by William Gay
If you can imagine someone laboriously chipping away at the rock and placing in the body, then it’s not hard to see how private and personal this was, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing you should be paying five dollars to see.
In the next chamber Chris shows us where she saw a strange haze shifting in one corner. Farther back, five hundred feet or so into the bluff, the cave narrows until it’s inaccessible. She shines the light. It’s almost absorbed into the wet dark walls as the tunnel veers crookedly out of sight. You’d have to be a spelunker to crawl back in there.
That’s where I heard the scream coming from, Chris says. Not any kind of animal, but a woman screaming. That’s what that Tennessean camera crew heard, too.
We fall silent and listen, but all you can hear is the gurgling of underground water. If you listen intently enough, it becomes voices, a man and a woman in conversation, a cyclic rising and falling in which you can hear timbre and cadence but not the words, and in the end it’s just moving water.
Outside in the hot sunlight you’re jerked into another century. Inside it was easy to feel that all these events were layered together and happening simultaneously: The haunting, a wall smoked black by Native American fires, the crypt of bones, the laughter of young lovers exploring the cave. Outside it’s just Adams, Tennessee, circa 2000, and a vague nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been and can never go.
Chris is locking up the cave. Some people might talk to you, she says. But a lot of people won’t talk about it at all. After that Blair Witch movie came out, this place was sort of overrun with reporters and writers. But some people around here don’t think it’s anything to joke about. Some of them have seen things and heard things and feel the whole business should just be left alone.
I don’t really know what to think, Tim Henson tells me. I know something happened, but I’ve never really seen anything myself. I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they have. A friend of mine was fishing down in front of the cave and swears he saw a figure, a human figure, that just disappeared. And people say they see lights around that property. But I’m particular about finding an explanation for things I see and hear. And so far I’ve always been able to find an explanation that satisfies me.
Henson’s the superintendent of the water department in Adams, but he’s also the town’s unofficial historian, a walking encyclopedia on the Bell family and their troubles, who can quote courthouse records and church rolls from the nineteenth century without having to look them up. He’s the man that people come looking for when they’re doing a book or a documentary about the Bell Witch. Most recently, he spent some time being interviewed for The Learning Channel. Henson comes across as a shrewd and intelligent man, and his take on the legend makes as much sense as any other I’ve heard.
It doesn’t matter to me if it’s true or not, he says. I guess something happened. There’s about forty books now about it, and you don’t write forty books about nothing. There’s been three in the last year or so, and just the other day a fellow gave me a piece on the witch from an old 1968 Playboy. But I keep an open mind on all that. What I’m interested in is the story and the history, the Bells themselves and the way they interacted with their neighbors. There was a bunch of students down at Mississippi State University who tried to prove it was all a hoax, that Joshua Gardner hoaxed the whole county just to marry Betsy. But it’s hard to say.
But folks still believe in it her? I asked.
Oh yes. Some do. And they figure it’s not too smart to make fun of it or to get into it too deep. There was a couple here, a descendant of John Bell and one from Joshua Gardner. They fell in love and courted all their lives, but they were afraid to marry because of the Bell Witch.
When I was kid I read an issue of Life magazine about the seven greatest American ghost stories, and that was the first time I heard of the Bell Witch. Later my uncle, who was a great storyteller and had read the early books, fleshed out the tale. I found the books and read them myself, and for my money it’s the quintessential ghost story. I figured that someday I’d go to Robertson County and see the Bell farm, which seemed to me an almost mythic place existing only in its own strange fairy-tale geography.
It was years before I made my first visit, more years still before I made my second.
The first I made with my uncle, whom I held in great esteem. I was beginning to read Steinbeck and Algren, and he seemed to be one of their characters come to life. He was sort of a restless-footed hard drinker, hard traveler, barroom brawler. Plus he had a tattoo on his bicep: a dagger with a drop of blood at its tip, a scroll wound round the blade that read, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. He had lied about his age to get into World War II, then crouched seasick and heartsick in the prow of a landing craft while the beaches at Normandy swam toward him like something out of a bad dream. He fought yard by yard across France and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a hero, and he had the medals to prove it, though he didn’t think they amounted to much.
After the war he bummed around the country, working where he could and riding freight trains, sleeping sometimes in places you don’t normally want to associate with sleeping: jails, boxcars, graveyards. He was an honest and an honorable man, but he’d been down the road and back. He was what they used to call “a man with the bark on.”
By the time we rode out to the Bell farm, a lot of time had passed, and he had settled down, quit drinking, and become a respectable family man.
At the time the cave was private property (it still is, but it’s set up as a tourist attraction), and we weren’t allowed to see it, let alone go inside. So we talked to a few locals, went looking for the graveyard and whatever remnants of Bell’s old log home that might remain. The graveyard is in a cedar grove a mile or so off U.S. 41, and it’s not easy to find. But it’s been found time and again by vandals, who stole Bell’s original tombstone and even dug up some of the graves. All that remains of the house are a few of the stones it used to stand on.
