Ralph Berrier
Page 6
Saford laid Garnett Warren’s fiddle bow against the rusty strings of his tin fiddle. He sawed off a four-potato kickoff and tore into “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” an appropriate summation of their trip so far. Clayton beat a perfect rhythm on his warped, dead guitar, which sounded as hollow as an African drum. It didn’t matter. The crowd was delirious or drunk or both. They loved the twins and the best was yet to come.
The big finale was Clayton’s rendition of “Blue Yodel Number One,” which he had learned off a Jimmie Rodgers phonograph record. He chunked chords on his dead guitar, Saford fiddled backup fills, and the two of them sang harmony.
T for Texas, T for Tennessee
T for Texas, T for Tennessee
T for Thelma, That woman’s a-killin’ me
Then came the good part.
O yodel-lay-he-ho, lay-he-ho-a-lay-heeeeee!
When in doubt, throw in a yodel. The crowd erupted as if a Wild West show had taken the stage, which it sort of had. More like vaudeville, actually—identical twins looking like clowns in ridiculous costumes and blue war paint. They exited the stage beneath a deluge of applause. Saford returned the fiddle bow to Garnett Warren, whose bemused band had the misfortune of following this kid act. Old men patted the boys’ shoulders and asked them for their autographs. Saford didn’t know what an autograph was, so he respectfully declined.
They won. The result was a foregone conclusion. The judges based their votes partly on musical skill, partly on crowd response. The twins were awarded a blue ribbon and a cash prize of $2.50 each, a sum that nearly equaled two weeks of apple-picking wages. They packed their winnings into a five-cent matchbox and started for home just around midnight. They ankled it up the muddy road and crossed the creek where they had almost been washed away. They turned up South Street and passed the diner where Clayton’s head had nearly exploded from a sip of Co’Cola. They followed Wards Gap Road back into Virginia and into The Hollow where they crashed into Granny Hall’s cabin at four in the morning.
The twins woke up Granny Hall and Mamo as they dumped the winnings on the kitchen table, all five dollars of it. Granny Hall didn’t speak. Mamo leaned over the coins and bills. “Where in the world did you get all that money?” she asked suspiciously.
“We won it making music,” Clayton said. He showed them the ribbon.
What Granny Hall and Mamo couldn’t stop looking at, though, was the money. As years passed, the value of that prize rose and fell like the stock market, depending on who was telling the story. Sometimes it was three dollars. In one version told to the Carroll News in 1989, inflation had pushed the amount to twelve dollars. Sometimes they were ten years old when they won the contest, other times they were twelve. They won first place in duet singing and fiddling, unless it was the version in which they finished first and second. Details, details. None of that really matters. What matters is what Papa Clayton told the Carroll News in ’89:
“Buddy, I want you to know that when we got back home we was rich.… They had never seen that kind of money before. We told them we won it making music.”
To which Saford added:
“Winning was like going to Hollywood. They couldn’t get over it. They thought we were professional musicians.”
Soon enough, they would be.
In 1938, at the age of nineteen, the twins and their mother lived in Bassett, Virginia.
—MOM’S BIO OF CLAYTON AND SAFORD IN A CARROLL COUNTY GENEALOGICAL BOOK, 1994
Bassett is like those old soldiers I remember from Boys State. You wouldn’t know it to look at it today, but it’s had one heck of a life and could tell ten thousand stories if those empty factory buildings could talk. Bassett is still a fine little town. More than 1,300 people call it home, down more than half from its postwar boom years. Bassett High School’s Bengals football and basketball teams are still competitive and still play for championships against larger schools. Low-slung along the Smith River, what’s left of the business district is bisected by train tracks that used to carry the town’s chief export—furniture—to exotic locales across the continent. The trains don’t run through here like they used to and all the furniture bearing the Bassett name is imported, mostly from China. So, when I drove into town looking for the Hell’s Holler section, I had to imagine Bassett as it was, circa 1937, when the twins were barely eighteen years old and had moved here from Patrick County.
