by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
The silver lining was that the accident spared Clayton from the draft. Saford, though, wasn’t lucky enough to be involved in a bad wreck.
The twins both received their notices to report to Local Draft Board No. 2 on February 7, 1941, for their physical examinations. Saford checked out OK. But Clayton, all battered and bruised and on crutches, was sent home. Don’t call Uncle Sam, he’ll call you. Clayton thought he’d dodged a bullet—literally.
• • •
Saford was ordered to report for induction in June, when he would be shipped off to Camp Lee near Richmond. Before he left Roanoke, he took care of one little loose end. He married Dot Wilbourne in May of ’41. He had just turned twenty-two. She was fifteen.
Their courtship had started listing toward the rocks. Dot was a pistol, excited about having an older boyfriend, but not always comfortable with the adult world she had been thrust into. Teenage girls are born to flirt with boys. Boys, however, are born to be jealous. Saford screamed at Dot if he caught her so much as talking to a boy, but if the tables were turned and she saw him flirting with a girl, he got all defensive.
“I saw you talking to that girl from the front of the stage,” Dot said to Saford one day when she caught him chatting up some lipstick Lolita at the City Market Building Auditorium. “I didn’t like what I saw.”
Dot’s smart mouth steamed Saford.
“Baby,” he said, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Actually, she had seen quite a lot, because nothing opened your eyes to a man’s worst faults faster than going steady with Saford Hall. He was a study in contradictions—funny but mean, loving but hateful, eager to please but just as apt to fly into fits of uncontrollable rage. He liked to show off, sometimes by playing music, other times by beating people up in front of his girl.
After all this time, Saford was still the old instigator, a guy who liked to start a fight. He was just the man Uncle Sam was looking for. On June 18, 1941, Saford (No Middle Name) Hall was inducted into the U.S. Army. He and thirteen other draftees lined up for a photograph that would be published in the evening World-News. Most of them smiled, including Saford, who put his hands on the shoulders of the two fellows in front of him. His hair was slightly mussed, but he looked dashing in a striped tie, striped shirt, and dark jacket. That evening, he boarded the train for Camp Lee and entered the army in style.
For the first time in their twenty-two years on this earth, the Hall twins went their separate ways.
• • •
Meanwhile, the Blue Ridge Entertainers played on.
They couldn’t let a little thing like a brewing world war slow them down. They had shows to play. Saford would be missed, but Roy Hall had a deep bench. Tommy’s red-hot fiddle had lit a fire under the band. Bill and Wayne resumed their careers as duet singers, which had been mostly back-burnered by the Hall twins. Roy’s brother Jay Hugh added harmony singing and manic mandolin playing.
Clayton hung in there. Roy threw him a few musical bones every now and then, vocal numbers such as “Long Steel Rail” and “Hung Down My Head and Cried.” Clayton and Jay Hugh sounded good together, so they sang duets. Roy made sure to let him know he was still a valuable part of the Entertainers’ sound. As summer turned to fall, the band maintained a full schedule, still playing weekly dances and daily radio programs, still oblivious to what was about to happen to the world and to them.
The radio shows were as popular as ever. The band always played a half-hour program at 6:30 a.m. and performed a fifteen-minute lunchtime show three times a week. Host Irving Sharp kept pushing that Dr Pepper. Sometimes he’d run into the studio at the last possible second before the “On Air” light went on, occasionally cussing and spitting. Once, he and Roy showed up seconds before a lunchtime broadcast with their britches legs wet and rolled up from a morning spent fishing in the Roanoke River.
After the familiar Dr Pepper theme song, Cousin Irving launched into his preamble:
Hello friends and howdy neighbors, you feeling good? We sure hope you are. It’s Dr Pepper Time. Now’s the time to kinda relax and sit back, enjoy life, and forget the cares of the day as Uncle Roy and all the Blue Ridge Entertainers get set to bring you the favorite songs you have all been requesting.
