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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DONKEY JACK'S BIG ADVENTURE

jenny and jack

 

This morning I woke with the old-time song playing in my head, Rabbit In a Log, Arnold Spangler singing it with the Laurel Fork Travelers. There's a rabbit in a log and I aint got my dog. How will I get him, I know. I'll get me a briar and twist it in his hair. That's how I'll get him, I know. The song has been in my head all morning. I love it when a good song gets in my head and sticks around. Ralph Stanley and Jimmy Martin recorded together Rabbit In a Log in the late 1960s, Ralph's second album after Carter died. But Arnold Spangler owns the song. He does it the old hillbilly way playing his squawking fiddle and Melvin Felts clucking his banjo. Makes me wet-eyed just to remember them. Lord have mercy, how I love old-time hillbilly music. It's the only music I've heard in my life that makes me cry for the beauty in it. I wept all the way through a Ralph Stanley concert, start to finish, for the beauty in the music. I can't play Stanley Brothers or Ralph Stanley much, their singing is so in line with my vibration, or something, that I weep. Carter Family too. When I'd play Carter Family on the radio show, I couldn't talk between songs for weeping and choking up at the mention of the name of any one of the three. My eyes are damp now just thinking about them. I didn't need to say anything about the Carter Family to any of my listeners. All loved the Carter Family, knew a great many of their songs. Never had to introduce anything. Just let it play, the more songs the merrier. And I sat in the chair and wept. It was the same when I played the Stanley Brothers or Ralph. Baptist hymnals have a considerable number of songs attributed to AP Carter. AP was a severely nerdy mountain boy in the time before WW1, who never got into fights, didn't run with the boys, but took all day long walks along the railroad track singing. He had a tremor in his voice the other kids made fun of and he quit school to get away from them. It's the tremor in his voice that makes his vocals AP Carter's alone.  

 

 

jack

 

Their story is told in a wonderful biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?, told in such a way that when it's over you feel like these are people you have known. Somehow, it brings them to life. And a wonderful autobiography by Ralph Stanley, Man of Constant Sorrow. He took that old, old forgotten song, recorded it and it, too, was forgotten. Then that silly movie about hillbillies, O Brother, and Dan Tyminski's version of Man of Constant Sorrow made the song immensely popular. Then it was discovered that Ralph Stanley has been singing it all along. Ralph Stanley, in his old age, began to get attention and big royalties since the movie made his song so popular. A rock version of the song has been made by the Charm City Devils. They have a great hard-metal version of it on utube that makes me want to see them in concert so bad I may find a way to drive to Johnson City, Tennessee, Aug 26, to see them the closest they'll come to here. I'm ready for another concert. I need a good rock concert every now and again. Looks like a two to two and a half hour drive, same as to Charlotte, Roanoke or Greensboro, the places I have to go to for a concert anyway. But it is so great to drive less than twenty miles to see Ralph Stanley in a place where only hillbillies go, the people who love him in their hearts, and bring out the people homebound in wheelchairs, the people whose bodies are out of control twisted up in knots, strapped into a wheelchair, faces glowing with joy. And the people around them regard them the same as if they're ok. His voice is the voice of the soul of these mountains. He sings in the old Primitive Baptist style like Aretha Franklin sings in black gospel style. I'm not an autograph seeker, don't care about them, but I carried my copy of his book to a concert and asked him to sign it. Only his name. It is one of my book treasures that will not leave this house as long as I'm living. Loaned books never come back. I love that book from my soul. Books are too easy to find on amazon for me to be a lending library. Most recent one I loaned had with it the stipulation I really do want it back. I'll never see it again. It's gone forever. Nobody knows what happened to it. It just went poof, vanished into infinite space. I've found a used copy on amazon to replace it, but would prefer my own copy. The book, itself, doesn't matter as much as the trust that was broken. Trust has a way of not coming back when it's broken, like fine china. Glue doesn't fix it.