It was dark before we found our way out of the woods, and though we were trying to maintain a degree of detached curiosity, it was undeniable that this was an eerie place.
A few months later my uncle and his wife turned up at my house in the middle of the night with a strange tale. H looked nervous and haggard, far from the cool and collected man I was accustomed to. Something had jarred him, and he didn’t take long getting around to it.
That thing has followed me home, he said.
Life had gone on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. What thing?
That Bell Witch, or whatever it is. We keep hearing things, seeing things. It’s about to drive us crazy.
What kind of things? I asked.
We’ve heard voices. People mumbling, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. A hell of a racket that sounded like you’d dropped a chest of drawers from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor. You go look and there’s nothing there. The other night I looked out the kitchen window and saw this ball of blue light just rise up from the ground and move off into the woods.
I didn’t know what to say.
We want you to sleep in that bedroom where we hear that stuff, he said. If you hear something, at least we’ll know we’re not going crazy.
There was no way I wanted to do that. But by now I was trying to get down the road and back myself, and I had a reputation to maintain. I was also hoping this would turn out to be his idea of a practical joke.
All right, I said.
This is what I heard, or think I heard:
I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a light on. At about three in the morning I was reading an old copy of Reader’s Digest when I heard a chuckle, a soft, malicious chuckle of just a few seconds’ duration. It seemed to come from no particular point in the room.
I thought it was a joke. I jerked open the bedroom door. There was no one there. I went through the house. Everyone was asleep.
It was a long time until daylight.
What did
I hear? I don’t know. Did I really hear it at all? I don’t know that, either, and I wouldn’t argue it either way. It doesn’t seem to matter. You hear what you believe you hear.
My uncle lives in West Tennessee near a town named after Joshua Gardner’s brother, and I called him the other night.
Did you really hear all that stuff in that house, or were you just pulling my leg? I asked him.
We heard things right up until we sold the place and moved, he said. It sort of died down, but every now and then we’d hear something. You’ll notice nobody lives too long in that house. It’s changed hands several times since we sold it.
I told him I had been back to Robertson County and that I was writing an article about the Bell Witch.
It might be best to leave that stuff alone, he said.
I don’t know if there’s any truth in all this business. Because almost two hundred years have passed since the original haunting supposedly occurred, I don’t suppose anyone else will know. But I do know that the world is a strange and wondrous place. There are mysteries on every side if you care to look. I also know that I don’t know nearly as much now as I thought I did at twenty-five. If I stacked the things I know next to the ones I don’t, I wouldn’t have a very tall stack
Every question is multiple choice, and truth depends on your frame of reference. It sometimes seems an act of hubris to even form a conjecture.
I’d leave that stuff alone, I heard time after time from one source or another, and it might be worth remembering that the Bell Witch saved her strongest malice for scoffers and debunkers. It might be wise to keep one’s disbelief to oneself.
On the other hand, she was clairvoyant. So it might be best not to think about that stuff at all.
MUSIC CRITICISM
TIME DONE BEEN WONT BE NO MORE
(But See That My Grave Is Kept Clean)
SEE IT AS A TREASURE CHEST or, more aptly, a Pandora’s box unleashing into the world not evil or hardships or death but ruminations and lamentations and commentaries upon them, fading picture postmarks mailed from a world that was already growing remote in 1952. That was the year Harry Smith released his Anthology of American Folk Music, and it must have been something to see: eighty-four songs on six LP records, two discs each for the three volumes, each volume with a title: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. All in an elaborate, metal-hinged album accompanied by Smith’s surreal liner notes in a homemade booklet festooned with occult and arcane symbols.
The LP format was new in 1952. No longer was a record restricted to one song per side. Now each side could contain a series of songs, and the producer could play with them, arrange them in any order he chose. This was a revolutionary concept, and Harry Smith made the most of it.
The Anthology is a case of the sum being greater than its parts, and Smith achieved this because he heard sounds not just as themselves, but in relationship to other sounds, and set out to make a sort of aural hologram. Perfectly ordinary voices, even pleasant voices singing pleasant songs, are interred side by side with brief three-minute vignettes of darkness that light will not defray, horror that is only heightened by its contrast with the ordinary, so that some of the voices sound like screeches and mumbles and whispers leaked through mad-house walls, while the normal world continues without a misstep or altered heartbeat.
His thinking, in the sequencing of the Anthology, is so strange as to be almost beyond comprehension, but there’s a clue on the cover of the original liner notes. A drawing shows the hand of God tuning a dulcimer to the Celestial Monochord, tuning it to a Heavenly harmony that unites Air, Fire, Water, And Earth. His plan was to tie together the four volumes of the Anthology in a similar fashion, but only three were released in ‘52. (the fourth, which Smith apparently meant to represent Earth, was put out last year by Revenant Records.)
There wasn’t much of a market for folk music in 1952, other than prettified versions of songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Goodnight Irene”, sweetened and made palatable enough for Your Hit Parade. To a generation of ears attuned to Perry Como and Patti Page, the Anthology’s old hardscrabble songs full of loss and death must have sounded totally alien, rantings and ravings and exhortations from another dimension.
