How to Meow in Yiddish: Memories From The Country Music Highway

Guest post by reader Priscilla King*

This is the main street in my home town, Gate City, Virginia. This is all of it--or all of what's considered the "downtown" part of it, anyway. Both east and west of the section shown here, Jackson Street continues on as Route 58, lined with houses and a few businesses.

Photo from Wikipedia.

This is the other street, Kane Street.

Photo from a tourist's video that is not especially well informed, but does show most of the old buildings and present-time shops downtown:

Kane and Jackson Streets intersect at an oblique angle; the narrow side of the angle includes a few side streets on which the schools are situated. The wide side includes one back street that in 1983 was deemed neglected enough that, with a little effort to make it look more dilapidated, could be used for the bank scene--"Downtown Mill Rock"--in the movie The River; it runs as far as the old railroad depot, now the headquarters of the Life Saving Crew. The main streets follow Daniel Boone's Trail to the Moccasin Gap.

The war on indigenous Americans, the Civil War, and labor unions' "wars" with employers most definitely reached Gate City but they're not the parts of our history people enjoy reenacting. Our favorite parts of our history skip from the "pioneers" who came after Daniel Boone and stayed long enough to contribute something to the building of a town, straight into the twentieth century when the Original Carter Family basically created the genre of "country" music.

A section of Route 23 near my home was officially identified as the Country Music Highway around the turn of the century. Gate City, Virginia, does not actually have a strong claim to be called the home or birthplace of country music, being about ten miles away from the settlement the Carters called home, but in the late twentieth century it certainly had a rich and vibrant tradition of folk/country music. It would be a shame if the tradition lasted through only two generations' lifetimes.

The Roberts family who ran the Family Bakery Cafe where I used to maintain this web site, pre-COVID, worked very hard to encourage present-time musicians...

Photo from Virginia.org, showing one of the Friday and Saturday evening street concerts during which the whole of downtown Jackson Street was used for open-air concerts. I suppose the contemporary bands who performed there--all local--thought the bands whose names I remember sounded "oldfashioned." To me they sounded "all alike, the sort of generic rockabilly sound of which Nashville is already full." Local youth still sing but I've heard very little of our sound...but maybe I just didn't go into town to hear enough, I don't know. The Appalachian Dream Spinners did seem to be preserving our sound, on their three albums, but then I've not heard anything about them since about 2010.

Unfortunately only some of our memorable musicians have posted any digital recordings online, and the one who currently owns the domain of FolkMusic.com is willing to share only an old, bad digital recording free of charge. Nevertheless. Musicians with some claim to be "local" do include some of the best known names in the "country" and "Southern Gospel" music genres.

Of the thirty names that leaped to mind, not all were ever actually based in Gate City. Most, in fact, were based in nearby towns. The Original Carter Family thought of themselves as residents of a settlement called Maces Springs. If people feel that Maces Springs was too small to count as a town, they might have called it a suburb of Hiltons, which had its own post office and was legally counted as a town. The Carter Fold is in what might be called downtown Hiltons, but it was where the Family worked, not their original home. Gate City was the county seat where they transacted official business, and one of the neighboring towns where A.P. Carter collected songs before his wife and sister-in-law started singing them. Bristol was where they recorded their first few songs. Later they moved west; in her memoir June Carter Cash said they moved to get away from the plague of tuberculosis, a later biographer thought the "real" motive may have been to distract attention from Sara Carter's divorce, both reasons would have been strong motivating factors. But Gate City loved them. (Gate City may, in fact, have been the source of some of A.P. Carter's songs.)

I'm probably leaving out some people who deserve to be listed. "Everybody's made a tape these days," lamented the same person who commissioned and marketed my retrospective album, "Fun to Play the Old Time Songs." Just about everybody had, too. Some of those homemade cassette albums were, like mine, souvenirs for people's friends and family, and some were actually played on the radio and recognized by people who didn't know the musicians personally. The thirty band names listed here all sold albums to people who did not know the musicians personally.

