by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
For Lucy
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 - THE HOLLOW
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
PART 2 - ROANOKE
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
PART 3 - THE WAR
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
PART 4 - ROANOKE
CHAPTER 16
PART 5 - THE HOLLOW
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Introduction
The old-timers are all gone. This is a little of what I know about them. They were our people, rising as untamed and beautiful as June’s rhododendrons from hard soil. They worked tirelessly, played old-timey music, and told lies. They lived back in the good old days, which you and I will know only through the stories we inherit, like eye color and hairlines.
When they left, the old-timers took with them all the old ways: honor, faith, and work ethic; self-sufficiency and decency. Not to mention drunkenness and fornication; fighting and killing. Folks don’t talk about those latter traits as much. Sentimental stories about the innocent soft-hair days spent swimming in the creek and helping Grandma string beans on summer Sundays are deemed more appropriate by us. Yet the mean old ways were undeniably as much a part of our proud mountain legacy as mules and country doctors. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Those are the good old days I want you to know about. Lord, lord, an old man once told me, the good old days were anything but. The unholy communion of desperation, poverty, hunger, and violence wrought abounding unpleasantness upon the hills of old Virginia, those Blue Ridge hills where I am from. The old-timers were complex, much deeper and harder to peg than the dog-eared picture of the illiterate hillbilly sittin’ on a locust stump, whittlin’.
True, they were from a time as unknowable to us as craters of the moon. In the old days, people drank homemade potions to kill worms and washed newborn babies in dishpans. Old-timers made liquor, shot their own kin in blind-drunk rage, and fathered and mothered generations of children who knew the face of only one parent. That our people could claim any upstanding qualities in such a time is a testament to their true character and perseverance. They were good folks, mostly, trying to survive in a world they didn’t create but wanted desperately to change.
I never knew captains of industry or passed time in the company of political leaders, yet I lived my whole life in the presence of greatness. I knew the last of the old-timers. In their honor, I offer this meager tribute.
Do not expect a tale of sorry old men reminiscing about the good old days. This is the adventure of young men, two brothers born pitiful and raised hard, who made beautiful things out of raw God-given talents. I think of them today not as I knew them: aged, crippled, silly, weak. I think of them as they appeared in their own stories: vibrant, happy, strong. Theirs is a story of brotherly love, war, and country music. What else do you need?
This is how I heard it.
THE
HOLLOW
Clayton and Saford, circa 1922
Saford was born first. That much I know. Clayton followed either ten or fifteen minutes later, depending on who was telling the story and when they told it. The twins fell from Mamo’s loins into the bony, waiting hands of Granny Hall on May 4, 1919, just as the dogwoods bloomed and peaches sprouted fuzz and young men came home from the War to End All Wars. They were the last of Judie Hall’s bastards born in The Hollow, a rough section of red dirt wedged hard between the Virginia mountains and the North Carolina line.
Clayton died last. I saw him the day he died. He had trouble staying awake—because of sickness or maybe the company—but when he was alert he talked about the birthday party Uncle Asey was going to throw in two weeks. He told me to bring my fiddle and we’d play music like we used to. Of course, he wasn’t strong enough to hold a guitar, but I told him I’d bring the fiddle, the one Saford left me, and we’d play all day and night. I’d show him how I’d learned “Florida Blues” and “Natural Bridge Blues” just the way Saford had played them. But it didn’t happen. Instead, Papa Clayton dropped dead in the living room that night after asking my grandmother to make him a tomato sandwich.
I returned to the house after I got the news to find family and neighbors standing glumly around the small, cramped kitchen, telling me how sorry they were about Papa Clayton. He was a good man, can’t believe he’s gone, he’ll be missed. I wasn’t that sad, to be honest. I was certainly going to miss Papa Clayton, but how could I be sad? The man helped MacArthur return to the Philippines and he sang with Roy Rogers, for heaven’s sake. He lived enough adventure to fill two lives, so it’s a good thing he had a twin.
