by William Gay
Maybe they are not of a mortal at all; maybe they are the hands of a king, a god.
And with the guitar clasped to him and his fingers moving over the strings, he is a god, the king of what he does. They are the hands of a man sitting on top of the world.
But every set has to end, and when this one does, and Doc begins to rise, his hand reaching for the hand that without seeing he knows is reaching for his own, and the hands touch, the illusion shatter: The audience sees that he is not a god at all but a mortal with frailties like the rest of us, and this somehow is more endearing yet.
The applause erupts again.
Chet Atkins is the best guitar player in the world, Doc said.
I figured you’d say Merle Travis.
Well, Merle was a great influence on me. I named (my son) Merle after him, and we finally met when we did that Will the Circle Be Unbroken record. But Chet’s the best. He can play anything.
That’s what people say about you, I said.
I’m slowing down a little. I’m getting older, and I can feel my hands stiffening up. I don’t tour as much as I used to. I can feel myself slowing down, some of the runs are slower.
Close-up, Watson’s face is pleasant, ruddy, the silver hair a little thin but waved neatly back, every strand in place. He does not wear dark glasses, as most blind performers do, and in fact, it is easy to forget that he is blind: The lids are lowered, the eyes just slits, and he looks almost as if he’s just squinting into strong sunlight.
Where’d you come up with the picking on Sitting on Top of the World?
Watson laughed. I made that up, he said, that’s my arrangement. I heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record. You might not have heard of them. But I changed it. I just played it the way I wanted it.
What do you think about the way MerleFest has grown? It’s pretty big business now.
Well, it’s good for the music. It’s good for Merle, to keep people thinking about him. And people have to make a living, have to sell records. It’s good to know so many people love this kind of music enough to come way down here to hear it.
Do you think it’s changing? Music, I mean?
Music is always changing, Doc said. But it’s all music, just people getting together and playing. One thing I noticed though, somebody told me there were some complaints about one of the performers using some pretty rough language over the mic during his show. I don’t care for that. This has always been a family thing, women and kids, and that young fellow needs to remember where he is.
It was almost dark, and gospel music was rising from the tents when I walked down the road toward the parking lot. It was Sunday, the last day of the festival, and gospel was mostly what today had been about. There had been Lucinda Williams, of course, but mostly it had been gospel, like Sundays on old-time radio when the Sabbath was a day of respite from the secular.
Off to the right were the campgrounds. You could see the RVs, but they were hazy and ambiguous through the failing light, and music was rising from there, too the plinking of a banjo, a fiddle sawing its way through some old reel.
What you could see best were the campfires scattered across the bottomland, and for an illusory moment, time slipped, and it could have been a hobo camp or a campground for Okies on their way to the Golden State. There was a gully beyond the camp area. It was shrouded with trees, and fog lay between the trees like smoke, and it was easy to imaging Tom Joad slipping through them like a wraith, fleeing the vigilante men on his way upstate to organize the orange pickers. Or Woody Guthrie himself might ease up out of the fog, his fascist-killing guitar strung about his neck, a sly grin on his face that said all the world was a joke and only he was in on it. He’d warm his hands over the fire, for the night had turned chill, and he’d drink a cup of chicory coffee before heading down one of those long, lonesome roads Woody was always heading down.
Then I was closer, and I saw that the fires were charcoal and gas grills, where ground beef sizzled in tinfoil, and hot dogs dripped sputtering grease, and I saw that these people were much too affluent to be Okies and that the guitars they played were Fenders and Gibsons and Martins. They were guitars that Woody would never have been able to afford.
After a while Grady wandered up. I knew he’d made id, since I’d seen him a couple of times in crowds and had seen him playing guitar in a tent with other players, guys with homemade basses and washboards and Jew’s harps and whatever fell to hand. I hadn’t talked to him yet, though.
You learn what you wanted to know?
Doc heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record, I said.
I told you that.
He invented the arrangement, though. It’s his song now.
But he did talk to you. Was I right about him, or not?
I guess you were right, I said.
I thought about it. It seemed to me that Doc embodied the kind of values that are going out of style and don’t mean as much as they used to: self-respect and respect for others, the stoic forbearance that Walker Evans photographed and James Agee wrote poems about. Something inside that was as immutable and unchanging as stone, that after a lifetime in show business still endured, still believed in the sanctity of womanhood, family, property lines, the church in the wildwood, the ultimate redeemability of humankind itself.
Life sometimes seems choreographed from the stage of a talk show, where barbaric guests haul forth dirty linen and a barbaric audience applauds, where presidents disassemble themselves before a voyeuristic media, where folks sell their souls to the highest bidder and then welsh on the deal. It was nice that Doc was still just being Doc, just being a hell of a nice guy.
But Doc’s getting old, and those values are getting old, too. Maybe they’re dying out. Maybe in the end there will just be the music. For there will always be the music. It is what Doc loves above all things: from show tunes like Summertime to music leaked up through time from old, worn 78’s by Mississippi string bands, from the hollow, ghostly banjo of Dock Boggs to the contemporary folk of writers like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan.
