by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
I am embarrassed by how little I knew about mountain music, in general, and my grandfather’s music, specifically, when I was in my early twenties. I knew just enough to prove I was an idiot when I tried to speak intelligently on the topic. I knew that Saford and Clayton had almost made it big with Roy “No Relation” Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers in the ’40s. I knew they loved songs by the Sons of the Pioneers. I knew Bill Monroe was the undisputed “father of bluegrass,” although I couldn’t have sung you a verse of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” So, when I distilled all that information, it came spilling out of my mouth as “In the ’40s when the war hit, the three biggest bluegrass bands were Bill Monroe, the Sons of the Pioneers, and Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers.” I don’t remember who I told that to, but I am pretty sure I bragged about it to multiple people multiple times. I was very proud—of my grandfather, sure, but mostly of myself for knowing so much about my roots.
Without slogging through the nuances of bluegrass and “pre-bluegrass” or pointing out that the Sons of the Pioneers were a Western cowboy band from California, let’s just say that since I now consider myself somewhat of a regional music historian, if I ever heard anybody say anything as foolish as “In the ’40s when the war hit, the three biggest bluegrass bands were Bill Monroe, the Sons of the Pioneers, and Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers,” I would call the police and have that person arrested.
I would have definitely made a citizen’s arrest on myself that June day Ruth gave me the fiddle for my birthday. How little I knew about old-timey music or fiddles. When Saford and Clayton inspected the fiddle and saw a Stradivarius label inside, I thought it was the real thing. “A Stradivarius!” I exclaimed like a goofball, thinking I held one of the five hundred or so violins made by the master instrument maker, Antonio Stradivari. I did not. (It’s all on the videotape.)
• • •
That was the day Saford talked about the war. The next day was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. He knew all about it.
I had heard some of the twins’ war stories before. Papa Clayton and Uncle Saford were never shy about sharing their experiences. That’s what they did, told tales. Neither was the stereotypical Stoic WWII Veteran Who Never Talked About THE WAR. To them, falling into a Jap tank trap or getting shot in the helmet were merely the parts of their lives between the time they recorded with Roy Hall in Atlanta and the night Tommy Magness showed up drunk at the American Theater in Roanoke. It’s part of the story.
Saford’s stories were amazing, even though I didn’t know the difference between a C ration and a Sherman tank. In fact, I couldn’t have told you then whether any of it was true. I’m not even sure I can now.
Papa Clayton didn’t say a word the whole time. He took a backseat to his gregarious, cackling older doppelganger. Clayton was a natural-born comedian, as good a musician and singer as Saford, but he was always the fop, the rhythm player, and the tenor harmonizer. Saford was the master of ceremonies, the lead singer, the star. Most country-music brother duos seem to possess these same characteristics. In the Monroe Brothers, Charlie was the gregarious one, and Bill hardly spoke to anybody, even as an old man. Carter Stanley shot the bull, talked to the crowd, and liked to have a good time, while little brother Ralph shunned the spotlight. But Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley made the more lasting musical contributions long after their brothers had flamed out.
The Hall twins were two halves of the same whole, opposite sides of the same coin. They were small, Saford standing about five-foot-seven, an inch taller than Papa Clayton. The Hall Twins and the Westerners kept them busy in the 1990s. They played for our wedding party in 1992, as they had for Ricky’s the year before. When we married, Ruth thought it incredibly odd that her fella’s grandpa played in a band. Two years later, she bought me a fiddle.
Something about that fiftieth anniversary of D-Day turned the light on for a bunch of us in our twenties. Up until then, World War II veterans were salty old men who marched in their blue blazers and hats every Veterans Day. They were the crusty guys who ran the Boys State program every summer, when young men deemed the best and brightest that the mighty Commonwealth of Virginia had to offer gathered to spend a week learning the minutiae of state government. I attended Boys State in the summer of 1983, and I believe it still ranks among the longest, most boring weeks of my life. We had to wear the Boys State uniform of white T-shirts and white tennis shorts the whole week, and each morning, we were summoned for inspection, lined up in formation, and marched off to breakfast. We were all assigned to “communities” with names like MacArthur and Patton and instructed to vote for delegates and make our own laws and codes.
