On May 8, 1941, at the home of Oscar Nix, Radford married his sweetheart and soul mate at the age of twenty-eight. Her name was Virta Berlene Anders. She was not only his soul mate but also his prayer warrior. She was very quiet and soft-spoken, but her ability to shine always shone through. She loved everyone, welcomed everyone into her home, and always had a bountiful spread. She was truly the backbone of Radford’s ministry with her quiet and humble demeanor. Radford and Virta had five children: Furman, Norman, Truman, Judy, and Jean.
Radford loved to sing. He was elected choir director of his home church at age eleven and competed in many singing events. For many years he had his own singing group, which included two of his sons, Furman and Norman, along with Ronald Crane. Radford taught Reagan and Larry Riddle how to sing shape notes, which was instrumental in forming The Primitive Quartet.
Reverend Wilson was a very good mentor and counselor. People came from far and wide to seek his advice. He would tell them, “It’s not what I think, but let’s see what God says in His Word.” He truly was a man of God. Norman states that he will never forget what his daddy told him on his dying bed. He said, “Honey, live right and you can die right.” Without a doubt, Radford and Virta were both people that you knew lived for God. They are gone, but they are still missed and will never be forgotten.
The Primitive Quartet’s music can be ordered at www.primitivequartet.com.
A Band Is Born
~George Reynolds and The Foxfire Boys~
As I quickly ran into class the day of my first Foxfire interview, I was extremely nervous because I was going to meet Mr. George Reynolds. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I had heard many stories about him already, so I was excited to get to meet the legendary teacher. I enjoyed listening to his recounting of how Foxfire came to be, how the Foxfire Boys started, and of his life after Foxfire. Also, I learned of his experiences as a Foxfire folklore and music teacher. Not only did he play his guitar and sing, but he played the jaw harp, as well, and Joyce Green even joined in and helped. Other classes also got to enjoy George’s interview because after he stopped talking he started singing, and he sang all the way through two more classes. It is easy to see how he motivated his students with his enthusiasm and talent.
George left Rabun County High School when he married, and he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his wife was teaching. He stayed at home with his son for a while before beginning to teach school. He even told our teachers that people would come up to him in the grocery store when he had his son and say, “Well, I guess Granddad is out with the grandkid again.”
He currently teaches music at an elementary school in inner-city Knoxville, where he still uses the Foxfire teaching approach every day. His elementary students make their own instruments out of flip-flops and cardboard tubes, and they love it! He is still listening and learning from his students today, and he feels blessed to be doing what he loves to do. Even though we miss his presence here at Rabun County High School, we are so happy that he is carrying on the Foxfire tradition.
—Ana Merino
I didn’t take education courses in college and did not plan to be a teacher professionally. My parents were teachers, and everybody said, “Well, I guess you’ll grow up to be a teacher like your mom and dad.” So I ended up being a teacher, and I got an opportunity to work for Foxfire. I guess you could say the timing was just right. Foxfire did not have a real true folklorist on the staff, and they were publishing materials about folklife—southern mountain folklife. They hired me to be a folklorist, and along with that they also expected me to teach. All the Foxfire staff were teachers, advisers, editors, and everybody did everything. We were still at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School then. It was the tenth year that Foxfire had been around. I taught one year there at Rabun Gap. I didn’t have to be certified as a teacher because they could cut the red tape and count me as the Foxfire teacher’s aide. I learned to teach in the classroom from spending time with the Foxfire staff.
Everybody was so excited and dedicated to being the right kind of teacher. We were involved in this process where we were actively engaging the kids in helping us learn how to do our job. I guess you might call it a profession. It was never based on what we learned at college, but much of it was in what we had learned from just paying attention to what the kids told us. The most important thing about being a Foxfire teacher was paying attention to the students you were teaching and becoming a learner in the process so that everybody shares a learning experience and nobody is the boss. No one is the center of attention, although someone has to be the adult in the room and be responsible. The whole process is a shared learning experience, and that is how I learned to teach—I listened to my students. Well, it turns out that that was a really good way to learn.
