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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GOING UNDERGROUND

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Lying down for a nap this afternoon, a memory of a cave came to mind. I followed it until sleep o'ertook conscious mind. It was some time in the late 1980s, a friend who no longer lives here took me spelunking in a cave at Speedwell, Virginia, between Independence and Wytheville. The cave opening is on the left side of highway 21 near the 4-way stop sign intersection. The road to the right goes to Mule Hell, Virginia, and the road to the left goes to Rural Retreat, Virginia, over near the Lee Highway. Cripple Creek runs along the side of the road between Speedwell and Rural Retreat. This is not the only place it runs. It's the only place I've seen Cripple Creek. Old musicians of the area claim it's the creek the fiddle tune, Cripple Creek, was named for. At the end of this post I've put a short video of Tommy Jarrell playing Cripple Creek on old-time banjo and singing it. YouTube has a video of him playing it on fiddle if you'd like to hear some amazing hillbilly fiddling. I chose the banjo version to show you here for it's sound. He played a fretless banjo the old-time claw hammer way. Each note, the forefinger strikes downward on a chosen string and the thumb hits the drone string behind every note. The drone string comes across differently each time it's struck. This is hillbilly music at its finest. I didn't know, before, that I could put YouTube links here. The beginning of new possibilities. When I write about hillbilly music, I can illustrate for you with a piece of music in future. For ye unfamiliar with mountain music, Tommy Jarrell was a legend while he was living. Old-timey. He was recorded extensively in the 1970s. 

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The cave opening is a rather large hole big enough to walk through easily. I do not advise going past the opening. I never will again. Yet it was one of the great experiences of my life. Inside the opening is a big flat area where I suppose people lived in the very old days. The day I was there, I saw it was a toilet for people passing by. Beer cans, Mountain Dew cans, trash and turds everywhere to tiptoe through. We took a passage to the left we could walk into easily, then bent over, then on hands and knees, then belly, crawling like a snake. Such narrow passages from one tube we were crawling through to the next that I sometimes had to say to self, I am snake, or, I am water, to wiggle through it. I got a good education in the limitations of the human skeleton, as well as it's supple nature. I was able to slide through by putting one arm straight ahead, the other straight behind, relax completely. One in particular, called for telling self that I am water. Snake couldn't make it. I mentally dissolved into liquid and flowed to the other side. It wasn't scary as you'd think. It was not more than a few steps into the cave that all light was gone. Not a photon of light. I saw little house spiders with no pigment, clear as a drop of water. The internal workings were on display like in a school science book diagram. Little bats sleeping here and there on the walls upside down. I had no sense that an entire mountain was on my back. The dark was blackness itself. Even black paint is not darker. The uttermost darkness fascinated me. This would be the only chance in my life to see total darkness, absolute black. 

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My friend at the time, while he lived here a neighbor, Don Smith, took me through the cave. I trusted his abilities. He'd been through the cave several times. He climbed rock cliffs, adventure. He liked the kind of activity that one slip will take you out. I don't. He has an uncanny ability to get out of tight corners he gets himself into. He's like a cat in that way. This is the reason I trusted him; I knew he could get out of any tight spot. We used old coal mine carbide lanterns. A little reservoir holds tiny rocks of carbide. Pour water on them and they emit a gas. Ignite it with a match, it burns like a candle but brighter. It had a reflector that directed a beam. His dad was a coal miner in West Virginia, hands solid as rock. They were his lanterns. I thought it was cool going through a cave with carbide lanterns. Don went ahead of me through the channels, slithering in shallow mud on our bellies, his light ahead of mine. You only see where the beam of the light shines. I see the tube I'm crawling through immediately in front and nowhere else. It does not feel like being so tightly encased for the inability to see anything but the small circle the light illumines. We were both in work coveralls that zip all the way up the front, have snaps at wrist and ankles to keep them tight when needed, and insulated. It's cold in the deep, dark grave. And I did feel a sense of the grave, the dark, the silence, limited mobility. I thought of people buried in the old days while in a coma and woke up in a box underground. I wouldn't like that. I went into the cave with fascination, though there came a time it started feeling creepy, thoughts the cave suggested in my mind made me a little uneasy. We found a cavern with a pool, had a seat, took a break, talked. We turned out the lights for the experience of the darkness. At one place in our conversation, he said, "Your light is your life. There is no getting out of here if the lights fail." All of a sudden, old carbide lanterns were not cool. I wanted out. 

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He told me about a guy he'd heard about found dead in a cave after his light source stopped working. Nothing to do but sit down and wait to die. I told him the only direction I want to go is out. We were at the turn around point. I could not imagine how he could know his way through the maze of pipes. I would not want to be in there during a rain. Nor would I want to be in there at sunset when the bats swarm through the tubes at flight speed. I did not enjoy the way out like I did the way in. Everything I saw on the inside of the cave was another world, and beautiful. I sometimes think I'd like to see inside a commercial cave, just to see that world again, minus commitment. The way out was gentler than the way in, until we came upon a chasm with a pool of perfectly still, perfectly clear water. Our walking place was up high over this cavern of stalagmites and stalactites, huge ones in terra cotta everywhere. I had to jump across a gap about three feet. Standing on millions of years of glass-smooth rock shaped by water flow, I needed to jump from the equivalent of ice, and land on ice the other side. In work boots. Don hopped across it like a kid jumping a mud puddle. I could not be so casual about it. I saw the Zen archery trick of one time only. I had one chance. Knew I could jump it easily, but wasn't sure about slipping upon landing. Any kind of slip would be at least a broken leg. I was carrying a fifty foot nylon rope rolled up on my shoulder. An odd knob on the wall beside the hole. I looped the coil of rope over the knob that was just the right size, held the rope with left hand, used it for a safety net during the jump. It was easy. Outside in daylight was a shock. The world of growing things, of houses, of cars, of highways I saw as if for the first time. It was incredibly beautiful in light like I'd never seen it before. I fell in love with above ground on the drive home. 

