THE HEART MUSIC OF WILLARD GAYHEART

    where I spent life's happy hours in the vale of shendoah

I've been sitting here watching a YouTube video of Willard Gayheart and Katy Taylor singing the Carter Family song, Mid the Green Fields of Virginia. Eyes started running. Nose started running. Tears running down my face. Mountain music has always done this to me. From the first time I heard it. It is the only music that has ever made me weep from loving it so much, feeling the joy in it. It's only played right when it's played joyfully. The Carter Family get to me the most of any of the music. I can't hear the Carter Family without tears running. Their grandson Dale Jett does the same to me when he's singing one of their songs. Ralph and Carter Stanley, both, make tears run. At one Ralph Stanley concert at Fairview Ruritan, I had tears running down my face the entire concert, tears of joy. The kind of joy you feel at the end of a really legitimate feel good movie like the Swedish film, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN. The kind of overwhelming joy that wells up from the heart and pushes water out of my eyes.

Mountain music is heart music. It is only played right played from the heart. Music played from the heart in the musician goes to the heart of the listener. Music played from the mind is received by the mind. In mountain music the very first thing is play from your heart. If you're not playing from your heart, you're not making music. I can hear a mountain fiddler like Buddy Pendleton or Thornton Spencer or Richard Bowman and be moved to tears because they're playing to my heart. A fiddler who learned mountain music playing cds by these fiddlers, copying them, learning to play like them, they play to the mind, because that's where their music is coming from. My friend Jr Maxwell, bluegrass banjo picker, said of the copiers, Th'aint no music in it. I recall a time I played on my radio show an hour of an old-time band from off the mountain. He said of the show, I didn't hear no music in it. All of a sudden I knew what he meant when he said they weren't no music in it. He meant what he said. Wasn't no music in it. Music comes from the heart. They were playing from the mind.



I was talking about this once with Kilby Spencer, fiddler son of Thornton Spencer, and he said Thornton was the same way. He could say of a band there was no music in it, when it sounded fine to Kilby. It puzzled both of us. But there it was when Jr said he didn't hear no music in it. I said without thinking, "They weren't none." I knew what he meant. And I spent the whole hour regretting I'd chosen to play such soulless mountain music. My show was for the mountain people who love their own music. That was my first and last venture into playing an old-time mountain band from the Flatland. I got it like an epiphany when Jr said that. I spoke my answer in the language of his meaning. I was grateful for that moment. Jr taught me a very great deal about mountain music from the inside. He informed my radio show all the way along. He had a good ear for fiddles and banjos and guitars. We'd listen to Blue Ridge Backroads, the bluegrass show on WBRF 98.1, and he would be listening to a banjo in a certain band, say something about it, and I don't hear a banjo at all for all the other instruments. He had a subtle ear for bluegrass. I loved listening to bluegrass with him. He loved bluegrass the same as home. His fiddlers convention winning tune was Home Sweet Home. He taught me a lot, not information, but understanding.



Mid the green fields of Virginia in the vale of Shenandoah. Willard sings that song like it's his own. Hearing him sing it, I think of Sara Carter. Willard's style of singing is not vocal gymnastics that call attention to the singer instead of the song. He sings much like Sara Carter in telling the words, telling the story to a rhythm. Lou Reed does that in rock. Willard's singing is mountain singing to a T. He plays music, music you feel in your heart, with his Henderson guitar. Willard always plays music that makes me feel satisfied I'm hearing music. Of all the bands and musicians Willard and Scott have featured every Fri nite at the Fiddle and Plow show in Woodlawn, I and the other 20 who go regularly enjoy a show of Scott and Willard with Dori more than any of the other performers. This is saying Scott and Willard are the equals of the best of them and Dori at her beginning is among the best of them. Next show will be January 6. I hope it is the three of them. It has a good chance.



Willard as a mountain singer is certainly among the best. So is Scott. When they sing together, it is mountain music as good as it gets. Not too many people that feature their singing really support it with driving music. Willard and Scott always have drive in the songs they sing. Willard's Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon with a western swing is a tune that moves right along. People could dance to it and get some motion going. All of the guys will be jealous when they see my playmate so sweet. Before I heard Willard sing it, I laughed at that song. Now I love it. Willard opened my ears to its inner beauty. I like to hear Bob Wills sing it on YouTube. Willard and Scott do the western swing well. I love it every time they get into playing western swing tunes. They do Take Me Back To Tulsa exceptionally well with a western swing.


