by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
Except to Mack. After spending ten hours climbing Henry Woods’s apple trees picking Magnum Bonums, Mack couldn’t stand the sight of a pair of look-alike urchins gallivanting carefree and sucking on sugar tits.
“All y’all babies do is play,” Mack said scornfully, smacking the sugar tit out of Saford’s hand and making him cry. Mack was right. The twins had advantages the older kids never had. They learned to read and write, to make friends and allies, and basically how to fit in socially. They also had ample time to goof off, play, and make music.
Ah, yes. Music.
• • •
The fiddle just showed up in Granny Hall’s cabin like it was a mess of trouble. Of course, Saford found it. They don’t call it “the devil’s box” for nothing. Nobody ever said where it came from. One of Granny Hall’s uncles might have left it. Maybe it was payment for an herbal cure. Fiddles and banjos were common in many cabins in The Hollow, where self-reliance was practiced in all arts, from cooking to liquor making to entertainment. The fiddle was there, and the craziest thing of all was that Mamo could play it a little. She pulled the bow down across the low G and pushed it back up, drawing a mournful tune from the instrument like water from a well.
That sound shook something in Saford’s soul. Saford begged Mamo to show him how to play. She set him on her lap and propped the fiddle beneath his jaw. She clasped her right hand over Saford’s little fist that held the bow. She fingered the notes with her left hand and together they pulled the bow across the low droning G. Mother and son played a sad nameless melody that sounded like the theme song of her life. That was the first fiddle tune Saford Hall ever played, and he never stopped. He played even in those last days when he situated the fiddle around the oxygen tubes that kept him breathing.
“That sound did something for me when I was real young,” Saford told the local newspaper, years after war, marriages, and fame had passed.
Mamo played banjo, too. She could do it all! Except find a suitable husband, perhaps. Banjos were better than husbands. True, both laid around a cabin all day, but a banjo never wore long-legged britches that needed ironing. Plus, if you never liked what you heard from a banjo, a twist of a peg here, a tweak there, and you could make it say whatever you wanted.
Like the fiddle, the banjo just showed up from somewhere—musical instruments materialized in that cabin like babies—and Mamo gave it to Clayton. It was strung with gut strings that got sticky and kind of smelly when you played it a lot. Mamo twisted its wooden pegs until a plinka-plinka-plink resonated from the low strings. Clayton eventually played a banjo so well that he made enough money in one week to afford a brand-new Chevrolet. That was a ways off, though. He’d never even ridden in a car yet.
• • •
Saford got a fiddle to call his own by selling salve. The instrument was smaller than a regular fiddle, the right size for a boy, and was made completely from tin, save for the tuning pegs. A tin fiddle played by a beginner probably sounded worse than a fake Stradivarius played by me, but it didn’t matter. Saford had a fever for the fiddle. Clayton was batty for the banjo. Life was about as good as it could be for two bastard boys from The Hollow.
The front porch of Granny Hall’s cabin was the twins’ first stage. Neighbors and cousins flipped pennies onto the porch in exchange for a verse of “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” or “Sitting on Top of the World” or some other song Mamo had taught them. Sometimes, the penny slipped between the boards and the boys scrambled over each other to retrieve it. Then they’d resume the song or dance a flatfoot until Granny Hall told them to come in and eat their beans and ashcake.
Saford could play any melody he could hear. Clayton beat a plinka-plinka-plink rhythm out of the banjo for accompaniment. The two made music that the Lord must have sent, even if it sounded like the devil brought it. The music grated on Mack’s nerves, he smacked the fiddle out of Saford’s hands like it was a rock-hard sugar tit.
“All y’all babies do is play,” he said.
• • •
The twins lapped up music like it was plates of hog jowl and pintos. They played and sang every day. They worked a little here and there, picking apples for three cents an hour, but work only distracted them from their true calling.
In The Hollow, very few musicians have formal training. A choir leader or organist at a church might know a little music theory, but most folks learned to play by listening to other musicians (or “musicianers,” as they called themselves). One reason why traditional music has remained prevalent in the rural Southeast is because people learn to play from the source—they learn from a daddy or a mama and try to play it just the way they heard it. But the twins had no daddy, and their mama just knew a little bit.
