by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
Dr. Gates might’ve come home as the cocky, college-trained doctor with the pretty, elegant wife from Richmond, but he quickly came to appreciate Granny Hall’s country expertise. Susan had delivered five hundred babies in Patrick County and had treated at least that many sick and suffering adults. Not even Dr. Gates could say that, yet. Her bedside manner was impeccable. One time she helped a mother deliver a breech baby after twenty-four hours of labor. Mother and child could have died—probably would have died—had it not been for Granny Hall.
Dr. Gates admired Granny Hall immensely and once told a friend, “She can do anything I can do.”
He also respected the fact that the Hall women had raised a family without a whiff of help from a man. Yes, the older boys were a little hot-tempered and uneducated, but they were no worse than any boys in The Hollow who’d grown up with daddies. The twins, though, were his favorites. They were personable and respectful, bright and outgoing. They were also gifted musicians, which is why Dr. Gates regularly invited them to join his family for supper and stay over at his house. He lived close to Blue Ridge School, so the twins wouldn’t have to ride the bus to and from home each day. Mamo agreed to let her sons stay with Dr. Gates, since it ensured they would stay in school.
The only payment Dr. Gates required was music. He wanted his own sons to be pickers. Dr. Gates invited other bright boys over, including the twins’ younger schoolmate Ralph Epperson. Ralph was one of those techno-geeks, consumed with radio. He didn’t just like listening to the radio, he wanted to know how the blasted thing worked. He caught the radio bug in a most unconventional way, which, this being Patrick County, naturally involved a mule. Ralph borrowed a pair of headphones with two wires attached, climbed atop a bareback mule, and rode it beneath a low-hanging telephone line. He clipped one of the headphone wires to the line and touched the other wire to the back of the mule, completing an electrical circuit that allowed him to hear a conversation through the headphones. Newton had his apple, Ben Franklin his kite, Ralph Epperson his mule.
The twins always obliged the Gates family and their guests with a slew of tunes. Dr. Gates chomped his cigar and bellowed, “Boys, that’s wonderful! You keep practicing, stick to your studies, and you’ll make something of yourselves. You might even make it on WSM!”
For now, they’d settle for WSJS.
• • •
Trouble always followed Saford around. About the time the twins were high school juniors, Saford started running around with some boys who were mostly interested in chasing girls and drinking illegal liquor. Clayton wasn’t averse to taking a sip or two, but having learned how to hold his Coca-Cola, he mostly stuck with that. He pestered Saford about the rough crowd he was hanging with. He didn’t care for them, and he told Saford they’d bring him nothing but misery.
“Why are you following them boys?” Clayton would ask. “You know ain’t nary a one of ’em no good.”
“They’re fun to hang around,” Saford would say, perturbed. They were more fun than the company he was used to. That hurt Clayton.
For the first time, Clayton could feel his twin brother drifting away from him. Saford flew off the handle at the slightest provocation and fought other boys at the drop of a hat. If Mamo asked him where he’d been all night, Saford figured Clayton had tattled on him.
“Why don’t you just let me live my own life?” he snarled.
One night, a fellow came looking for Clayton to tell him Saford was stirring up trouble down in Mount Airy. Saford hit all the beer joints on Main Street that filled up on Saturday night with factory workers looking to let off a little steam. This particular night, Saford had started early, flipping tables and grabbing waitresses at the Bluebird Café. The management had tossed him onto the sidewalk, but the night was still young.
Clayton raced to Mount Airy in a borrowed Chevrolet, and when he got there he heard that Saford was last seen on the verge of starting a brawl at Doc’s Drive-In on Lebanon Street.
Doc’s was a notoriously rough place, especially on Saturday nights when it always closed with police showing up. They didn’t call it “Doc’s Drag-Out” for nothing. The squatty cinder-block building looked like a jail-house, only less hospitable. Inside, a permanent smoke cloud blinded visitors. Conversations were loud and grew louder by the hour and by the glass. Saford could get in real trouble in a place like that.