 

jenny and jack

 

Talking on the phone this morning with Carole, I saw Jack walk by the windows exploring my territory. I jumped off the phone in a hurry, picked up 4 carrots from refrigerator, went out the door calling to Jack. I did not know what to do. I thought carrot might be an attraction for him. Not. He was on an adventure. I followed him talking to him like I do, called him by name, keeping him knowing I'm behind him and aware of him. He was walking along my rock walkway to the parking lot for one, sniffing every rock. I let him take his time, have his adventure, hoping a car would not drive by and scare him. He was smelling my footprints, Caterpillar's and the possums that walk around here at night picking up bird feeder leavings. He was exploring my meadow he sees across the fence, knows it's the meadow I live in like I see the meadow he lives in. I walk into his meadow. Why not Jack walk into my meadow? I was a bit anxious, because a car always goes by when you don't want it to, even if only three cars go up the road in a day. I didn't want Jack to feel my anxiety. I wanted him to feel that I was walking with him, having a stroll. He sniffed his way along, pulled up some jewelweed and snacked on it, tried some grass, pulled up some plantain, chewed it some and spit it out. He was in a place he'd only seen from the fence. He was up close to the car he sees me ride by in. I honk at them when I drive by the meadow and holler out an open window, Donkey. Today was Jack's first experience with the car up close, to walk by it, smell it, smell the ground around it. He put a front hoof on the pavement and I thought, Oh no, let's not go walking on the road. The new surface, asphalt, his first time feeling it, he pulled his hoof back and would not step on it again.

 

jack

 

Jack made a turn toward the grass in the tracks that lead to the gate to the other meadow. I thought maybe he was heading that way. No. He turned around and walked back to the stone walkway with intent, walked past me holding a carrot, taking no interest. He walked back to the gate like he was in a hurry. He walked to the gate and it didn't move as easily as the other way. It spooked him. He walked a ways to the left and grazed in a jewelweed patch. I gave Jenny some carrot. I went through the gate, left it open and walked out into the meadow along their trail with Jenny following. Jack watched us go away into the distance. He stepped through the gate and came running, ran by us with a big smile on his face like he was having a great time. I gave carrots to Jenny, Jack came around for a carrot. Jack got too close, Jenny swung her ass end around on me, quick as a cat, and I hollered, Jen! She calmed down, I stepped out of her range and said, I'm going to my barn. They went at each other, slinging their heads around each other's necks, donkey martial arts sparring. They even raised their front legs high off the ground, standing on their back legs like pictures of rearing horses. It was beautiful. Their teeth were bared, they came down and Jack went into domination mode. Jenny ran, Jack behind her with his chin on her rump, her kicking him in the chest and neck, running. She came to a flat place by the creek and he ran up, took hold of the back of her neck and walked her where he wanted her to go. She broke free and he took hold of her again, took the fire right out of her. He let her go, they pretend tussled a short bit and both went to grazing. I replaced the baling twine I use to hold the gate closed. It was from last winter and is getting rotten, breaks easy. No problem. Easily replaced. I love the ratty old gate too much to put up another one. The wooden frame is all rotted, none of it would hold a nail, but the wire mesh holds it all together. It looks like it would fall apart from just touching it. I like about it that it's a soft gate, a gentle gate. It was old when I was new.  

 

jenny scratching on the gate

 

 

*

 

 

JACK STABLE RAMBLE

Much of the day I was making steps toward emptying a shed I'd built in 1977 out of boards from an old shed that had been torn down. Initially, it kept chickens for ten years. They nested in there and slept in the trees. One night when they slept in the shed a coon got in and killed a couple of them and they never slept in there again. They slept on a white pine branch close enough to the ground they could easily fly to it, but out of reach of night predators. Eventually, so many dogs came into the area that I couldn't keep chickens anymore. I liked to let them run free. I threw grain to them in the mornings and they pecked in the meadow for grasshoppers and every kind of bug they eat. I've kept scrap wood in the shed since the chickens. I'm a natural born junkyard man. I can't throw anything away unless there is nothing left that can be done with it. Over the years I've cut things out of plywood with a jigsaw, like a life-sized fiddler, a seven foot long guitar, things like that. I've kept the scraps. I have ten foot long one by ones, two twelve foot long dowels, a wooden barrel missing top and bottom. Posts of various sizes, blocks of wood. Two plywood circles 4 foot diameter and neighbor Tom Pruitt's mailbox with post. A few years after Tom died the road was paved. The bulldozer pushed the box and post out of the ground and treated it like trash. I brought it home. It's rusted really bad, has remains of paint in places and two bullet entry holes on one side and exit holes on the other side. I've aimed for years to plant it in the ground somewhere around the house for old-time memory. The post is old dry wood roughly nailed together. I call it found art.

