THE GRASSY HOLLOW BOYS LIGHT UP THE FRONT PORCH

scott freeman, willard gayheart, mike gayheart

 

Another night of good music from home, acoustic mountain music by Willard Gayheart, guitar, and Scott Freeman, mandolin and fiddle, with Mike Gayheart playing bass. They are calling themselves the Grassy Hollow Boys, Scott and Willard with whoever they can find available for banjo and bass for a given show. They said Jimmy Zeh plays banjo with them, but couldn't make it for this show. They found a banjo player who might make it, but didn't. No problem. Scott and Willard together make the most satisfying shows I've seen and heard there at the Fiddle and Plow Show at Woodlawn, Virginia, in Willard's frame shop and gallery for his extensive collection of pencil drawings of regional people and musicians of the past and present. A second book of Willard's drawings has recently been published. It's his pictures hanging on the walls. Willard and Scott play together at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway once a week, I think Thursdays, during the summer months. Scott is married to Willard's daughter, Jill. He and Willard have made music together at least twenty-five years. They have had bands together, Alternate Roots, a stellar, first-rate bluegrass band of Scott and Willard's own style of bluegrass. And Skeeter and the Skidmarks, disbanded for several years because the banjo player had to leave the area, and when he returned years later, the band is back together. They have been called a "progressive old-time band," and I can't improve that. It's what they do.

 

willard gayheart

 

 

Willard and Scott have been giving concerts at the frame shop, The Front Porch, where they bring out about forty folding chairs for the show. Excellent sound system Scott keeps at a level where it sounds like there is no sound system, but it's easy to hear everything clearly. Tonight's sound was about the best ever. I think Scott has been working with the sound system, fine tuning it. The audience is often less than twenty, and often full. Last time Skeeter played, they had to bring up chairs from downstairs and still there were people standing against the back wall. Wayne Henderson fills the place up too. Full is about fifty. Everybody is comfortable. The people who go every week to almost every week, of which I'm one, all know each other after something like four years of hearing some of the finest music from the Central Blue Ridge every week. We're spoiled. There is no place any of us want to go to hear better music. There isn't any better music. Some more popular, some more dynamic, some more showy, but to my ear, even Willie Nelson's band doesn't compare to Scott and Willard's bands. Back in May I saw Willie Nelson and was struck by what a good band he had, and struck even more that the band was no better than what we hear at Woodlawn on Friday nights. Not less, but not better either. My respect for Scott's and Willard's music is the fullest of any music I have ever loved. They bring in different musicians of the Central Blue Ridge who play for $5 a seat.

 

scott freeman

 

Jeanette Williams has played there I think three times. She won bluegrass music award for best traditional vocalist twice. Her band, Jeanette Williams band, has made about ten albums. She's Nashville bluegrass and says every time she's plays at the Front Porch with maybe fifteen people in the audience that it's her favorite place to play. She gets no more than gas money when she plays there. Her husband, Johnny, is with her and he's fine bluegrass musician and singer on his own. He's recently played with Big Country Bluegrass, one of many he's made music with. It's some high-powered straight-ahead bluegrass when they play. The VW Boys, from Bristol, have played three times, as well. Another auditorium bluegrass band that likes to play at Willard's place for gas money because everyone in the audience listens. No coughing, no getting up and going to the bathroom. It happens, but rarely. Everyone is there for the music, because they love the music, go when they don't know who is playing. We all know that whoever is playing is music we want to hear. This Fiddle and Plow Show can come under the heading, Best Kept Secrets. They don't advertise. People hear about it in their own ways. Scott and Willard open every show with two songs. Going by my own musical taste, I'd rather hear Scott and Willard than any of the people who play there. It wouldn't do to have Scott and Willard every week. But it's great to have them give a show after ten or so by other musicians. It's always refreshing for me when they give a show. Neither Scott nor Willard take any money from it. All the money goes to the guest musicians. Scott and Willard won't have it. It's not what they're about.