Clayton entered Doc’s and slid silently between chairs and tables, hunting for his twin. He didn’t dare say a word to anybody. He noticed some rough-looking dudes eyeballing him as he made his way to the bar. The conversations seemed to die table by table as he moved past. As he approached the bar, he walked right into a .44 pointed directly at his head.
“I told you if you ever came in here again, I’d blow your goddamned head off,” the bartender drawled.
Clayton stopped and threw up both hands.
“Whoa, now,” he said. “You got the wrong man.”
“Like hell I do,” the bartender said.
Clayton kept his hands up. He kept his wits, too.
“Now, look, I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You think I’m a troublemaker. But the guy who was in here before, he was drunk, right? Well, I ain’t. And I didn’t come in here looking for a fight or to cause nobody any trouble. I’m just looking for my brother, and I want to take him home before he gets hurt.”
He turned his head slightly toward the rest of the room.
“Does anybody know who I’m talking about? Kindly a short feller. Looks a lot like me but more ornery.”
“I think I seed him passed out outside,” somebody said.
The bartender lowered the .44 just a little. Clayton dropped his hands slowly and kept them right in front of his chest as he backed his way out of Doc’s. He found Saford around back, passed out across the backseat of some dude’s car. The dude stood by the driver’s side door, a shit-eating, rotten-toothed grin cracking his face.
“I believe he’s had too much beer,” the dude said.
Clayton carried Saford to the borrowed Chevrolet and headed back up Wards Gap Road. Saford, the old instigator, had done it again. What to do with him?
• • •
Clayton and Saford had accepted that they didn’t know their daddy and probably never would. Questions about their old man still came up on occasion, especially from the new friends they made at Blue Ridge School who didn’t know the twins’ family history. Clayton simply replied, “I never knew my daddy.” Saford told people it wasn’t any of their damn business who his daddy was.
That anger is probably why Saford had the hardest time when the Smith kids arrived in Patrick County. The Smiths were good people, fine, mountain middle-class folk, which meant they weren’t rich but they weren’t poverty-stricken. The Smiths had lived in North Carolina for several years, but returned home to Patrick County when a couple of the children were teenagers. Two girls and a boy attended Blue Ridge the same time Clayton and Saford were there. Soon, people started asking questions.
Principal Charles Fultz was one of the first to notice the new kids. Their long faces, prominent noses, and black hair reminded him of another family. He asked Saford for confirmation.
“I don’t mean nothing by this,” Principal Fultz said, “but are y’all related?”
Saford had never seen the Smith kids before this, but he figured that if he admitted as much, then Principal Fultz and everybody else at Blue Ridge would start wondering why the Smiths and the twins looked so much alike. Saford wanted to stop the tongue-wagging before it started.
“Yeah, I believe so,” he answered Principal Fultz. “I believe we’re cousins.”
“Well, I thought so,” Principal Fultz replied.
Saford’s ruse didn’t work for long. Every day after that, he looked the Smith kids over closely, searching for a resemblance. For his part, Clayton didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Everybody in Patrick County’s related some way, ain’t they? So what if the Smiths look like we do? Maybe they are
our cousins. Big deal.
It became a really big deal. Somebody told the twins that the Smith kids’ daddy was named Dan. Somebody else mentioned the Smith kids had an older brother who had moved away long ago. His name was Fitzhugh.
Dan and Fitzhugh! That’s what the bullies of Chestnut Grove had called them when they were little. Somehow the mean boys had known that either Dan or Fitzhugh had sired the twins. All the old hurts, the old taunts, returned. Saford, ever proud, was especially sensitive to perceived slights.
“What’s the matter? My coat not look good enough to suit you?” he’d bark at a kid who might have gazed a little too long at his hand-me-down coat held together with holes.