We started the Foxfire music program with the idea that we would collect music tapes and turn them into recordings and sell them in order to support the music program. It was the same way that the spoken word was published in the magazines. The magazines, by that time, had become quite a big producer of material but not necessarily income. The books themselves were incredibly successful. As you may know, The Foxfire Book was the biggest-selling book at that time in Doubleday’s publishing history; its corporation was one of the big five publishing companies in the world. So that was a real plus, because not only was Foxfire a great place to work, but everybody knew about Foxfire—it was real famous.
The magazines were published from ’67, you know; the class started in ’66. It wasn’t like the other magazines; it was like a school literary magazine. They invited poetry and prose from other communities. There was artwork, and there was all kinds of things that were pretty much along the lines of the typical high school arts journal. The turn of events that changed the magazine forever was when they first interviewed Mr. Luther Rickman, the sheriff, about the first great bank robbery back in the thirties. People were just fascinated by seeing printed word about somebody in their community and about an event that happened up there that was dramatic. They all wanted copies of it, so the kids decided to sell more and more and do more interviews and include more community people in the magazine. The popularity increased dramatically with the introduction of the personal interview and material that was collected. I don’t know how many issues the magazine sold, but it was 1972 when the first book was published, and so all the collected materials, up to what would have been 1971, were organized in the first book.
Most of the people were Betty’s Creek folks because the community kids who went to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School were mostly from Betty’s Creek. The county would pay Rabun Gap–Nacoochee a certain amount to provide teachers to handle that number. It was an unusual combination of private-school kids that boarded there, who had no transportation away from the school, and kids who lived in the community. The combination was pretty cool. The kids who lived in the community knew all the folks up on Betty’s Creek. They were kin to them, as well as friends with them. They could introduce them to the boarding-school kids, and the kids at the boarding school were just dying to get out of there. It was a pretty contrastive atmosphere. They would just jump at the chance to leave campus and do something out in the community.
One interesting thing I learned while we were doing the Foxfire: 25 Years book was that it was sort of a self-study. We interviewed other people who had been in Foxfire. Some students were interviewed and also people who had been Foxfire students. The kids who were A students didn’t want to take Foxfire because they had figured out and insisted that they knew how to get A’s. They knew exactly what was going to be on the test, and they knew how to make the system work. The kids who were not doing really well in school were a perfect match for Foxfire because it gave them opportunities to use their gifts and the things that they knew. They were kids who knew culture. They didn’t like school very much and didn’t care about an English book. They were really good about going and interviewing the locals, and they learned the language skills by organizing the words so th
at they could make the spoken word interesting and easy to read. I think that the whole phenomenon of how Foxfire started was a really fortunate combination of a lot of different factors that nobody might ever even have planned.
Having a connection to the real world out there, doing things hands on, creating things, and working with each other in small groups—all those aspects about Foxfire came from young people telling the teacher what works. Being able to cut it down to something that simple where you just say, “Okay, we’re just gonna ask the kids.” That’s so simple; it’s genius. Nationwide, there was this yearning for something that wasn’t made out of plastic. There was this movement that occurred that was bigger than Foxfire, which they call the back-to-the-land movement, where everybody was kind of struggling to find things that were naturally grounded and simple with healthy and earth-friendly dimensions. When Foxfire came out, people just soaked it up like water to a thirsty person, and it sold all over. It was a best seller for weeks, but they couldn’t print enough copies of it; people just loved it! The royalties generated enough money to hire other folks to work for Foxfire and help meet the needs of other kids. Maybe they didn’t want to do a magazine, but they would rather do a television program or make a record of different types of music. They hired me because I was a musician and a card-carrying hillbilly and folklorist all combined.
