Ralph Berrier
Page 32
The twins lie in eternal rest some fifty miles apart. Strangely, I have never been bothered by this. Some people think it’s a shame that the twins are not together. Some family members have talked of actually exhuming Saford’s body and moving it to the Franklin County cemetery. Perhaps that will happen someday. To me, though, it seems entirely appropriate that Clayton and Elinor will be together, while Saford wanders off on his own.
• • •
Their last gig was a classic. As they got older, the Hall Twins and the Westerners were regulars on WPAQ’s Merry-Go-Round, the live radio broadcast that began in 1948. The Hall twins had been among WPAQ’s first performers, and their swingin’ brand of acoustic country music and bluegrass stood out in a region famous for old-time mountain music.
WPAQ had become an institution, a place where the rural and small-town folks of southwest Virginia and northeast North Carolina could tune in to hear their musical heritage doled out in generous heaps of fiddle and banjo tunes. The station gained such a reputation among bluegrass and old-time mountain music fans, performers, and scholars that Rounder Records issued a CD of WPAQ recordings called WPAQ: The Voice of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The CD’s selections were all by the home folks, including one song that Clayton and Saford had helped record around 1950—an up-tempo version of the old Roy Hall tune “Can You Forgive?” retitled “Forgive Is Number One.” Rounder was the biggest label that ever put out one of their recordings.
In June 1998, just before the release of that CD, WPAQ hosted a gathering of musicians and musicologists for a series of workshops to discuss the radio station’s impact on the local culture. The workshops culminated in a big concert at the Andy Griffith Playhouse, an old school converted to a concert hall and named for Mount Airy’s most famous native son. (Locals still lay claim to the fact that Mount Airy served as inspiration for the fictional small-town utopia of Mayberry. Years later, that inspiration reversed itself as Mount Airy morphed into a real-life Mayberry, home to the Mayberry Mall, Aunt Bea’s restaurant, Floyd’s Barbershop, and other Mayberry-themed enterprises that attract Andy-philes to town.) Naturally, local favorites the Hall Twins and the Westerners were on the concert bill along with the headline act, Wade and Julia Mainer. That’s the same Wade Mainer of the old Mainer brothers band that inspired those twin bastards from The Hollow so many years earlier. Wade Mainer was ninety years old at the time and still performed on rare occasions. Mike Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger and a famous roots-music performer and music historian in his own right, was one of the masters of ceremonies. The Hall twins were thrilled to be included.
There was only one problem. Saford was dying. He was tethered to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day and was almost too weak to sing or play the fiddle. He had no business being onstage.
A few days before the show, Clayton visited his ailing twin at the little house on Wards Gap Road that old friends Bruce and Jean Moseley had bought for him. Saford was a thin doll of himself. He could speak only a sentence or two without coughing or wheezing, but he told Clayton he would play the show. They talked about the old days, even about their M1 rifles. Old soldiers never forget their rifle’s serial number, Saford told Clayton, who agreed.
But try as he might, Clayton could not come up with his number.
Saford couldn’t remember his, either. They both thought and thought, then each began to chuckle until Saford started coughing again. He hacked up gobs of phlegm from the depths of his scarred lungs as Clayton reached for a box of tissues.
“I’m a goner this time,” Saford said.
Clayton started to protest, telling Saford he shouldn’t think that way, but his older twin cut him off.
“My time is done,” Saford said. His coughing subsided. “I know I ain’t been the best person all the time. But I did the best I could. I’ve seen and done things that not a lot of country boys ever get to do. I know I ain’t got much time left, but I know where I’m going when my time comes. I did my best to live a good life. That’s all any of us can do, ain’t it? Just live a good life? When it’s all said and done, ain’t that enough?”
Clayton gazed at his withered, dying other half. It was like watching himself fade to nothing.
“Yes,” Clayton said. “It is.”
• • •
The stage manager at the Andy Griffith Playhouse was skeptical—and nervous. This poor old guy can’t possibly play fiddle while hooked up to an oxygen tank, can he? Will he even survive the walk to the stage?
Saford wasn’t well. Even a few steps winded him, so he limited his movement as much as possible. He wasn’t sure if he could play and sing. My family attended the show in hopes of lending moral support to the old boys, but I am sure we all had the same thought: that this time, in front of a packed house, Clayton and Saford might embarrass themselves. We also knew that this was probably their last show, although none of us said that. What a shame they had to go out like this.
We weren’t the only ones who felt that way. Saford was scared, too. That’s why he brought along a hired gun—his old friend and protégé from Thomasville, John Hofmann.
John had driven to Virginia to pick up Saford before the show, but when he arrived at his friend’s house, Saford informed John that his fiddle-playing services were sorely needed. John politely refused at first, claiming he didn’t even know all of Saford’s songs, especially the Western numbers. Saford was determined that John would play.
“I’ve never asked you for nothing,” Saford told him sternly, oxygen tubes hanging from his nostrils. “But I need you to do this one thing for me.”
John could not refuse his old friend.
