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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AN EVENING AT HOME WITH SCOTT FREEMAN'S BLUERIDGE FAR AWAY

scott freeman and willard gayheart

Another day of rest during which I refused to hear radio news or pay attention to internet news. Let it rest. I'm listening to Scott Freeman, mandolin, and Scott Manring, guitar, pick Sweet Georgia Brown. Manring's guitar is his own, a sound he created with his ear, something like a jazz guitar, strumming slow, high-pitched chords with Freeman's fast-paced mandolin picking. Then there is Willard Gayheart singing Don't You Dare Love Anyone But Me, Dori Freeman singing harmony with grandpa. Next, Willard solos a recent composition of his own, Turn Toward The Light. The song has depth and visual presence like all Willard's songs. He tends to write a short story in a song, like Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog, The Shootin, Robin D. In Turn Toward the Light, Willard records this song the first time. He has sung it getting to know it at the Friday night shows at Woodlawn  several times. It is a good worded song and has a nice flow in his singing of it. It has a beautiful feeling. It rings the wind chime of the heart.

dori freeman and her henderson guitar

Dori singing Twilight Time flows nicely with Scott's music. This song is associated with a music quite different from bluegrass or mountain music, generally. The music on the cd collection has the effect on the listener it has on stage. Dori in her early twenties onstage with a bluegrass band behind her starts singing a 40s style ballroom orchestra song. It works. It's right. A few songs later she covers Hank Williams' Cold Cold Heart. She makes it her own. At the Wayne Henderson fest one of the bands played it while Willard and I were talking. Our eyes met and he said it wasn't even close to what Dori does with the song. Not to inform me, but to speak out loud what we mutually agreed in our eye contact was so obvious there was no question. Hearing Willard and Dori singing Don't You Dare Love Anyone But Me, I recall seeing the joy it gives Willard to be singing and recording with his grandbaby. And Dori loves singing with Willard as much as he enjoys singing with her.

scott freeman fiddler

 

 

This collection of songs, Blueridge Far Away, is a sample of a Friday night in Woodlawn at The Fiddle & Plow show that Scott and Willard put on with special guest musicians every week from among some of the more interesting musicians of the Central Blue Ridge. Butch Robins plays the bluegrass banjo with his rolls from note to note making a flow line; Steve Lewis picks his guitar and banjo like an inspired wild man; Scott Manring makes electric jazz guitar sounds with his acoustic. David Johnson glides over ice on his Dobro, and Scott Freeman picks the mandolin free as a swallow flying in circles over a mountain lake, Willard and Dori pick rhythm guitar, and Scott plays fiddle. An instrumental amounts to a dynamo by musicians who complement each other racing side by side at 140mph. After four years of hearing these people make music almost every week, I know their sounds well enough that I know who is picking what on every song. I like that. Especially with these musicians. It is the sound, the vibration, the whatever, that is in Scott's and Willard's music that draws me to it. I've listened to a lot of music closely, and by this time in the life after hearing music of a wide variety, the sound of Scott and Willard's music is just right for what I like music to be.

willard and his new henderson guitar

For one thing, I regard both Scott and Willard artists. Dori is an artist. All these musicians are artists. Scott, Willard and Dori write songs and perform them with musical authority. All these musicians have what it takes to play in bands that travel in buses all the time, but prefer to live at home and have a life. Scott's musicianship, his picking articulation is clear and he gives his notes a ring. He finds the life in every note. He never strikes a dead note. Scott's singing is remarkable too. So is Willard's. They sing their own sound in the mountain tradition. Both have a musical affection for Western Swing. Both grew up listening to it at home. Willard's bluegrass band, the Highlanders, played Take Me Back To Tulsa and some others equally well. They have the spirit of the music in them. Scott is a good singer with a voice that he uses to deliver the words as articulately as he picks the mandolin strings. Dori's singing is clear and articulate. David Johnson's Dobro projects curls of cigarette smoke in the air. Willard's singing has the same quality of clarity and articulation. All three of them have the quality of singing from the heart. I can tell, because the heart is where I feel them.

scott freeman, willard gayheart, mike gayheart

Scott started this album, Blueridge Far Away, the same way I would start a radio show when featuring a musician or a band for the day's show. I'd start with an instrumental that gave examples of how everybody in the band could pick. From there, it's whatever comes next. Sweet Georgia Brown starts the album and lets the listener know these are musicians that deserve attention. The picking itself pulls my ear into the album from the start. Then, once he has the listener's attention, he turns it over to Willard to sing a couple songs. I felt like it was Scott's way of featuring Willard's incredible singing. Willard sings in the mountain tradition of drawing attention to the song, not the singer. His voice, like Scott's, pulls no attention to itself, no see-how-good-I-can-sing flourishes. The point for both of them is to deliver the song from the heart with their voices, all attention on the song. Scott's mandolin playing is an objet d'art itself. Banjo throughout that is a good part of the music but not dominant like top 40 bluegrass. Scott is a master musician with mandolin and fiddle, that includes vocals. You can hear music by him and everyone mentioned here by writing any one of their names in the search box at YouTube.