Guy Carawan, who was on Foxfire’s National Advisory Board, was a musician for social change who was employed at the Highlander Center. He took me under his wing and took me around to do concerts and stuff with him. He recommended me to Foxfire. He brought me down here for a concert to meet the kids. They all talked first, and then he and the kids said, “Well, we want to sing.” They found out what I was all about, and they were going to talk about hiring me. They brought me down here to do a concert at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School, and resulting from that and other things, they eventually hired me. There happened to be this really famous television documentary producer who is still around, Geraldo Rivera. He was really famous for some documentaries that he did. The kids wanted to see what a real documentary producer looked like, and the benefit was in the information video program, so they invited Geraldo Rivera to come down here and be there for the weekend when Guy and I came to sing. We’re at the concert, and there are all these television cameras and lights and stuff hitting us in the face and this big ole ABC lens right in front of my face while I’m singing my song. Boy, I was really impressed—ABC is here filming me. I’m gonna be on television, yeah! Well, Guy wasn’t impressed, and he realized that these guys were in between him and the kids, and he said, “Turn that camera off and get out of my face! You didn’t ask me if you could do this, and I bet that you didn’t ask these kids if you could do this. You’re messing up this concert, and I want you to just be quiet for a minute because I’ve got a song I want to sing, and I don’t want you bothering us.” The kids gave a standing ovation. They didn’t care if this guy was famous; they didn’t care if this was ABC. They wanted to hear the song. So Geraldo gathered up his film crew, flipped that little scarf around his neck, got into his car, and got back to Atlanta. We never saw anything on ABC. Basically, they ran them off, but the kids didn’t care. I thought, boy, I was so impressed by ABC, but I’m in the presence of people who are not impressed. That, in turn, impressed me.
PLATE 81 “I was a teacher for Foxfire for nineteen years.” George Reynolds recalling his Foxfire experiences
I was a teacher for Foxfire for nineteen years. After one year at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School, Foxfire moved lock, stock, and barrel down here to this high school [Rabun County], which was a brand-new building. Everything was exciting.
I [didn’t work on] the magazine at first; it wasn’t in my job description. I’ll never forget this: [the Foxfire teacher] and I were sitting up there on the hill, up there on the mountain [The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center], looking at this house that was partially completed, and we were talking about how it would be the house where I would live. We were talking about my salary at the time, which was twelve thousand dollars. He said, “Now, I want you to start a music program.” Four words [“start a music program”]—that was my job description; there was an underlying idea that I would do that when I first came here in 1976. I was asked to start a music program, and it was just that simple. That simple idea came from the fact that the publications supported the magazine program. If we documented musical traditions and sold records, we could support a music program. There were already the beginnings of a video productions program, and the idea behind it was that we would produce videos. It would be self-supporting, too. Foxfire Records was immediately part of the idea, and I was asked if I wanted to teach some courses, and I said, “Well, I will teach the folklore course, and I’ll teach the folk music course, so I will do a record production course, too.” When I first started teaching folklore and folk music, I was sort of teaching about music. The kids would go out and study other people playing music, but they didn’t play music at that time. In the conversations that the staff had with each other, we were constantly thinking about how we could do our job better by including the kids in the way it was designed. Everything we did has evolved; it evolved pretty much from scratch because we decided we weren’t going to teach like teachers but more like advisers, counselors, or coaches. Instead of deciding what to do, we were gonna work with the kids to figure out what the next step would be. When I got here, I was teaching about folk music, and Filmer Kilby had been in my class at Rabun Gap, and Filmer said, “You know, George, when we get all our work done, can we bring our guitars in and play a little bit?”
I said, “Once we get all our work done,” so he brought his guitar, and it was great. We had a great time, and that became a regular thing. Next thing you know, it was the next semester and the next school year, and I’m saying, “Well, I’m just going to offer a course in music to teach students how to play.” We could teach anything we wanted to teach at school at that time. We let the kids sign up, and we had a terrific amount of kids to create new things from scratch, and it was incredible. We had the money to do something very interesting, very new, and on the cutting edge of education because we had the brains to do it and the schoolrooms to do it and the kids to do it with; it was a very serious responsibility. At the same time, it was just joyous to be able to decide, “Well, I’ll teach a course,” so I taught a musical performance class. I requested that my kids bring their guitars to school. We started a performance class, and I had maybe twelve or fifteen kids, and we had most kids bringing guitars. I brought a bass fiddle in and a banjo, and some wanted to do pop music, I remember. One student was singing Beatles songs, and Steve McCall was doing some Hank Williams songs. We had a couple of people doing some gospel music. They all had different things in mind they wanted to do, and I didn’t decide they were gonna do this kind of music or that kind of music. I just said, “Okay, now you’ve got your instruments here, what do you want to do?” The first year (I think the first semester), they performed for us and for each other. We had a little boy named Dan Barnes who said, “You know, my sister is in the second grade over at Tiger at South Rabun Elementary. Could we take our class over there and do a concert for her second-grade class?” Well, I thought, that’s gonna be a lot of trouble to gather this group up and get a bus or van or something and get them over there. Dan and I thought about it and decided that it was worth giving it a try, so we loaded up and went over to Tiger and performed for the second-grade class. It was a big hit at Tiger, but on our way back home, I realized that it was a big hit with high school kids, too. They thought, “Man, I’m really gonna practice ’cause I want to do this again,” and so when they got back to class, there was absolutely no doubt about it; they were seriously motivated, and they didn’t even have time for any kind of foolishness. Everybody worked really hard, and we went back and did another concert as a result.