I would have known my great-uncle Saford better had he not run off to North Carolina when I was a kid, but you can’t do much with a rambler except let him go and hope he finds his way back. Clayton figured that out a long time ago.
Just a few hours before Papa Clayton died, he sent Grandma to Tilley’s store to get some tomatoes. He also asked Grandma, since she was going that way anyway, if she would stop by the Mount Bethel Moravian Church cemetery to see who was being buried there. He’d heard it was a Smith. Clayton had a keen interest in Smiths, especially the ones he was related to. Grandma reported back that, yes, a Smith had been buried and, yes, she got the tomatoes.
Papa Clayton died of some kind of pulmonary fibrosis, scar tissue in the lungs, just like Saford and Mamo. The twins had smoked and worked in the bad air of furniture factories most of their lives, but the fibrosis was probably genetic. The twins died the same way, but they didn’t always live the same way. Clayton was more laid-back and dependable than the wandering Saford, although he, too, had a short fuse. I saw his temper in action only one time, when I was seven, and it was a doozy. My younger brother Ricky and I were staying at Papa and Grandma’s house one afternoon while my mom was working at the beauty shop. I was in the living room when Ricky, about four, charged like a loose beagle from the kitchen and fell smack-dab in front of the fireplace hearth. Papa Clayton raced in right on his tail and grabbed Ricky by the arm and commenced whipping him with a rolled-up magazine. Papa had told Ricky not to run so close to the hearth, because he could fall and hit his head. Ricky sassed Papa, which was not the thing to do to a former army sergeant who had fought the Japanese; then came the whipping. The story lived forever after Ricky cried to our mother later, “Papa whipped me with a paper switch!”
We laughed and told stories about Clayton the night he died. After everybody left, I helped Grandma stack up the plastic plates and cups. That’s when I saw it on the table: the tomato-sandwich-in-progress, open-faced with a smear of mayonnaise. It looked lonely. Papa Clayton never got to eat it. He really liked those tomatoes from Tilley’s store. Or maybe this time they were just an excuse to get Grandma to run by Mount Bethel and see if it was a Smith who was being buried. I picked up the bread and threw it away.
• • •
A year earlier, I had pushed Papa Clayton around the VA in a wheelchair, which hardly seemed fair. He had won the war just so he could live long enough to require the likes of me to push him past the carcasses of old soldiers? Other old guys at the VA glanced his wa
y as I wheeled him down the hall, looking for some insignia on a cap or jacket that identified his military outfit. But Papa Clayton never wore anything like that. He wore a Braves cap.
I knew many of his war stories, like the one about how he got busted for eating the navy’s apples on a troop ship after a crate busted on the deck and the one about getting shot in the head, and, of course, the one about falling into the tank trap. They were great tales, but they weren’t everything. When his health failed him for the last time, I knew I didn’t have much time to ask for more information.
I decided to interview him, really interview him, about the war. I went to Papa and Grandma’s house and set up a tape recorder in the cozy living room decorated with photo albums and National Enquirers. Grandma brought us instant coffee and sandwiches. Papa Clayton sat in the recliner and repeated the same well-rehearsed anecdotes I’d heard since I was a boy. But I had the goods on him. I had discovered a brief history of his army outfit that one of his buddies, long since dead, had written, so I read him some of the accounts to see if they sparked a memory.
“And on October 26, it says you were at Tay-bon-tay-bon,” I said, attempting to pronounce the name of the village where Company F of the 382nd Regiment of the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division, the fearless Deadeyes, had been baptized in combat.
Clayton’s eyes widened and he grinned, like he had been waiting years for somebody to mention that place.
“Tah-bon-tah-bon,” he corrected.
We had a couple of good interviews. He told me about Tabontabon and Mecham Ridge, about the escarpments of Okinawa and the final battle at Aragachi. The old guy from the hollows of the Blue Ridge couldn’t pronounce “Michigan” correctly but sixty years later he could still say “Aragachi.” I have the tapes. You can hear his oxygen machine in the background. A month after our last interview, he got up from the recliner, walked toward the bedroom, and died, just a few feet from where we had sipped instant coffee and talked about the war, where we had played music all those afternoons and where he had whipped Ricky with a paper switch.