• • •
The twins talked to the Mainers backstage. They had met Wade Mainer years before, back when he brought his band to Roanoke during the peak of Roy Hall’s career. Mainer was cordial; he remembered the twins from Roy’s band, and he certainly remembered Roy’s brother Jay Hugh, who had worked with him in the 1930s. They didn’t make much small talk; besides, Saford could barely talk at all.
The show began when a local family group called the Slate Mountain Ramblers whipped the audience into a frenzy with a half hour of incredible old-time fiddle tunes. On came the Hall twins. Saford was adamant about leaving the oxygen tank backstage, although it would have helped save his breath for singing. He took his place behind the microphone. Clayton sat next to him and waited for Saford to call a tune. Already, Saford was too winded to sing. Huffing and puffing as if he had just run a half marathon, Saford pointed to John and asked him to play “Soldier’s Joy,” one of the first fiddle tunes Saford had learned as a boy in The Hollow. John obliged, and with Clayton playing rhythm guitar, they zipped through the tune.
Saford caught his breath long enough to sing harmony with Clayton on “Cool Water.” This was not the greatest Hall Twins show of all time, but the boys were holding their own. Saford didn’t have the energy for a comedy bit, which was just as well. “Orange Blossom Special” was not an option. How would they close out their brief set? Only Saford knew.
“For our last number, we’d like to do an old song that my brother and I had the privilege to record with Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers in Atlanta, Georgia,” Saford said. “It’s called ‘Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die’ and it goes something like this.”
He motioned to John, who fiddled his way through the intro. Clayton fell into the rhythm as if finishing a twin’s sentence. Then, with voices of angels, they sang as one:
Don’t let your sweet love die like flowers in the fall
Don’t take away the smile and leave the tears
My heart believes in you, please say you love me too
Don’t leave me here to face the lonely years
From somewhere miraculous, Saford found his voice:
I drifted all alone, no one to call my own
Then you came like an angel from the sky
You said we’d never part, don’t leave and break my heart
Be mine alone,
don’t let your sweet love die
When flowers fade away, they’ll bloom again someday
Will you love me when the rosebuds open wide
Or is your kiss to be only a memory
I need you so, don’t let your sweet love die
Saford sang beautifully, as good as ever, summoning a voice that filled the hall. To this day, I do not know how he did it. Was it a voice from God? From his soul? Or just from his gut? His singing was free from the wheezes, rasps, and coughs that were killing him. Clayton’s harmony and chugging rhythm were spot-on. John, the veteran pro that he was, had no trouble finding a melodic hook on which to hang a fiddle solo. The performance was a triumph.
How many times had these old bastards been counted out? How many times did they rise from the canvas to deliver the counterpunch? How much pain, loss, and suffering could two men possibly endure time after time, and yet still go out singing and smiling? They were undefeatable. They would not be embarrassed. War could not kill them, bitterness could not separate them, and sickness would never, ever keep them from the stage.
I was not there the first time Clayton and Saford played together on Granny Hall’s porch, where they sang and danced for pennies tossed by weary travelers. I was not yet born to see the dye running down their arms and legs the night they stole the show at White Plains and won first prize. I was not there the day Roy Hall came to Bassett, or when the Blue Ridge Entertainers made records in Atlanta, or when the twins played at the Academy of Music. I was not even there for their 150th birthday party, or their many Merry-Go-Round shows. But you can be damn sure I was there the night they played their last gig.
Clayton and Saford repeated the last line of the chorus, the international bluegrass code for “OK, we’re through now.”
I need you so, don’t let your sweet love die.
I need you so, don’t let your sweet love die.
The audience rose as if electric shocks had been sent through their seats, exploding into cheers. Sure, the twins probably scored a few sympathy points, seeing how few expected poor, sick Saford to even survive the performance, much less sound as good as he did. But Clayton and Saford earned those cheers. They always could please a crowd.
Clayton and Saford stood up and took their final bows. The bastard sons of Judie Hall, the good-looking boys who made records with Roy Hall, the soldiers who won a World War, the old men who could still put on a good show, hugged their instruments to their chests and exited the stage, disappearing behind the curtain as the sound of applause and hollers rang in their ears.
The crowd wanted more.
Acknowledgments
I have a notebook from a long-forgotten college course about early European literature that must have been as interesting to me as listening to The Canterbury Tales read in its original Middle English. On the right side of one page, written next to actual class notes that included the words “Dante,” “Virgil,” and “Dark Foreboding,” is an outline for a story. It’s my grandpa’s story. The date on the page is February 9, 1988.
That’s how long this book has hung over my head. I often doubted that I’d ever get around to it. I didn’t know enough about Clayton and Saford’s story, about bluegrass music, about World War II.… I didn’t know enough about anything, really. But I kept gathering thread, not actually starting until 1994, when Clayton and Saford told some of their war stories to mom’s video camera, and I kept at it for the next fourteen years, even after the two of them died, until Crown Publishers accepted my book proposal in 2008—a mere twenty years after my primitive lit-class outline.