Now that Dr Pepper sales have really been going up every day, cold weather’s coming on. And you, good neighbors, since I begun talking about it last week, have begun to realize that the best thing to do this winter, as every winter, is to try to avoid all the bad colds that you possibly can. Now it’s so easy to catch a cold when the weather’s damp and chilly, and one good idea I have, and I think you’ll all agree, is to stay on the alkaline side. You’ve heard that many a time, and one good way of doing this is to try Dr Pepper. You drink Dr Pepper at ten, two, and four, and you’ll help to avoid colds. Dr Pepper, you know, is a blend of pure fruit juices. You know how good fruits are for you. You get the handy six-bottle carton, and you’ll find out what I mean. First tune is “Old Joe Clark.” Here ’tis!
Tommy fiddled three verses at light speed and was through in less than a minute. Irving killed time by reminding listeners that if they felt like dancing, they should push back the dining room table.
And speaking of the dining room table, if you happen to be having dinner, Dr Pepper is a mighty good drink with meals or even without meals. So, if you’re eating dinner or haven’t started yet, Dr Pepper is the thing you want. Right now, it’s “Ranch House on the Old Circle B.” … Cousin Wayne, Uncle Roy, Bill, all of ’em gathered around.
After the pretty, Western-style number, Cousin Irving picked on Clayton for not standing with the rest of the band—and for his hair being way too long.
COUSIN IRVING: “Clayton, you’re sitting down, jump up. You go out and get yourself a Dr Pepper, your energy’s sagging. That haircut’s getting him down.”
[Laughter.]
CLAYTON [in the background]: “Yeah, man!”
COUSIN IRVING: “Lord have mercy, you could buy a dog tag.…”
ROY: “He’s got a fourteen-gallon hat on top of that hair, too.”
COUSIN IRVING: “Fifteen gallons of hair … Buffalo Bill didn’t have a thing on Clayton! [Then, straightening up and getting serious] Right now, it’s hymn time on Dr Pepper Time. The old sacred songs always seem to do us a lot of good. There’s a lot of cheer and comfort in every one of them. Today, it’s ‘I’ll Be Somewhere Listening’ and we hope you like it.”
The Blue Ridge Entertainers made more records in Atlanta on October 1, 1941—almost one year after their 1940 session. The band had worked up a slate of six songs—“Until I Return to You,” “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight,” “I’m Glad We Didn’t Say Goodnight,” “I Wonder If the Moon Is Shining,” “My Sweet Mountain Rose,” and “The Best of Friends Must Part Someday”—to go along with a pair of Tommy Magness original fiddle tunes, “Natural Bridge Blues” and “Polecat Blues.”
Tommy’s fiddle numbers were especially swingy. Even though the songs both had “blues” in their titles, they could just as easily have been called “rags.” “Natural Bridge Blues” was colored with moaning slides and lively lopes that soared into a high chorus and swooped back down again. “Polecat Blues” was built on a similar pattern. If old-timey fiddle tunes were corn liquor, Tommy Magness’s pieces were like homemade wine: smooth and sweet, but packing a punch. Somehow, a slow-talking, relatively uneducated Georgia boy had become a genius on the violin. And that’s how he played it, like a violin.
Tommy had written some lyrics for “Natural Bridge Blues,” and he convinced Roy to let his buddy Glenwood Howell sing them for the session. Howell was a fine country singer in Roanoke, who would go on to lead the Dixie Playboys and the Texas Troubadours. But when it came time to record in Atlanta, his voice couldn’t hit the high notes in the chorus. The newfangled air-conditioning system freeze-dried his voice, and he froze up, literally and figuratively. After Glenwood blew the chorus, Tommy kept fiddling, Clayton plunked along on the banjo, and nobody sang
another note.
For years, nobody knew that the tune had a chorus. Tommy’s chorus appeared only on a two-page pamphlet of sheet music:
Natural Bridge is calling me, I’m lonely for you, too
I can’t wait until I see all my friends so true
I hear that train a-rolling, I’ll soon be on my way
At Natural Bridge I’ll settle down, with you I’ll always stay
• • •
Despite that little slipup, the Blue Ridge Entertainers completed an outstanding recording session.
