Ralph Berrier
Page 31
The Hall Twins and the Westerners performed on the Radford University campus during the annual Folk Arts Festival when I was a senior. Did I walk a half mile to see them? No. The show was on a Saturday morning and I was probably a tad groggy. This began a regrettable era for me—the era when I didn’t attend nearly enough Hall Twins and the Westerners concerts.
I had my opportunities. They performed all over southwest Virginia in the early 1990s, which coincided with the beginnings of my journalism career and its concomitant sixty-hour workweek. The shows I missed were legendary: the Mount Airy Autumn Leaves Festival in 1989 (that’s the show where Saford announced, “I’m seventy years old!” And Clayton replied, “I’m seventy, too!”); a concert at a local high school practically in my backyard in 1995 (Ruth went to that show with a friend; I took calls on the sports desk); numerous performances on the Merry-Go-Round in Mount Airy (I’m not sure I knew what the Merry-Go-Round was until it was almost too late); and, most regrettably, the twins’ 150th birthday party in 1994.
Fortunately, I got to see a few shows, because the Hall Twins played so often. A lot of people remembered the boys’ time with Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers.
A Roy Hall revival had been rekindled in the late 1970s, when a small Virginia record label called County Records issued fourteen Roy Hall numbers on an LP titled Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers: Recorded 1938–41. An article about the album appeared in Bluegrass Unlimited, an influential publication dedicated to bluegrass and old-time mountain music.
Clayton was interviewed for that article, headlined “Roy Hall & His Blue Ridge Entertainers: Almost Bluegrass.” One of his most famous stories was boiled down to a single sentence: “Clayton Hall contends that in one unusually good week his share of the band’s earnings provided him with a new automobile.”
By the late 1980s, somebody else came looking for the Hall twins.
• • •
Kip Lornell was a young professor and music historian at Ferrum College in Franklin County, about forty-five minutes south of Roanoke. He worked for the Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum’s center for the study and preservation of southwest Virginia folk life and culture.
Lornell had taken a keen interest in the Roanoke Valley’s folk-music history. He was surprised, however, to learn that much of Roanoke’s country music had been influenced not so much by mountain string bands, but by bolo-wearing Western bands that played on the radio. Roy Hall’s name came up frequently in his research, as did the names of Tommy Magness and the not-related-to-Roy Hall twins.
The Blue Ridge Institute made a name for itself in the 1970s and ’80s by producing a landmark series of albums called Virginia Traditions, records themed around genres from Tidewater blues to southwest Virginia ballads. In 1988, Lornell spearheaded the institute’s final LP, Early Roanoke Country Radio, an album that featured old radio transcriptions that dated back to WDBJ’s earliest days in the 1920s. The pièce de résistance of the vinyl LP was side two, which was anchored by a pair of fifteen-minute radio programs—one by Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers, one by Tommy Magness and the Orange Blossom Boys.
The Blue Ridge Institute had come into possession of seven Roy Hall programs and a few Tommy Magness shows that a former WDBJ employee had saved from destruction when the station moved from Kirk Avenue in the 1960s. Prior to the album’s release, a Roy Hall radio program had not been heard publicly in two generations.
At the drop of a needle, the scratchy sound of 1942 crackled to life.
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper and we’ll all go out and he’p her
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
Then came the voice of “Cousin Irving” Sharp, as reassuring and comforting as St. Peter welcoming blessed souls at the pearly gates. “Well, hello there. We’ve been expecting you. It’s Dr Pepper Time. Time for another quarter hour of your favorite old-timey songs presented by Roy Hall and the Blue Ridge Entertainers, brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Dr Pepper dealer.”
Irving called for “Fisher’s Hornpipe” from Tommy, who fiddled so fast, he transcended time and space and transported Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers back to the future. As much as I’d like to tell you that the Early Roanoke Country Radio album zoomed to number one on the Billboard country charts, won a Grammy, and made national celebrities out of the Hall Twins and the Westerners, the truth is that its appeal was pretty much limited to Roanokers old enough to remember local country music radio of the 1940s.