 

willard's henderson guitar

 

I've not been able to go for several weeks due to one circumstance and another, and lately because city night driving through Galax blinds me with the bright car lights. This is a new condition of my eyes. Night driving with other cars on the highway gives me a fit anymore visually. It makes me uneasy and I do it less and less. I missed some really good music. And I was glad the show was Willard and Scott. Scott's mandolin is out of this world. The sound system carried Willard's guitar the best I've heard it. Willard sang the songs he loves that I have learned to love hearing him sing them. When It's Nighttime in Nevada, one of my favorites, the Bob Wills Texas Swing song, Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon. This show was the best Willard has done that song, one of his I love the most. A lot of the people take it for a children's song, but it's not. It's a beautiful love song. They had a good rhythm going, a kind of Forties big band rhythm Bill Monroe used in his bluegrass that has gone out of bluegrass over the years. Willard and Mike kept the rhythm going at a pace that makes you tap your foot double-time. They played another of my Willard favorites, I Get The Blues When It Rains. It rained when I found you. It rained when I lost you. That's why I get the blues when it rains. Beautiful song, a pop song from the 1920s. He sang several songs of his own composition, Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog, one we love every time we hear it. He sang Hank Williams' song, Mama Tried. To my ear, Willard has made that song his own.  And one of his more recent songs, My Henderson Guitar.

 

mike and willard reflected in the window and mirror

 

Scott played several songs of his composition and sang a Bob Wills song, Roly Poly, a good Western Swing song that Scott performs so well he has made it his own. By made it his own, I mean the way Jimi Hendrix made Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower his own. He played an instrumental on the mandolin of Sweet Georgia Brown that was killer. I don't usually use that word, like awesome, but it fits here. It's the only word. My old banjo pickin friend, Junior Maxwell, would say of Scott that he has found every note there is in a mandolin. He has only said that of Earl Scruggs where the banjo is concerned. I believe if he'd heard Scott picking on every song he played he would have come away from it saying Scott has found them all. Scott would not say that. And maybe Junior would not say it. But I do. I've heard Scott smoke his mandolin such that the others in the band looked at him in awe like, What got into you? That was in an Alternate Roots show at the Blue Ridge Music Center scheduled right after Scott won the mandolin competition at the Wayne Henderson Festival. He was playing the new mandolin he'd won made by Wayne Henderson. He tore it up. Steve Lewis standing beside him playing banjo looked at him like he'd found a hole in the stratosphere and went through it. In the mountain tradition, Scott is not a show-off musician. He just plays music so beautifully he doesn't need to pretty it up with flourishes to draw attention to himself. His musicianship is about addressing the song itself as beautifully as he can make it. Scott and Willard satisfy my ear to the same degree Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys give me musical satisfaction. I feel privileged in a very real way to be one of the people who knows the Fiddle and Plow Show is happening. They are my primary source of music in this time of the life. I feel like I have grown into them over years of listening to every kind of music, educating my ear to the place I can appreciate the music Willard and Scott make.

 

 

willard

 

 

*

 

VW BOYS IN ELKIN NC

     vw boys: tim white, al blackburn, dave vaught

     vw boys

     vwboys with fiddler melvin roten and his wife

     tim white, melvin roten

      justin, landon, crystal, cheyanne


It was a dry, cold night in the mid 20s, no wind, the kind of cold that if you step outside for a moment without a coat it's like you're instantly freeze-dried. VW Boys playing at the Elkin National Guard Armory on N Bridge St. It was a giant cinder-block box with one end a huge garage door that rolls upward. The stage was a flatbed truck trailer for hauling tractors and round hay bales. This one would hold at least 22 packed right. It made a great stage. The speakers were placed on the stage. I wondered how the sound would do in a cinderblock box, conjecturing the place full of people might soften the echoes of the block walls. It was clear as soon as the music started that there need be no concern about the sound. It sounded good. Not far into the first song, some people started hollering to crank up the volume. They did, and it was just right. It was rock and roll kind of loud. The walls enhanced the music, gave it a raucous, crisp edge. It made the sound of a big auditorium that holds ten thousand.



I've heard VWBoys http://www.vwboys.com/ at shows in small places, like Willard Gayheart's Front Porch Gallery, where 20 or so people go to hear the music. There, they need just slight amplification, so it's almost without speakers. Last night was a big auditorium rock concert by the VWBoys playing acoustic. I loved it. The occasion was an awards ceremony for drivers at Friendship Speedway, a dirt track, just outside Elkin.  http://www.friendshipracing.com/  Big trophies stood on a rack waiting to be delivered, one at a time. The VWBoys played first, and would play again after the giving out of awards. It became interesting right away to see that the drivers were all around in the audience. They'd go up, one at a time, recieve the trophy and talk about whatever dirt track drivers have to say. Tall trophies, 3-4 feet high stood in apparent random placing on the tables, glittering gold in the light like a city with skyscrapers going up. I felt good for everybody concerned. It was a great big room full of people interested in something besides television. It was refreshing in that way.