The communities were chaperoned by men in their fifties and sixties, real American Legion types, who’d holler at us to shut up, get back in line, and march in step. My fellow MacArthurians imitated our white-haired platoon leader’s Olde Virginia accent: “MAC-Ar-thuh! No tawkin’ in thuh RANKS!” We’d start every sentence with “Mac-ar-thuh” this and “Mac-ar-thuh” that. We were cool.
I know now that every damn one of those old guys probably fought in either World War II, Korea, or both. They had sailed on overcrowded troop ships, survived the jungles of the Philippines, fought Nazis in France, killed other men, and nearly been killed themselves, only to live long enough to waste their time babysitting a bunch of thankless brats who made fun of them behind their backs.
When the roll call of fiftieth anniversaries began in the 1990s, starting with Pearl Harbor in ’91, then on through D-Day and Hiroshima, a lot of us Gen X boys quit horsing around and finally started paying attention. Those doddering elderly men at Memorial Day ceremonies and Veterans Day flag raisings were no longer just cute, stooped old guys in blue hats. That guy over there, the short guy with liver spots and Coke-bottle glasses, might’ve slit a German’s throat in Belgium. The dude with the shock of white hair and leathery jowls who trembles a lot might have cut the ears off a dead Jap and now keeps them with his Purple Heart. The mayor, the high school janitor, the bus driver—they all could have committed acts so violent and murderous all those years ago on continents a world away, it’s no wonder they never told you about them. It was none of our damn business what they did.
The day Saford talked about North Africa, Patton, Mount Etna, Normandy, and hedgerows was a day when the boy in the white T-shirt and short-shorts stopped cuttin’ up in the ranks and started to listen.
They lived with their mother, their sisters … their brothers … in a small cabin in The Hollow community of Ararat.
—MOM’S PARTY INVITATION, 1994
The Hollow is the perfect place to grow up a bastard, because Virginia doesn’t claim you and North Carolina doesn’t want you. The Hollow is actually in Virginia, tucked deep into Patrick County’s foothills like a penny in a pocket, but the Blue Ridge Mountains wall it off from the rest of the commonwealth. All the news, TV, and radio come from the flatlands of Piedmont North Carolina, which explains why there are so many Tar Heel basketball fans below the mountain today. That’s what they call it—“below the mountain.” You’re looked down upon both literally and figuratively.
The Hollow was a rough patch of weeds with a reputation so bad that the Moravians sent missionaries from Winston-Salem in the 1850s like it was a subtropical island of godless savages in desperate need of civilizing. The task proved so monumental the Moravians had to build three churches within five miles of one another. To this day, those churches—Mount Bethel, Willow Hill, and Crooked Oak—are still the only three Moravian congregations in the Commonwealth of Virginia. My family has longstanding ties with the Mount Bethel and Crooked Oak churches.
Clayton and Saford were the babies of the family, and they called their mother “Mamo.” I call her that, too, even though she died when I was two and I have no memories of her. She was small and sparrowlike, and was good at making things with her hands. She made a little ball for me out of wadded-up Christmas wrapping paper and string. Mom kept it for years. That ball
and the intricate baskets she weaved from oak splits were the only vestiges of her that I ever knew. I learned a whole lot more about her as I got older. Like, for example, she had ten babies without availing herself of a husband, which apparently was not as scandalous back then as it sounds. Several women in The Hollow became mothers before wives, including a couple of Mamo’s sisters.
Back when the twins were little in the 1920s, the government either couldn’t or wouldn’t help poor families, unless they wanted to pack up and move to the county farm. Unmarried women like Mamo were on their own to feed, clothe, and house their growing broods. The poverty and illegitimacy that wracked the Hall household in the early twentieth century sounds a lot like the problems we associate with urban areas in the early twenty-first century, which is why I have always believed that poor whites and poor blacks have much more in common with one another than they do with higher economic classes of their own shades. We have been divided and conquered.