But that was good enough. The local media jumped all over the surviving Roanoke musicians. The Roanoke Times & World-News published a story about the record. Roanoke public radio station WVTF invited Clayton and Saford to be interviewed by host Bill Vernon for his popular In and Around Bluegrass show. The twins were media darlings, spinning their timeworn stories and reciting their old comedy routines for their grandchildren’s generation.
Nobody talked about the war or lamented what might have been. Nobody talked about unsteady nerves, depression, or sickness. Clayton and Saford only sang, told stories, laughed, and sang some more.
• • •
The Blue Ridge Institute made a documentary about Roanoke country radio, narrated by Franklin County native David Huddleston (yes, Coen Brothers fans, The Big Lebowski!). I never saw it when it aired, but I did make it down to Roanoke for the big reunion show at Smith Park on the Roanoke River during Roanoke’s annual Festival in the Park. Clayton and Saford easily were the MVPs (most valuable pickers) of the afternoon, as they represented three classic Roanoke bands: the Blue Ridge Entertainers, the Orange Blossom Boys, and the Wanderers of the Wasteland.
The boys were in their element. Snow-haired men and middle-aged women in big glasses sat in lounge chairs beneath the old oaks and sycamores that shaded the stage. Clayton and Saford hadn’t played a real show in Roanoke in … how long? Forty years? Probably not since the night Tommy Magness showed up drunk at the Roanoke Theater and the Orange Blossom Boys busted up. They picked up where they had left off, singing the same songs, yukking it up between numbers, doing the same comedy bits.
I sidled up to the stage and snapped pictures with my new 35 mm Minolta. What a cool story these old dudes have, I thought, a primordial outline beginning to evolve in my soft little brain. Somebody ought to write a book about them.
They sang their song they wrote for Mamo, “When Mother Prayed for Me”:
When mother prayed for me
Down on her bended knee
A blinding tear rolled down her cheek
When mother prayed for me
She held me in her arms
Her eyes lifted heavenly
When she asked God above to shine down his love
When mother prayed for me
The crowd loved it. The twins’ harmonies were pitch-perfect. They hardly seemed real, these two look-alikes singing old songs that dated back before the days of television and FM radio. But there they were, singing on a stage in Roanoke, almost fifty years after they had arrived in the Magic City by driving the wrong way down a one-way street. They had endured. The crowd cheered. Fans did not rush the stage and cause it to crash to the ground. They did not demand the twins play five shows. They just wanted one good one, and they got it.
• • •
The Hall Twins and the Westerners performed at house parties, VFW dances, Democratic fund-raisers—anywhere folks wanted to hear classic bluegrass and Western songs. They peddled their cassette tape Then and Now at show dates. They videotaped a thirty-minute program of music and stories that aired in 1993 on some fly-by-night cable channel called the Americana Network based out of Branson, Missouri. They taped it in my parents’ living room, right about where we recorded Saford’s war stories that day Ruth gave me the fiddle for my birthday.
Thanks to Papa Clayton’s connections to the Moravian church, the Hall Tw
ins and the Westerners were in constant demand on the gospel-singing circuit. Not a month passed when they weren’t invited to play a revival or homecoming service.
They played just about every Moravian church from Winston-Salem to Carroll County. Along the way, they met a fellow traveler from the world of country music and the Moravian faith: George Hamilton IV, the old singer best known for his 1961 number one hit “Abilene.”
Abilene, Abilene
Prettiest town I ever seen
Folks down there don’t treat you mean
In Abilene, my Abilene
Hamilton loved the twins, and he invited them to accompany him at other Moravian churches around Winston-Salem, the epicenter of the church’s southern branch. In 1993, he even took them to his old stomping grounds in Tennessee—a little place called the Grand Ole Opry.