dori freeman and willard gayheart

The album is self-produced and recorded by GROUNDHOG SHUFFLE RECORDS, 2906 Cranberry Road, Woodlawn VA 24381. I've listened to this album like watching a movie; sit back and let it run from start to finish. It holds my attention as well as a movie. It's so much better than the news, I wonder why I'm slow to shift my attention away from the news. Steve Lewis picking guitar strings and banjo strings, Scott Freeman playing fiddle and mandolin. I missed Woodlawn last Friday night. Playing this cd brings Friday night at Woodlawn into my living room. This is the very music we hear on Fridays. I don't even tell anybody about it anymore. Too many times I've heard how do you get there? where is it? when is it? how much is it? and that's the end of it. Turns out when the subject comes up it amounts to an oral exam I'm given to no purpose, but filling up the silence with noise. I don't want too many people there anyway. It holds up to 50, though it's usually around 20 in the audience. When Wayne Henderson is there, it jumps up to 50, and I stay home. It's all people we never see otherwise, Easter Christians, who come out for THE BEST, the celebrity. And that's a good thing. It keeps them paying attention to mountain music, believing somebody is best. Everybody has their own reasons. In mountain music I stay away from calling any musician or band the best. It's like Billy the Kid, there's always a faster gun in the West. Or like 2-Pac in da Hood.  

willard gayheart laughing

 

 

 

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SCOTT FREEMAN ~ BLUERIDGE FAR AWAY

scott freeman and Willard gayheart

 

 

I'm hearing Scott's new self-produced cd, BLUERIDGE FAR AWAY, a collection of songs that have a vibe about them that doesn't jangle me out of my nervous system relaxed at home. I've got to where I tend to listen to old-time banjo solo by old-timers like Jont Blevins, Gaither Carlton, Kyle Creed, Fred Cockerham. Whenever I want to put on some music to have in the air, I pick up one of them over and over. This project of Scott's has that non-hysterical vibe I've come to like more and more as I drift deeper into simple living. In my mind's eye I can see the musicians like a concert, and am able to pick out who is playing by their styles of picking. This is the music I have listened to the most over the last four years. It satisfies my ear totally. This project was familiar before I heard it. This is what we hear on Friday nights. Just reading the song titles I heard the album. It is a perfect album to have in the air at home. Every note of the musicianship is stellar. Scott makes his mandolin sing as beautifully as Dori sings. And when it comes to singing, Scott himself is a good singer. His talent with the mandolin and fiddle dominate how Scott is taken musically, but his singing is right there with his picking. I've noticed along the way the fiddlers who sing are excellent singers. They tend to play the notes with their voices. Scott's voice has a full range he uses subtly. He seems to be singing just plain like AP Carter, but paid attention to, he uses his voice to play music as much as his mandolin and fiddle.

 

 

dori freeman

 

 

This project is like a sampler of what we hear on Friday nights at the Fiddle and Plow Show in Woodlawn, Virginia. Everyone Scott chose to accompany him has played more than once at the Friday night show. Willard sings three songs on the project. Willard, too, is a singer who can deliver a song with reverence for the song itself. Dori sings two of the songs and sings harmony with Willard, her grandpa. It gives Willard a thrill of his life that his grandbaby is making music with him and sings so beautifully; they do shows together, record together, make music together. A few years ago Dori wasn't interested in singing or being in the music world. Then she sang publicly a few times, immediately starting her fan base, which has grown every show she performs. She writes a good song too. Wayne Henderson, who has known Dori all her life, made her guitar. Last Thursday evening Dori and David Long, the man she'd been waiting for, who plays mandolin and guitar, sings and writes a good song, played music at the Sparta library with Scott. As always, when I see Dori perform, the audience's focus is on her, every minute. On sight it seems like an audience is automatically drawn to her. Then they hear her sing and they are with her to the last note, no coughing, no chattering. Ears wide open. Dori has a quality in her singing that makes the songs she sings her own. She's singing Twilight Time at this moment with Scott's mandolin. This song from another time Dori brought into her time.    

 



 

steve lewis

 

Steve picks guitar some on the project. Steve is a picker who wins guitar and banjo contests all over the country. He has won a good collection of guitars and banjos. He and Scott make music together as one. Steve's guitar artistry I think of in relation to Wayne Henderson's as the difference between Earl Scruggs and Don Reno. Both truly excellent pickers with very different personal styles. Steve and Scott like to stretch way out there with one foot outside the box. Scott and Steve picking David Grisman's Eat My Dust is pickin hot as it gets, and cool. Everything they pick together is hot and cool as it gets. Steve is picking banjo and guitar with Scott singing, playing fiddle and banjo, bluegrassing Curly Headed Baby like it wants to be bluegrassed. Scott announced on facebook a week or so ago that he, Steve and a handful of their musician friends were recorded recently in Boone for a future Prairie Home Companion radio show. His note indicated the band would be called The Bluegrass Boys. It's kind of an audacious name to call themselves, but they are up to it. Steve picked his banjo and guitar one-after-the-other on the tune King's Carolina Bill. David Johnson played some good Dobro licks and Scott ended it with mandolin like a yellow jacket in attack mode. Everybody in the band has played Friday nights in Woodlawn. They will make a musical statement on Prairie Home Companion. Scott now playing Sweet Georgia Brown on mandolin with Scott Manring on guitar. Amazing. I hear every time I listen to Scott's mandolin the subtleties in his touch, juxtaposing loud and soft notes in a kind of iambic way, though certainly not restricted to that. 