 

 

Making the chicken house into a stable. Cutting out the wall that faces the meadow, making half of it an open doorway and the other half a wall about half way up, leaving the upper half open. It's a good size for two donkeys and a foal. I already know when Jack gets his Jeanette and they have a little donkey, I will be inseparable from the little one. It will be my pet from the start. It will be born in the same place my cats were born. It feels a little bit funny that in this time when I'm wrapping up this lifetime to suddenly have something I've wanted all my life, a donkey. It just came to me. Wanting a donkey was something it never occurred to me to tell anybody, because I believed it a hopeless urge like wanting a car I can't afford. And when I needed my old man car, the Toyota pickup burned up and died. I had the use of this 93 Buick that is an excellent car and two weeks later it became mine. Insurance money from the truck gave me the money to bring the Buick back to its potential after years of desperately needing a tuneup and taillights and a new headlight, new brakes, new tires. It took quite a bit to bring it back. Ever since that visit with the mechanic, it has run to my total satisfaction. It's 20 years old and doesn't use oil. It's a v-6 and evidently as classic a motor as the Chevy Nova slant six. Those Nova motors continue after the car has rusted away. They end up in Third World countries running pumps.

Much of the time driving I'll not listen to music because I like listening to the motor. It's running as close to perfectly as it can in the hands of a non-mechanic. My mechanic is like the guys on the NPR show Car Talk where people call in, tell their car's symptom and these master mechanics with advanced degrees from MIT answer to what the problem is, what it will take to fix it and a ballpark figure of what it will cost. Done in spontaneous Marx Brothers comedy. A few times when I've had something just a little off in the car, I could tell my mechanic (I say my because he is the only one I'll go to) what the car is doing and he goes straight to the problem. He doesn't half fix the car, either. When I drive out of his garage I feel the difference immediately. Chuck Billings is his name. He's in Glade Valley on Osborne Call Road. He's like a dentist, takes care of one appointment after another. I admire his knowledge in a big way. He's the kind of man you can trust as a true human being, too. He plays acoustic guitar with a hillbilly gospel band, Covered By The Blood. I love their name. It could also be a hard-core punk band or gangsta rappers. Musically, Chuck and I are in tune that the Stanley Brothers are the best there ever was, no two ways about it. Oh, I just felt this overwhelming longing to hear Carter Stanley sing. It brings tears just to think about him. Such a superb singer. Ralph Stanley tears up every audience at his shows when he recites The Hills of Home, his memory of Carter, growing up together, making music together. It's one of the wonderful hillbilly tear-jerkin talk songs. It leaves few dry eyes in the audience. To sit in a Ralph Stanley audience is to be among people who live by their hearts having a heart fest.

I'd put on some Stanley Brothers, but then I'd have to stop writing, sit back and listen. The music will do that to me. I can't do anything else and listen to the Stanley Brothers or Ralph Stanley. Even if I wanted to, I'd have a hard time turning off Thomas Mapfumo, whose band is playing now. He's from Zimbabwe. His band is the Blacks Unlimited. Dance club music. He sings in his home language. It's a flow like palm wine music and a lilting reggae, understated vocal, talk-singing. You can hear him on youtube if you're curious. I can listen to it because I can't understand the words. The vocals are the same as an instrument. This is dance music from Harare. It's a sinuous flow with interestingly complex rhythms. I sometimes wonder about how Mapfumo gets along these days. He was the rebel singer in Rhodesia when the blacks ran the white farmers out of the country and took over the farms. Robert Mugabe. The voice of the revolution, it's going to be a better world. Not. Mugabe has bled the country the same way the Banks are bleeding the American people, taking all to self. Mugabe loses every election and won't leave office. Zimbabwe is so incredibly depressed I can't help but wonder how much Mugabe hates the Zimbabwean people. He has 9 PhDs. Of course he deserves keeping the people in the worst kind of poverty. It's his privilege. He's smart. I wonder how Thomas Mapfumo comes to terms with himself for his part in the revolution. I can only imagine him disappointed. But his music hasn't suffered any. His music satisfies my ear like maybe Dvorjak quartets, like recent Bob Dylan projects. Very different music, but similar satisfaction in my ear. Music with a flow that obviously affects my thinking. It's been playing the whole time. I've tried to not get lost in the music, but it happened.