Willard and Scott are musicians who play together as one. Around 25 years they've been making music together. Scott married Willard's daughter. When they started going together, Scott didn't know Jill was Willard's daughter. He and Willard were in their band Skeeter and the Skidmarks at the time. Later, they got Alternate Roots going, one of the very finest bluegrass bands of a new kind of bluegrass that was their own. Katy Taylor sang and played rhythm guitar. I maintain Katy is the equal of Allison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent, just shy a million stage experiences. What I'm getting at is with as much stage experience as they've had, Katy is their equal. Only to say she's a really fine bluegrass singer. Katy with Alternate Roots was good bluegrass. Scott Freeman and Steve Lewis, Randy Pasley, Willard Gayheart, Tony Teserman and Katy. It was a magical group in their field like Jane's Addiction and Rage Against the Machine in rock, bands that made 4 great albums and went POOF.



The four Alternate Roots albums are mountain music classics. They were not a band to self-promote. No one in the band was a self-promoter. They just liked making music the best they could. They'll be discovered in the future when half of them are dead, and hailed as a great band of their time. Willard Gayheart and Scott Freeman are two musicians of the mountain tradition that the other musicians of the tradition love to make music with. They all say Willard's rhythm guitar is such that they don't have to think about the rhythm, Willard's got it. And it doesn't get any better than Willard's singing. I told Scott and Willard and Edwin Lacy before a Skeeter and the Skidmarks show, Y'all are my new Rolling Stones. I meant it. I appreciate their musicianship at this time in my life like I appreciated the Rolling Stones' earlier in my life. Skeeter works more with my flow in this time in the life in love with mountain music. Skeeter playing Running Through The Graveyard satisfies me as much now as Honky Tonk Women used to, still does. We have a world of beautiful music. The music is the best part of the modern world. Today in the coffee shop I heard Michelle Shocked sing Anchorage, and Faith Sandoval sing Fade Into You. Hadn't heard either one in awhile. Both moved me to silence, but not to tears.



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FOGGY MOUNTAIN TOP OF THE MIND

        eva hesse, drawing

     

I'm finding myself in a phase of life where my peers are breaking down, ailments galore, dying, what have you. One thing I find is I stay home more, like all the older people I've known. Out running around spending money is a youthful activity. Older, you have other things on your mind besides how you look and the name brands of your clothes. I know how I look. I rarely look in the mirror. Just not curious. I've quit shaving and run over my face about once a week with hair clippers and let it go for another week. Hair same way, though less often. This is something I grew into, like driving up the mountain into a cloud, which on the ground is called fog. The fog is a place of the mind, less active, even at peace, uninterested in confict, long spaces of no thinking, peaceful blank spaces of no mental agitation. Lots of forgetfulness goes with it. Names disappear when you need them. I can see them go away. I think of them running down the groundhog hole. I've seen this natural progression in a number of people I've known well enough to see declines in mental and physical abilities. Almost every one of them was annoyed by being less able to do what they could easily do before.



I have come to take it as natural as baby fat going away or growing pubic hair and all the hormone whirlwinds that go with that period of one's life. My teen years were the ones I'd dislike having to live again. The confusion in my head was opaque. I prefer this time of drifty mind and driving slower than ever. I find I'm driving 45 now in the 55 zones of Highways 18 or 21. Scared of highway patrol too. I can't afford a $50 ticket that will run my insurance rate up so it ultimately costs around a thousand dollars. I maintain the insurance corporations ought to be paying the highway patrol expenses. Insurance corporations get the thousand dollars over a ticket that is $50 for the state. The state is paying the highway patrol for the insurance corporations. Tax dollars from the people that work for a living, not even getting a living wage. Corporate lobby makes laws in favor of the corporations on the state level as well as the federal. This has been going on for so long, they've got us by the throats and they know it. They aim to keep it like that. And they will as long as they're able.



I'm reminded of a joke Dave Vaught of the VWBoys told onstage last time I saw the band. He was speaking of the bass player, Fat Albert Blackburn, who was bald, saying he grew up through his hair. I find myself growing up through the beginning phases of what we call old age. I tend at this time in the life to think of old age when one becomes feeble. Everyone dreads feeble. When I was looking after Jr Maxwell in his old age, feeble hit him hard. I was able to make it not a problem by being able to get him a glass of water so he didn't have to make the effort and end up on the floor. I carried him a few times when his legs could not hold him up. He protested that he was too heavy. I told him he's no heavier than a hay bale. And he wasn't.