All Music that will endure and help us endure. The music will never let you down.
INTERVIEW 2008 - 2009
JMW I’ve seen several interviews with you recently in various magazines around Nashville. Seems like the most substantive was the one you did a couple of years ago for Water Stone.
WG Yea, it kind of wears me out. I feel like it is hard not to repeat myself. Water Stone sent this woman down. She was nice, said she was from Ireland. She just showed up and stayed for several days. She wanted to tape and to tape and to tape and we rode around in a car talking and it got kind of bothersome since she had been there for three days at that time and I rapidly lost interest.
JMW Yeah, end of interview. When I first met you over at the trailer on Grinder’s Creek I would go home and write up our conversations
WG Yeah, Truman Capote could do it. People were intimidated by the tape recorder. He would test himself. Early on he would tape things then he would write it and then listen to the tape and see how close he came.
JMW You can come pretty damn close.
WG It’s hard to go back and go over stuff. That’s why I’ve never rewritten or tried to go back over that Natchez piece. (He is referring to a book he was working on several years before, a novel about the early days on the Natchez Trace. He had one scene where the characters come up to a swollen river that he thought was the best thing he had ever written. However the manuscript was stolen and has never been recovered.) It just seems like ground I have already covered. I’ll probably do it sooner or later, especially since I don’t have another idea for a novel. I’ve finished Lost Country and now will have to start on another.
JMW I’m trying to remember was Bloodworth’s band in Provinces of Night the Skillet Lickers?
WG No, it was the Fruit Jar Drinkers. I had that woman asking him, “You don’t have a drink on you, do you Mr. Bloodworth”. And it said, “Of course he did.” What would a Fruit Jar Drinke
r be without a drink?
JMW Weren’t the Skillet Lickers in there somewhere. Were they a real band?
WG They were a great band. They were like the Beatles of their day, like the rural Beatles They sold a lot of records; they were from Georgia. They had a sound that nobody else has been able to duplicate. My brother and I talked about this once. He was a big Skillet Lickers fan and had all these records. They figured out how to have more than one fiddle player and most of the other bands only had one. They didn’t even have a banjo player just guitar and fiddle with an extra fiddle that made it sound different. I want to see if Oxford would like me to write about the Skillet Lickers before people forget about all that stuff.
JMW Are the Skillet Lickers on the Harry Smith album? (Harry Smith compiled and edited the three album Anthology of American Folk Music, commonly known as the Harry Smith Anthology, which came out in 1952.)
WG No.
JMW I don’t think I have ever heard them.
WG They have the best version of Casey Jones I have ever heard and I have heard a bunch of versions of Casey Jones. They were sort of humorous and did country comedy and sometimes they would just do straight songs. There were a lot of people who imitated them, I found that out when I was living in that trailer and I was writing a piece on the Delmore Brothers. I researched a bunch of that stuff about that time and found out about some of the other groups. I’ve got anthologies with songs that sound like the Skillet Lickers.
JMW Did you hear that kind of music when you were a kid, either on the radio or being played anywhere around Lewis County?
WG Nobody wanted to be backward, or consciously backward. The music I heard as a kid came from a stack of records my Daddy had, a bunch of old 78’s: Jimmy Rogers, the Skillet Lickers and the Carter Family. We had an old crank up phonograph. I listened to the radio all the time but I didn’t like country music; I was listening to pop music. When Elvis Presley came along it kind of reordered my world. Not the later Elvis but the stuff he did for Sun Records, that was great stuff. I went from there to folk music. It was what I thought was real folk music but it was like the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters and Peter, Paul and Mary. When I first got into Dylan I went backwards. I read this thing that said a lot of his influences came from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music so I got into that and I ended up going into it backwards.
JMW Harry sure opened that door for a lot of people.
WG Oh yeah.
JMW So now it seems like the Kingston Trio and all that were just doing popularized versions of songs from Harry’s Anthology. Is that right or not?
WG They did some; how they got famous was nobody was buying Dylan records because people thought that he couldn’t sing with his raspy voice. Well Albert Grossman was Bob Dylan’s manager and he thought how can I get this stuff out over the radio so he formed a group. He knew these folk singers around the Village so he put three of them together, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow. So Grossman put them together to do Dylan type songs.
JMW Wow that worked great huh?
WG Yeah with “Blowing in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”. Grossman was a very smart man; apparently he was not a very likeable man but he was certainly smart at what he did. He managed Dylan perfectly; he kept him appropriate for the times and didn’t try to make him too accessible. He never tried to make him be more congenial to the press or anything like that, he just let him be who he was. Of course Dylan would be who he was anyway.
I know a record I would like to play for you, my daughter drove me up to Columbia to go to the Doctor for a check up. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said to take me over to the sound shop and I was looking for this record called “I’m Not There” and they had it on sale. It is the soundtrack to the movie and boy is it good. I figured it would be a bunch of really crappy covers of Dylan songs but not so, it was good versions of the songs with a bunch of relatively famous people and then it had more obscure people that you don’t hear all that often. It must have twenty-five songs, plus it has Bob Dylan’s version of “I’m Not There” which has heretofore been available only on bootlegs on the Basement Tapes.