Bessie Boyd knew a lot about music. She was a trained musician who played piano in church and loved all kinds of refined music. Miss Bessie and her husband Dewey lived near Granny Hall, and she heard the twins playing their rough-hewn fiddle and banjo tunes on the cabin’s front porch. The boys had raw talent, she could tell that, but they needed a little fine-tuning—or any kind of tuning. She invited them over to her house for a music lesson and some good grub. She fed them enormous hunks of warm cornbread slathered with melting country butter, which tasted sweeter than chocolate cake to a hungry boy who would still remember it seventy-five years later.
The twins had never seen or heard a piece of furniture like Miss Bessie’s old Victrola. The wooden cabinet was as big as a washstand and had a crank on its side like the kind you saw on Model A’s. Miss Bessie opened the cabinet’s door and pulled out a large black platter the size of a dinner plate from a brown-paper wrapping. The platter had a label fixed to it, and she placed the disc atop the cabinet and turned the crank. The platter spun rapidly and made the boys swimmy-headed when they tried to read the words on the label. Miss Bessie pulled a short wooden arm with a sharp needle over the spinning black disc and dropped it onto the edge.
The cabinet began to sing a mournful song.
Bring back my wandering boy
For there is no other who’s so apt to give me joy
Tell him that his mother with faded cheeks and hair
Is at the old home place awaiting him there
The cabinet sounded like Mamo. It sang with the melancholy voice of a woman who sounded strong and weary in equal parts, as if she bore all of the joys and sorrows the world could summon. Accompanied by an unseen guitar, the singing cabinet continued with a chorus of multiple voices, like a mountain church choir singing untrained and untamed. The twins had never heard any piece of furniture sound so beautiful.
Miss Bessie asked how they liked the new phonograph record by the Carter Family of far southwest Virginia. Just fine, the twins replied. Here is another, she said, by Mr. Grayson and Mr. Whitter. When she played a Charlie Poole record, the cabinet sang like a man who had worn out three lives and was on his last one.
Saford and Clayton listened transfixed. They turned the crank and played records repeatedly. Miss Bessie brought more cornbread and butter. She asked them to play their instruments and try to make the sounds they heard. They listened to the records again and again, Saford finding notes on his tin fiddle and Clayton playing plinka-plinka-plink on the tuneless banjo.
Miss Bessie sat at the piano where she practiced hymns. A bell seemed to chime when she pushed an ivory key. That is E, she said. She pressed another key. This is C. Here is G. She played several keys at once. That is called a C chord, she told them. Those same notes lived in their fiddle and banjo, she said.
Clayton and Saford went to Miss Bessie’s house every afternoon after school, playing and singing with their new friend, the singing cabinet. With Saford on fiddle and Clayton on banjo, the twins accompanied the Carters, Charlie Poole, Jimmie Rodgers, and other disembodied voices as Miss Bessie listened and critiqued their performance.
“Now boys,” she admonished them when they sped ahead of the voices. “You’re getting off the song here. Aren’t you listening to the s
ong?”
No, they weren’t. They played like their britches were on fire. Timing and tone didn’t matter as much as volume and velocity.
Each was immersed in his own instrument, absorbed by his own playing. They had to play together, Miss Bessie told them, at the same speed and in the same tune as the record. “Can’t you hear the music?” she’d ask. They listened. Clayton had natural rhythm. His steady playing provided the foundation that kept Saford’s fiddling in check when he wanted to race ahead on his own. Even as a seven-year-old boy, Clayton had to be the steady one, the dependable one.
Eventually, Clayton picked up a beat-up Montgomery Ward guitar. Miss Bessie loaned him a pamphlet of chords and songs, and Clayton practiced shaping his skinny fingers across the neck, pushing down three strings at once to make a G chord, then a D, then a C. He practiced those patterns until he could switch from one to another without putting the brakes on a song. He figured out which chords sounded better underneath Saford’s fiddling. For his part, Saford tried not to play too fast for Clayton’s rapidly improving skills. He restrained himself and played right along with his twin.