The sound was so bad for the talking that it didn't travel very well. You about had to know the drivers to understand the name spoken. That was ok. Just an acoustics problem, and only a problem for someone not associated with the racing crowd, me. And for me it was not a problem, because I didn't know any of them, their names or their car numbers. I had never imagined such a thing existed as dirt track racing awards ceremonies. Of course, there would be. I knew a dirt track was somewhere nearby, but had never seen it, never thought about it. Thought I'd like to go some time, but that kind of some time never happens. Curious, but not curious enough to crank up the car and go.



I became fascinated by this world I had no idea existed, an awards ceremony for people I have to confess to a great deal of respect for, race drivers. It's not the speed that turns me on about a race as much as what I call the actual racing, drivers that know how to get around somebody in front of them, giving it all they've got, operating with highly charged mental, emotional and physical skill, all three as one, with a passion for the race. Without knowing in advance who the drivers were in the audience, there was no telling among the men who was a driver and who was not. Everybody there was country people of the area. None stood out from another as somebody special. It was a good feeling community atmosphere in the place, felt like immediate and extended family everywhere, and just about everybody either knew everybody else or knew who they were. Through the whole evening I never saw a single face I'd ever seen before. I am never in that world below the mountain, because I stay on the mountain. Only the VWBoys had I seen before.



I doubted the mic on my video camera would pick up the sound in that echoing box very well. I made 2 videos, one of their Everly Brothers song, Dreamin, and Amy. I automatically assumed the sound would not be good. On the way home, I played a moment in the camera and the sound was horrid, like taping a rock band from the balcony area with a pocket cassette recorder. You can tell what song is playing, but that's about all. Home, I put the pictures into the computer and the sound is good. The sound is a little bit more exaggerated a version of the auditorium sound, like a recording made at a big city coliseum with a cell phone, the Cars playing full volume. I like the way the walls make it sound like a huge auditorium. It's a very different sound from without volume. Not lesser. Just another way to hear the band. I've heard the VWBoys live 4 times and like their show as much as their music.



The band has a new fan in Justin. I took him over to Woodlawn a few weeks ago to hear the VWBoys. He came away from the show a fan. Tim announced they'd be playing at the armory in Elkin and Justin put that in his memory. He wanted to take the kids. He wanted Crystal to hear the band. She has been working non-stop toward Christmas in her studio photography business, babies with Santa. Justin and I encouraged her to go and get her head out of her stress for a little while. In the picture above, she's so tired she's forcing herself to stay awake. Justin and I have been talking for some time, year maybe, of his interest in the kids learning to make music. I've given him what I've learned in the time of the music store, seeing kids take up the music. I suggested he start taking them to music shows of bluegrass and regional music now. By the time they're 5 or 6, they might voice an interest in learning to play something. They can get into the jam program at school when they're 8. If they want to learn before 8, then a good teacher can get them going. If they don't want to learn, don't force it. Though if they want to play, regular practice is the way.



One of the things we talk about concerning the kids is something major I have noticed, musicians are happy people, compared to the rest of us. They don't go around angry. They're fun at home, because they want to make music. They would rather make music, period. I've seen in the older people, women, married to fiddlers, banjo pickers and guitar pickers, appear to be happy people. Musicians know there's no money in making music without selling your soul. Mountain musicians may buy and sell instruments, but their souls have no price tag. Justin wants to be a good daddy and give his kids sound guidance toward growing up and making a go of it in the adult world, so often kept secret from the kids.



 By the time of the 7th or 8th trophy, and still a lot more to hand out, we saw the kids fading. Crystal, who belonged at home in bed, was fading. Justin and I were liking the idea of waiting for the VWBoys to return, but it was closing in on 10, kids were dropping off, Crystal needed to stop at Walmart. We made a collective decision to get on up the mountain. An hour to their place in Justin's 4-door pickup, and a half hour in my car to home. The kids put to bed, the three of us went to the basement, sat in lawn chairs beside the wood stove smoking cigarettes, and talked at length about whatever came up, feeling the concert still in us.