Although the bulk of the songs was recorded only twenty-five or so years earlier (between 1927 and 1932), they seemed to be coming out of a world far more remote than that. This was not easy-listening music, it was not soothing Muzak played in the background as you lived your life. This was darker stuff. There was something there, crouched down out of sight, but you had to squint to see it. You had to meet these songs halfway, and the halfway point was not always a pleasant place to be. Sometimes it was alien, too: A coal mine in West Virginia; a plank road that began nowhere and led circuitously back to the same place; a claustrophobic block in the French Quarter that existed nowhere save in the geography of Richard Rabbit brown’s James Alley Blues; an old railroad camp (where Bob Dylan would find a verse he’d later use, like scrap lumber replevied to shore up “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”); an unreal geography in a cold, sourceless sepia light.
Stage props abound, jarring and dissimilar as symbols slid from the surface of a Dali painting: Kassie’s watch, Dock Boggs’s red rocking chair, the folding bed Furry Lewis’s woman welcomed him to. It seems to be the setting for a thousand tales told long ago or tales not yet created.
Almost all this music came from the South, but it was a South folks figured themselves well shed of. There was something almost shameful about it. The South was trying to turn a face to the future, to catch up with the rest of the country in its pursuit of the American Dream. Post war prosperity had hit, rock n’ roll was on the horizon, people wanted gleaming appliances in every kitchen and fish-finned cars in every garage. People wanted what was new, and this stuff was decidedly not new. It was primitive and unsophisticated, and folks would just as soon not hear it. It was the idiot child chained to the bedpost, the great-uncle who went to Texas and was hanged as a horse thief.
Which is all to say that the country was not waiting with bated breath for Harry Smith’s Anthology. What is amazing is that enough copies fell into just the right hands. Hands that were maybe already tuning guitars or that would be compelled to pick up guitars by the sheer magnetism of the music these records contained– enough of the right hands to sow the seeds for the ‘60s folk revival and subsequent ones (or you could say that it never went away, just dropped off the Hit Parade). The present alt-country Americana movement and bands like Wilco still owe a debt to Harry Smith, which magazines like No Depression freely acknowledge. The whole Greenwich Village-Cambridge-San Francisco scene derived from it as did clubs like Gerde’s Folk City, the Bitter End, the Troubadour and a panoply of performers as diverse as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Saint-Marie: The whole thing being chronicled in Sing Out! and Broadside magazines in a heady movement that in retrospect seems forever poised before the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, a time when it seemed perfectly logical to believe that a song could change the world.
Van Ronk said, The Anthology was our Bible. We all knew every word of it, including the songs we hated. They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire house would rise in a body and finish the quote along with them. It was like that.
And then there was Dylan. It is not such a stretch to postulate that without Harry Smith, Dylan the folk singer would never have been. He certainly would have been different. Part of the legend he has propagated about his early years is that he once played piano in Bobby Vee’s band. Vee was a minor teen idol around 1960, and there is an aching void between Bobby Vee and Harry Smith. So Dylan might only have been a variation on Bobby Vee or a white Little Richard, whom he used to emulate with his high school rock band.
It is unclear where Dylan first heard the Anthology. It is probably in the late 50s, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota and pla
ying gigs at a folk club in Dinkytown, a raffish and bohemian district in Minneapolis. What is clear is that he heard it and took it to heart. (That’s where the wealth of folk music was, he later said. It’s all poetry, every single one of those songs.) His first album, released in 1962, contains his take on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, from volume three of the Anthology, and one of his earliest songs, Hard Times in New York Town, is a virtual rewrite of the Bently Boys’ Down on Penny’s Farm, from the second volume.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong in this. From Robert Johnson to John Hurt to Furry Lewis, these old images and calls and responses roll down the years like echoes, like memories. Folk music and the blues have been constantly borrowed back and forth, reshuffled lines, put them in new surroundings, as if there is a vast supply of lines and metaphors and archetypes that serve as pieces that can always be assembled into new puzzles.
Popular culture critic Griel Marcus wrote an entire book to prove that the Anthology was the invisible substructure to The Basement Tapes, the fabled sessions that Dylan and The Band recorded in Woodstock in 1967, and the case he makes is more than persuasive.
But in the long haul none of this changes what Smith did, and from a perspective of time it seems scarcely to matter. None of this Dylan, The Band, John Cohen’s New Lost City Ramblers, the folk movement, the fact that the Anthology resurrected the careers of musicians presumed long dead sums up Smith’s accomplishment. In the end, the Anthology stands on its own as an eerie, prescient, and elusive piece of work, as if it had neither antecedent nor forebear.
Sometimes the Anthology is a historical document. Sometimes it is a subjective comment on itself. Sometimes it’s a mirror reflecting life back at you, casting a normal reflection, but then you move, and it’s a warped fun-house glass that sends back the comic or grotesque or both. Occasionally it’s even a scryer’s crystal that lets you see further into the human condition than you wanted to see.