Our Lady Of The Mountain-With Hazel
Dickens In Mind
By Zack James
Jack Callahan caught the folk minute
bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver back in maybe 1961,
1962 he was not sure now exactly which with the elapse of almost sixty years
and his memory not what it once had been. Knew it could not be before that
since Jack Kennedy, of his own clan and brethren was President then so 1961
would be the earliest. Caught that bug after having heard some songs that held
him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college
station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill
Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs. Songs from the latest protest songs of
the likes of then somewhat unknown but soon to explode onto scene as the
media-ordained king of folk Bob Dylan and sullen severe Phil Ochs to old
country blues, you know, Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and above all
Mississippi John Hurt who were “discovered” and feted by adoring mostly white
urban college students who had a famous “king of the blues’ shoot-out one year
down at the Newport Folk Festival to Bob
Wills and Milton Brown Western Swing and everything in between. A fast
paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook from which he
knew either from his parent’s dreary (his term) 1940s Frank Sinatra-Andrews
Sisters-Inkspots material to budding rock and roll. What got to Jack, what
caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things
like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the
mournful Come All You Fair And Tender
Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a now forgotten treasure of a singer from deep
in the Tennessee hills somewhere whose voice can still haunt his dreams.
Now this adhesion to folk minute was
quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it
was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of
WNAC in Chicago where the fix was on for the electric blues and rhythm and
blues that were the precursors of that rock which would be the staple of his
early musical tastes (and reaction to that parent’s dreary 1940s music but that
story has been told elsewhere and this is about mountain music so forward).
Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in
radio wave land, classmate Irwin Silver the science wiz of his school tried to
explain it one day but he never really caught the drift of the science behind
it, and he had caught that station and then the
Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado
of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real
love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was the signature
genre for his generation (and again for those who missed the point the bane of
his parents). He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all
out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain
music.
One summer, this was 1964 he thought,
while he was in college in Boston, he had decided rather than a summer job he
would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky
maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard
before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor
parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that
staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a
story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of
people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or
musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of
authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete
Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs
like Harry Smith from earlier times but young people looking for roots which
was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in
reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization,
golden age modernization and forget the hunky, dusty, dirty immigrant pasts. (A
sad admission in an immigrant country except for those indigenous peoples who
ground we stand on today making no discrimination between sacred or profane
land, or mocking those distinctions. Sadder today when vast tracts of people
are being denied access to their sacred and profane lands down along the
gringo-imposed southern American border and working the northern ones now too.
But that story too is for another day.)
A lot of the young, and that included
Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia
through Michael Harrington’s The Other
America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack
was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a
gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this
he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk
group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having
headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had
brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the
mountain world.
Jack had spent a couple of weeks down
in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out in West Virginia
where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his
motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn
musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday
night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in
coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been
brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of his high school friend Jimmy
Jenkins who was later killed in hellhole Vietnam on his father’s side from back
home in Carver. Jimmy had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard
where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War II had driven
him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.
This girl, a pretty girl to boot,
Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that
whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from
that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn
dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on
the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s
term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a
motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few of what Nadine called
mountain harps.
The first half of the dance went
uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what
the locals called “white lightning,” illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the
stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason remember her
name at first, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp
and sing a song, The Hills of Home,
that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack
marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she
told him a gal from “around those parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and
wasn’t she good. When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending
more time with friendly Nadine in that searching for mountain music) he
contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax her north for college
audiences to hear. They did so although Hazel initially was fearful of coming
north to what she thought was a crime-ridden black plague city but which turned
out since she was to play at Harvard’s Memorial Hall an ivy-covered sanctuary
which she would visit several times later in her career and recognize as the start
of her break-out from the hills and hollows of home to a candid world. That was Jack Callahan’s small proudly boasted
contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel
Dickens did before she dies several years ago much, much more to keep the flame
burning.
