He Came Through The Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind

He Came Through The Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind 

 

He wasn’t his father’s only son, not by a long shot. There was Isiah, Levi, Joshua, Samuel, David and Isaac but Preston was his favorite, his youngest son that he got around to naming after him when the smoke blew off of his “burned over” religious experience when the evangelical movement made it way south as it did periodically through the mountains by the early 1920s and he had been a previous sinner “reborn” and stopped naming his sons after some ancient high king in heaven Jehovah and his progeny. Preston also had a parcel of sisters, his father’s measurement term for the girls that he had called Missy, Little Peach or “hey you” when they were younger and almost nothing as they came of age, became womanly with their womanly needs most pressingly to be separated in sleeping quarters from the boys meaning  that the old man was forever building lean-to sheds for each newly minted young woman in the back of the cabin giving the whole property the look of so many  mismatched ticky-tack boxes, which they were.  As the parcel came of age he could not frankly understand them and their ways any more than he could understand his late wife, Sarah, bless her soul, when it came right down to it but they were kin and so the boxes and the not so secret wish that some young bucks would come and take them off his hands.

It had not been that young Preston (that is how we will call it here since you know who old Preston is) was so like his father in his old-fashioned ideas about women, about religion (although the old man had calmed down a bit about the matter after Sarah died but he still read his good book every evening and while he was lenient about many things he still would not abide [his term] swearing in his house and put one than one boy out for a time to prove his point) but that he had an independent streak that he had sensed that he had gotten from the old man. Like the time that young Preston at age twelve had run off with a couple of boys from up the road, Hobart Smith’s boys, going up to the Ohio River from their home in Hazard, Kentucky to see if they could hear John Newbury and his Appalachian Mountain Boys play on a riverboat sited at Paducah.

See young Preston had the music bug just like his father had before he was married and before he came to believe against all good reason that music was the devil’s work (although here too the old man had backed down a bit only refusing to personally be the devil’s servant, again his term), had been working on his guitar for since he was eleven singing old Jimmy Rodgers tunes, you know the Texas yodeler although he was actually born in Mississippi for some reason, and a few from A.P. Carter’s vast collection of simple songs guaranteed to get the girls to pay attention. (Carter would go around the countryside into the hillbilly hills and hallows, into the Nigger-towns and grab up every song he could, rework them a little, although keeping some monotonous same melody and then copyright them as his own like a few other guys would do later like Bob Dylan with traditional songs that were in the public domain.

He needn’t have worried about the girls since from early on the girls around Hazard, Prestonsburg, hell, even down to Haran County come Saturday night barn dance at Red Miller’s old homestead the girls had eyes for him, and not just the younger ones either. (It was a sixteen year old girl from over in Lewisburg who took away his virginity and hers at the same time when he was fourteen so yes he did not need to worry on the young girl front). But the way he figured the situation the guitar was his way out, his way out of the coal mines that dotted the countryside that turned everything within a few miles into black, and more  black on top of that until one sickened of the color ruining the natural beauty of the valley. So young Preston would practice constantly, got pretty good at it until it was his time at fourteen to go into the mines to help the family, and go like his older brothers down to the pits along with half the men in the town (the other half not working, nor not wanting to work, just sitting on their front porch tar paper shacks drinking homemade whiskey or just hanging out looking to be hanging out. The classic Tobacco Road white trash situation that more than one author has milked for all it was worth, not too much worth in the end but enough to hang that name on them). So he went, went to do coal separation work like all the boys did on day one in the mines, and then to the mines themselves when he grew too big for the separation work.

But he always thought about that guitar, about that possible way out of his freaking existence (my term). Then one night when he was sixteen he and a couple of boys stepped away from the pits, went to find out if they could get away first and then when they did they went their separate ways and good luck. Preston to Louisville and then over to try his luck in Nashville in the Tennessee night. Got himself into a small school that taught him how to really play the guitar, got him to be able to carry a tune with some precision. Got him noticed too when he entered a couple of talent search competitions one which had been judged by the most famous one of the famous Lally brothers, Shiloh, the master fiddler who kept the group lively, and although he did not win that competition he made an impression on Shiloh by doing a deep version of Anchored in Love, the old Carter Family standard. Preston got offered a job travelling with the Lally Brothers as second guitar and maybe some vocals (although Shiloh preferred to sing solo most of the time).  

That went along for a couple of good years with Preston playing back-up guitar but occasionally lead on some bass-ful songs. Got him plenty of come hither looks from the girls too, one of the things that Shiloh had noticed about Preston in that competition he had judged when the girls all crowded around close. Then December 7, 1941 came and blew a hole in a lot of dreams, a lot of expectations. Preston, as patriotic as the next man, and a couple of the younger Lally brothers went up to Louisville to enlist in the Marine, Semper Fi guys no question. When the Marine sergeant recruiter noticed that Preston had worked in the mines he told him that guys with mine experience could be exempted from military duty since many, many tons of coal would now be needed for all the ships and other vessels that would go against the Axis powers. Preston laughed, told that recruiter that between digging god awful coal and facing the “Nips” (a common term referring to the Japanese) he would take his chances against the latter.     

And he did facing off against the hated enemy on all of the big Marine Pacific Island operations that his division was called to perform. Before being discharged he was assigned to the Naval Depot in Hingham in Massachusetts where he met his future wife, stayed there and didn’t prosper but didn’t complain when in his turn he had five sons who were raised somehow. He would sing old Hank Williams songs when his oldest son, Preston III asked him to do so taking out that old woe begotten guitar that he salvaged from a trip back home. But he never got up on that big high stage again.