The Original Carter Family

They really were the First Family of Country Music. There's a channel dedicated to their music on Youtube and an article about their history on Wikipedia. Although their home base was about ten miles away from Gate City, the high school was consolidated in 1956, so I went to school with Carter, Dougherty, and Bays cousins.

Among Maybelle Carter's contributions to musical history was enshrining the autoharp, a fad instrument of her day, as a traditional part of our "country" music--as distinct from Nashville's. "The Nashville Sound," as played 24/7 on some radio station somewhere on every part of the continent, is a product of unionized musicians who were more interested in secure jobs than in exploring or perfecting the art of music. It sticks to three or at most four chords, a steady duple rhythm, with an emphasis on lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass guitar. The Carters themselves were not bound by those limitations. Their sound did reflect the fact that they were young, not rich, and pretty much self-taught musicians, but they were also creative and apt to experiment. So: autoharp. So: sometimes a 3/4 rhythm, sometimes even a "diverse" musical influence--everyone recognizes the Mexican sound in "You Are My Flower."

I was not a particularly talented child. Special talent was not considered necessary by music teachers, or art teachers either, in elementary schools up to about 1970, or older ones after that time. Most children aren't born singing on key or drawing recognizable images. So, teachers have to teach them. Apparently I sang some songs, even as a toddler, recognizably enough that my parents were delighted and started recording and coaching me; I remember that the whole idea of singing on key started to make sense to me in grade four, but I'd been taped (mercifully the tapes don't seem to have survived) before starting school. In grade four I was able to bang out tunes on a keyboard. Also in that year Prevention magazine mentioned that playing a wind instrument could help straighten kids' teeth and improve their lung capacity. My teeth, which had been pronounced hopeless by orthodontists, certainly needed all the help they could get and my lung capacity could use some help too, so my parents gritted their teeth and signed me up for the middle school band, in which I was issued a French horn. Neither of them liked the brass band sound, which was going out of fashion, so after three years of that they returned the horn to the school, took me into Kingsport, and bought me an autoharp, and said "Now you can learn to play something that sounds like music. Like Maybelle Carter."

By that time, what had once been "the Carter lick that nobody else can do" was the "lick" or "scratch" every player of a stringed instrument wanted to do; I was doing it within the year. Your thumb hits the "oom" notes on the bass side, and your fingers pick out the "pah" and melody notes on the treble side. Easy peasy. But when Maybelle Carter first recorded, nobody else was playing rhythm and melody with the same hand. It seemed difficult to those who had grown up not doing it. It was the sort of thing people learn when they try to do by themselves what they've heard or seen done by a group.

I appreciate the visuals, but that's not the version of "Little Moses" I learned. The original recorded version has a soprano lead on the chorus, which is barely discernible on the video. What I sing is the soprano melody part.

Two more things to note about the video: (1) Older Americans didn't grin as much as Americans born after 1950 did. The natural facial expressions on that video, and the other extant video of Sara and Maybelle Carter as mostly "retired" widows singing the songs they made famous in the 1930s, have impressed some young viewers as looking "sad" or "tortured." Actually their generation was influenced by Victorian tastes, which admired "grave" expressions and manners. They are old women singing songs that must have reminded them of bygone times and losses, so feelings of pain or grief might have been present, but their brisk, rhythmic, and "grave"-faced performance showed nothing. A natural, unaffected, non-grinny attitude appeals to some people. I am one.

(2) Many of the Original Carter Family's songs didn't fit into the 1950s broadcast music culture at all. For one thing no line was drawn between religious and secular songs; traditional singers, like my family, would sing gospel songs and even High Church hymns for after-dinner home entertainment, along with popular songs and nursery songs. Also, "love" was recognized as something about as likely to be tragic as to be happy, and romantic "love" was not confused with spiritual love or elevated to the position of a supreme value or virtue. Also, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, death was part of life; major wars and plagues were going on, people were likely to attend more funerals than weddings in any given year, even "upbeat"-sounding songs might be about someone's untimely death...