Roy Hall recorded fifty-two songs in his career. He wrote songs, covered classic tunes, and, occasionally, copyrighted other people’s work. He participated in five recording sessions in four years for three different labels—Vocalion, Conqueror, and Bluebird. RCA Victor, which operated Bluebird, promoted Roy’s records heavily, even internationally. The Bluebird catalog advertised his music beneath the banner of “Old Familiar Tunes and Race Records.” The band members clearly enjoyed themselves during the ’41 recording session in Atlanta. The last number they cut was “Polecat Blues,” and you can hear Roy and the others in the background, hollering out funny lines behind Tommy’s fiddling.
“That old Polecat Blues!”
“That’s an old Virginia polecat!”
Near the end, Roy blurts out, “Anybody want to buy a skunk?”
The boys were having a good old time. It’s probably just as well that none of them knew this would be the Blue Ridge Entertainers’ final recording session. Roy Hall had made his last record.
• • •
They must have known war was coming. The front page of the Roanoke Times told of terrific battles raging from Europe to Asia to the South Pacific. France had fallen, and Great Britain was under siege. Japan threatened American interests in the South Pacific. They read all this, surely. They made their living at a radio station, so they probably heard daily dispatches from London. They must have known the army would come for them, too.
But if Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers were aware of any of this, they weren’t letting it affect their musical output. They still packed houses for show dates, even in the boonies. In the little Virginia town of Ivanhoe, they attracted so many people to the schoolhouse that some fans had to sit on the front of the stage. About midway through the show, Clayton noticed the lone microphone begin to sway slightly, as if the earth was starting to quake. A second later, the front of the stage gave way like a trapdoor. Everyone on the stage toppled cowboy hat over banjo into the boiler room below. Nobody was badly hurt; the band landed right on top of its loyal fan base.
Other than that occasion, you couldn’t keep the band off the stage. Roanoke was drawing nationally known hillbilly and Western acts to the Academy of Music for the Saturday night Blue Ridge Jamboree and other special shows. The Sons of the Pioneers headlined a show with the Blue Ridge Entertainers on Easter Sunday, 1941, that packed the Academy to its nineteenth-century rafters. Cousin Irving Sharp was so impressed with the size of the crowd that he took a picture from the stage and included it in a booklet of photos he called a “family album” and sold for seventy-five cents.
Later that year, Roy Rogers brought his hot new Western band to Roanoke. Rogers already had a dozen cowboy movies under his belt, but music was the real reason he was Clayton’s idol. He had cofounded the Sons of the Pioneers back when he was an unknown cowpoke by the name of Leonard Sly, and he had been with them when they recorded their best songs—“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water,” “Way Out There,” and others. When Clayton met Rogers, he told him how much he loved that yodel on “Way Out There” and that he had tried to perfect it for years. Rogers told Clayton that if he mastered that yodel, he could sing it during a live performance on WDBJ radio. Rogers would even throw in a Western shirt.
Clayton stayed up most of the night strumming “Way Out There” on a guitar repeatedly, practicing the complicated yodel until his yodeler was sore. (For hipster film buffs who dig Coen Brothers movies: Y’all remember the yodeling theme used in Raising Arizona? That’s the yodel I’m talking about. The first time I heard Papa Clayton do that yodel was the same year I, and every other twenty-something nerd, went cuckoo over the Coens. I was at his house, talking about old tunes, when he picked up his guitar and launched into this “Weeeeeee-ooooooo, yodel-li-lay-he-hooo …” and I just about spit up sweet iced tea. I had no idea it was a Sons of the Pioneers yodel.) Clayton showed off his yodel for Roy Rogers on the radio and Rogers was so impressed he really gave him a Western shirt. He also told Clayton that if he ever came to California, to give him a call. Clayton thanked him for the shirt and told Rogers that California was just too far from home. That shirt and a photograph of the Blue Ridge Entertainers with Roy Rogers became prized family heirlooms, even after my mother colored in Roy Rogers’s white hat with a pencil when she was a little girl.
• • •
The successful Blue Ridge Entertainers seemed to be living in a parallel universe from the rest of the crumbling planet. As American troops trained for combat and American forces in the Philippines girded for a possible Japanese invasion, back home in Roanoke, Cousin Irving sounded so cheerful as he recited the healing powers of Dr Pepper that you would have thought he never read a newspaper. Dr Pepper couldn’t stop a war, however.