*

VW BOYS LIGHT UP WOODLAWN VIRGINIA

     tim white, fat albert blackburn, dave vaught

             tim white

             dave vaught

             fat albert blackburn

     tim white, fat albert blackburn, mack puckett

Bluegrass at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Virginia, Friday night. It's predictable that the VW Boys make good music and good humor. I took my friend Justin along to hear some good live bluegrass. Justin I've known since before he started school, so I've known him almost all his life. Now he has 3 kids and is almost 30. His wife, Crystal, Christmas shopped all night last night and was sleeping. It was a bit of a mind adventure for me on the way there, worried about running out of gas, somewhat confident it would not happen, but not sure, because it was the closest the needle had been to the E line since the new fuel pump, and I didn't know where E really was. Before the new fuel pump, it ran out of gas when the needle touched the quarter tank line. I had an idea it would have to go all the way to the E line to be empty, because when it was full the needle didn't quite touch the F line. I was wanting to fill the tank in Galax where I found gas for $3.13 when it's $3.45 in Sparta. Put in 15 gallons for $4.80 less than in Sparta, just by crossing the state line. By the time we made it to Woodlawn the worry about running out of gas was in the past and my head was clear, ready to focus on some bluegrass music.

It was good to be back among the people who go to the Friday night Fiddle & Plow shows at Willard Gayheart's frame shop and gallery. Walk in and shake hands around, greet, how-ya-doin, talk about looking forward to the music about to happen, remembering how good their show was last time they played at the Front Porch. Seeing the guys in the band brought memory back of their music and their musicianship. Willard and Scott played the opening song, Willard singing Lay Down My Old Guitar. I've heard him sing it several times, but felt like tonight his voice flowed seamlessly through the song, Scott's mandolin sounding as good as Willard's lyrics. It's a good worded song, the story of a man at the end of his life laying down his old guitar, "wish I could strap it to my side and take it along with me." Very satisfying song just to listen to as well as to hear the words. The old-time songs are all good-worded, but this one has a satisfaction about it when it ends that makes me say to myself, good song. Willard sings it like it's his own, too. Scott's daughter, Dori Freeman, took Willard's place on the next song and sang beautifully, accompanying herself with guitar, and Scott played along on mandolin. 

VW Boys came forward telling light hearted jokes and comical sayings, connecting with the audience. All three of them are singers. Dave Vaught on guitar plays rhythm and lead. Tim White plays bluegrass banjo and guitar. Fat Albert plays bass and sings melodiously a variety of song styles. He played bass and sang with the bluegrass band Fescue, I think he said 17 years. Fescue was a very respectable SW Virginia bluegrass band. Albert took the place of Larry McPeak whose cancer has reached the place where he can't get out anymore. Larry was a good part of the band, played electric bass, sang and wrote a good song. Larry also played with the bluegrass band, the McPeak Brothers. Larry had a personality for taking the background. Albert's personality is foreground. His bass, his extroverted voice and his size standing between Tim and Dave makes a pyramid. Dave said of Albert that he grew up through his hair. He said his present wife is an angel. She's up in the air harping all the time. He told about an old boy that said he wasn't going to get married anymore, said he was going to buy a house every 5 years and give it to a woman he hates. 

They had the audience going, grooving to the music and laughing over their jokes. They kept me laughing nearly the whole time. Justin was laughing at least as much as I was. The band started off with the Rooster song that tears Justin up every time he hears it. I think the VWBoys do that song as good as I've heard it. Everybody that does it, does it well. Justin fell out when they played If My Nose Was Running Money, honey, I'd blow it all on you. If my nose was running money, but it'snot. It's a booger of a problem I've got. I'd buy you a Cadillac and a PT Cruiser too, if my nose was running money, honey, I'd blow it all on you. That's a song they borrowed from the Moron Brothers of Kentucky. The Moron Brothers are worth looking up on YouTube. Good comedy bluegrass in the vein of comic bluegrass the VWBoys are in. Telling their jokes, they flow freely as making music. When they make music, you know it's music you're hearing. It's the real deal. Actual music.

They played a song I remembered from the early 50s, RAGGMOPP, Ragmop, just before rock & roll rose to the surface. Dave Vaught told me during intermission they found the song went back to about 1932. That made my ear listen a little more closely. Sounds like it has a Charleston rhythm. I hear Cab Calloway in the fast beat in the dance music of that time. Another they played from later in the 50s, a comedy song, Hot Rod Lincoln. "My dad said, Son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin if you don't stop drivin that Hot--Rod--Lincoln." They played Bob Dylan's Wagon Wheel with the zeal the song deserves. Fat Albert sings it and does it right. It seemed to me they made that song their own. They played the Everly Brothers' Dreamin. I didn't know back in the 50s that the Everly Brothers were so close to bluegrass. Back then I didn't know about bluegrass. Heard it listening to Grand Ole Opry with my grandmother, but didn't know what it was. It was my grandmother's music.