 

 

FEELING IS EVERYTHING

australian aboriginal art

Sometimes a picture I see in facebook or someplace else will be a problem for my visual interpretation. Just now I saw one of a white man in a black uniform pushing a corpse wrapped in white on a gurney into the back of an ambulance, at night, seen from the side, light source inside the ambulance, a red light. I had to look at it for a long time before I could see anything but an abstraction. I'm so used to seeing abstractions in art that when I can't make out the subjects in a photograph, it automatically looks like an abstraction of colors. Just before that I saw a thing on facebook of an animated woman turning on one foot like a dancer. If I'm right-brain dominant, I'll see her go clockwise. If I'm left brain dominant, she'll go counter-clockwise. First time I looked, she was going clockwise and I could not see her going the other way. I looked away at something and when I looked back, she was going counter-clockwise. Then I could get her to change direction by looking away and looking back at her. Evidently that means I've a fair balance of left brain / right brain. Under the twirling image was a list of what constitutes right brain and what constitutes left brain. I read them both. Right brain tends toward intuitive and left brain toward reason. I feel like it's true to say that I live by a fair balance of left and right brain. I imagine anyone who reads these writings more or less regularly can see it, and possibly it is your base reason for reading them.

alex katz

I'm recalling a conversation with a lawyer friend a few months ago when he said of somebody we were talking about, "That's not logical!" It stunned me to hear someone say that. In a nano-second I processed in my head, he's been a lawyer all his adult life, he knows humanity, and in his sixties believes logic has something to do with human behavior. I blurted out a little too much in my shock to hear it, "Logic? Logic only matters in math." We don't do no logic round here. It caused me to reflect that the only place I've seen logic apply in adult life is in court, or somebody deciding not to kill somebody for pissing him off, the logic of considering what's next. He spends his time in court where logic matters. I was looking at it from outside court where logic doesn't have much of a role, except maybe sometimes making a given decision when you have to weigh the odds. I found it interesting that logic was a given for him in his world, and barely anything at all in the world I live in. In my world, emotion still plays a large role in someone's life, people who live by the heart. It's when we live by the mind that logic becomes an issue. Urban living is more of the mind than country living. In the country we're not on the climb for more money and status, and we're more relaxed to live our lives completely illogically if we can get away with it. It's like the law takes care of logical thought for us and we do our best to stay out of trouble with the law. That takes care of our need for adherence to logic.

morris graves

I remember in my first years in the mountains being astonished by logic having little to no importance. They were still living by the heart when I went off to school and the urban work world where logic sometimes has value. What I'm getting at, it's been a long time since I've thought that way, the urban, college-educated way of using logic. I do, but I don't use the word. I've seen in the mountain people I live among the value of living by the heart. I felt I was heart-deficient when I came to the mountains, too much emphasis on mind, reason, logic. People who live by the heart are often guided by their emotions making a rollercoaster ride of everyday life. I was struck in the beginning years of observing mountain culture that emotion played such a leading role, even in tone of voice and rhythms of speech. I've talked with a very few old-timers who continued to talk in the emphatic every other syllable iamb like in Shakespeare, Elizabethan rhythms. Old-time fiddlers used to keep the rhythm while playing melody from the days when the fiddle was the only instrument for square dances, before banjo and guitar came along to take care of the rhythm. The iambic emphasis carried emotion very well, could be used for emphasis of emotion behind the content spoken. The oldest time old-timers I met years ago sounded like song when they talked.