Hamilton had been a member of the Opry since his heyday in the early 1960s. The Hall twins went with him to Nashville, where Hamilton played a show at the Ryman Auditorium, the “Mother Church of Country Music.” Clayton and Saford made the six-hour trip, staying in a campground cabin along the way, just so they could visit the Ryman and watch their friend. During his set, Hamilton introduced Clayton and Saford and asked them to stand. Hamilton told the audience that these old boys had played the Grand Ole Opry back in its beginnings in the early 1940s. The crowd applauded respectfully, even though surely no one in the audience had ever heard of the Hall twins. That didn’t matter to Clayton and Saford, who stood, waved, and grinned like they were famous.
They never took the stage on that trip, although they did meet country star Vince Gill. They also paid a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame on fabled Music Row. They went looking for an old friend, whose name was enshrined among the immortals Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and even Elvis Presley. Along the “Walkway of Fame,” they read the familiar names of Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Gene Autry, Chet Atkins, and Patsy Cline, until, at last, they found it, written on a slab of stone in the ground for all the world to see: Tommy Magness. Class of 1980.
Saford snapped a picture, and the twins headed home.
• • •
A few final words about Tommy Magness.
After the Orange Blossom Boys imploded in 1947, Tommy fell in with country music legend Roy Acuff again for a couple of years. No moss ever grew on Tommy’s fiddle, and by 1950, he was back in Roanoke, right about the time the twins were leaving. Once again, he led a band. Once again, he broadcast over WDBJ. Once again, it all fell apart.
He called his band the Tennessee Buddies, and it featured two young hotshots—guitarist and singer Red Smiley and banjoist Don Reno. The Buddies were good, and Tommy taught them many of the old hits he had played with Roy Hall: “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die,” “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight,” and “I Know You’re Married but I Love You Still.” The group held one recording session in Cincinnati for the Federal label in 1951, under the guidance of producer Syd Nathan, a music pioneer whose work with rural white and urban black musicians (including James Brown) laid the groundwork for rock ’n’ roll and earned him induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.
Reno and Smiley eventually kicked out Tommy, who still battled the bottle, and formed their own band—the Tennessee Cut-Ups—and became bluegrass music legends. The duo of Don Reno and Red Smiley became household names in Roanoke, literally, because they played in most households every morning by way of WDBJ television. They were the daily musical act on Top o’ the Morning, a news and entertainment program hosted, naturally, by “Cousin Irving” Sharp, who had moved seamlessly into the new visual medium. Reno and Smiley scored a slew of bluegrass hits. Many of them were penned by Reno himself, but others were the old Roy Hall songs they had learned from Tommy.
But Roy Hall was dead and with him part of Roanoke’s musical past, and soon Tommy Magness would be, too. From that point forward, when people spoke of the history of bluegrass music in Roanoke, they didn’t talk about Roy Hall, Tommy Magness, or the Hall twins, or their cute little programs on WDBJ radio sponsored by Dr Pepper. They spoke of Reno and Smiley, Top o’ the Morning, and the show’s sponsor, the Kroger grocery store chain.
Roanoke had changed. The Academy of Music, where the Blue Ridge Entertainers had played scores of Saturday Night Jamborees with the likes of the Sons of the Pioneers, the Carter Family, and Roy Rogers, deteriorated and was razed in 1952. The city even had a new nickname, which originated from a ridiculous plan by a local merchants group to erect a ninety-foot freestanding neon star atop Mill Mountain as a promotional gimmick before the 1949 Christmas shopping season. The shining star immediately caught on with the public and was allowed to stay permanently. The Magic City was eclipsed by a giant neon-powered star. To this day, Roanoke bills itself as the Star City.
Tommy moved back to Mineral Bluff, Georgia, land of his birth, where he married one of his old girlfriends, a small, middle-aged woman named Leah. His health declined, and he suffered a series of small strokes that caused numbness in his hands, making it difficult to play. Other than his immediate family, few people in northwest Georgia knew that Tommy Magness was a music legend. Sometime in the early morning hours of October 5, 1972, Tommy Magness suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep just before his fifty-sixth birthday. He would be little remembered for most of the next twenty-five years.