 

 

 

david long and scott freeman

 

I've become tired over the years of the "contest favorite" Sweet Georgia Brown, but when Scott Freeman and Scott Manring play it, it's music again. I've heard Willard sing Don't You Dare Love Anyone But Me so many times I know all the words. Willard takes songs from the past and revitalizes them, like Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon and Nighttime in Nevada. I especially like Willard singing his own songs, the songs he has written over the years. It's good to hear Steve Lewis's banjo again in Kings Carolina Bill. Scott's song Talking To The Wino is another one of Scott's soulful songs he puts one of on each of his projects. One was Jean Ritchie's song, Black Water, about coal production in West Virginia and east Kentucky mountains. He also sings a gospel song soulfully. The label for this project, BLUERDIGE FAR AWAY, is Groundhog Shuffle Records, 2906 Cranberry Road, Woodlawn VA 24381. After about a decade of knowing Scott and hearing multiple times every song he has ever recorded, by now the music of this album is a review of the music I have come to love since first hearing his then existing band Alternate Roots. I find I think of Willard with Scott together musically. Willard has been Scott's rhythm guitar and vocal accompanist, musical partner for at least a quarter century, about all of Scott's adult life. He also married Willard's daughter Jill. Something about the vibe of their music corresponds to my own vibration. I've listened to every kind of music and by this time in the life am happy to have found this music. Their music and I fit like puzzle pieces. This is what I share in common with the twenty or so regulars that go to Willard's frame shop on Friday nights to hear the Scott and Willard sound.

 

 

scott, willard and mike gayheart (son of Willard)

 

 

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FREEMAN & GAYHEART @ THE FIDDLE & PLOW

scott freeman, mike gayheart, willard gayheart

Last Friday night Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart played again at the Fiddle and Plow Show with Mike Gayheart playing bass. Scott and Willard open every week's show with two songs, then turn it over to the guest musicians. This night it was Scott and Willard the whole show with Mike playing bass. I had a kinda feeling the show might be Scott and Willard. They play a whole show every few months. For my listening pleasure, the best shows are when it is Scott and Willard. They have made so much music together, they play as one. Willard likes old songs from the 1920s, 1930s and older. One of my very favorite songs he sings is Coney Island Washboard, which he says came from around the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He sings a pop song from the 20s, Drifting and Dreaming, which he makes into a beautiful folk song. He started the show with Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon, the Bob Wills Texas swing song that Willard turned into another beautiful folk song. Scott sings a Bob Wills and Hank Williams song, Roly Poly, which he makes his own, like he does every song he arranges to his own style. Scott played his instrumental, Dori's Waltz, on the mandolin exquisitely like every time he plays it.


I like it that Scott and Willard are not known outside their region, the Central Blue Ridge, and they're not big stars. They're known among musicians of the Central Blue Ridge as very respectable musicians, but they've never sought fame and fortune. They like living at home. They don't like to play anyplace so far from home they can't be back to sleep in their own beds. It's on the borderline of unbelievable to me that in someplace like the coffee shop I can mention Scott or Willard's name and I get, "Who?" Then I explain. Response: "Oh." Though if I were to say "Wayne Henderson," it's suddenly animated, "Yeah, I've heard of Wayne Henderson. He's the BEST!" He is awfully good and he does tend to win Galax almost every other year, telling me he has a few unknown equals lurking about, Scott Fore one of them. Leaving off such exaggerations as best and worst, Scott and Willard are in Wayne's league when it comes to making music, and I'd put Wayne next to Doc Watson as a picker. Wayne has played at the Fiddle and Plow Show three or four times. A few weeks ago he was in the audience when Dori Freeman was the guest performer, accompanied by Scott and Willard. Willard invited him to pick a couple tunes with them. Scott, Willard and Dori were all playing Henderson instruments. Musicians love to play his guitars; owning one is more important to a picker than a Martin.

helen white & wayne henderson at fiddle and plow

 

 

Scott has been recording a new project that should be available on cd in a month or so. Its title will be BLUE RIDGE FAR AWAY. It will have some of his musical allies with him, like Willard on guitar, Edwin Lacy old-time banjo, Steve Lewis bluegrass banjo and guitar forward motion, and I think he said Scott Manring will pick some guitar, and Dori will sing one. Scott always puts together a fine album, cd, project.  Very fine. He's a master on a mandolin and close to the same degree on the fiddle. He picks a guitar too. Then there's the part I tend to overlook, Scott's vocals. Scott is a good singer. No two ways about it. He doesn't sing with flash or bellering; he tells the words to the song as articulately as he picks his mandolin. In line with mountain tradition, Scott's voice and singing style do not call attention to himself. They call attention to the meaning in the song, only. Scott's performance style is something of an anti-performance style. He goes on stage, wherever he is playing, in the clothes he has worn all day, talks to the audience in a friendly, intimate way as one person to another, and never points a finger at himself. Willard praises him from time to time, and rightly so. Willard points out Scott's abilities as a songwriter, composer, singer, musician with several instruments, knows an unknown number of songs. Five or more years ago I made a cd of all Scott's compositions that he has recorded. I think there were 16. I played from it on one of the Saturday morning radio shows. It made an hour of some good music.