From then on, they played as one. Saford holding himself back, Clayton keeping a steady dependable rhythm. They chugged along with the grace and precision of a grandfather clock. They sang along with the singing cabinet. They learned the words and melodies of new songs and sang with voices as pure as heaven’s own oxygen.
Little Clayton could really sing! Up until now, Saford had been the lead singer, memorizing words and singing loud with his big mouth. But when Clayton heard Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman of Meridian, Mississippi, yodel his way through those bluesy records at Miss Bessie’s, Clayton heard his calling. He yodeled so high he pierced the sky:
T for Texas, T for Tennessee
T for Texas, T for Tennessee
T for Thelma, that woman’s a-killin’ me
O yodel-lay-he-ho, lay-he-ho-a-lay-heeeeeee!
Miss Bessie busted with pride.
• • •
The Halls were an extended musical family. One of the twins’ first cousins claimed years later that he had ninety-one cousins who made music. Clayton and Saford inherited that same banjo-shaped chromosome. Rafe Brady was gifted, too.
Good ol’ Rafe Brady. What a fiddle player. What an entertainer. What a character. Others would say “What a drunk,” but I don’t like to speak of Rafe that way. Sure, he liked his rotgut, sometimes excessively so, and he was known to pull a drunk or three. For this story, it’s a good thing he was a drinking man, because if he hadn’t been, he never would have passed out in the woods and allowed the twins to steal his prized fiddle.
Rafe was the twins’ first cousin. His mama was Mamo’s sister Margaret, whom he called “Babe,” because Rafe called everybody “Babe” or “Baby.” He was a few years older than Clayton and Saford. He had a few older illegitimate brothers, but his mama had married Dowell Brady by the time Rafe came along. He never buddied up with the twins when they were little, but once Saford started learning the fiddle, he’d saw one off with them.
“Now, Baby, you watch me and you’ll learn something,” he’d tell the twins.
Then he’d play the fiddle behind his back or between his legs and dance a jig like a monkey.
Rafe was dark-skinned, too, and told people he was part Cherokee. His thick black hair swept upward like a mountain road climbing a peak. By the time the twins approached puberty, Rafe was in his late teens and had already acquired some bad habits, the worst of them the dual lust for liquor and fiddle music. He carried a fiddle with a rattlesnake rattle stuffed inside, and he wore a baggy coat with a half-drained liquor bottle in one pocket. He told people he had the rest of the rattlesnake in the other pocket so the liquor was snake repellent. He could often be found playing fiddle outside the tobacco warehouses in Mount Airy, where roughneck workmen pitched pennies at him. He played all the old tunes—“Hop Light Ladies,” “Sally Ann,” “Soldier’s Joy,” “Duck’s Eyeball,” and some that didn’t have names. The workers ate their dinner from tin pails and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. When they went back to work, Rafe picked up the pennies and unfinished butts, which he smoked.
One of Rafe’s buddies was Jumpy Shinault, an older dude who may or may not have done prison time for slicing up somebody in a knife fight. Jumpy was a fair guitar picker, which is why Rafe hung around with him (and because Jumpy liked liquor, too). He played a beautiful, big, black Gibson with steel strings that made every flat-picked note stand out like the prettiest girl in school. Rafe and Jumpy would disappear into the woods for days and play music and get drunk. When they got hungry, they’d break into Granny Hall’s smokehouse and cut raw slices off a curing ham and eat them. Clayton and Saford bird-dogged the shabby duo as they staggered into the woods. Clayton had his eye on that black Gibson. Saford wanted to play Rafe’s fiddle.
The twins hid out and waited until Rafe and Jumpy got too drunk to make a tune—which doesn’t give them an excuse for propping their instruments against a tree and throwing rocks at them, but that’s what they did. Fortunately, their aim had been adversely affected by the liquor. When Rafe and Jumpy finally passed out, the twins made their move. They liberated the fiddle and guitar from their rock-throwing owners and beat it back to Granny Hall’s cabin.