Another dimension of the music program came out of that, too. It was expected that when you walked in the class
room, you were gonna be working up something to perform for someone else outside the classroom. It became clear that people were gonna have opportunities to work in small groups. People were gonna have opportunities to choose what they did, and I felt I would be the facilitator person who helped them learn what they wanted to do, but I became the person who decided what to teach when they decided what they wanted to learn. I didn’t make any of that stuff up, not that anyone can make that up. It’s just a combination of all of us putting twenty heads together.
The performance program became a real performance program where there was no question about it: If you walked in that room, you were gonna be expected to do something for somebody else, and it also became clear that as the teacher in the room, I wasn’t gonna be able to work and teach everybody what they wanted to know. The kids had to teach each other, so the rule was as soon as you learn something, your first responsibility is to show someone else how to do it. Teaching is no longer in my corner; it’s everybody’s responsibility for helping each other to get better at what we do.
When I asked George Reynolds what he is doing now, he replied: I do the same thing, except I do it with little-bitty people in the inner city who have never seen a cow. I teach elementary school in Knoxville in an inner-city school next to a seven-hundred-fifty-unit housing project. I tell people I’ve changed planets from here to there. First of all, going from high school to elementary school is a big change, but going from good ol’ Rabun County to good ol’ inner-city Knoxville is more than just going to another place; it’s going to another kind of life. My son goes to that school. He’s a real smart boy. It’s a magnet school, and they draw people in from all over the country to participate in the things that the school offers, but it also shares all those goodies with the community kids who don’t have the same kind of opportunities that kids out in the suburbs might have. It’s good for my boy, too. He’s got buddies that live out in the community, and his best buddies are the community kids. You’ve got these kids that come in and are academically accelerated, and then you’ve got your community children, some of whom the parents don’t read to, or maybe the parents have other problems like not being able to read, being in jail, or being drug addicted. There are a lot of folks that are struggling people who have jobs and are working to get out of the projects. Then there are people who live very modest lives and live around the edges of the projects, but they have real low-income jobs. It is a very interesting community. I left here [Rabun County] because I married a woman who lived in the inner city, and she had her career, and I had this career. One of us had to quit our job and go to the other place. She also had our child on the way, so I decided to go there and be a full-time daddy for a couple of years and see if I could find another career over there. It was kinda like jumping out of a plane, and I didn’t know where I was gonna land. I never imagined that I would find a career that I enjoyed as much as Foxfire, but they gave me the same opportunity that I got here. I was looking at all kinds of different options. I was thinking about maybe applying for a job as a band director or something. The paradigms of what music teachers do out in the world were getting pretty narrow. I knew, or at least I thought, I was never going to find anything as wide open as everything I was allowed to do here at Foxfire, but they hired me through several events that just sort of fell into place. There was a position open at this elementary school, and the people who ran the magnet program decided that this would be a good match for me, and I thought, “Man, I’m a high school teacher; I’m not sure this is exactly what is the best, but I’ll take your word for it.” So they put me in this instrumental music position in a school that already had a regular choral music teacher, but it was specialized to be instrumental music on the school level from kindergarten up, which was the only position like that in the whole system and maybe in the whole state.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 33