 

I feel like Scott is in a highly creative time of his life. I suspect Dori now singing, writing songs and putting on stage performances has inspired the artist in Scott, a new burst of creative energy. He plays on her projects and she plays on his. A few people doubt her for having it made, her daddy and grandpa with their places in the regions music world, knowing everybody. Scott's musician friends watched Dori grow up from a baby. They love her. They love that she turned out to be a good singer, an equally good song writer and can join them making music. They love supporting her musically. They love to see her successes. They're her friends she's known all her life. Sure, that is a little bit of privilege, but the issue is whether she is up to their support. The musicians around her know she is up to their level of musicianship. If she were not, they would be encouraging her to practice, not playing gigs with her. I'd be more inclined to call Dori's situation karma, not privilege. Her soul is obviously connected intimately with Scott and Willard. The three of them are about the same as soul mates. Sure, they have their differences, they're different people, but what I see is three people very much in tune with each other, from knowing each one of them individually. They're souls who found each other and love to make music together. It tickles the fire out of Willard to accompany his grand-baby on her albums and to sing with her on stage. It lights Willard up that Dori has become such a good singer and musician. Dori is invited to play for gigs because she is an excellent musician in her own self.

 

   

 

 dori freeman at the wayne henderson festival 2012

           with edwin lacy, mike gayheart, scott freeman, steve lewis

 

 

 

I arrived at the show Friday night a little sooner than anticipated. There were no cars ahead of me all the way. I made good time without going fast; just nobody to follow for ten miles who speeds up in passing zones and goes 35 to 40 in between. Scott and Willard were practicing when I walked in the door. They were working on songs I'd not heard them do before. My feeling by the end of the show when they had not played any of those songs I heard them practicing is that these are songs Scott has on his new project and they are learning their parts to play them together the night of the show after the cd's release. They sounded good. I liked what I heard. Scott is making some powerful music. His musical partnership with Willard over the last quarter century has created several cds together, Skeeter and the Skidmarks in the early 90s, then Alternate Roots in the 00s, two bands of what I can only call art. Skeeter and the Skidmarks are back together as a band and Alternate Roots in the past, alas. These are art bands. They are about musicianship and their own interpretations of the songs they play. It appears to me that Scott and Willard's bands are the projects of artists. Audiences appreciate their art, but as artists, Scott and Willard don't play down to the audience or get the audience charged up and hollering. They're like the Carter Family in that they present the songs beautifully, make no production of themselves, just play some really good music.

 

 

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BLUEGRASS EXPLOSION

sandy mason and willard gayheart

There must have been a glow in last night's sky over Woodlawn, Virginia, above Willard Gayheart's frame shop, The Front Porch. For two hours the god of music was present. Awesome is the most overused word since Wow in the Sixties, yet it's still a valid word with its own meaning, appropriate to this moment. Maybe better would be the old-time meaning of the word awful. Today it means terrible, of negative interest. In the old-time way it meant full of awe, something so awe-inspiring it's awful. It's still used in that meaning, like, "the music last night got to me something awful." We say, "an awful lot all the time." The word now has two opposite meanings according to use. I'll just say it was awful, but that sounds too much like offal, and it weren't none of that. Awesome is the word. It was the cd release party for Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's new album, 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It's a fiddle and banjo album like no other. You can hear some or all of the tunes at the label's website http://www.mountainroadsrecordings.com and cds can be ordered through the website. All the cds from Mountain Roads Recordings at Bristol, Tennessee, are present moment mountain music good as it gets.

I arrived a little bit early, and even early the parking area looked like a used car lot. Inside, Willard had to bring up more folding chairs. The place was packed with people anticipating some awesome music. A happy spirit was in the air running through everybody, a friendly atmosphere to step into. I knew about half the people. It's a place where you can speak to somebody you've never met and they don't look at you like you're trying to sell them a grave plot on the moon. Right away I saw Willard was not busy for a few seconds. I went straight to him wanting to show the picture in the digital camera of the new painting of Scott and Edwin. Willard and I are artist friends who share insights with each other. I crack up when I think of the time Willard told me he's not really an artist. Willard is one of the greatest artists I know, right there with his musical partner, Scott Freeman. My artist friends are almost all musicians. Willard makes a beautiful pencil drawing and he plays rhythm guitar with a reputation for keeping perfect rhythm such that the other musicians don't have to think about the rhythm themselves. As a bluegrass singer, Willard has a lifetime of stage experience. He can sing the same song folk style or bluegrass and they're equally beautiful. He writes a good song too. Willard is every bit as satisfying to my ear musically as Doc Watson, and I look way up to Doc Watson. I say Doc here to give you an idea of the measure of my respect for Willard's musical artistry.

