How to Meow in Yiddish: Memories Of The Country Music Highway Part 2

Guest post by Priscilla King

Our tradition did not filter out songs about mourning, or worship, or other things, for that obsessive focus on Teen Romance that commercial advertising brought in.

A.P. Carter, who seldom really sang (he said "I just bass in now and then") but was posed standing behind Sara and Maybelle as if he did, had died before I was born. I heard a few of Sara's and Maybelle's retrospective performances on radio, though. They died a few months apart in the winter of 1979-80. For what seemed like the rest of the Reagan Administration local radio stations played their songs daily; especially "Wildwood Flower." I used to wisecrack about trying to get through a day without hearing either a recording or a rendition of "Wildwood Flower," but of course John McCutcheon called it "Scott County's national anthem" and of course I like it--how not! (See below.)

Jimmie Rodgers

The Carters met "The Singing Brakeman" in Bristol. He already knew he had tuberculosis; he exposed them, their recording crew, and their agents to the disease. Rodgers was born in Mississippi, but had been performing with a band in Virginia when he and the Carters recorded the historic "Bristol Sessions." He didn't stay in Virginia long...but it was where he became famous.

Notice: Traditional songs did not shy away from either narrating sensational violent crimes, or expressing violent fantasies. I'm not sure that this aspect of traditional songs needs to be emphasized, but I don't think it should be painted over, either. Pete Seeger's astringent remarks on this subject can hardly be improved on here; they can be roundly seconded, and they are.

The Carter Sisters

After Sara and A.P. Carter divorced and Sara was living with her second husband. Maybelle Carter, her three daughters, and sometimes their friends, performed as the Carter Sisters (and their Mother Maybelle). Their version of "Wildwood Flower," as preserved on YouTube, is not the one I grew up singing along with but it does offer a fine illustration of the Carter "lick" or "scratch."

Their 1950s girl-band sound showed more commercial influences. No more gritty prewar reality; they sang about Teen Romance with an occasional, usually single-release, gospel song, like "Lonesome Valley" (here recorded as a retrospective, featuring daughter Carlene Smith Carter).

None of the young men who performed with the band was originally a local fellow, but marriage gave them local connections. June Carter, of course, married Johnny Cash. Helen, sometimes considered the pretty one, and Anita, often said to have the best voice, also recorded on their own after the girl-band sound went out of style.

Carl Smith

By the time I came along, Carl Smith was remembered somewhat scornfully as the man June Carter dumped, but he was still selling records on his own. Here are two songs of his that were still being played on the radio, not always on Jimmy Smith's show, either, during my early life.

Jimmy Smith

"The Old Ridgerunner" wisecracked about being Carl Smith's brother. His official biographies say they were not noticeably related. They were friends; their voices and musical choices were similar, and performing with Carl while he was married to June Carter led Jimmy Smith to settle in Gate City. He hosted the morning radio show on WGAT AM (Radio Gate City) for several years, then moved to WDUF AM (Radio Duffield), fifteen miles up the road, in the 1990s. He recorded some songs, and played some of them on his radio show, but none of them seems to be available as a free video online now. I don't recall ever hearing that he retired. My impression is that he was on WDUF up to his final illness in 2002.

A Ridgerunner is a person from North Carolina and proud of it. Online sources say Smith was born in Tennessee. ???

Johnny Cash

My parents' generation didn't approve of his image, his rockabilly style, or his and June Carter's having divorced other people to marry each other. My generation generally forgave them since they were so obviously Partners For Life. Johnny Cash never lived in Gate City but he had friends and fans here. He had friends and fans everywhere.

Chet Atkins

He came from the other side of Clinch Mountain, in Tennessee. He performed with the Carter Sisters, with Jim Reeves, and with just about everybody who was anybody in all genres of popular music in the mid-twentieth century.

Patsy Cline

She grew up in the Swamp not the Point, but she was a Hensley. A relative. I think my parents would have liked her for that reason even if she hadn't been considered one of the best singers in the pop and country genres.

Many people I've met think there's something disreputable, even immoral, about walking outdoors at night. I suspect they just don't have good night vision. I've always liked walking at night.

Beachard Smith

Toward the end of his life, winter of 1979-80, this strictly local fiddler exchanged some mutual promotional benefit from his friendship with John McCutcheon. He played at local events all his life but was only really featured, or recorded, during the last few years. His "Home Folks" have the authentic traditional sound, not influenced by Nashville. I listened to a fair bit of this on the Old Ridgerunner Show, growing up. I should mention, though, that some of my elders belonged to a church that frowned on this sort of dance tunes.

You can see the road from Hiltons to Gate City at the beginning of this dance video. The dancing is definitely part of a local tradition that flared up into a fad in the 1970s. Clog dancing originated in Ireland and was popular in the Victorian era because it's not sensual. As much as possible the dancers move only their feet, looking at the audience not at each other. It's all about precise, rhythmic footwork. The more feet beat in the same rhythm, the better the dancing is considered to be. In the 1970s the Rye Cove Cloggers were rated very good; they performed on the Grand Ole Opry and elsewhere. Some students at my school were excused from classes to rehearse and perform with the Cloggers. The group later broke up. Anyway, you see would-be Cloggers, and their parents and their baby sisters, in the video.

Fair warning: this link replays a whole LP, and McCutcheon's label, June Appal, was known for packing more minutes of music than most labels put on their LPs.

Loretta Lynn

Feelings about her were mixed in my town. To some people "Coal Miner's Daughter" was a term of contempt and was all they ever noticed about this Kentucky singer. Loretta Lynn's well publicized story and stage image, marrying at an age that wouldn't even have been legal anywhere but Kentucky, worse yet claiming not to be able to read (even if she meant "in this light"), seemed trashy and demeaning to all mountain people in the 1960s and 1970s. She was not someone I was encouraged to take as a role model in any way. But her mother was a Ramey, so she had distant relatives in my town. Some people wouldn't listen to her records or watch the movie about her early life. "Coal camp trash" was a phrase I heard. Some people thought she was great. Even when she died, a few years ago, the comments people posted on a social media page about her showed that ambivalence.

Let's just say this. The Carters had the image of ladies and gentlemen, but Loretta Lynn did stay with one husband until death did them part.

She was known for singing about issues of real concern to mountain women, and in her autobiography she mentions this song as one that had special resonance for her. The Rameys are, of course, part Cherokee though questions have been raised whether the name was originally "Rainy" or was imported from France, Scotland, or Ireland. (Answer: nobody knows. They lost the records.) The most common pattern of genetic alcoholism is, of course, estimated to affect about three-quarters of all Irish people and three-quarters of all Cherokee people in the same way, raising some question about how many of these people's ancestors made contact before Columbus's time But the song always made me think of a neighbor family whose name came from the English Border country and who look about as White as White gets, all with ash-fair hair and blue eyes. They had the same type of alcoholic gene and a long history of letting it get the best of them.