First time I scooped him up, his eyes about jumped out of his head when his feet left the floor. It was momentary fright, about like picking up a cat. Some years ago Caterpillar would have a moment of anxiety being lifted up from the floor. From the moment her feet left the floor, her eyes got big and round. I realized when she was a kitten I was probably picking her up so fast it disoriented her. So I raised her from the floor slower and she relaxed into being lifted. Fast, she braced against it. I suspect it made her head swim. I was aware of this in cats and saw the same in Jr. The times I had to pick him up after that first time, I did it more slowly, deliberately, giving his mind that had slowed down considerably a chance to stay with the motion. It was disorienting the first time. But not the second time. I only had to carry him to get him through a doorway in the house when his legs were about as sturdy as wet spaghetti.



I'm growing up through the different phases of old age; first, the white hair, then memory fading away. The latest science says coffee is good for inhibiting Alzheimers. I drink some good Kenyan or Etheopian coffee every morning. Not because of this Yahoo! news bite, which I look at as may or may not be so. But because I like it. This news bite justifies it when I'd been questioning it. I'm not interested in going all the way into Alzheimers or have the mind just go away like it did Jr. I wouldn't want to be in that situation. In a nursing home I wouldn't notice that everything they fed me had the nutritional value of jell-o and ketchup. I wouldn't remember I'd been staring at that ceiling for months and months. Like everyone, I don't really care to drop off the edge into complete helplessness. Considering that's not my call, I really don't believe it's in my future as I grow up through the cloud on the mountain of age.



Everyone my age is looking at this. Some worry about it, some don't. I'm among the ones that don't. I think. When the doctor diagnosed heart failure, he said, "You're gonna die." His actual words tattooed on the vacated drive-in screen of my mind. All I could think to say was, "Duh." The only thing that really bothers me is thinking of the mess I'll leave behind. Australian Aborigines had it. One spear. That's it. I'm a post-WW2 American consumer who would rather buy onions and potatoes in the store than grow them. Hoeing a garden is not what I was put on earth to do. It is not among my talents. I have come to like the gradual changes. When I take the fear out of the changes, they can be fun. Like I'm reversing letters in typing rather regularly now, like whne for when. Sometimes I even leave out words, like the implied "you" in get me a beer. I don't mean that one, but several that are two or three words left out. I understand they're "implied," but no reader would. That's what rereading is good for now. It's ok. Like Jr said, "If it aint one knot in a log, it's ten." There's always something. These are just some of the things we grow into.



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TELEVISION

     jimmy kuehnle

     twas the day after christmas

     and all through the house

     the ticking clock went

     tock   tock   tock   tock

You can tell it's a house without television. If anybody could talk about it rationally, television is certainly among the more influential phenomena of social change in civilization, but I've found nearly no one who can talk about television rationally. To watch it is to be invested in it, automatically defensive for it, like owning stock in it. The people that don't watch it are on the other side of an invisible divide, a conceptual divide, from the ones that watch tv. It's even more radical a divide than between readers and nonreaders. People who watch tv are in one culture and people who don't watch it are in quite another culture. I don't include watching movies the same as watching tv, at all. Movies are picked by choice and they have no commercials. They have none of the hype that goes with television that cranks one's nervous system way up and holds it there. Television is the propaganda organ of corporate America: Mammon.



It used to be a said in the Third World that whoever controls the radio station controls the nation. Now it's whoever controls the television. It's not me. It's not you. Television is totally a corporate entity, it's purpose to keep the consumers shopping, and to create a myth of reality that involves buying something new more frequently than you're able, keeping you in wanting mode, never satisfied. On tv, everybody is famous but you. You don't even figure except on a poll of how many people watch what tv shows, and that is discovered by statistics, not talking with you. You are the target, the one addressed by the most sophisticated propaganda machine the modern world has known, and the one to be set subliminally into salivation. I think it was in the 11th grade in a Sociology class I learned about the different appeals of advertising, like bandwagon, etc., and realized these techniques were about undermining my judgment, which I hadn't even yet developed, cutting loose uncontrolled craving to the point that wanting equals living. Since I left the house of my parents, I never lived with another tv, except as a video monitor to watch movies with.



