In The Hills And Hollows Again- With
Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind
By Lance Lawrence
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[Although I am a much
younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older
writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it
short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. As far as Phil Larkin’s,
what did Si call them, yes, rantings about older writers heads rolling, about
purges and the like seem like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have
read about that regime and are dubious at best. The gripe the former two
writers have about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it
purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green
and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned,
I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all,
interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.” That I too, as Si
pointed out, while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am
now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the
disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.
In the interest of transparency
I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now
started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth
and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for
reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stoped
young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go,
had to “retire” and bring in Greg Green and surrounded him with an Editorial
Board. (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks around
retire as definite proof that Allan was purged.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s
sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal
struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can
tell. That fact should signal the end of these embarrassing and rather provocative
disclaimers. Done. Lance Lawrence]
************
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.
