty, though this show had an audience of about 45, full house. I'd missed at least the last six weeks of shows. Hearing the band brought me back like I'd been underwater too long, breaking the surface, inhaling the music of four mountain musicians whose musicianship is out there past what words can tell. Everybody who came through the door knew we were going to be hearing some music when these fellers set to jamming.  

 

scott freeman, spencer strickland, gerald anderson

 

scott freeman, spencer strickland

 

spencer strickland, gerald anderson

Gerald Anderson, Spencer Strickland and Butch Barker evidently play together as a band. Anderson and Strickland have been making music together quite a number of years. I heard Spencer Strickland at the Wayne Henderson Fest eight or nine years ago when he was in his late teens. I'd not seen him since, though had heard him on a few cds. He can tear up a mandolin. He and Scott played mandolins together on one song. They had a good time, something like kids playing catch. Scott played the fiddle mostly, and Strickland played the fiddle some, and Scott played mandolin some. Strickland could make the fiddle do its thing, too. He had a good touch with it. Good mandolin touch too. His picking and his fiddle have a lyrical lightness about them. I mean lightness like a chickadee, no weight, can cavort in the air like a swallow. He and Scott were enjoying making music together. Both are masters of the mandolin and both excellent fiddlers. It was visible they were tapped into each other musically, were flowing. They've known each other several years and flow very well together. It seemed like there was understanding between them throughout the show. No one-upmanship was going on. They made music together, flowed together with Anderson and Barker like a jazz quartet jazzing some traditional songs in their own style. Like in the be-bop period, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, jazzing Broadway standards, these guys jazz traditional tunes from another songbook.

 

gerald anderson

 

scott freeman

 

scott freeman

scott freeman, spencer strickland

 

Anderson is a noted luthier of the region. His mandolins are prized instruments to the musicians who play them. He makes a good guitar too. He is one of the mandolin players of the region in the same league as Scott and Spencer, also a guitar picker who can knock your sox off listening to what he can do with his guitar. So far I've stressed musicianship, which is an aside in relation to the music. The music is what they play. Their musicianship gives them a broad range of sound possibilities. Gerald Anderson played guitar at the Front Porch once before, accompanied by Scott and Willard. These are all musicians who play music first. The depth and breadth of their musicianship is what they play the music with. They are not musicians to show you all the tricks they can do, not at all. They show their musicianship by playing the songs about the best you ever heard them. They draw attention to the music, not themselves, in the mountain tradition. Butch Barker's bass was one of the instruments in the band. He kept the rhythm, but he also picked the bass in a way that made it all the more interesting to the ear. He played guitar in the Ashe County bluegrass band, Rock Bottom Bluegrass. They were good listening. The band is no more, and Butch is now playing bass with Anderson and Strickland. They make a musical team with their own sound. The show was a good welcome back for me after such a long string of circumstances that prevented going. The welcome back from the others who go almost every week was like family. Appreciation for this music is our bond.

 

butch barker, scott freeman

 

gerald anderson, butch barker

 

spencer strickland

butch barker

 

 

 

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