Clayton and Saford worked in the finishing room on the very top floor of the three-hundred-thousand-square-foot, three-story main factory. The twins applied dark stains to bare wood pieces and inhaled noxious fumes ten hours a day. The room had a high metal ceiling and a floor crowded with barrels of stains, hoses, rags, and sprayers. The work was hard but enjoyable enough for two boys who needed money. In fact, the twins would have been happy enough working, living, and staying in Bassett, and this story very well could skip ahead nearly fifty years to 1984 and they’d still be here, winding up their long careers at Bassett Furniture. Retirement would allow Clayton more time to watch his grandsons play high school baseball. Saford would spend retirement playing fiddle every Saturday night at square dances in Ararat or Stuart or some other wide spot in the road. Then they’d grow old, die, and both fade away like most of us will do. But that’s not what happened.
Let me explain how the twins got to Bassett in the first place. Last time we saw them, they were barefoot little boys agog over their winnings from a backwoods fiddlers convention. They were almost professional musicians. Now, we find them as teenagers, making thirty cents an hour smearing stain on table tops and killing their lungs in the process. What brought them to Bassett? Humiliation, that’s what. That’s what they told me, anyway.
• • •
By the time the twins were teenagers, their big brothers Thamon, Mack, Sam, and Romie all worked in Bassett—and for Bassett—at one time or other, opening a pipeline from the orchards and whiskey-making woods of The Hollow to the promised land of Henry County’s new economy. When the twins reached Blue Ridge School, Mamo could afford new shirts and britches for her youngest sons, although most of their wardrobe was still made up of hand-me-down rags and shoes that were too big. They played music better than they ever had. Music lovers in Patrick and Carroll counties knew of “those Hall boys from below the mountain,” and many families invited the boys to dinner in exchange for some flashy picking. When they arrived at Blue Ridge School in the ninth grade, they played old-timey tunes during the school’s morning vespers in the auditorium. Saford fiddled “Golden Slippers” and Clayton sang Mainer Brothers songs for classmates. They loved the Mainer Brothers, J. E. and Wade, a pair of North Carolinians who scored hit records such as “Curly Headed Baby” and “Maple on the Hill,” with J. E.’s band, the Mountaineers. Brother duos were popular in North Carolina and other parts of the South—the Mainer Brothers, Monroe Brothers, Callahan Brothers, Delmore Brothers, and the Blue Sky Boys (who were actually the Bolick Brothers but had more imagination than that). Brothers were, and still are, natural musical acts. Their voices blend in God-given harmonies that strangers can’t fully duplicate. It’s also easier to find practice time when your singing partner shares your bunk.
Not that Clayton and Saford always lived in perfect harmony. They still liked a good scrap now and again. On Sundays, Clayton and Saford strapped on fat boxing gloves and staged a boxing match in their sister Lee’s front yard. Neighbors, friends, and kinfolk rooted them on. Teenage girls swooned over the good-looking identical twins with pitch-black hair, olive skin, ropy biceps, and calves that bulged like baseballs. The Sunday afternoon fights followed the same script each week: Clayton would pop Saford a good one right in the nose; Saford would respond with a sniffling, teary, “Now, baby, I told you not to hit my nose”; whereupon Clayton would drop his arms in apology only to catch a cheap-shot uppercut to the gut that would drop him to all fours. They’d fight a little more, then make up, and retire to the shade of a giant catalpa tree where they’d take out their instruments, make m
usic, and drink lemonade. That made for about as good a time as a young man could have in The Hollow and not run afoul of the law.
In time, they formed musical bands with some of their guitar-toting pals. The first actual musical outfit was called the Blue Ridge Buddies, which looked and sounded like a real band.
The Buddies were Clayton, Saford, Rex Willis, and Clarence Marshall. Clayton and Saford’s bandmates were boys from the top of the mountain who had thought they were hot pickers until they met the twins. Rex, a handsome boy with bright blue eyes and sandy hair, played a hollow-bodied Kalamazoo guitar. Clarence, a moony-faced lad with a toothy smile as big as a whitewashed fence, was Rex’s buddy, and he picked a Kalamazoo banjo. They had met during a party at somebody’s house, where they discovered they all liked the same kinds of songs, everything from old-timey tunes to the new Western numbers on the radio about life on the prairie. They even dressed Western-style for their publicity photo. In the classic picture that my grandma has, the boys look like they were auditioning for the role of “faithful sidekick” in a Bob Steele movie. Dressed in their cheap dime-store cowboy hats, they looked as imposing as a band of cap-busting six-year-olds. They wore white shirts with light blue checks and rolled-up sleeves. They knotted red bandanas around their throats and slung their instruments over their shoulders with leather straps.