plum tree japanese

I grew up in urban culture schooling where reason has come in to replace emotion as the next step in our collective development. In the mountains, I found that the people still valued emotion, didn't mind talking with hearty emotional emphasis. I loved hearing people talk with emotional emphasis. I had shut down emotion in myself in childhood, except of course, for anger. By mid thirties when I arrived in the mountains a year after engaging myself with the Divine Will, whatever that is, which I set to find out, my spiritual path was about opening my heart to love. My parachute landed me in a world of people who continue to live by heart, a subculture. Living among the mountain people I have found my heart among people not afraid to flare up in rage, get drunk and be stupid, fight, cuss, threaten, and on the other hand help, support, love, care for, look after with generosity of heart. Mountain men like to act like they're hard-hearted, but when their women leave them and take the kids, they break, they break all the way down, and many pop a cap in their heads to quiet their agony. From the outside, that looks kind of pathetic to be such a slave to emotion, but from the inside, from inside the culture, it's how a man feels. Jr Maxwell of Whitehead, banjo picker, welder, tractor mechanic, told me at the table over a dram of good mountain liquor with emphasis, "Feeling is everything."

christo

Mountain music is not music when it is not played from the heart. Almost every Saturday morning after my radio show on the local AM station of mountain music I'd stop by Jr's to visit with him for a few hours on the way home. I almost only played musicians of the mountains born in the mountains playing mountain music as it is played in this region, the Central Blue Ridge. That would be northwestern North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. It's a fountain of music all up and down the Appalachians, each region with it's own sound, or personality as I've come to see the differences. One Saturday morning I decided to play an old-time band from Durham that seemed to have a pretty good mountain sound. The fiddler played well, banjo too. Jr would usually tell me what he thought of the music I played that day. He leaned more to bluegrass than old-time and I leaned more toward old-time than bluegrass. It kept me reminded this was the case among my listeners too, people who liked both, so I didn't want to make one dominant over the other. After playing the Durham band he didn't say anything. I asked what he made of it. He said, "Weren't no music in it." I said, "I know," at that moment understanding for the first time after wondering for some years what he meant by the word music. Music comes from the heart. The urban old-time band from the flatland was playing from mind. I never played another band from outside the mountains on the radio show. It's not that their music is invalid, just that I called the show "music from home," from the heart. My listeners knew the difference too.

 

barnett newman

 

The evidence convincing me that mountain music is played from the heart, is that mountain music is the only music I've ever heard of any kind of music that can make me weep for the beauty of it. I have sat at the radio station, tears running down my face, unable to introduce songs or talk at all while playing the Carter Family or the Stanley Brothers. They bring up my tears I love their music so much. Sara Carter sings in as plain a voice as there ever was, yet her singing goes straight to the heart, because she is singing it from her own heart. It's the resonance of the heart that makes mountain music mountain specific. It is that something in mountain music the people from outside the mountains tend not to be able to put a finger on or even hear. By now, after half a century of television and more years than that of radio, of city people moving their culture to the mountains, that old thing about the music needing to be from the heart is not necessarily a rule anymore. Through school, television and work, reason, logical thinking has been coming to the mountains. Being cut off from the coastal cities until the age of technology, the mountains were slow to pick up the next step in our collective development, from emotion to reason. Our next step is intuition, which age we have already entered. Intuition somehow transcends reason and emotion, mixes them up in a special blend, shakes them good like a martini and serves a new way of tasting the ingredients. Feeling and reason work together, one balancing the other, letting go and allowing the flow.

robert ryman

 

 

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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.

STANLEY BROTHERS

stanley brothers & clinch mountain boys

fiddlin art wooten on left

This morning I stuffed all my Stanley Brothers cds in the library bag used for carrying radio station stuff, like the pair of glasses that are not my prescription, but so close it doesn't matter, for reading minuscule print on cd packages, and the cd with the theme song on it. I keep one of them at the station too for when I forget to bring the one I carry. The text of the commercial is in the bag too. I wanted to play Stanley Brothers because I am reading about them now, I love them and wanted to hear especially their early music, like first recordings not very many months after they started, with Leslie Kieth playing the fiddle and Art Wooten.

