Homeplace

by John Lingan

  Jim had bought this plot years ago, after burying Patsy and his son Andrew in the same ground. He’d since buried Charlie, along with many other friends and family, adding up to more than five decades, two-thirds of his life, spent in recurring grief and remembrance on this one loping field. It sounds tragic, but cemeteries aren’t only for mourning; they are defenses against time, claiming a landscape against further change. This particular cemetery was acres wide, bordered by single-family homes on all sides, including a neighborhood of prefabricated mansions just west. But in fifty years, no section of Winchester will look more well preserved or timeless than Shenandoah Memorial Park. As we listened to Jim’s last words, the ultimate fate of the Troubadour remained unclear. But Jim would rest here, south of Winchester, among his most dearly missed friends, for as long as this land existed. Mourning allows for constancy, something that this region—this country—often precludes.

  Despoliation, the plunder of once-pure things, is the most American song of all. No city is ever as good as it once was, and every old man can regale you with tales of days gone by. Imagine what unblemished beauty Alexander Spotswood beheld as he crested the Swift Run Gap, or what it must have been like to hear Patsy Cline’s voice soaring in some nondescript roadhouse before the world knew her name. We take it for granted that our mania for new buildings and new fortunes deprives us of these experiences, then we romanticize the rediscovery of what we’ve lost. A house that looks just like a country legend’s. A luxury spa scene to rival Berkeley Springs’s early days. A farmers’ market to sell the kind of heirloom produce that every family used to grow as a matter of course.

  We know, too, that all this change and loss leave tragedies in their wake. Factories close or an industry dies, neighborhood businesses lose out to chains, and the people around them are left desperate and isolated. And so we convince ourselves they deserved it: they’re uneducated, or uncouth, or addicted to the wrong kinds of drugs. We pathologize. We look for justifications and treat each left-behind community like a self-contained case. In many ways, Jim was a left-behind person. The music industry he loved outgrew his style and never returned his devotion. His rural community collapsed, a victim of modernization. Then his health faltered and his businesses struggled, as happened to so many country people around him. He had a drawl, and a home that might have been featured in a glossy magazine article about the rural poor. Yet over the course of my time around him, Jim’s life only came to seem more and more similar to mine. He fought against mounting bills and tried to keep his family intact. For a time, a long time, he managed that. He sold records and songs and sandwich meat and beer, and finally opened a place that granted people a rare view of the way things used to be. He showed me that the left-behind people aren’t mere victims. They are trying to make a life in a world where the good old days are gone. What could be more purely American?

  There was talk around the grave site of the reception back up at the Troubadour. There would be a potluck and eventually, inevitably, music. Today would be purely celebratory, a respite from the ongoing sense of impending loss that had settled there. There would be time for that later, because in our country, it’s always the end of something.

  I dropped my bag on the bed and looked out the window onto Washington Street. A mid-December ice storm the previous night had turned the road to a slick, wet mess. My room, one of five cozy low-lit hideaways on the second floor of a Berkeley Springs restaurant, looked like a spot where you might take refuge with a briefcase full of money and a dangerous woman. Briefly, I washed my face and looked at the bathroom’s floral print wallpaper, the musty pillows on the tall bed. Then down to the restaurant bar for a coffee to stay awake.

  “The Troubadour?” asked the young woman in a waist-apron and embroidered polo shirt as I took my first sip. It was as if I’d told her I was in town to swim the frozen Potomac. “What’s going on up there?”

  “There’s a band tonight actually.”

  “Really? I didn’t even know they had music anymore. I’ve never been there.”

  Her loss. The band was from Baltimore, a country-rock trio that kept bottles of beer on the amps, wobbling precariously as their racket shook the stage. The singer spoke of what a privilege it was. Dr. Matt Hahn was there with friends, dancing and shouting on the checkerboard main floor. Codi couldn’t pour the Rocket Fuel fast enough. I hadn’t seen it this raucous in ages. It was as if Jim’s death had released the place from its obligation to seriousness. We were no longer waiting around for the end of an era. A new one could commence, come what way.