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OLD-TIME MUSIC RAMBLE

found art in Sparta

Monday was a good time for parking in front of Food Lion. A lot of parking spaces to pick from. The store was not crowded at the registers. I thought I may as well grocery shop on Mondays since it is inevitable that I need to drive to town for one reason or another every Monday. It is the day of the week I'd rather stay home and get over the weekend of staying up late three nights in a row. I'm becoming nocturnal. I really do my best after midnight. It took the whole day to get over waking up and by midnight I'm ready to read, write, paint. The day's obligations are over, the phone is not going to ring unless somebody died. All that I love to do I do best after midnight. If I remember correctly, which I don't, it seems Eric Clapton sang a song After Midnight in his electric rock star years, maybe with Cream. It's a shame how good they were in that time and are good in this time. Then there is Thelonious Monk's tune Round Midnight, one of my favorite jazz numbers and I don't know why, kind of like in bluegrass and old-time Maple On The Hill is about my favorite song and I don't know why. It just vibes with me right. Same with Round Midnight. That just put me in a mind to put on some Monk playing live at the It Club in LA with Charlie Rouse on tenor. One of those magical moments in recording that puts me into a minor bliss like Horowitz playing Schubert, Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle and Fred Cockerham playing banjo, and the other way around, on their album Tommy & Fred. Both are very soulful hillbilly musicians.

At the moment Josh Blevins of Whitetop VA is picking open-back old-time banjo. It's a field recording made available to we who love this music by the label Field Recorder's Collective. A lot of beautiful music from field recordings has been available at this label Field Recorder and the website is self-explaining. It is a dynamite catalog of old-time music. The label is a service to humanity. It is a non-profit so buying the cds helps the label toward the expense of bringing out a new one. All their cds are fine examples of old-time music, some of them having that magical accidental quality that makes them stand out from all the others. I felt like Gaither Carlton's cd of old-time fiddle and banjo was hanging down on a string  from heaven like a fish hook if you want a little taste of heaven. I think I'd like to be bunked on the old-time music corridor with the music of these mountains from before electricity was imagined. I love the old squawking fiddle of Marcus Martin and Gaither Carlton. Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham play that old squawking hillbilly music that makes my heart flutter for the beauty of it. Fred plays on George Pegram's Rounder #001 album. Fred squawked his fiddle and sang with his old hillbilly voice that wasn't about pretty, but was about delivering the words of the songs with music, often while playing the fiddle too.

I went looking for Kyle Creed's Heritage cd, Bobby Patterson's label in Woodlawn, Virginia. I was having to dig deeper than I wanted to go and came upon Kevin Fore's Round Peak, The Tradition Continues. He plays banjo and sings songs with fiddlers like Benton Flippen, James Burris, Kirk Sutphin and Eddie Bond who plays fiddle on some, guitar on several and sings on several. Several Round Peak musicians like Chester McMillan on his rhythm guitar, Joey Burris on guitar, Verlin Clifton on mandolin. It is a kind of all-star album of mostly Round Peak musicians by Bobby Patterson's label, Heritage, Kevin Fore the banjo player. It is a good example of music from this region of the mountains about half way between Sparta and MtAiry off Highway 89. It's some almighty fiddling and banjo pickin. At this moment Eddie Bond is playing the fiddle and singing Rockingham Cindy, Kevin Fore and Kirk Sutphin playing banjos. A good rendering of the Tommy Jarrell great song. To my ear, Jarrell made that song his own. That doesn't stop these guys from giving it a respectable go. Round Peak, the next generation. Almost put on a Clark Kessinger album. May hear it next. I don't know why I play music so seldom. I've come to prefer silence. I can hear myself think when there is no racket. Music holds my attention, clears my mind. Silence lets the mind run until it slows down to a walk.

It was early afternoon when I went into the grocery store. Food Lion has a little space unto itself where they keep the produce in a cooler temperature than the rest of the store. Pushing my cart toward the entrance doorway, a man and woman who looked awfully married were standing directly in the middle of the doorway discussing whatever it was that was important to them. I waited a moment wondering if they'd wake up any time soon. A woman about my age walked up from behind me with a cart. She waited a moment. Then she headed for the exit door and I followed her. All I wanted to do was get a bag of oranges. I dropped them into the cart and exited through the exit, swung back around to get some bananas and the couple had just made a decision that whatever they wanted was not inside the doorway where they stood unconsciousness as people, we and others, lined up and went around them to the exit door after waiting like at a traffic light.

If one of us had spoken to them noting they're blocking the doorway, they'd have exploded in apologies, Oh we're sorry! Explaining and shittin and gittin. It would have brought them into consciousness from a deep cavern in unconsciousness so fast it might have given them the bends. I thought of girls in high school talking in the doorways before and after class. A bunch going in see a bunch coming out and they talk in the doorway while the guys on both sides of the door fume waiting for them to get in motion and unblock the door. They don't do it intentionally. They do it unconsciously. The adult couple in the doorway at the grocery store did not irritate me. They must have reasonable IQs. I just marveled at the unconsciousness. I thought these people actually get around in traffic. Obviously city people, they must drive in city traffic and they drove from wherever to Sparta. I jotted it down in my head as the inexplicable event of the day.


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