Song of Appalachia

On Google Maps Hiltons, Virginia looks to be only a short jog from Abingdon where our hotel was.  In fact the directions will tell you that it’s only 27 miles away.  The directions will also tell you though that it’s about a 50 minute drive.  Well that didn't look at all right when we started out until a few minutes into the drive when we left the the town limits of Abingdon for a narrow, winding road through the woods and farms of that little corner of Appalachia. This section of Virginia is about a tobacco spit away from the border with Tennessee.

A familiar Baptist Church in Appalachia

The wife wasn't thrilled about venturing out so far into the rural reaches on a country road that we didn't know and would be pitch black on the way back to Abingdon.  I saw it as a photographic opportunity.  The road winds through a countryside that alternates between deep woods and family farms; all the color of emeralds, broken only by splashes of purple, white and yellow wildflowers. Every couple of miles you catch the familiar cross topped white spire of a Baptist Church.  They’re as thick as fleas in Virginia.  The wife wondered out loud, “Aren't there any Catholics here?”  I took it as rhetorical and didn't answer but suffice to say, Catholics seem to be a rare breed.  The turnouts on those roads are about as rare as Catholics and most places to pull over are near the gravel entry road to a farm.  More than a few times I would get out of my car near one of those farms to take a picture and then beat a hasty retreat back when the farm hound dog approached, barking and looking angry.  Seems that everyone here has a dog and nobody has a fence.  Back at Fredericksburg I’d struck up a conversation with a woman in an Irish tavern.  I noted that in California we cling mightily to that line by Robert Frost that “good fences make good neighbors.”  I told her that for us a fenced in yard is as essential as a flush toilet and by the way “What do people do about their dogs here where there aren't any fences?”  She told me that you train your dog to stay on the property or you use an electronic fence or you trust that Rover won’t do too much roving and will come back home when darkness settles in; or a day or so later. 

Rural Appalachia

“Destination is ahead on the right,” announced the GPS lady.  We’d really no idea what our destination would look like until we arrived.  From a distance we saw cars and trucks parked haphazardly by the side of the road and in a nearby pasture.  I pulled up to a fellow who by virtue of his orange vest looked official.  “Y’all heah f’ the shaow, ye can pull i-yan behand that re-ad va-yan.”  In five days of driving through Virginia it seemed we hadn't heard one syllable of southern drawl.  In fact our innkeeper at Fredericksburg sounded like she was from the Bronx - must have gone left instead of right at DC.  I was a little disappointed.  I’d really hoped to watch my wife with her Filipino accent communicate with someone speaking with a southern twang.  Now we’d finally found it; and in abundance.

Our destination was a big wooden flat topped shed-like structure built into the side of a hill – the Carter Family Fold.  If you’re a bluegrass aficionado, the Carter Family Fold is the house of the holy in a section of the country that is the mother to bluegrass and old timey music.  The fold, named in honor of A.P, Sara and Maybelle Carter who first recorded blue grass music in the 1920s is part of the larger Carter Family Music Center which includes AP Carter’s original cabin – a National Historic Site.  The cabin was originally so far out in nowhere that in order for people to visit, the cabin was deconstructed board by board and then reassembled by the side of the road.  As best I could tell, this is pretty much Hiltons; no Wal-Mart, no car dealership, no diner, no general store.  I’d be willing to bet though that somewhere down a side road that we missed there’s a Hiltons Baptist Church.

A couple of older ladies (yeah, older than me) sit at a table selling tickets at 10 bucks a piece; a bargain if the show’s any good.  Off to the left of the ticket ladies is another lady selling Mason jars full of peanuts – salted, lightly salted or unsalted; “Fahve dollahs, and thea rea-ally guuuud.”  Still full from a dinner of barbecue ribs I passed on the peanuts. 

Once inside the fold you step onto a big concrete floor that separates the stage from the seating.  You can walk to the concession on the other side and buy a cap or t-shirt (I did!) or some popcorn and homemade lemonade.  You can stroll around and look at the history of bluegrass on the walls.  Just as everywhere else when we stepped out of the air conditioned car it was like stepping into an oven and having a hot wet towel thrown in your face. Sweat beads on your brow almost immediately.  To keep the building from turning into a sauna it was built with big side panels that flip up, creating a covered, yet open air venue.  Still there are many ceiling fans that labor though the evening and the ladies fan themselves with paper fans.  There are only a few rules here; no smoking, no drinking, no cussing and no electric music.  The exception to the latter was extended to Johnny Cash who married into the family when he married his wife June Carter.  The man in black played some of his last concerts at the Fold. 

History on the walls of the Carter Fold

I strolled around the building in complete nirvana that state of perfect happiness, in this wellspring of bluegrass.  The VW Boys began their set with a lively reel and an old boy who must have been 80 if he was a day took to the floor.  He wore britches hiked up just under his arm pits and a blue plaid western style shirt and a kindly smile and steel tapped shoes that clicked not so much to the music but to his own deliberate pace; I imagine that in his day he could cut a mighty rug.  He was the ice breaker soon joined by a pair of women who in their clogging shoes tapped in lively time to the band.  Soon the concrete floor was filled with cloggers, shufflers and folks just swaying to the music.  A little girl swirled around the floor looking a little like the young Deadhead women I used to see at Grateful Dead shows.  A young boy, maybe 10, clogged across the floor wearing tapped Chuck Taylors.  I tried to conjure up a 10 year old child clogging in image conscious San Francisco and it was like trying to imagine a platter of pork ribs at a Bar Mitzvah. 