“My shoes too big? My socks don’t match? My shirt’s worn out? Whatcha gonna do about it?”
Clayton was always there to help finish the fights Saford started, and he restored a tenuous peace. Clayton didn’t care if people talked. In fact, he wasn’t so sure that Saford wasn’t making too much of all this business with the Smith kids.
“We’ll show them,” Saford told Clayton. “We’ll go to Bassett and get jobs and make more money than those jerks have ever seen.”
We? Without much say in the matter, Clayton was shanghaied into moving to Bassett. Like their brothers before them, the twins quit school and never looked back.
Dr. Gates, their mentor who had seen so much potential in them, was furious.
“You’re throwing it all away, boys,” he lectured them. “You’ll never make it in this world without an education.”
The world would have to take them as they were. Their minds were made up.
Not long before they left, the twins saw the Smith kids walking down the road away from Blue Ridge School. A car pulled up beside the Smith family, its door flew open, and the children climbed in. Clayton and Saford saw the driver from behind, and they could make out only the back of his balding head. That’s the only glimpse they ever caught of Dan Smith. The car moved on down the road, the family headed for home.
• • •
“Let me do all the talking.”
Saford was going to talk his way into jobs for the both of them. The twins arrived in Bassett in the spring of 1937. Most of the young men of The Hollow had relocated to Bassett, including their brothers, at least for the workweeks. On weekends, the men returned to The Hollow to give their wages to their families, maybe drink a little ’shine, fight, lose their money, and come back to Bassett to start the whole cycle over again.
Mack had told the twins to go see the finishing room foreman about jobs. The finishing room always had work, due to the fact that people hated it. Clayton and Saford went up to the third floor of the factory and met with the foreman, John Carter, who took one look at the skinny, shrimpy twins and chuckled.
“Where’d y’all leave your cradles at?” he drawled in a deep baritone.
“We can do anything you got to do,” Saford snapped back.
Carter didn’t tease the boys. He didn’t have time. The factory was sending scores of pieces of bare wood furniture to the finishing room every day. He needed help. He sent the twins down to the main office, where they filled out the proper forms and were immediately put to work. They were placed in a company house in Hell’s Holler, a rough section of town where plain weatherboard houses stair-stepped up the hill by a creek that ran past the factory. Hell’s Holler was home to poor mountain trash that blew into Bassett from neighboring counties. Boys from Franklin County were particularly rough. Rent was three dollars a month, which was taken out of the bimonthly paychecks, along with the light bill, water bill, and other assorted expenses. It didn’t take long for Clayton to realize that Bassett Furniture got most of its money back.
The pay was good enough, though. Thirty cents an hour for a workweek that reached sixty hours. Finishing work was the hottest, nastiest, smelliest, and dirtiest job in the plant, which is why the people hired to do it were black men and poor white trash from places like The Hollow. The twins hadn’t been around many black people, hadn’t seen many, really. One thing they learned was that in the finishing room, there were no black people or white people—only stained people. The twins sprayed varnish onto tables, not bothering to wear gloves or masks, because none were available. Next, they’d tote the furniture into the “rub room” where it was polished with rags. At the end of the day, workers washed their hands with soap, water, and paint thinner, but the dark stain never completely came off. Stain outlined their fingernails and seeped into the cracks of their knuckles. You could always tell a finishing room worker by his hands.
Six months into their new lives, the twins got a new roommate—Mamo. All her babies were grown up and had left Granny Hall’s cabin. Instead of tending to the growing brood of grandbabies tugging at her apron, she decided she’d take care of her real babies. She cooked for the twins, washed their clothes, and babied them, even though they were men. The twins were real mama’s boys. Mamo’s boys.
• • •
With its two movie houses, cafés, and a bowling alley, Bassett laid more fun at the twins’ doorstep in one night than The Hollow had in eighteen years. Back home, boys drove or walked to Mount Airy to find a good time. Bassett, though, had it all. It had a music scene.