At other people's houses I like to watch tv with them, see what the commercials are appealing to today, see the art in the commercials. Commercials are the only art form on television that I've found. I don't ever see ads for anything of interest to me. I don't want a new car. I'm fine with my shaving supplies. The ones that make me laugh every time are about "erectile dysfunction." Havin a problem gettin a bone on? Erectile dysfunction, you can say in church from the pulpit and it's ok. Last night at Justin and Crystal's house I saw maybe 10 minutes of Truman Capote's Christmas Story, which I'd never seen. It was at the time the child said fuck from surprise and parents went ape-shit. Had the child said fornication, no problem would ever have arisen. They'd have thought it cute. He learned that word in church. Like the kid said in the story, he heard his dad say it ten times a day. Just trying to be like daddy. No you don't.



The commercials are entertaining once, even up to half a dozen times, but to live with them in my house on a regular basis telling me I am nothing without whatever it is that costs more than I can afford, I cannot live with that. I'm nothing if I don't want to drink beer in a sports bar and watch football on the nearest of a dozen tvs. I'll die in a car wreck if I don't buy tires that cost more than I can afford. I sit and watch these things at friends' houses and break into laughter. They don't know what I'm laughing at, because they "tune out" the commercials. They still hear them, however. They ask what I'm laughing at, I say a certain something in the content of the commercial and they say, "Yeah, that's pretty funny." Like the one of the kid playing Darth Vader on the Volkswagen in the driveway, and dad inside the house with a clicker starts the car. Blows the kid's mind. (I was glad the car didn't run over him like in an event on A Thousand Ways To Die when a guy started his pickup with a clicker and it ran over him.) To my mind-eye, the commercial of the kid playing Darth Vader was a work of art. It was inspired by YouTube, as so many commercials I see now are.



Even when I see a commercial for something I don't want, I experience that appeal to undermine my judgment and sell me something I absolutely do not want, like a George Foreman grill, making me believe I do, subliminally. When I'm in the over-the-counter medications section of the corporate drug store looking for something like an anti-expectorant, and see hundreds of things that I don't even know what they are or what they mean, that don't even give me a clue to how close I am to what I'm looking for, I know that any person I see nearby I can ask and they'll give me an educated answer and find it by going straight to it. They watch tv. I don't. That's the difference. People who watch tv know what all that stuff is. People who don't watch it don't know what any of it is but aspirin, which the AMA has rendered by prescription now, because it works and they want some payback on it. Tapped into television is a straight line to the worst influence on any human being there could be. That is a true saying. If the US Govt really wants to control Afghanistan and Iraq, they'd arrange it so everyone could see American tv in translation. Them foreigners would acquiesce and become as easily manipulable consumers as Americans. Under control.



I've found that television is the only thing in America that is really sacred, besides money, the given. You can't talk down about television to anybody. The gawkers are right there in your face if you do. Seems to me that's the definition of sacred, something everybody agrees in common is not to be made light of. It's a good source for news (really?) and keeps you up with what's going on (really?). The commercials are necessary for the rest of it (really?) and we don't pay attention to them anyway (really?). What I see is the spaces between commercials getting shorter every year to the place that by now the content between the commercials is there for the commercials' sake. Television used to be about what was between the commercials; now, it's about the commercials. I really don't care to hear about McDonalds Whoppers a million times. I'd rather hear a wren sing. I'd rather have a conversation with a friend. I'd rather hold Caterpillar and watch a movie. Today's movie I'll be seeing again, JUST ANOTHER LOVE STORY, by Danish director, Ole Bornedal. In a 5-star system, this one rates 6.

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I DRINK ALONE

    twas the day before christmas (image borrowed from Fox)

Christmas is here. Parties everywhere. Dinners everywhere. Kids playing everywhere. Television football everywhere. Then there's the other half of the population that's depressed due to something that happened somewhere along the way in their lives. I had a friend from Knoxville, who was depressed at Christmas because when she was a kid her mother and dad got drunk and fought. Another I know had a brother who killed his wife and himself on Christmas Eve. It wrecked his life, not just his Christmases. Then there is the song Carter Stanley sang, The Story of Charlie Lawson, who killed his wife and all his kids but the oldest boy on Christmas. These were men with serious issues. The people who play happy on Christmas think their behavior a normal response to Christmas. Somebody whose entire family died on Christmas does not think happy is normal for such a day.