When the seven-piece bluegrass chamber orchestra indicated they were ready, everybody sat down in a hurry and all attention went to the band. It was the Siamese Cousins + 5 or Skeeter and the Skidmarks +3. Everybody who played a part on the project was in the band, minus Dori. I didn't get to talk with Scott but a minute when the show was over, and he was in that place musicians are still in for quite awhile after jamming all-out for two hours. I didn't ask about Dori. I'd heard something about she went to Nashville a week or so ago. I took her absence to affirm it, though still not knowing. She has a man in her life now who appears to be the one she's been waiting for without knowing who or if. She has two songs on the project that deserve mention, Gold Watch And Chain she sings just right, and a Gordon Lightfoot song, The Way I Feel. I've been hearing Dori develop her singing voice for the stage the last three years. My thinking is if she has her eye on making a shot for it in Nashville, now is the time. She has a charisma onstage something on the order of Sade's, subtle and smooth without being too smooth.

The band started off with an explosion. Lonesome Road Blues, the first song on the album, blew the roof off the place in the first ten seconds. And the roof never came back, the reason I suspected the sky lit up over Woodlawn. Butch Robins kicked it off, a really good punt, with his bluegrass banjo. Scott Freeman tore up his mandolin and left it in shreds. Steve Lewis came in with his guitar and did some unbelieveable pickin. Brandon Davis played lead guitar too, immediately commanding respect for the music he could get out of that wooden box. Edwin Lacy cut completely loose on his old-time banjo, left mind somewhere else and let the music guide his hands without any mental interference. Willard kept the rhythm going with Sandy Mason on the bass. Sandy sang Dixie Darlin, a song I love to hear her sing. They rocked our world from the first note to the last. They finished after two hours with a request for Orange Blossom Special. In bluegrass it is one of the tunes they call "war horses" in classical music, tunes audiences love to hear and bands get tired of playing. Rocky Top is another. And Duelling Banjos. They didn't pay that any mind. They got it going so hot that people jumped to their feet clapping. Scott played the train on the fiddle and Steve was right there with him doing all he could to destroy every string on his guitar. I love it when the two of them get together like that. It seems like there is no limit to how far they can go.

Scott is such a master mandolin picker that when I hear a mandolin in a Nashville bluegrass band, I hear it in relation to Scott's sound. I've heard several his equal, but none better. Over the last decade, Scott, Steve and Willard caught my ear when Alternate Roots was a band. I freely call Alternate Roots my favorite band for life. When they disbanded I grieved for six months the same as if a really close friend had died. Steve Lewis and Scott pick together such that you know they have the time of their lives doing things with the strings they can't do with anybody else or very few, intuitionally. It's dynamic every time they get together. Scott and Edwin too. Scott and Butch Robins too. Seven master musicians on the stage, people who play incredibly well together. I say the god of music was there last night, because every one of the musicians had a spirit about them, individually and together, everybody lit up in joy. The second song they played after clearing the roof out of the way was Hang Me, a Skeeter and the Skidmarks favorite. It cranked the music up to the next level. And they kept it there througout. Even the ballads had the joyous energy. After Hang Me was Billy In The Lowground, and it was on from there. Steve likes to call it Goat In The Swamp.

At intermission after the first hour when everyone in the audience stood up and turned around, I saw joy beaming out of everybody's face. I knew I was lit up the same. It was a joyous air in the place. Different ones I see there every week, we'd look at each other big-eyed and make a short statement about the music we were experiencing. The music at the Fiddle and Plow show is always worth driving an hour each way for. I could buy a cd with what it costs in gas, and it's better than buying a cd, because I'm hearing my favorite musicians playing twice as long as a cd. Live. In Concert. Last night was special. One Skeeter and the Skidmarks show a couple years ago reached into that place of a joyous musical experience for band and audience together. All the shows are extra good, but these two stand out in my memory for the joy energy in the music. They know how to let the music breathe and they know how to let it run wild. Everything I've said here sounds like overstatement, but it all is understatement. And for any of the ones in the band who might see this, I don't want to give them the big head. I can't reach with words the place their music took me to. On the way home, I stopped to see some friends. I tried to tell them something about it, but all I could do was emote: awesome, amazing, fabulous, unbelieveable, totally incredible, over the top. It degenerated into babble fast, because I was unable to do anything but blabber. So I shut up after hearing myself fumble for words I couldn't find, enough that I was boring myself. This morning I woke up singing Edwin Lacy's Little Black Pony, a song with a story as good-worded as Catfish John.