Saford and Clayton were born May 4, 1919, in Patrick County, Virginia, to Judie Elizabeth Hall.
—INTRO TO A BIOGRAPHY WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER
FOR A BIRTHDAY PARTY INVITATION, 1994
In 1994, the Hall twins, Saford and Clayton, celebrated their “150th birthday”—their way of describing turning seventy-five. They liked to tell other jokes about birthdays and ages. When they turned seventy, they were playing lots of show dates with their band, the impeccably named Hall Twins and the Westerners, and Saford would take the mike and announce to the crowd, “I turned seventy years old this year.” Right on cue, his twin brother would reply, “And I’m seventy, too!” This gag surely dated back to 1939, the year the twins turned twenty (except for Clayton, who was “twenty, too!”) and probably resurfaced every ten years from then on. Seventy was the last birthday they got to use it. Their big brother Asey—who actually was seventy-two at the time—never got the joke. He heard them do it on radio station WPAQ out of Mount Airy, North Carolina, when the band played the Autumn Leaves Festival in ’89 and he cried for days, “Oh, poor little Clayton! He doesn’t know his own age anymore!”
Mom made a big deal of that seventy-fifth birthday. She rented out the Cana Rescue Squad building for a huge bash and printed tri-folded invitations on beige paper with pictures and a mini-biography that she wrote herself. The old photographs showed the twins as young musicians (there’s Clayton with Roy Rogers!) and as old men in their satin shirts and cowboy hats. She included a family photo of Clayton’s descendents (there’s Clayton with me!) but nothing from Saford’s family. Saford had strained most of his family relations beyond all recognition, so there was no family to have a picture of. Mom even found sheet music from a song the twins wrote when they played with Roy Hall (“no relation,” Mom noted in the bio). The song was called “Little Sweetheart, Come and Kiss Me” and was included in one of Roy Hall’s songbooks from the 1940s.
The rescue squad building was packed. Family was there, grandsons, great-granddaughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws, neighbors, friends, and Asey, the last of their older brothers. The twins and the rest of the Westerners performed their trademark Western songs, such as “Cool Water” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” Saford fiddled “Orange Blossom Special” at a hundred miles an hour. The boys told stories, laughed, drank coffee by the potful, and ate sugary stuff that wasn’t good for them. Everybody had a great time. Everybody except me. I wasn’t there.
That very week, I had started a new job as a sports copy editor at the venerable Roanoke Times & World-News. I was scheduled to work the night of the party and was too timid to ask off, so I missed the fun. Ruth, my wife, went without me and shot dozens of photographs.
I saw them all a month later at a cookout, June 5, 1994, two days before my twenty-eighth birthday. Ruth and I went to my parents’ house for a late-afternoon cookout. The first apples in the family orchard—the “June apples,” sour Lodis and Yellow Transparents—would be ready for picking in a week, so this was one of the last lazy weekends my dad would know until winter. It wasn’t as big a bash as the twins’ sesquicentennial, but it was a day I’ll never forget. That’s the day we videotaped Saford talking about the war, and I got a fiddle.
Ruth bought the fiddle for $150, case and all, from our friend Karen Ziegler, who showed Ruth how to play a simple version of “Happy Birthday.” Ruth practiced for several weeks unbeknownst to me, since I worked five nights a week on the sports desk, and on the day of the cookout, she stood on the front porch of my parents’ log home in her long hippie-chick dress and sleeveless top and scratched her way through “Happy Birthday” on my present. We still have the videotape.
“Now play ‘Orange Blossom Special’!” Ricky requested.
When they passed the fiddle to me, I held it in both hands as awkwardly as a new father cradling his baby the first time. What do I do with this thing? How do I hold it? Will it break if I drop it? Does it need changing? I set the fiddle under my jaw and dragged the bow across the strings, extracting a scratchy, shrill noise that sounded like a family of sick cats trapped inside a wall. “I sound like Jack Benny,” I said. No, not that good.