Things were so tough for the Hall family that Saford and Clayton never wore a pair of britches until they were six years old, and only then because the teacher sent them home from school when they showed up in dresses. But, like unmarried mothers, boys in hand-sewn gowns were not an uncommon sight in The Hollow. Gowns were cheaper to make and patch than britches; they lasted longer and they provided easy access for little fellers to do their business without fumbling over buttons, zippers, and buckles and soiling themselves. For poor folks, gowns were a cheap, functional clothing alternative.
Even in The Hollow, however, most boys graduated to britches by the time they went to school. Saford and Clayton, though, marched bowlegged straight up the hill to Chestnut Grove School still draped in the little gowns a preacher’s wife had made for them, all flimsy and practically see-through from years of wear. The hemlines that had hung to the boys’ ankles when first made had risen about knee-high as the twins inched ever so slowly taller. When their teacher saw them, she scolded them for dressing like wild savages and told them they could not come to school without britches.
“But we ain’t got no britches,” Clayton shot back, defiant, proud, and, above all, honest.
Well then, the teacher said, you just go right back to Granny Hall’s and you tell her and your mama to make you some britches.
• • •
Expelled on their first day of school, the twins whined to Granny Hall about their problem. That night, she and Mamo made britches from the worn-out denims of older boys who had moved on to overalls. The next day, all trousered up, the twins began their public education in Patrick County, Virginia.
Papa Clayton loved telling that story. Times were hard in The Hollow in those years just before the Depression hit (and a few more before anybody in The Hollow knew it had). But it does make you wonder: What kind of a mother sends her sons to school without any pants? The same kind of woman who has ten children but no husband, I reckon. These questions were never asked when I was growing up, possibly because we didn’t want to know the answers, possibly because we didn’t think fatherless sons and pantsless boys were all that odd. You just accepted the situation for what it was. The sky is blue, country ham is salty and delicious, and your Papa Clayton grew up without a daddy and without pants.
Once Clayton and Saford learned to put their britches on like everybody else, they did very well at Chestnut Grove School. The schoolhouse was cuddled by cornfields and apple orchards on a hill just a few hundred yards above Granny Hall’s cabin, which was shoved down in the draw near a creek-fed pond. The white-frame school building boasted four rooms and seven grades, which meant young children learned alongside older classmates. Most years, the school was open until May or June, except for the year the county ran out of money and closed it in February. The building burned to the ground in the 1930s, set ablaze by a poor country boy who didn’t like school. The county never rebuilt it.
The twins enjoyed their time at Chestnut Grove. They were handsome boys, with high foreheads and dark hair. Even by twins’ minuscule standards, they were little. They were a bit bowlegged, probably from lack of proper nutrition, and their step pigeon-toed. They got by on their natural smarts and wits, especially Saford, who was quick to pick up on new subjects. They learned their ABC’s and many new words, like the one Clayton heard when he and another boy emptied coal ashes from the school’s woodstove.
“You a bastard,” the boy said to Clayton.
“I’ll kill you for saying that,” Clayton snapped, even though he didn’t know a bastard from a barn door. It sounded like a bad word, though, and it fired the hair trigger of Clayton’s temper. He socked the boy in the snoot and knocked him into the ash pile. The boy got up, spitting and literally ashen-faced. Clayton said, “Don’t call me that again,” and clocked the kid a second time.
That boy probably learned his lesson, but it didn’t matter. Plenty of other people knew the word, and there wasn’t an ash pile big enough for Clayton to knock ’em all into.
• • •
The bigger boys posed more of a threat. Saford couldn’t figure out why those beastly older fellows were in the same classroom as him and Clayton, marooned somewhere between third and seventh grades of the county educational system. A couple needed a shave, Clayton thought. They were mean, nasty boys, young men, really, who growled at the underprivileged and formerly dress-wearing twins and wagged their fingers as if to say, “Just you wait. You’re gonna get yours and I’m the man to give it to you.”
So the twins steered clear of the bullies. They aligned themselves with other boys, some of them cousins, some closer kin even than that. They were country boys running wild like Jersey cows that had broken down their fences. During recess, they roughhoused their way through baseball games and tag. They rolled down the hill behind Chestnut Grove School in old rubber tires and skidded down hillsides of dead leaves on tin signs as if sledding on packed snow.