I was laughing throughout the show from start to finish. Justin was too. There was an old boy in the next row of seats, about 10 years older than me, wearing a jacket with a waving US flag on the back and stars down the sleeves. I said to Justin, "I need a jacket like that to start dressing my age." He was laughing bent over much of the time. I thought all their jokes were funny and the funny songs cracked me up too. It would be too much to hear the VWBoys and the Moron Brothers on the same show, one following the other. Laughter therapy. Whatever I had going into it, I'd come out of it cured. Tonight was a good night of light hearted feeling in a room of about 20 people, every one feeling light hearted and happy. It was over too soon, even though they played three hours.      

* 

UPLOADING MUSIC VIDEOS

                                               tim white                                         

"fat albert" blackburn

                                  "fat albert" blackburn, dave vaught




Much of the day I listened to the music from the VW Boys videos made Friday. Last night I watched the dvd made of all the still pictures and all the videos, plus some Skeeter & the Skidmarks filling in the last half hour of a 2 hour disk. On disk, I don't have to keep it in the computer for archive. Sat with Caterpillar on my lap watching the concert again. It's a concert video. It had a good musical spirit about it. I noticed after awhile that the visual seems to have a feel for the music, flows with the music. I like to keep the camera in more or less motion moving from musician to musician, paying most attention to hands and fingers, seeing what they're doing. Looking through these VW Boys videos that were all dynamite music, I was seeing how especially in the 2nd half of the show, the camera was like it was taking its own motion flowing with the music. I doubt it could be seen by anyone but me, seeing visually what I was feeling inside, free flow with the music, taken up by it and going with it.

My videos don't have really good sound, though it is plenty adequate considering it's a hand-held point-and-shoot $150 camera, fujifilm finepix S1500. 10.0 megapixels. I love about this camera that it is easy to operate, easy to learn. I'm not asking any more of it than it can deliver, because it delivers so much I don't need anything it can't do. When it focuses automatically during the videos, a sound of turning gears inside the camera is picked up by the internal mic. A little distracting sometimes. The camera's ears amount to two tiny holes the diameter of a paper clip wire. They pick up the sound very well. It has a shrill quality when played a little bit loud, but that matters so little considering what I'm doing--recording a concert with one little box easily held in one hand. Digital, so I don't have to have prints made unless I want prints of particular images. I waited all my life for digital cameras and didn't know it.

It's been a good day with VW Boys music in my head all day, hearing songs several times apiece, admiring every one. I put on a Bob Dylan album I'd never heard before, Oh Mercy. Have had it for several years, never even took the cellophane off the case. It was the album he wrote about making in his autobiographical book, Chronicles. This cd I've held with the notion that when I was ready, I'd go pick it up. That's what I did. The VW Boys playing Wagon Wheel, listening to it 3 times today urged me to play it. Wow. I think I waited for the right moment. Before, I'd have put it on with expectations. This evening I just put it on to hear what Dylan had to say in that recording studio in New Orleans. It is great Dylan, like everything he's recorded. He's like Ralph Stanley in that way, never recorded a song short of definitive. It's quite a beautiful album, Oh Mercy. The music has a Lucinda Williams quality in it. It makes me want to play Dylan the next several days, hear his most recent ones again, the ones I think I like best of all the Dylan I've heard from the beginning. He has matured along the way as an artist who started out better than anybody else and went from there over the next half century to the place where American poets embrace him as a poet, of their own will. I've an idea he's the most powerful influence on all the poets his age and younger.

*

VW BOYS BLUEGRASS THE FRONT PORCH

tim white, "fat albert" blackburn, dave vaught



The crowd at the Front Porch tonight got their ears full of the VW Boys from Bristol TN/VA. They played some straight ahead bluegrass that they're quite able to do, told some crazy jokes and performed a few magic tricks, slights of hand that were so awesome you couldn't even start to think about how it was done, just accept it and go on. For one thing, guitar player Dave Vaught took a $20 out of a man's billfold from the audience. This was definitely not set up. He asked a woman in the audience to verify that it's indeed a $20. He showed both sides to the audience. With his sleeves pushed up and his hands just a few feet from the eyes of a woman in the audience who had verified it, he folded the 20 until it wouldn't fold any more, unfolded it and it was a $1. Showed both sides, let her examine it. He took the $1 and folded it until it wouldn't fold any more, unfolded it and there was the 20. He only does really good tricks like that, the kind that bumfuzzle you're head.