I don’t think I get it. I read a book by Greil Marcus one time, you probably read it, called Invisible Republic where he talks about that song and goes on and on about it. So I listened closely to that song to try to hear what Greil Marcus heard and I like the song, it is an ok song but I don’t hear all the significance, which is not to say that it’s not there.
When we go by Barnes and Nobles I want to pick up a copy of Best Mystery Stories of 2009. It might have a Joyce Carol Oates story in it. It seems like forever since I bought any magazines, I subscribe to some magazines but I am hardly ever where they sell magazines, I want a copy of No Depression and see what kinds of CD’s are with the magazines. My subscription to Fortean Times is out but I won’t buy one of those, they cost over $11 on the newsstand and they aren’t that big anyway.
Mark Smirnoff of Oxford American is making noises about me writing something. We had a little falling out over my Dylan piece. (Smirnoff wanted him to cut the piece significantly and he refused and instead sold it to Paste who made it the cover article and printed it in full.) He has been calling every now and then. Sonny Brewer told him I was sick and his girlfriend called and then he called from Little Rock. He wants me to do something and I want to do it. I like being in there, they still have me as a continuing writer. Anyhow Sonny is coming up for a reading next month. He will stay over and then carry me up to the reading and then stay over again that night. He is on a never-ending tour.
He told me a story about his dog. I’ve been down there a lot and had seen the dog so he has written a memoir of the dog and he calls it Cormac, which of course is the dog’s name. He really thought the world of that dog and the dog comes up missing and he goes to all kinds of efforts to find it; he even hired a private eye, and the private eye discovered that the dog had been kidnapped and to make a long story short the dog eventually turned up in Connecticut and he tracked him down and he had a lawyer to get the dog back and prove that it was his dog. The dog had been neutered but it was still his dog.
He told me this long story and I said “Damn Sonny, you ought to write about your dog.” So he wrote a whole book about it. I’ve seen it in bookstores. There’s one called A Sound Like Thunder and I tried it. He has been everything and no telling what he may do; he may be a movie producer or director or anything.
JMW Is there any news about your movie?
WG You know No Country for Old Men is being released as a movie. Paste magazine had a big review and it is a rave. I haven’t seen a bad review and everything is saying that the Coen Brothers are at the top of their game. This is the first movie for a long time that I have actually considered going to the theater to see. When it opens in Columbia we might drive up there and watch it. We went and saw Shrek III not too long ago.
My least favorite actor in the world is Adam Sandler. I don’t like Jim Carrey much either but I like him better than Adam Sandler. There is something weird about that guy. I kind of like that movie Dumb and Dumber. Tommy Franklin, down in Oxford, had all these guys hanging around together and they started going over to each others’ house on Sunday night and it would be movie night and all these guys were semi-intellectuals and they were showing arty type independent films and when they came over to Tommy’s house he showed Dumb and Dumber but they didn’t really get into it. I think there are some really funny scenes in that movie.
JMW I have never seen it.
WG It was made by these two brothers and they were good when they started out. Something About Mary, was their movie, but it (Dumb and Dumber) is really crude.
JMW Can the kids watch it.
WG Well it has bad language in it. But most of my grandkids they get to watch anything they want to watch except when they are over at my house and I won’t let them watch anything with an R rating, but that is just me. I never let my kids watch everything that
anybody else got to watch.
JMW I just saw you are going to be a fellow with the United States Artists foundation this year.
WG They are making the announcement later this month and they have been calling me wanting me to fly out there and they are having an award ceremony at Paramount Studios. They wanted a picture so I took care of that but I don’t want to fly out there.
I need to quit smoking like I quit drinking. That would be really good. I’ve got patches but I just haven’t used them yet. I should have checked into this stuff, I’ve never had any interest in disease or health for that matter. I have always been healthy and I never went to doctors. I have never been seriously sick; it is a little disquieting to have to face all that. I knew I was feeling really rotten all last year. I probably had high blood pressure for months before this deal happened. (He recently had a heart pacemaker installed.) It was probably an accumulation of things like a lot of stress over the kids’ situations and worry about that dog. Then my heart just said, “Fuck it, I’m not putting up with this crap no more”. It was time to go to the house.
JMW Yep, the long home.
WG When I heard that phrase used I knew that would be a book title. I heard it at my Uncle’s funeral; it’s a quote from Ecclesiastes. My editor didn’t like the title and we fought over that. That was one of the few fights I won. He wanted to call it The Pit.
JMW Sure glad you won that one.
WG One time I was with this guy who runs a writers program over at MTSU and he was trying to get a program going for Tennessee writers and I said that I hoped Tennessee would treat its writers like Mississippi or Georgia. Alabama and Mississippi have these awards like Writer of the Year and as far as I could see Tennessee doesn’t have anything. (William became the first recipient of the Tennessee Writer of the Year in 2009.)