  Bertha stopped in for a second, greeting me with a big hug of the sort I’d seen her lavish on beloved guests on my first night. She was surviving, she said. Taking one day at a time. I couldn’t help but tell her: I missed him. She took my hand and guided me over to a picture of Jim near the door. “He’s still here,” she said, hugging my shoulders. “I know that for sure.”

  A good crowd, bigger as the night wore on. A whole separate party raged around the pool tables, deep-toned screams of delight with every victory and especially every embarrassment. Dozens of empty glasses covered every table, surrounding half-finished pitchers like worshippers around an idol. All the pool players wore baseball hats, most of them camouflaged. Between songs a fight broke out between two girls in equally ill-fitting tops. It was about a boy, a smooth-faced young man who looked barely old enough to drive. Tammy, Codi’s normally all-smiles partner at the bar, had to break it up with a few hard slaps on the counter and threats to kick them all out. An hour later, one girl hit her Rocket Fuel limit and ended up weeping on another man’s shoulder. When she left, escorted through the crowd by a protective friend, her face was one puffy smear of tears and mascara.

  All the way till midnight, three-plus hours of sweaty work by the band. They closed with a riotous final chord, held forever, the drummer tumbling and whipping at his kit before lifting the sticks and bringing everything to a close with one final triumphant blast. Then the clapping, the stomping, begging, before Codi called it all to order and made us close out. It was almost Christmas. Everyone tipped heavy and threw another couple bucks in the big plastic jar for Bertha’s medical bills, or a new roof, or whatever they might need it for up here.

  Outside, “on the wide level of a mountain’s head,” as Coleridge put it, the good-byes were sloppy and quick in the freezing parking lot. The Troubadour’s huge neon sign was brighter than the full moon but only barely. Then the familiar left turn onto Highland Ridge Road, putting the moon on my right. I rolled the window down a little and got that frigid mountain air on my face. Past the new neighbors and a construction site I’d never seen before this visit—they were fixing the one-lane bridge and had cleared out a corner of the woods to make room for bulldozers and piles of steel beams. Down past the artificial ponds, partly frosted-over, the garages and porches, following the path that water would take if a spring suddenly sprang from the McCoy property. A raccoon stole across the road, turning its head just enough to catch my lights in its glowing mirrored eyes. Soon enough it was gas stations and streetlamps and resorts once again. Back on earth. Until next time.

  Acknowledgments

  If I’m being honest, this entire project began as an excuse to hang out with Matt Yake, who joined me on my initial trips to Winchester and the Troubadour and on many more over the next four years. His photographs and conversation have helped me see this place and these people in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s an honor to have his work and his name in these pages.

  No one has ever worked harder on my behalf than David Patterson. That makes him a great agent, but his kindness and support during the writing of this book have made him a trusted friend. Ben Hyman, meanwhile, saw the import and drama in Jim McCoy’s story and convinced me it was worth telling at such length. This would be a lesser book—and I would be a lesser writer—without him. I owe these two gentlemen the world.

  I am so grateful to have found a home for this book at Houghton Miffl
in Harcourt, where Nicole Angeloro guided me to the finish line with care and insight. Thank you to her and to Bruce Nichols, Martha Kennedy, Beth Burleigh Fuller, Chrissy Kurpeski, and Elizabeth Pierson for the incredible thoughtfulness and attention that I was given from the get-go. What an absolute thrill to work with people who respect readers and authors so much.

  Thanks to Marisa Carroll and Steve Kandell at BuzzFeed; John Summers, Thomas Frank, and Lindsey Gilbert at The Baffler; and especially Andrew Womack and Kate Ortega at The Morning News, who edited and published essays that grew into chapters herein.