But whenever Clayton and Saford strayed from the safety of the pack, the bullies were ready to pounce.
• • •
“Look, it’s Dan and Fitzhugh,” one of the fuzzy-faced beasts growled at the twins.
“Who you calling Dan and … Fiz-choo?” Saford demanded to know, running up to the hulking beast, his little fists balled up.
“Simmer down there, Dan,” the mean boy said. Two more circled Saford like a pack of orchard mongrels.
“Why you calling us names?” Saford demanded to know.
“Them’s your daddies.”
Now, what the twins knew about having a daddy could have fit into a shot glass. No man ever pitched a ball to them, took them fishing, or brought them pieces of hard candy. Plenty of women were available to whip them for various offenses—which included, but were not limited to, sassing, cussing, spitting, smoking, fighting, and dipping Granny Hall’s snuff—and their older brothers struck the fear of God into their hearts with basic orneriness and meanness, but otherwise the twins never had much to do with grown men. Despite the dearth of proper adult male supervision, Saford and Clayton knew this much: If they had a daddy, surely they had the same daddy. Right? After all, they were twins. So what’s this “Dan and Fitzhugh” business all about?
“We ain’t got no daddy!” Clayton shouted, defiant, proud, and honest as always.
The mean boys laughed. Well, somebody’s bound to be your daddy.
The twins’ brother Asey, two years older and a scrapper himself, ran up to the crowd and asked what the trouble was. Just then, the teacher rang the bell at the top of the hill and ordered the boys back inside. Confrontation avoided for now.
“See ya ’round, Dan,” one of the mean boys said. “See ya ’round Fitzhugh.”
The encounter so unnerved little Clayton that he told Granny Hall about it. The boys at school call us Dan and Fitzhugh, he told her. They call us bastards. Clayton asked if that was a name they called a boy who didn’t have a daddy.
“Some of them other boys would be better off if they never had no daddies neither,” Granny Hall said.
• • •
When I was a kid, maybe five years old, I saw what was left of the log cabin where Clayton and Saford were “partly raised” (as Saford liked to say, which suited him perfectly since he never grew up). I remember being there with my mom and grandma and some other women, tramping around the woods like we had discovered Mayan ruins. All that was left of the cabin was the foundation, maybe some logs and a fallen roof, situated at the bottom of a hill in a copse of scrubby trees. I don’t remember much, except for a child’s leather shoe lying in the rubble, looking as lonely as an orphaned child. I wondered if the shoe had been my Papa’s. He and Saford wore shoes only in the cold of winter, hand-me-downs stuffed with brown paper in the toes so they’d fit. Maybe this had been one of those. Or maybe they had only one shoe and had to share it! No, they would’ve told me that.
I also recall how dark it was at the ruins. Honestly, fallen in like it was and with evening’s light retreating, the old home place was pretty scary to a kid. It looked like it had been haunted, maybe was still haunted.
Turns out that it was! Young’uns thought Granny Hall was a witch. She wore black from bonnet to boots even on the hottest July days, when you could boil a frog in Booger Branch. Her long black dress hid her tiny feet, making it look like she floated as she carried a basket of magic potions on her arm. She was old, her toothless face resembling an apple-head doll left in the sun. Her hair was black and always pulled back into a tight bun, and her eyes and skin were dark. She might have been part Cherokee, a heritage people claimed in order to explain their swarthiness to neighbors who boasted of Scots-Irish ancestry. Her black attire spooked the local kids, but Granny Hall was actually a respected medicine woman and midwife who brought five hundred babies into The Hollow despite her better judgment. When the call came that a woman had gone into labor, Granny Hall mounted the sidesaddle of her old broken-down bay horse with “U.S.” branded on its hindquarters and rode to the expectant mother’s house. If it was a particularly difficult delivery, like a breech baby, she might stay gone two or three days. Sometimes she’d return late at night and fall asleep right in the sidesaddle and trust the old horse to find his way back to the cabin.