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STEVE LEWIS TRIO BLOWS THE ROOF OFF THE FRONT PORCH

steve lewis and josh scott

scott freeman, steve lewis, josh scott

scott freeman

steve lewis

josh scott

willard gayheart

The angel of music visited the audience of 19 at Willard's Front Porch Gallery again Friday night with the Steve Lewis Trio. Steve plays bluegrass banjo and bluegrass lead guitar like the master he is, masterfully. Not just masterfully in that he plays pretty and real complicated, no. Steve plays music. You don't hear his intricate picking in the music. You see it in what his fingers are doing, but in the hearing of it there's no emphasis on self and what self can do with a banjo. Steve's mastery with music itself tells my inner being, from the time the first notes are struck, the music is On. His mastery with the banjo and guitar strings gives the songs a breath of life. In a work of visual art, the ones that stand out are the ones that have a breath of life about them. Steve breathes life into his art form, bluegrass music. The very same words can be used to tell about Scott with mandolin and fiddle. It's because they are both masters of music and their instruments. When Scott gets with Steve, we hear a Scott we don't hear a very great deal of, because he doesn't show off in front of musicians he's making music with. With Willard, it's more folk music, Doc Watson style guitar playing and singing old songs. With the Skidmarks it's their own jazz renditions of old-time tunes and tunes Scott and Willard composed. Sometimes, a Skidmarks concert can be a sound assault.

When Scott and Steve get together, Scott thrills everyone in the audience that comes to the show every week. We appreciate Scott's pickin and his singing, his music, and have for a couple years of almost every week. He always plays stellar mandolin and fiddle. When Steve is visiting, Scott opens to a new level he can only reach with Steve. And Steve can only get there with Scott. They have a musical sense with each other something like Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, or Ron Wood and Keith Richards, or Cannonball Adderley and Nat Adderley, or Charlie Rouse and Thelonious Monk. In the time of the band ALTERNATE ROOTS, Steve came into the band between the band's second and third albums. The band had no banjo before. It was Scott's mandolin and fiddle, Randy Pasley's resonator guitar, Willard and Katy's rhythm guitars, Tony Testerman's bass. When Steve was with them, their sound was the sound of Alternate Roots. Steve's banjo arrived in the band and rose their sound to a new level. He didn't change the nature of the band, but gave it a new sound to dance with Randy's Dobro and Scott's mandolin. An Alternate Roots concert was as satisfying a concert as any of the most satisfying ones I've been to. Satisfying like Burning Spear at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem. Or hearing Carlos Montoya in an audience of a dozen.

I'd forgotten the refreshing sound of Scott and Steve making music together. Not forgotten, just hadn't thought about it in awhile. Scott and Steve like to reach out in their bluegrass pickin. They can tear up David Grisman's EMD (Eat My Dust), mandolin and guitar. They tore up some contest tunes, Alabama Jubilee one of them. One of my favorites tonight was Angeline The Baker, which Steve told about was written by Stephen Foster. That's a tune you hear at fiddlers conventions about as frequently as John Brown's Dream. I've known it as a fiddle tune, autoharp tune, mandolin tune, guitar tune. It's one of the great old-time songs. They played it right, too. Josh's bass gave their music a fullness of sound. I mean that literally. It filled in the nanosecond gaps between their notes with the bass sound that advances, even like it is behind them pushing them. Jane's Addiction's drummer had the same sense in his drumming of pushing the rhythm. That's the closest I can get to defining what I'm reaching for. Mandolin and banjo playing together, both of them playing aggressively, the bass thumping a true bass sound that did not stand out as artful bass playing, because he wasn't showing off. He was providing the rhythm, Scott told me some years ago that Josh's control on the bass is so with the flow that the instrumentalists don't have to think about the rhythm. Josh has it under control and they can ride the waves of his rhythm like on surfboards. Hang five, dude.

The audience was happy with the music we heard. It's always a happy audience there. When Steve and Scott get together there, once or twice in a year, they light up the night. Steve and Scott without the bass give a different kind of show from with the bass. Josh's bass does something that supports their sounds like a floor supports dancers. The three of them together have their sound that works. It is distinctively them. Whatever tune they play, it's exactly how I want to hear it played. They kept the air alight with their music. These three musicians have a musical charisma together like the four musicians of Skeeter and the Skidmarks. They have a sound that is their own, and both bands are composed of excellent musicianship. They keep the tradition advancing through this time of fast change. The picture above of Willard is him listening to these musicians he regards, as a musician, with awe. He is in awe of both their abilities. He thinks they're way out there beyond him in musicianship. He only plays rhythm guitar, can't play lead, or doesn't like to play lead. He isn't vain enough to allow himself to consider that his rhythm guitar playing is known by musicians all around this area. Other musicians embrace an opportunity to make music with Willard. The musicians he listens to with full respect listen to him, in turn, in full respect.