I was listening closely to their voices, what they were doing, singing in the style of a brother duet they especially liked, the Blue Sky Boys from around Lenoir. Smooth harmonizing. I saw them playing every night of the week in places all over these mountains, Bristol the hub they went out from in all directions, playing on stages in small town movie theaters, courtrooms, school auditoriums. From the start, the very start, they were getting audiences of 2-300 every night. They played what Ralph calls mountain music played a new way, and people all over these mountains took to it. It was hillbilly music, so much so it was not accessible to ears from outside these mountains. Like fiddler Marcus Martin in that way. It's just not enjoyable to any but a mountain ear. Occasionally, somebody from the flatland would appreciate it, but not enough to keep Carter and Ralph in contracts with record labels.

The only time a song of theirs made the Billboard charts was when How Far To Little Rock touched 17. They needed one more song to fill out the album they were in the studio recording in Cincinnati, 1960. It came to them to take their stage jokes and put them to this song they'd learned from an old banjo picker they knew when they were kids. Spontaneously made it up in the studio and recorded it. Here's Ralph talking about it, "Then, we thought it was really funny, because we'd just cut the joke song as a joke, which it was, and then the joke got us our only hit. Makes you wonder about the music business." Every time they tried to stretch beyond the mountains for audiences it never worked out. Bristol was their base. Their music was just right for the hillbilly ear and just wrong for the flatlander ear. There's not hardly enough hillbillies to generate a great deal of income for musicianers.

Over the hour of the program I heard the evolution of their voices from smooth harmonizing in The Girl Behind The Bar to the Primitive Baptist style Ralph continues to sooth our ears with, Carter singing East Virginia Blues. I say evolution, because the changes from one way to the other spanned 10 years of almost every night making music someplace out in the mountains. A little change here, a little change there. Let's tighten this up. Let's loosen that up. A little more emphasis, a little less emphasis. A lot of people say with conviction Carter Stanley is the best bluegrass singer there ever was. That's like saying Maybelle Carter is the best guitar picker there ever was. Maybe so, maybe not. I won't dispute it either way, though in my way a-hearin, Carter is the best there ever was. Ralph is too.

Barbara, one of my listeners, called during the show after I'd mentioned fiddler Art Wooten was from here. She hadn't known that. It tickled her when I said he lived in Twin Oaks when he died. He's in the Elk Creek Primitive Baptist cemetery on Hwy93 close to Farmer's Fish Camp Road. He played on Rambler's Blues and Molly And Tenbrook in 1948 on the Rich-R-Tone label. Art was every bit the hillbilly they were. He had the Primitive Baptist music in him too. I hear that old-time singing in bluegrass like I hear black Baptist church singing in Aretha Franklin. It seems like as Ralph Stanley has grown older his singing has reached further back into his original music such that he sometimes sounds like an old preacher, like Millard Pruitt. Millard, too, had a singing voice that was a gift and sang up out of the soul of these mountains. He was not the only one. These mountains have good singers all over them.

At the end of Carter singing East Virginia Blues it hit as a shock to my system to have to stop playing the music. Next the North Carolina News from NCNN. It felt like a knife stabbing a pillow. It does that to me every week. I play music to uplift the listeners, give them the good feeling of good music they only get to hear once a week, their own music, music from home. Then, Bam! A hammer on a brick. The News. The latest up-to-date murder and mayhem brought to you by real loud noise Ford Pickups, varoom, varoom. Crank up the chainsaw! Let's make some noise! Let's Partay! Yeah!

I replaced the cds in their cases while the symphony of hammers hitting steel crashed around in my cranium scrambling the eggs. It set Sue to complaining about what's wrong with the world. I put on my jacket saying, "It's the world." I thought of words from John Lennon in the song Revolution, "if you want to change the world, change your mind instead." My editor within recommended not saying it, a little too preachy, and she has to find it for herself, like I had to find it for myself. I walked out the door singing in my head, If you want to change the world, change your mind instead.