They had the name and the look, and they even had a theme song. Set to a tune that sounded a little like “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” it went:
How do everybody, how are you?
The Blue Ridge Buddies have come to you
We hope to make you smile, as we play for you a while
Yes, we’ve come to sing and play our songs for you
The Buddies were a polished band. They played all over Patrick and Carroll counties, from schoolhouses to house parties. Clayton and Saford’s mastery of the Mainers’ hit records gave them a leg up on the competition. Their version of “Curly Headed Baby” was the high point of every show:
She’s my curly headed baby
Used to sit on mama’s knee
She’s my curly headed baby
She’s from sunny Tennessee
Clayton and Saford tossed in a yodel at the end of the chorus, having learned that a good yodel wins over the crowd every time.
The Blue Ridge Buddies were so good, they hitched rides to Winston-Salem and played outside the tobacco warehouses and textile mills. During summer vacation, they stayed in Winston-Salem for days, making enough money to pay the three-dollar weekly rate at a boarding house.
By that time, the twins had devised a comic stage show, complete with cross-dressing, a staple of the kerosene-circuit medicine shows that passed through Mount Airy. Men dressed like shrewish housewives and nagged their “husbands” in comic sketches that tickled Clayton and Saford. Clayton knew cross-dressing was comic gold, so when the band started playing Saturday night shows in the Blue Ridge School auditorium, he worked up a sketch in which he’d wear a dress that was much too short for his five-foot-seven frame and he’d strut bowlegged on stage with freckles painted on his face and his front teeth blacked out. The effect on an audience was as subtle as a two-by-four to the funny bone.
“Woman, go into the kitchen yonder and fetch me a drink,” said Saford, the “husband.”
Clayton the henpecker grinned a wide black-toothed smile, and the audience snorted themselves silly. He responded that he would not fetch Saford any refreshment anytime soon. Saford pulled a cap buster on Clayton and fired, prompting a dramatic, flailing death spasm in which Clayton spun and tumbled backward into Saford’s arms and was dragged away with his toes pointing outward.
OK, so politically correct sketches and snappy punch lines were not yet the sixteen-year-old twins’ forte. Still, the time had come to take this show on the road.
Rex’s daddy heard that a new radio station in Winston-Salem was auditioning bands for broadcasts, and he told the Buddies they should try out. The boys hitched a ride with Arnold Sowers, who hauled lime to Winston-Salem in a Ford half-bed truck. Saford, Clayton, Rex, and Clarence clambered aboard with their instruments and settled in for the open-air, forty-mile ride down U.S. 52.
Now, lime is a white powdery compound made from burning limestone. People used it—still do—to make plaster or glass; they even spread it in their gardens. That’s not important. What’s important is that Arnold Sowers had swept the lime from the truck bed, but he hadn’t cleaned between the bed’s wooden floorboards. A few miles into the trip, the whooshing wind that whipped the Buddies’ bandanas and mussed their combed-back hair began to kick up a dust storm and sting their eyes.
“Hey, there’s lime blowing everywhere,” Saford hollered. Blowing lime swirled from the cracks and coated the boys and their instruments. They rode all the way to Winston-Salem, eyes scrunched and mouths clenched against the squall of lime. Arnold Sowers pulled up in front of the building for the Winston-Salem Journal and the Twin City Sentinel. The owner of the two newspapers had started the radio station and lent it their initials, WSJS, which stood for Winston-Salem Journal-Sentinel, as call letters. The Buddies fell out of the truck looking like dusty millers, white as ghosts.
A guard directed them to the paper’s newsroom, where the new radio studio had been built a year earlier. The Buddies shuffled dustily into the studio, hoping their appearance wouldn’t lead to their eviction from the premises. They were warned not to touch anything and for God’s sake don’t sit down in those filthy britches. The grumpy sound engineer positioned them in a crescent pattern around a single microphone and snapped at them to play something. Saford sawed off the start to “Curly Headed Baby,” and he and Clayton sang it as good as the Mainers, especially Clayton’s roof-scraping yodel.