Saford wrote to Clayton and told him to enjoy his freedom and avoid this man’s army for as long as he could. Maybe you’ll luck out, he wrote, and Uncle Sam won’t need you.
Saford returned to Roanoke a few times on furloughs. He wore his sharp-looking uniform around town because he liked the way it impressed the girls (including the one he was married to). Asey was in the army, too. The twins hadn’t seen much of their older brother since they moved to Roanoke, and Mamo wanted to see her youngest boys, so on one of the furloughs they all got together in The Hollow for a reunion. Their older brothers were too old to serve, and most of them had started families. If there was going to be any fighting, the youngest Halls would be doing it.
Saford and Asey wore their uniforms for Mamo, who would not have known the difference between a corporal and a sack of potatoes. Nor would she have ever found Port Lyautey, Morocco; Normandy; or Germany on a map if you’d given her a year. But over the next four years, this simple country lady would hear about all kinds of places she never knew existed, even if she never did quite understand what her sons were doing there.
Back in Roanoke, Clayton and Saford had their picture taken at a downtown studio. Saford wore his beige army uniform and stuffed the bottom of his necktie between his shirt buttons. A black army hat with an eagle pin sat cockeyed atop his head. Clayton was dressed in the typical white Dr Pepper shirt with a comb poking out of the pocket. He wore his skinny banjo strap around his neck and a white cowboy hat on his head. They photographed well, one twin dressed up like a banjo picker, the other like a soldier.
• • •
Clayton had trouble with blurry vision, which his doctor attributed to cataracts. He had surgery, then spent the night of December 6, 1941, in the hospital. The next day, he saw the world with new eyes.
One of the doctors told him about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor late Sunday afternoon. We were at war, and Clayton knew Saford would be right in the thick of it. But it was all so confusing to a poor country boy from The Hollow. Wasn’t Saford training to kill Germans? Weren’t the British the ones who needed our help? Why do the Japanese have a beef with us? And where is Pearl Harbor, anyway?
Over the following days, declarations of war piled up on one another like brushwood thrown onto a bonfire. Everybody declared war on everybody else. President Roosevelt spoke of “a day that will live in infamy,” and Congress declared war on the Japanese. Germany declared war on us. So did Italy. (Italy? What did we do to them?) The whole world had exploded. Young men lined up outside the Roanoke army recruiting center on Campbell Avenue like it was giving away free beer. The time to fight had arrived, and Clayton knew of only one thing he could do.<
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At the crack of dawn Monday morning, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, he left his boardinghouse on Church Avenue, marched a block downtown past the post office—and walked into the WDBJ studios and went back to work making music on the radio.
Why give up a gig as good as this? Besides, if Uncle Sam needed him, he knew where to find him. Saford could handle the Japanese and the Germans. Whoever.
The other boys stuck around, too. Bill, Wayne, Tommy, Roy, Jay Hugh, and Rufus all stayed in Roanoke. They figured people needed entertainment and Dr Pepper more than ever to help take their minds off the war, which the United States still wouldn’t fully join for several months. The Blue Ridge Entertainers played on.
But soon their numbers would be up.
The band began to disintegrate in 1942. Clayton moonlighted in another group, a cowboy-inspired vocal band called the Wanderers of the Wasteland, a name inspired by a Gene Autry song, which likewise had been taken from a Zane Grey novel and movie.
The Wanderers scratched Clayton’s cowboy itch. They sang “Cool Water” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and all those Western numbers Clayton had sung with his brother, who was long gone.
Then he lost his girl. Reba had fallen for a soldier boy named Donald Roman, who had passed through Roanoke on his way to war. Reba’s family was impressed with Donald. They adored Clayton, too, but Donald was mature and dignified, an army pilot, no less, headed off to defend his country. Clayton was a hillbilly banjo plucker from The Hollow who didn’t seem to be in any hurry to join the fight. He had been a nice high school sweetheart for Reba, but she had grown up and moved on.
Before Clayton knew what had hit him, Reba was on a train bound for Louisville, where she would marry her army pilot, leaving Roanoke—and Clayton—behind.