Then, in the late 1990s, Sony Music issued a series of CDs intended to chronicle the best of American twentieth-century recorded music. Through mergers and acquisitions, Sony absorbed many record labels, including Columbia, which through its subsidiaries had issued the greatest popular songs ever recorded. Sony greeted the new millennium with a series of compilations that featured the best of twentieth-century jazz, pop, folk, classical, show tunes, rap, and country—practically any genre that Columbia recorded.
The country CD was assigned to famed music historian and pop culture critic Billy Altman, a guy who wrote about rock for Creem and Rolling Stone, who has been a curator for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and who writes for the Huffington Post. Altman is the classic musicologist snob, a dude who knows more about Chuck Berry’s session musicians than any teenager knows about the latest American Idol champ. He knew his country music history, and he knew about a certain historic recording that had never been released to the public. He was sure the master still existed, though, buried deep in Columbia’s vault.
After a few calls, Altman found it—an original acetate recorded in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1938 by a hillbilly singer from North Carolina and his young fiddling prodigy. Roy Hall and Tommy Magness’s original version of “Orange Blossom Special” had survived for sixty years. Altman included it in Sony’s Country: The American Tradition CD. Right between the Sons of the Pioneers and Gene Autry, you’ll find Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers, the band that did not include Saford and Clayton but which was much improved after they joined. In 1999, Sony compiled all the discs into a Soundtrack for a Century box set, which means that Roy Hall sits alongside the likes of George Jones, Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, and Aerosmith.
I bought the country music anthology just so I could play the original “Orange Blossom Special” for Papa Clayton. He had heard Tommy play the song a thousand times, but he had never heard the original recording. Papa listened to his long-dead buddies, as a nervous twenty-one-year-old fiddler shuffled stiffly through the tune. After hearing the historic recording, Clayton looked at me and said, “Boy, Tommy didn’t do much with that one.”
• • •
Saford died first. I watched him dying, wheezing, gasping for oxygen as he lay mostly lifeless in a hospital bed in Galax, Virginia, on a cold February night. I could not bear to stay until the end, so I hightailed it home and got the news the next morning that he was gone.
In late 1997, Saford got pneumonia, which ravaged his long-scarred lungs. His health spiraled downhill for the next sixteen months, until he died of pulmonary fibrosis on February 11, 1999. He died from roughly the same causes t
hat had taken Mamo thirty-one years earlier and would claim Clayton four years later. I was a pallbearer at the funeral, during which I saw something I never thought I’d see—Papa Clayton bawling uncontrollably as the family was led into the funeral home’s chapel. The old toughie couldn’t help it. As Clayton walked down the aisle toward the flag-draped coffin, Saford’s voice sang sweetly from the public-address system, because my mother had chosen the Hall Twins and the Westerners’ version of an old hymn called “Come on In” as the prelude. The twins harmonized on the chorus:
Come on in, the battle is over
Come on in, your race is run
Come on in, heaven is waiting
A crown of life you now have won
Saford was buried in the Montgomery Cemetery, close to Mamo, Granny, and Pappy Hall. When he died, he barely had a penny to his name. An insurance policy paid for some of the funeral expenses; friends and family picked up the rest. Another friend spearheaded a fund drive to buy Saford a headstone engraved with a fiddle. Even in death, Saford relied upon the kindness of others.
• • •
Incredibly, Clayton’s health improved the first couple of years after his twin’s death, but eventually, he, too, grew weaker and labored to breathe. He died on April 22, 2003. (Strange twins fact: If you take Saford’s date of death—2/11—and double or “twin” it, you get 4/22.)
Clayton had decided years earlier that he did not want to be buried in the Montgomery Cemetery, which had badly deteriorated from neglect—a few tombstones had fallen over, the rutted gravel road that led to the graveyard was all but impassable due in part to a couple of fallen trees, and the only person who even bothered to mow was his older brother Asey, who by the time Clayton died was nearly ninety. Considering the graveyard’s sad shape, Clayton had agreed to be buried in Elinor’s family’s cemetery in Franklin County, the place her father had discovered on a hunting trip so many years before.