 

The VW Boys 

Clogging to the VW Boys

The VW Boys played about a two hour set of bluegrass, gospel, country and a few pop tunes, led by Tim White on banjo, Dobro and “gi-TAR” as he says in his drawl.  The rest of the band is the typical bluegrass band; mandolin, upright bass, guitar and fiddle.  This was an informal deal.  There were no security goons to eighty-six the kids and dogs that occasionally meandered on the stage and the Boys seemed acquainted with many in the audience. They throw in a little comedy, some of it at the expense of the current White House occupant.  Tim White announced that they would do a song about working men. “How many of you are working men?” he asked.  A few hands went up.  “I guess the rest of you voted for Obama.”  The wife took a quick glance at me to watch me quietly fume and was probably surprised to see me laugh. Hey it was funny, alright.  I may be a lefty but what do you expect in what’s probably the most crimson corner of an already red state?  And I wasn't there for a political forum you know; I was there to enjoy the music and the experience.

When I stepped out of the car that evening it was almost as if I’d stepped into a different place and time.  After we’d returned home, I said as much to a friend and he completely mistook my meaning.  He thought that I was describing a people out of touch and somehow a decade or so behind the rest of the country; you know – rubes, the Beverly Hillbillies.  We urbanites sometimes can’t resist an opportunity for condescension at the expense of “bumpkins.”  I meant nothing of the sort though.  Sure life is slower but that doesn't make it prehistoric.  Cell phones aplenty but I’m willing to bet not one was tied to a corporate master.  These people don’t strike me as apparatchiks answering to the man.  And for that they may well be ahead of our so called urban sophistication.  There’s very little pretense.  You like what you like and dress how you dress  and if you’re wearing a plaid western shirt and overalls or suspenders, and someone has a problem with it it’s their problem not yours.  It’s a place where a hoe is a gardening implement and a bitch is a female hound.  It’s a place where manners are still cool.  As we were leaving the building the old boy who’d been the first on the dance floor was filing out just in front of us.  He turned and saw my wife and stepped aside for her to pass.  He bowed his head slightly to her and the corners of his old eyes crinkled; “How you doin’ this evenin’ mam?” 

Was it worth the twenty bucks?  Hell yeah.  That and more.  I’m writing this on a Saturday evening and back in Hiltons they’re just finishing up another show.  I wish I was there.  I’d go every Saturday given the opportunity.  Sure as shit beats watching back to back to back episodes of panicked chefs sweating over how to make an appetizer out of creamed corn, pretzels and dried dog poop on Chopped while that white bread moderator Ted Allen displays all the pizzazz of grass growing.

We didn't have go to the “big show” at the Carter Family Fold that evening.  We could have stayed right in Abingdon for the Saturday night jam session at Capo’s Music Store.  Or we could have gone to Floyd, Virginia for the Floyd Country Store Friday Night Jamboree; an hour of gospel music followed by two dance bands.  In Woodlawn, there’s the weekly Concert at the Fiddle and Plow in Willard Gayheart's Frame & Print Shop.  Fifteen miles or so down the interstate in Bristol we could have gone to The Pickin Porch for bluegrass and gospel.  Weekend concerts are held in shops, theaters, churches, community centers and campgrounds all over this little corner of Virginia, bordered by Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina.  At many the cost of admission is nothing more than an appreciation of the music.  They call this area The Crooked Road and if you had the time you could start with the jam at Verner Blankenship Park in Hurley Virginia, and drive 330 leisurely crooked miles with music at every stop and end in Rocky Mount, at the Dairy Queen, where you can hear the Thursday night jam session.  At many of these if you can pick, you can play. 

Out in this little corner of Virginia they unabashedly celebrate music that harkens back to the beginnings of our country and in the intervening years adopted forms and traditions from other cultures and the waves of immigrants to America.  The music is an amalgam of, as Bill C. Malone describes in his book Country Music USA, “folk songs, ballads, dances and instrumental pieces brought to North America by Anglo-Celtic immigrants…absorbing influences from other musical sources, particularly from the culture of Afro-Americans.”  Everyone recognizes bluegrass by the familiar tinny sound of the banjo; probably derived from an instrument brought to America by African slaves and referred to by Thomas Jefferson in 1781 as the “banjar.”  I suppose that the history of the music is one of the reasons why I love it so much.  A bluegrass, gospel or country song usually has a story to tell and the music itself is part of the story of America. 

When we planned our trip through Virginia we had a choice of turning east at Fredericksburg for Virginia Beach, Williamsburg and the Labor Day throngs or turn southwest for Appalachia and the Crooked Road.  It was a choice between going to Williamsburg and seeing a reenactment of a colonial woman spinning wool or driving a lot of extra miles to see the bona fide preservation of Americana.  My only regret is that our time in Appalachia was so brief. 

 For more on The Crooked Road, visit the website: https://www.myswva.org/tcr