I handed off the fiddle to Uncle Saford for testing. He pulled the bow across the G string and remarked what a terrific bass tone it had. He could be enthusiastic over the littlest things, sometimes sincerely. He fiddled a simple version of “Happy Birthday,” complete with a bluegrassy sounding slide or two, and just as he played the last note Ruth chirped in his ear, “Show off!”
Saford, wearing a blue cap and short-sleeved checked shirt, held the instrument in front of me and plucked the strings with his fingers. That’s your G string … D, A, E, he said, plucking each one for effect. He bowed two strings at once and told me it was a G chord. That was my first fiddle lesson. Like I said, we still have the videotape.
I like to believe that I inherited a love of music, if not necessarily the talent for it. We hillbillies do love that mountain music. You can’t swing a banjo in Carroll County without hitting someone my family has played music with—and you can’t swing a ukulele without hitting someone I’m related to. The phrase “tight as kin” takes on a whole new meaning where I’m from. That’s why I married a Maryland girl. Clean up the gene pool a little bit.
Carroll and Patrick counties lie side by side like sleeping babies, with the Berriers from Carroll and the Halls from just across the line in Patrick. Papa Clayton and Uncle Saford—the Hall side, naturally—were raised in The Hollow by two remarkable women, their mama and their grandmother Susan, whom everybody called Granny Hall whether she was their granny or not. The boys grew up in Granny Hall’s cabin, where they knew no father and where they heard their first music.
Mamo taught the boys those old mountain songs, ballads with so many verses you could hoe a row of corn before the song was over. Mamo knew them all—“Barbara Allen,” “Down Among the Budded Roses,” “Poor
Ellen Smith” to name very few—and she sang as she worked in the fields or washed other people’s clothes. Those unaccompanied melodies were the first music the twins heard. In the hills and hollers of Virginia, love of music isn’t taught so much as bequeathed, like a precious brooch. You absorb it like vitamin D from the sun. It gets in your bones and becomes a part of your Blue Ridge DNA.
Just as Mamo passed on her love of music to her children, my own mother inherited her musical talents from her daddy, then passed those musical genes to her own three sons. All three of us—me, the oldest, and Ricky and Billy—can carry a tune for a fur piece. Ricky and I pick a little, but not like Papa Clayton and Saford.
I had wanted to get into traditional music for a couple of years, but then again, in my youth I had wanted to be a baseball player, a rock star, or a movie director. I never lost the dream, I simply never possessed the initiative to go out and become any of those things. I kept waiting for greatness to fall upon me, but, strangely, it never did. I wanted to learn my grandfather’s music, but I was too busy or lazy to buy a fiddle, mandolin, or banjo. I played guitar, poorly. But that fiddle changed everything.
I grew up with my grandfather’s music and even knew the words to “Cool Water” and some of his other favorite cowboy tunes, but I didn’t fully appreciate or even understand his and Saford’s musical legacy until I was older. I made the long, strange trip through the young hipster musical odyssey that every college-radio-loving loser went through: You start with the Top 40 phase in your early teens, writing down every song that Casey Kasem counts down, then discover the Beatles in high school and realize that all contemporary pop music is swill, so you enroll in the Classic Rock Immersion Program for two years, even staying home on Saturday nights to catch an oldies show from Charlotte while cool teenagers are out on dates, then you hear U2 for the first time and you descend into the rabbit hole of the American underground. Paul Westerberg caterwauling “Hold my life until I’m ready to use it” is far more relevant to you than “La la, how the life goes on,” and just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, the ’80s crumble spectacularly like the Berlin Wall, and you’ve used up your college eligibility and you become instantly nostalgic, not only for your own youth, which is ridiculous since you’re only twenty-three, but for your roots, too, probably because you feel guilty about not knowing more about your family than you do, so you tumble back generations way before your own birth and go completely native. That’s what happened to me, anyway.