The band's bass player Larry McPeak evidently is no more with the band, meaning his illness has advanced. I didn't ask about him, because I was afraid of what I'd hear. Larry is a good man and an equally good musician. Fat Albert has taken over the bass, using his upright doghouse bass. Albert plays with his other band Fescue out of Marion, Virginia. They're a well respected bluegrass band that plays mountain bluegrass the way it's meant to be played. Albert is a good singer and a good comedian. All three of them are comedians. They fill in the gap of bluegrass bands without a comedian with everybody in the VW Boys a comedian. Each has his own style of humor, so they keep us entertained in the original bluegrass way with most often the bass player the clown. VW Boys have humor covered in abundance. It's the same with the music. These fellers play music. It's not just something that's trying to sound like music, it's the music itself they take hold of from the start. It's the only way they play.

I could take up this entire space with a list of their accomplishments musically, the albums they've recorded on and so forth, but it's just too much. Perhaps most notable, Tim White the banjo picker made the song 5 Pounds of Possum in my headlights tonight. It was one of those comic country hit songs like The Day The Squirrel Went Berzerk. I don't know anybody that didn't love that crazy 5 Pounds of Possum. This old boy Foyst Blackburn and his wife did a crazy act to it at the Hillbilly Show year after year. She would be dressed in pink long-johns with her hair up in big curlers, wacky bedroom slippers on her feet, pedaling a stationary exercise bicycle with a flashlight taped to the handlebars and a Harpo Marx type horn on one handlebar. Foyst floated around in his bib overhauls and straw hat flat-footin the old-time way, feet barely leaving the floor, while he held a stuffed toy possum on a leash. It was Dada theater in Sparta. 500 miles Off-Off Broadway.

One of the hottest songs they played was the old country song about the Hot Rod Lincoln. They do the music right and Fat Albert sings it right. He complained afterward of forgetting some of the words, but that didn't matter at all. It was the spirit of the song, the music, the story, the way he sang it. From the early 50s before rock&roll they played RAGGMOPP. That was a big hit in its pop moment. The time of Grandma's Lye Soap and Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Somebody would be put in prison for singing that song now. They did Raggmopp right, too. They caught the spirit of the song. That's what it is about the VW Boys, they actually do catch the spirit of a song. The Everly Brothers song Dreamin, I'm dreamin my life away, from the mid Fifties. It wasn't like they were covering an oldie. It was like it was their song and I remembered the words from the Everly Brothers singing it. To my ear, the VW Boys left the Everly Brothers version in the dirt, and that's not throwing off on the Everly Brothers, whose singing of it is indelibly imprinted in my gray matter for life, like a lot of songs in that time. Mr Sandman that Katy Taylor made her own with Alternate Roots comes to mind as a brilliant singing of another song from that time.

These three musicians, Tim White, Fat Albert Blackburn, Dave Vaught, keep the crowd entertained with good singing, good story telling, good humor, magic tricks that are beyond clever, and the foundation for all this is some pickin by fellers that make music first, and in the making of the music is some musicianship that catches your attention because it becomes somewhat amazing every once in awhile, and all the time the closer attention you pay. Dave Vaught can light up an acoustic guitar. His fingers dance all over the fretboard, and he's one to get some sound out of an acoustic. Fat Albert's fingers can work the bass strings too. His size gives him a commanding presence, and doubly with the size of the bass. He has a stage persona that is charismatic in his talking as well as his singing. He's a singer who uses his own voice instead of a made up voice, a mountain singer in that way, and he doesn't mind belting it out there when he needs to. All three are good singers. Tim White too. Tim is quite a capable bluegrass banjo picker, who can tear the roof off the place when he lets go, though he's not a picker to hold himself out in front of the others, restrained in that way.

In the time of the radio show, I played the VW Boys from time to time. When the their chicken pickin album was fairly new, I intoduced the show saying it would be all chicken songs. That, I'm sure, threw everyone who knows old-time music, considering there are 3 old-time fiddle tunes about chickens and then there's the comedy Rooster song, another rooster song by Whitetop Mountain Band, and that's about it. I played the fiddle tunes, then from the VW Boys album their version of a Chic Filet advertising jingle. Several times in following days someone who heard the show told me how that cracked them up, a chic filet jingle among old-time fiddle tunes and then all the crazy VW Boy chicken songs throughout the album. It made a fun hour. I was well enough acquainted with their music by tonight to know in advance this would be a night of real deal bluegrass pickin. That's what it turned out to be.

VW Boys website: http://www.vwboys.com/

*