  Many people welcomed me into their homes and/or talked at generous length about their complicated hometown. A few I feel indebted to for life: Wil Cather, Nick Smart, Katie Pitcock, Kent Mull, Jodi Young, JudySue Huyett-Kempf, Phil Glaize III, Andy Gyurisin, Warren Hofstra, John Douglas, Dr. Matt Hahn, and Russell Mokhiber. Among the many people I’ve written about in these pages, I am particularly grateful to Barbara Dickinson and Oscar Cerrito-Mendoza, who were unbelievably patient and generous as I poked and prodded their personal lives for years. I only hope I have repaid your trust and openness.

  Supreme thanks to a few guys whose excitement and support have meant everything: Ted Scheinman, Elon Green, Dave Stack, Burke Sampson, Pat Jarrett, Daniel Polansky, Pete Backof, Will Crain, and Alex Cameron. May your music always be loud and your beer always be cold.

  Thanks are not enough for my mom and dad, who taught me to love reading and music, and have been incredibly supportive in all my efforts with both over the years. In so many ways, this book is a tribute to them. Ditto for Ishai, Anna, and Jake, wonderful siblings who have always taken such joy from my enthusiasms and given me so much to be proud of in return. To Denise, and to my extended families in the United States and Poland: you have enriched my life beyond measure and your support means everything. I love all of you.

  To my beloved young readers, Nina and Albert: this is where Daddy was all those nights. I hope this book exhibits a little of your curiosity and kindness. I am amazed by you every day.

  And of course to Justyna, who carried this book on her back as long as I did. Who watched our kids on her own as I drove around in search of a mercurial story hours away. Who endured my growing obsession with “twangy” music. Who deserves much more than just a dedication in a book. As Patsy wrote to her mama: We made it. Kocham cię.

  Notes on Sources

  Preface

  My main source on the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe and the early development of Winchester is The Planting of New Virginia (2004) by Warren R. Hofstra, a leading historian of the region who teaches at Shenandoah University and once kindly met me for coffee. For the changing face of Winchester, I relied on U.S. Census Bureau figures and a Winchester-Frederick County Chamber of Commerce document called “Facts from Figures” (2006), as well as the area’s Manufacturing Directory (2012).

  That breathless Wordsworth line is taken from the first poem in his collection Poems on the Naming of Places (1800).

  Chapter 1: The Blue Ridge Country King

  For the origins of honky-tonk country, the place to start is Bill C. Malone’s epochal Country Music, U.S.A. (1968; multiple editions ever since), the first major scholarly historical treatment of the genre. Malone has written many additional books, of which Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (2002) proved most illuminating for this project. Additional insights and biographical information about Ernest Tubb are available in Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway (1979); Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis Presley (Last Train to Memphis [1994] and Careless Love [1999]) contains vivid descriptions of the early rock ’n’ roll record and touring industries as well. For sheer fun, any reader interested in the formation and character of those industries should read Nick Tosches’s Country (1977) and Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (1984). It was Tosches who identified the late-Victorian appearance of the phrase “honky-tonk.” Another invaluable font of information here is John Broven’s magisterial Record Makers and Breakers (2008), particularly the “Hillbilly Boogie” chapter.

  For this and subsequent chapters relating Jim McCoy’s biography, I am supremely indebted to John Douglas’s Joltin’ Jim: Jim McCoy’s Life in Country Music (2007), a spirited and well-researched biography that you can find in greater Winchester’s finer gift shops and bookstores. There is also a biographically informative video interview with Jim on the website Morgan County, USA. For scenic descriptions of life on Highland Ridge in the immediately pre- and postwar eras, I relied heavily on Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (2010), the memoir of Jim’s neighbor, Joe Bageant. There is more on Joe’s books in the notes for Chapter 6.

  Information on the early days of WINC was gathered from “WINC-FM—The First 50 Years, 1946&x2013;1996,” in the Stewart Bell Archives of the Handley Regional Library.