Like everything else, Christmas is what it is to each individual, no one thing for all. This American thinking that we as a nation ought to be homogenized, in education, in culture, just one culture---white culture---is what the corporate control of our government would do with us, put us into forced homogenization like Stalin and Mao did their people, and rule us under a collective dark cloud. Will that be a happy Christmas? For half the people, yes. Interesting that half the people also choose not to vote. Half the American people are depressed at Christmas and half don't vote. I'm certain the two halves are not composed of the same people. Of course, some would intersect, but probably not most.
We understand why, because half the people are tired of having no one to vote FOR. I only vote because I vote AGAINST. I've never had anyone in my lifetime to vote FOR, but Carter and Clinton, and all others I vote against. I vote against district "representative" Virginia Foxx, whoever is running against her. It's a case of anyone would be better.



I also don't vote with the belief my vote will count. So much fraud is involved in our elections, they've become meaningless. I don't vote because I think my vote matters. I would not vote at all if thinking it mattered were important. I vote as a form of protest, saying: I want democracy. I vote to add my digit to the votes cast as one more vote for democracy. If I vote persistently, it says I dream of some day having democracy in America. It matters to no one, but me. It's my own symbolic gesture to satisfy myself. It has nothing to do with who is running. It has to do with one anti-republican vote. My single digit raised high. The very same gesture back to the republican party that it gives to the working people and now the middle class. I'm a rebel and I'll never ever be any good. I vote to cancel one republican's vote. It's legal. Again, it's not that it matters. Only that it's fun.



In my own childhood I never had any adverse associations with Christmas. It was always a good and festive time. Presents, seeing relatives. In Jr Hi and High School I would come down with the flu first day school was out and recover the day before school started. It was never easy for the young rooster in the chicken house when the big rooster was in. Christmas was big rooster day and little rooster stayed in the background, out of sight of the big rooster as much as possible. If big rooster was inside, little rooster went outside, and the other way around. It was personal safety as much as avoidance. Any time young rooster got some attention, big rooster gave him a look that said, when we're back in the chicken house you better watch out. I call the house with my parents the chicken house because the behavior inside was pure poultry. I mean unconscious all the way back to bird consciousness, like an evolutionary arrested development.



When I grew up and went on my own, I let Christmas go, except as a time to give presents to friends and party. The giving presents is the fun part of Christmas. Much more fun than getting presents. How often does a kid get what he or she wants? I do tend to have a problem with all the get-up with trees and decorations and food and spending too much money. I try not to spend too much money. Always do, but that's ok. It's all in good spirit. It's the spirit of Christmas I like, the spirit of friendliness with friends and family, anyway in my experience. My maternal grandmother made Christmas into a Norman Rockwell time, big family around the table with grandma and grandpa. Since I've lived by myself, I've never had a Christmas tree. For one thing, I've experienced what goes into making a Christmas tree, and I don't want one in my house. An artificial tree would be ok, but not a tree grown in the mountains where the growers poison the ground water with carcinogens, kill all life in the mountain streams, and destroy the soil. I can't partake of that. It's my boycott of one. I don't care if nobody else boycotts it, as long as I do.



Like everything else in our commercial world, Christmas has become absurd. The shopping is absurd with malls and big stores staying open all night. You may be sure they will not be open all night on December 26, the day for returns. Television at Christmas has become absurd. The money some people spend that they don't have is absurd. That Christmas shopping is the bed rock of the Economy is absurd. That Christmas has become meaningless is absurd. Churches pound their members with the reason is the season, or the other way around. Whichever. The marriage of Capitalism and Christendom has made Saturnalia ok, and the holy day of the year means more calories for the fat cats. None of it has to do with anything but money. Like Jesus trumped the pre-Christian festive time, Saturnalia, Mammon trumped Jesus at Christmas. None of it inspires me to any kind of participation, but to visit with friends, give and receive presents, watch football with friends, eat some good food made by friends, wine when out and about, liquor at home. I'm like the George Thoroughgood song, I Drink Alone. It's too much trouble, with drunk driving laws, to drink anyplace but home. I've a feeling that one day during this Saturnalia I may let myself get shit-faced and see what happens. I might pass out in the chair watching a Steven Seagal movie.



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