Both Scott and Steve teach the next generation. Scott has a corner of Willard's Front Porch Gallery where he works with his students every day. Steve has a steady schedule of students in Ashe County and teaches Appalachian history at the high school. That would be a good class. Steve can connect with teenagers freely with a mutual respect going. He and Scott would come under the Japanese word sensei, teacher in the highest sense of teacher. A master passing knowledge of one sort or another on to the next generation. This is how the music has lived down through the centuries, each generation passing the music to the next, however it's taught in a place and time. In the old-time days when you wanted to learn an instrument, you got some money together to buy one. Then you figured it out. Whenever somebody asked bluegrass banjo picker Jr Maxwell to teach him to pick, he told him if he can't figure it out on his own, he don't want to learn it. Jr meant it. The guy took it for Jr's way of saying no, which it was, but it was also his reason for saying no. He figured it out. All the other banjo pickers he knew figured it out, fiddlers and guitar pickers too. Figuring it out was the tradition. The tradition is changing. We don't learn by figuring out any more. We learn my memorizing details for tests. Very different ways of thinking. I won't say one is better than another. Just different. Maybe one naturally follows the other. Scott and Steve and a host of other musicians in the tradition are passing on the music as it is done in this generation.

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STEVE LEWIS TRIO

 scott freeman, steve lewis, josh scott

steve lewis

steve lewis

steve lewis

willard listening to musicians he respects the highest



Another Friday night at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn hearing some of the finest music in southwestern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina. Steve Lewis is from Todd, NC, on a road crooked as a running snake between W Jefferson and Boone. Josh Scott, playing the bass, is Steve's step-son by marriage and closest friend in life. Scott Freeman is the mandolin player in the band. There are a couple of videos on YouTube of them at the Cook Shack around Union Grove, NC. And when I get selections from tonight's show uploaded there will be some from the Front Porch. It was a show of excellent music, as always there. As always wherever Steve plays.

You might say he's an intricately detailed picker of guitar and banjo. He hits all the notes and then some. And then some more. Articulate notes. Every one is clearly itself. Very clear picking. To compare a sound to something visual, to my ear Steve's noting is clear as polished glass. If it were a singing voice instead of a guitar, every word would be heard clearly, like when Sara Carter sings. Scott Freeman's mandolin is picked with the same articulation as Steve's guitar and similar clarity. They sound good together. During a time Scott is on a break with the mandolin, when he's wrapping it up, the sound very smoothly flows over to the guitar, seamlessly, such that you can't hear where one picks up and the other leaves off. They flow in and out of each other's sounds, musicians who are with their favorite musicians to make music with. Nat Adderly playing trumpet with his alto saxophone-playing brother Cannonball Adderly in the Be-bop jazz period of late 50s, early 60s, bring Steve and Scott to mind when I hear them. Nat and Cannonball weave in and out of each other's sounds much like Steve and Scott.

Now that I've been listening to Scott weekly for a year, plus all his cds several times apiece, I have a fair ear for his pickin and his music. He's always good. Always extra good. When he's picking with Steve, he smokes his mandolin all the way through the concert. It's like Steve is his inspiration to reach out there as far as he can stretch looking for sounds he's after. I'd guess his mandolin strings are black where his pick hit them tonight, from burning. He kept them hot. Sometimes it was just unreal hearing him. It recalled for me the night at the Blue Ridge Music Center with Alternate Roots an hour after he'd won a new Henderson mandolin at the Henderson festival on Mt Rogers. He smoked the new mandolin on the music center stage like I'd never heard him do before.

Tonight was the 2nd time I heard him smoke his mandolin. He tore that thing up tonight. Sometimes rock bands tear up their instruments at the end of a show by bashing them onto the floor over and over, breaking them on amplifiers. Scott tears his mandolin up playing it. Tonight, Steve looked at him with the same look he gave him the night at the music center, eyes saying, What got into you? The concert was up there with a Skidmarks show or Jeanette Williams, who is returning next week with her husband Johnny. It will be some straight aheadbluegrass. Scott and Willard will accompany them making a band of 4. They can get-er-done too.

Tonight's show was master musicians, bass included, every one of them playing with their favorite musicians to make music with. Scott and Steve have a kind of musical chemistry between them. They like about Josh's bass that he keeps such good time they don't have to think about it. They can flow however they will on his rhythm. The people who are coming to the shows regularly, more and more of them are, get carried away with the standard of music played there. They're learning who an awful lot of the musicians in our region are. The audience is about half mountain people and half people from Away living here in retirement.

Tonight after the last song the audience applauded like crazy and several people stood up for the band. Then the people who didn't think to stand up took the standing up to mean they were getting up to leave, so everyone got up and headed for the door. It seemed like the audience's inclination was to clap for a long time and loud to express their appreciation. Several jumped to their feet to lead a standing ovation, but created an exodus. I don't recall ever seeing that happen before, anywhere. I was at the back of the place, and saw everyone had big smiles on their faces when they turned around to leave, satisfaction after hearing a couple hours of some stellar music. 