In Saford’s little hands, Rafe’s fiddle looked as big as a canoe and sounded like a foghorn when he dragged the bow across the strings. The low G note went hummmmmmmmmmmm and seemed to shake Granny Hall’s cups and saucers like an approaching summer storm. Clayton flicked the steel strings of Jumpy’s black Gibson and they rang like church bells. They sounded like real pros on “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” and “Get Along Home, Cindy.” The twins played those glorious instruments for three days and nights, right until Rafe and Jumpy sobered up enough to go hunting for them.
Rafe came around, crying about his lost fiddle.
“Baby,” Rafe said to Clayton—or Saford, he couldn’t have told them apart—“somebody done stole my fiddle.”
Clayton said they had taken the instruments while Rafe slept because a couple of drunks were throwing rocks at them. Rafe thanked them both profusely for saving his fiddle from people like that. Then it was back to the tin fiddle and the Montgomery Ward guitar for the twins.
Time to come clean. I left something out a while back when I quoted from Mom’s cute little bio for the twins’ “150th birthday” invitation. Here’s the bio again, restored to its original state:
Saford and Clayton were born May 4, 1919, in Patrick County, Virginia, to Judie Elizabeth Hall. They lived with their mother, their sisters Lee and Roxie, their brothers, Thamon, Mack, Romie, Samson, Simon and Asa, and their grandparents, Henry and Susan Hall, in a small cabin in the The Hollow community of Ararat.
I omitted the part about the grandparents. Granny Hall you knew about. Pappy Hall, you didn’t. So there was a man in the house, but only briefly. I am sorry to have misled. I wanted to wait until the time was right before telling you about Pappy Hall. Don’t feel deprived—Clayton and Saford didn’t know about him at first, either.
By the time the twins met him, Pappy Hall was half-dead and blind, which was the only way Granny Hall would take him back. They were separated, never divorced. Granny Hall had tired of his drunken, sorry ways and tossed him out. Pappy Hall had built himself a cabin. “Heh-heh! Ol’ Susanny’ll never darken that door,” he said when he finished his little shack, as if Granny Hall ever in a million years considered setting foot inside.
• • •
Mamo and her sisters took care of their daddy. They took him food and doctored him when he was sick. The twins knew none of this. Then, one day, Mamo showed up at the cabin with this half-crazy old buzzard with cottony eyes, jug-handle ears, and a bushy mustache that resembled a dead rat.
“What’s he doing here?” Saford demanded to know.
“He’s your Pappy,” Mamo replied, which confounded poor little Clayton. This daddy business was ridiculo
usly confusing. First, they had to contend with boys taunting them with claims that some dudes named Dan and Fitzhugh were their daddies … or daddy … whatever. Now, here comes Mamo with some drawed-up bag of bones, blind as a possum and drunk as a month of Saturday nights, and we’re supposed to believe he’s our daddy?
“Not your daddy,” Mamo explained. “Your grandpappy. He’s my daddy.”
Turned out Granny Hall was the one who had sent Mamo to fetch Pappy Hall. She was going to look after him until he died, which didn’t appear too far off. Henry Clay Hall was nigh on eighty years old and fairly feeble when Granny Hall took him in. He still drank, although he could hardly see a liquor bottle in front of his face. He was originally from Yanceyville, North Carolina, and would have been the right age to have fought with a local regiment in the Civil War, but if he ever served a day, no one ever heard tell of it. That’s shocking, because in Virginia, we build statues for any long-dead Confederate relative who so much as shoveled horse manure for J. E. B. Stuart (even if we can’t tell you what our own dads and granddads did in World War II or Korea). The fact that nobody knows beans about Pappy Hall’s service record is pretty conclusive evidence that he lacked enthusiasm for the Southern war effort. His youth would forever be a dark hole in the Hall family mythology, as if the line began only after he found his way to the foothills of Virginia, The Hollow being the perfect hiding place not only from a rich man’s war but from most of life’s trials and responsibilities.
He had been a carpenter at some point. Even as an old man, Henry Hall possessed estimable woodworking skills that he plied by building cabins and carving wooden dough boards he called bread trays. He built coffins, too, for which there was a high demand during the 1918 influenza epidemic. He probably built a coffin for little Simon, the twins’ brother killed by an accidental bullet.
