In The Hills And Hollows Again- With
Mountain Music Man Norman Blake And Satruday Red Barn Dances And White Lightning Dreams In Mind
Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s
relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows
of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for
generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned
decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and
moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber
noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s
Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of
North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by
Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy
Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee
and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land
had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins
barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence
a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they
did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.
They all, all the hills and hollows
people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so
in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these
sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the
British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and
so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went
into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short,
nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred
Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain
people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would
gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed
bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the
winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and
the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.
But like Bart said when discussing the
matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the
old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in
folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts
like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out
in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a
lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a
cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on
Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that
he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.
See Sam and Diana were tucked away from
the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and
Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up
the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in
their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out
ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to
listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy
Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon
River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up
belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American
Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for
something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled,
tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla
existence.
Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he
thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days
when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago
and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was
different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political,
social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would
not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next.
That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down
there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest
in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole
thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against
the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been
like that ever after.
The way Sam told it one night a few
years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed
forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book
club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical
influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak
then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central
place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook.
He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time
discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which
were a very big concern for a part of their generation, a generation that
was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art,
and even in the family tree.
Their parents’ generation no matter how
long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto
these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very
consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla
Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of
that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during
that period.
Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy
rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations
were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their
beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for
something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program.
Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was
out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find
out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor,
Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just
that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being
played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was
before long that he was tuned in.
His own lucky station had been a small
station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out
later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request
of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the
Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too,
thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like
roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the
license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom
Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear
in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he
would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were
proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were
manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money.
Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners
for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep
in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double
that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for
the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list
clubs.
He listened to it all, liked some of
it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the
performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the
radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills
and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds.
Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and
Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell
Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his
rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider
younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various
band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped
his memory.
This is where it all got jumbled up for
him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm
boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high
school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and
that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why
he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably
broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance
complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full
complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for
the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.
Then one night, a Sunday night after he
had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently
the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station)
he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father
came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the
song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him
a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older
brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from
the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father
decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were
better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after
seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a
new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try
to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were
in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all
along.