  Chapter 2: A Closer Walk with Thee

  The first biography of Patsy Cline was Ellis Nassour’s Honky-Tonk Angel (1981), though I found more use for Margaret Jones’s Patsy: A Life of Patsy Cline (1994), which seems to be the preference for most devotees I’ve met. (Conjecture and grapevine tales are preferable to books for most of these folks, however.) As I say, Douglas Gomery’s Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon (2011) is exceptional for his insights into Patsy’s very early life and love of jazz, as well as his depiction of her posthumous career as a cultural totem and signifier. Naturally, Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976) contains some beloved descriptions of Patsy the friend and vulnerable star, and you can find additional early-’60s Nashville memories in Willie Nelson’s It’s a Long Story (2015) and Johnny Cash’s Cash: The Autobiography (1997).

  There is a preponderance of additional published material on Patsy’s life, including Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline’s Letters to a Friend (1999), if you want a taste of her epistolary talents; Patsy Cline: Singing Girl from the Shenandoah Valley (1996), which features some nice photos and region-specific stories; and The Airplane Crash That Killed Patsy Cline (2011), an e-book that features exacting mechanical triage of the crash itself, if that’s what you’re after. Serious fans should also track down The Patsy Cline Collection box set (1991), featuring all 102 sides she recorded in her career, as well as expert liner notes by Paul Kingsbury.

  Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline (2013), edited by Warren R. Hofstra, features essays that have enhanced this book from all angles, particularly its wealth of information about Winchester’s midcentury social customs.

  The details of George Washington’s cursed stay (and exploitative redemption) in pre-Revolutionary Winchester are drawn from Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (2010), though you can find them repeated and embellished in most local guidebooks and historical pamphlets.

  Chapter 3: Resistance

  My main source for the early history of Virginia’s apple cultivation is an article by S. W. Fletcher, “A History of Fruit Growing in Virginia,” from Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Virginia Horticultural Society, 1932. For the Valley’s apple industry, specifically its recent decline, I relied on Scott Hamilton Suter’s introduction to Scott Jost’s handsome photo book Shenandoah Valley Apples (2013). Henry Adams’s note about Virginians is from The Education of Henry Adams (1902).

  Unsurprisingly, I also found plenty of fruit material in the books that detailed Harry Flood Byrd’s greater life and career: Ronald L. Heinemann’s Harry Byrd of Virginia (1996) and Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion (1988); J. Harvie Wilkinson’s Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics (1968); and Alden Hatch’s The Byrds of Virginia (1969), which maps the dynasty back to William II for good measure. For the history of southern business development under Byrd’s senate reign, the key text is Bruce J. Schulman’s From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 (1994), and I also learned much from Gavin Wright’s “The New Deal and the Modernization of the South,” from Federal History 2010
: 58–73.

  Byrd can be found lurking in Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013) and even briefly in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970). For the dark details of massive resistance and Prince Edward County’s fight against school desegregation, one need only read Kristen Green’s Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County (2015).

  For insights into Virginia’s postwar mourning and memorial culture, the go-to is Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), though there is a particularly evocative firsthand account of this period in Richmond native James Branch Cabell’s feisty, corrective Virginia ethnography, Let Me Lie (1947).

  Chapter 4: A Museum and a Mountaintop

  There is a short biographical essay on Julian Wood Glass Jr. on the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley's website, www.themsv.org. I learned additional details about his life and relationship from “Rearranging the Closet: Decoding the LGBT Exhibit Space,” by Michael Lesperance in InPark Magazine #51 (2014), and “In Tribute to R. Lee Taylor,” delivered by the Hon. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia to the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, June 28, 2000.

  Chapter 5: How to Build a City

  Berkeley Springs’s reputation as an early-nineteenth-century spa destination can be gleaned from almost any book on Virginia in that era, though the specifics I used are taken from Jeanne Mozier and Betty Lou Harmison’s Images of America volume on the town and from Jeanne’s expertly curated work in the Museum of the Berkeley Springs. The twentieth-century descriptions of the town’s post-glory sleepiness can be found in The WPA Guide to West Virginia (2014; originally published by the Federal Writer’s Project as West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State [1941]) and Shenandoah: The Valley Story (1972) by Alvin Dohme, which is the “faded and broken-spined” book I quote at length.