When the Buddies finished the song, the engineer was grinning. The Buddies had gotten the gig. They were going to be on the radio.
• • •
A weird thing happened in The Hollow during the Depression: Most people’s lives got better. Just when all those New York guys started jumping out of windows and the movie houses began showing clips of starving people standing in breadlines, folks in the country made some gains on their previously well-heeled northern neighbors. They’d all been poor forever, so what was it to them if the stock market crashed? Sure, many rural folks suffered and had to leave home to find work, but for most, the work they found was better than any work they’d ever done. Other improvements followed. Houses, which included more than a few ancient cabins, were increasingly electrified. Indoor plumbing made cooking and bathing easier. Commodes rendered the midnight walk to the outhouse obsolete, which was especially gratifying on those cold nights when all you had to keep you company was the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Not everyone embraced the modern technology; Mamo would claim years later that her newfangled electric oven never baked biscuits as good as her wood-fired cookstove did. Nobody got rich. But, for the most part, The Hollow’s hard-scuffling populace made strides. Nothing hastened this forced march into the modern age like that high-tech piece of furniture, the radio.
Radio was the ’30s versions of the Internet, DIRECTV, and Xbox all rolled into one. Farm boys and city boys alike were obsessed with radio, like today’s tech geeks with their laptops. They learned how to build their own receivers and never missed their favorite shows. Radio brought the rest of the world to places like The Hollow. You could get the news from Cincinnati, listen to a ball game from St. Louis, and hear the National Barn Dance from Chicago. Folks in The Hollow who could afford them bought deluxe Philco radios, the “cathedral-style” models with arched tops that looked like big-city churches sitting on a dresser. Those beautiful sets reeled in the voices and songs from exotic locales—like Nashville. That was home to WSM, the all-powerful home of the Saturday night Grand Ole Opry, which was beloved by millions of listeners, including a pair of bastard twins in The Hollow.
Radio changed the country, and by that, I mean country country. Clayton and Saford grew up
learning the ancient mountain ballads from their mother and timeless fiddle tunes from guys like Rafe Brady. By their teens, they heard the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys sing polished harmonies, Uncle Dave Macon’s comic banjo bashing, DeFord Bailey’s bluesy harmonica, and the fancy fiddling of Arthur Smith. The music was as invigorating to young boys from The Hollow as Elvis Presley would be to American teens a generation later. Radio, phonograph records, and cowboy pictures shaped the music of the Blue Ridge. Old-timers despised the hot licks of “them radio musicians in NAYSH-vul TIN-uhsee” that leeched into the playing of mountain boys. The young folks dug it, though.
The Blue Ridge Buddies grabbed their tiny piece of the airwaves by landing that gig on WSJS in Winston-Salem. Their neighbors thought it quite an achievement, too. Everybody told the Buddies they sounded great on the radio, even though they surely never heard them. WSJS broadcast at only a couple hundred watts and could barely be heard outside the Winston-Salem city limits. The Buddies’ buddies were just trying to be supportive, and no one was more supportive than Dr. Gates.
• • •
Arthur C. Gates had taken a liking to Judie Hall’s baby boys. He saw a potential in them, some kind of magic, that often goes unseen in poor children. Dr. Gates had gotten to know the boys well because of his work with their mother and grandmother, The Hollow’s medicine women. Even though he was a bona fide doctor with a diploma from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond and a briefcase full of modern medicines, he had come to rely on Granny Hall and Mamo to provide care for The Hollow’s weak and infirm. Those women were still the closest thing to a doctor as most old-timers ever met.
After graduating, Dr. Gates had returned to his native ground in Patrick County determined to wrest his neighbors free from the superstitions of the previous century. These people drank slimy potions to kill worms rather than learn how to cook meat properly. They treated children’s coughs with sips of whiskey instead of cough syrup. Dr. Gates was bent on teaching the locals the virtues of modern medicine. The shelves in his home office were laden with small medicine bottles bearing handwritten labels. He’d hold a clay jug of cough syrup atop his shoulder like it was a gallon of liquor and gently tip it, pouring thick syrup into tiny bottles that he’d pack into a hefty leather bag. He dispensed scores of bottles right before the winter season of bad colds and influenza. Science was displacing superstition.