I will never be able to thank everybody who helped me make this book a reality. I mentioned a few names in the Sources section of those who provided wonderful vignettes and pearls, but so many others helped, too. To everyone who took time to talk to me, to tell me about their lives, to play music with me, or to assist me in any way, I am eternally grateful for your help. Please know that little pieces of you are in this book.
Peter McGuigan, my agent at Foundry Literary + Media, was the first person in the publishing industry who actually believed in this book. Without him and his assistant, Hannah Brown Gordon (now an agent herself), I would be handing out collated copies of this manuscript at family picnics, or giving them away at Christmas. Mary Choteborsky, my editor at Crown, performed an incredible job getting the book into shape and making this as much her project as mine. To her, her assistants, and everyone at Crown, especially Jennifer Reyes, Brett Valley, and publicist Courtney Greenhalgh, I am forever indebted to you all. Likewise, I thank my bosses at the Roanoke Times for allowing me two leaves from work that allowed me to complete this book.
My family has provided encouragement for years, long before I ever thought I had it in me to write a book. My wife, Ruth, has been a “book widow” for several years now, probably feeling like a single parent at times while she cared for our daughter, Lucy, as I slogged away in my cluttered upstairs office in our little house. Honey, I finished it because of you. I’ll bet you wish you’d never given me that fiddle.
Although it is too late to thank them properly, the only reason there is a book at all is because Clayton and Saford Hall led such incredibly rich lives. You know that this story has to be true because no one could make it up. Whatever the book’s failings are as a tribute to two great, flawed men, the effort to tell their story properly is heartfelt and sincere, even if I didn’t finish it while they were still around to bask in the glory.
Sources
Most of the research done for this book resulted from hundreds of interviews conducted mainly between 1994 and 2008. The primary sources were Clayton and Saford Hall; my mother, Renee Manning; my grandmother, Elinor Hall; my great-uncle Asa Hall; and scores of other family, friends, soldiers, and historians. I am indebted to people such as Rufus Hall, Everett Dawson, Mamie Helen Bateman, Ralph Epperson, Johnny Vipperman, Clarence Marshall, Bruce and Jean Moseley, John Hofmann, Dorothy Spencer, my dad and brothers, and scores of other people who told me their stories to help hang the flesh on the bones of this tale.
The Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College provided invaluable WDBJ radio recordings from 1941 to 1942, as well as recorded interviews with many long-gone radio pioneers, which included Clayton and Saford. I am the happy beneficiary of the hard labors of institute director Roddy Moore and former staffer Kip Lornell, whose work in the 1980s provided a wealth of sources that I would have sorely lacked otherwise.
The main sources for “The War” section were interviews with men who fought. I am grateful to Donald Huber, Jay Waxman, Raymond Jenkins, Wayne Page, and Donald Seibert, among others.
The primary books, articles, and manuscripts used for World War II research included:
Ambrose, Stephen E., Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany—June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945, New York: Touchstone Books, 1998.
Atkinson, Rick, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2003.
Davidson, Orlando R., The Deadeyes: The Story of the 96th Infantry Division, Nashville: The Battery Press, Inc., 1981.
Dencker, Donald O., Love Company: Infantry Combat Against the Japanese, World War II, Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 2002.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s official report on Operation Torch found at www.american-divisions.com.
Histories and reports from the U.S. Army Center of Military History, http://www.history.army.mil/.
Johnson, Chalmers, “The Looting of Asia,” London Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 22 (November 2003), pages 3–6.
King, Jr., Clyde Raymond, and George Sadallah, “The Fighting Foxes,” a self-published history of the Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division, 382 Regiment, Company F.
Mittleman, Joseph B., Eight Stars to Victory: A History of the Veteran Ninth U.S. Infantry Division, Nashville: The Battery Press, Inc., 2003.
Personal papers of Lt. Col. (ret.) Donald Seibert.
Peterson, Lance Cp
l. Bryan A., “Memorial Park Honors Lives Lost During Battle of Okinawa,” http://www.okinawa.usmc.mil/.
Pyle, Ernie, Here Is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Reed, John S., “Okinawa: The Battle, the Bomb, and the Camera,” Prologue 37, no. 2 (summer 2005), pages 18–23.
Rottman, Gordon L.; Peter Dennis, illustrator, World War II Combat Reconnaissance Tactics, Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2007.
In addition to interviews with bluegrass musicians, several sources detailed the early days of bluegrass and Roanoke:
Dotson, Rand, Roanoke, Virginia, 1882–1912: Magic City of the New South, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Rosenberg, Neil V., Bluegrass: A History, Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Wolfe, Charles K., Classic Country: Legends of Country Music, New York: Routledge, 2000.
About the Author
RALPH BERRIER, JR., is a reporter at the Roanoke Times, for which he has written extensively about Virginia’s musical heritage. His work has been honored by the Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Awards, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and the Newspaper Association of America. He is also an avid bluegrass and old-time fiddle player who lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.
Copyright © 2010 by Ralph Berrier
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of random house, inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the estate of Paul Edgar Johnson for permission to reprint lyrics from “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die” by Clarke Van Ness and Zeke Manners.