* 

STEVE LEWIS MASTER PICKER

scott freeman & steve lewis - 21may10 - woodlawn va

Music again tonight at Woodlawn in Jill Freeman's frame shop, The Front Porch. A big crowd tonight. 25 to 30 people. A little bit crowded. It was Steve Lewis night. Steve and Scott are something like musical twin souls. They play together well. Steve played with Alternate Roots during the time of their last 2 albums. He was a major addition to the band when he came in. I saw Alternate Roots play 14 or 15 times. Went to the Carter Fold at Hiltons VA to see them perhaps the last time. When the band ceased to be a band, I fell into a period of grief as though a close friend had died. They were a good band. If you ever come upon an Alternate Roots album, it's some good music, whichever album it is. Katy Taylor, Scott and Willard Gayheart did the vocals. All equally good bluegrass singers. And good bluegrass musicians. They are a band that will be appreciated in 20 or so years. Like Scott and Willard's band before AR, Skeeter and the Skidmarks, made 2 albums and the banjo picker was taken away. 20 years later they've made a 3rd album, by popular demand. More and more people are wanting something by Skeeter & the Skidmarks. Edwin Lacy, who played banjo with Skeeter, will be playing at the Front Porch June 4. It promises to be a night of good music too. Lacy has a style all his own and he composes songs with good words that sound like old-time songs. I could just about say his banjo style is much like his name, lace-like.

Steve Lewis is one of the great musicians of the moment in this region of the mountains. He's mid 40s and plays both guitar and banjo equally well. Doesn't sing much, but when he does, he's good at it, too. Steve grew up at Todd and will most likely always live there. He said he was recently in the recording studio with Doc Watson. Tonight, he played his Henderson guitar. He told some Wayne Henderson stories. When Eric Clapton was considering making the trip to Rugby to meet Wayne, Clapton's publicist called Wayne and asked him, "You think security will be a problem?" Steve imitated Henderson's voice saying, "Well, I don't think so." Security from what? Hillbillies? Not very good. I don't think Clapton made the trip, but he'd have loved it if he had, even though he is an old English urban hippie. I've heard him on the MTV Unplugged dvd and can only say he's got nothing on any guitar picker around here who plays in public. Acoustic. Electric, Clapton rules. I wished I'd never heard him play Layla acoustic.

Perhaps the Clapton I like the best is the studio jam session cd that came with the Blind Faith album when it became a cd with the original cover. It's like hearing Bob Dylan's Albert Hall concert when he first played acoustic, then electric. One of those great moments in time when rock & roll became Rock. There was something spontaneous about Dylan and the Band playing to the Boos and hollering against them. The electric band playing great Dylan music and the audience in all-out vocal resistance. It gave the music a spontenaiety to my ear, a spontenaiety like the jamming by the musicians in Blind Faith. Not that it sounds like it in any way. To my ear, they have a similar spirit. They connect, albeit by the thinnest of threads.

Steve and Scott are good comedians during a concert. They both have enough stage experience that they can work the humor like a stage comedian. They do it in banter. Steve, talking about an old picker said, "A groundhog delivers his mail now." Everybody in the audience set to laughing at that and couldn't stop. Steve went on talking and the people continued to laugh, like peepers, 1 or 2 over here, 2 or 3 over there, going through the audience like that, running through everybody several times. It rattled around in everybody's heads and every time they looked at it, it was funnier than the time before. He handled it well, too, like an experienced comedian.

Scott got a good one on Willard. Willard had just finished playing a couple songs with Scott before Steve came on. Willard said something about Scott being his partner. As Willard got up to put his guitar away, Scott said, "Willard, why don't you ever call me your son-in-law?" Willard bent over laughing. Willard was the one Scott told jokes on in Alternate Roots shows. They were always funny too. Jokes about being old, stage humor. Willard would hang his head like he was humiliated, though he'd be laughing because he didn't always know what Scott was going to say, and it was as funny to him as to the audience. All 3 of these guys have shared a stage for several years, have a good rapport speaking publicly with genuinely funny humor.

I actually got a video of Steve and Scott playing Clinch Mountain Backstep, and Steve talking about Ralph Stanley while he was tuning his banjo for it. The sound came out good enough. I attempted to upload it here for the picture, but it took way too long, so I cancelled it. I don't want to logjam your computer. This little ole camera does surprising things. It took a good visual and the sound was pretty good too, considering it's mic is a hole the size of a paper clip wire and I was at least 10-12 feet away. Again, I'm awed by the nearness of such good musicians, people who are not pretentious in even the farthest corners of their minds. Steve, Scott and Willard, such good musicians for $5.

2 hours of listening to Steve Lewis and Scott Freeman pick and sing in an intimate at-home place where everyone is snug and cozy, all enjoying superb music, and, like me, enchanted that it's right here. You don't have to go to New York to hear them. You don't have to go to Las Vegas to hear them. In the age of tv and pop music we don't tend to think of our neighbors as better entertainment than what is "out there." Out there is always better than where we are. Not so in these hills. I'd rather hear Steve Lewis play the banjo than Steve Martin any day. I can shorten it even further, I'd rather hear Steve Lewis play banjo than anybody. That doesn't mean I think he's better than anybody. His style and tone of banjo pickin suits my ear, and his ability is something to behold.