The town produced fiddlers, banjo pluckers, and guitarists like dresser drawers and bed frames. Pickers played on front porches and in barbershops. In the late-night hours following a full day at the factory, the twins quickly established themselves as the hottest pickers and singers around. Pops Maxey’s barbershop was a good hangout spot because Pops played fiddle between haircuts. A cousin named Haze Hall lived in Bassett and played banjo—all their cousins played something. Bassett thrummed with music.
They met Wayne Fleming, a sixteen-year-old dropout from Mount Airy, who played a slide guitar that he laid face up in his lap. The twins had never seen anybody play like that. They had much in common with Wayne: They had all quit school to go to work, they liked music more than work, and Wayne had earned his first guitar the same way Saford had procured his first fiddle, by selling salve. The three young men formed a little group that played at the company store on Saturday nights, making a joyous racket that kept people singing, dancing, hollering, and drinking until early morning.
But the best music the twins heard was on the radio, where, from Winston-Salem, you could pick up WAIR, the rival to WSJS that broadcast live bands every day. The very best of the lot was Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers, a hillbilly outfit that played a half-hour show every weekday at lunchtime. After the noon lunch whistle blew, the twins climbed the metal stairway that led from the factory grounds into Hell’s Holler. Mamo had lunch ready, and the twins gobbled down baloney sandwiches and listened to Roy Hall’s broadcast.
Roy was an OK singer, a little nasally with limited range and just a passing familiarity with pitch. The twins had heard better. They were better. Roy Hall’s singing wasn’t his strong suit, though. Putting together a top-flight band and leading it was. The Blue Ridge Entertainers were incredible. Bill Brown played slide guitar, just like their new buddy Wayne Fleming. Clato Buchanan was a decent banjo picker. Bill Brown and bass player Wayne Watson sang some nice duets. But the undeniable star of every broadcast was the fiddle player, a young dude by the name of Tommy Magness. Every day at noon, Magness kicked off the show with a pair of high drones that sounded like a train whistle. The band fell in like a line of freight cars, chugging at a quicker tempo than other bands the twins were used to. After a few more “bells and whistles” (which Tommy made by plucking his bottom E string and dragging his bow across the middle two strings), Tommy Magness took off on a wild double-shuffle melody that barreled into a flashy finale. He played fast and wild, almost leaving the band behind. The tune was called “Orange Blossom Special,” and Saford had never heard anything like it.
“How does he do that?” Saford asked every day. Clayton allowed that he did not know. He couldn’t even hear that fast. Clayton was playing a little fiddle now, too,
in addition to banjo and guitar. For his part, Saford had learned to play anything with strings. The Hall twins were good. But they couldn’t play like this band.
Saford broke out his fiddle and tried to play “Orange Blossom Special.” He couldn’t do it. Tommy Magness was a monster. Saford figured he’d never be able to play like him.
Roy Hall’s broadcasts were sponsored by Dr Pepper. The band kicked off every show with a Dr Pepper theme song, set to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain”:
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper and we’ll all go out and he’p her
She’ll be drinking Dr Pepper when she comes
Clayton and Saford had never tasted Dr Pepper, but if Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers swore that its blend of real fruit flavors made it the perfect daytime beverage, it must be good stuff.
That was their routine during the fall of 1938 and winter of ’39. They’d listen to Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers during the day, and then play music around town at night.
• • •
The twins lived in Bassett for more than a year, perhaps even as long as two. They stayed long enough to save a little money from their jobs, although Saford went through wages the way a drunk goes through corn liquor. Mamo stayed with them in Hell’s Holler. Around this time, the twins composed their first song, a suitable ode to Mamo called “When Mother Prayed for Me.” The song’s melody was slow and Western-influenced. The words were oddly nostalgic for a couple of twenty-year-olds who hadn’t seen much of the world, yet they captured the tenor of their rough-and-tumble existence:
