by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
As soon as they got the news, Saford and Clayton hopped a ride to The Hollow for the funeral in the Montgomery Cemetery, where Susan Montgomery Hall was laid to eternal rest next to Pappy Hall. Clayton and Saford sang “Amazing Grace” as their own mother wept nearby.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I’m found
Was blind but now I see
At least Granny Hall lived long enough to see those little grandbabies grow up to become professional musicians.
Back in Winston-Salem, the twins went to work. They studied the Blue Ridge Entertainers’ songbook and learned their parts. They jumped right into the WAIR broadcasts, having learned their way around a microphone from their youthful excursions to WSJS. They knew where to stand, so as not to drown out the soloist or overmodulate their vocals. Their new coworkers Bill Brown and Wayne Watson were childhood buddies from western North Carolina. The musicians slept five to a room in a boardinghouse, ate meals together, and rode to show dates crammed tight in one car, five dudes wedged shoulder to shoulder, everybody smoking unfiltered cigarettes, their instruments packed in the trunk. A sign on the back read “Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers, playing on WAIR Radio.” When Wayne finally procured a reliable upright bass to replace the washtub bass he usually played, he strapped it to the car’s roof.
Shortly after the twins arrived, Tommy Magness left to work for Bill Monroe, who was starting his own band. Tommy was a friendly young man, only a couple years older than the twins. He was a stocky-built, nice-looking chap with a pudgy baby face. His Georgia drawl made him sound older than he was, and he came across as a bit bashful, even though his fiddling was anything but. His version of “Katy Hill” actually outran the rest of the band, who desperately and failingly attempted to keep up. Saford had never seen anybody’s fingers work that fast. Most fiddle players he had known played not too slow, not too fast—they played “half-fast,” which sounded like “half-assed.” Tommy played really fast. He was the best fiddle player Saford had ever seen.
In the short time they were together, Saford played guitar and soaked up as much of Tommy’s style as he could. For his part, Tommy demonstrated how to work the bow and finger different notes with each bow stroke. He even showed Saford his pièce de résistance—“Orange Blossom Special.” The tune had a unique shuffling bow pattern, completely foreign to Saford, in which Tommy rocked the bow across two strings at once and occasionally caught a third string on every other stroke. The sound was electrifying to Saford, who tried like mad to get the pattern down, but he couldn’t match Tommy’s skill. Then, quicker than a verse of “Katy Hill,” Tommy was gone. The twins doubted they’d ever see the likes of him again.
Saford was no Magness, but his repertory of old-time fiddle numbers could carry any square dance. Every night, the band had a show date—which is what every working band called their live performance. Clayton made a good accounting of himself, too, playing a rapid-fire two-finger banjo style that kept pace with the fast instrumentals. The twins’ strength was, as always, their singing. They sang a slew of numbers each night, their harmonies as tight as Dick’s hatband. Their singing and looks earned them new fans among the young ladies in the crowd.
• • •
But music was work. The band played a thirty-minute set on the radio every day, then piled into the “Push Model DeSoto”—so-called because the band often had to push-start it to crank it. They headed for towns all over mountainous northwest North Carolina, the pretty part, but also the part with the crookedest roads—and the most musicians. The Blue Ridge Entertainers hurtled up the mountains to play a place like Asheville only to discover that the Mainers had played there the night before, the Callahans the night before that, and the Blue Sky Boys were on their way tomorrow. The crowd was small, the pay low, and the DeSoto wouldn’t crank after the show.
But it sure as hell beat the finishing room. The twins never forgot that. Every time Roy assigned Saford some tedious task, such as researching music copyrights for the next week’s radio programs, a job that took hours, Saford needed only to remember the finishing room’s poison fumes and unwashable stains. The music business was more work and more tiring than he’d imagined it would be, but at least he didn’t have to walk around with his hands shoved in his pockets to hide his black fingernails. He wasn’t trapped in The Hollow, either, picking apples or making liquor. And nobody was asking who his daddy was or calling him a bastard.
Roy Hall was the indisputable leader of the band, but Dr Pepper wrote the checks. As chief sponsor, the soda company paid each member twenty-five dollars a week. That was less than the twins made at Bassett Furniture, but they also earned a cut of show dates. All they had to do was wear their Dr Pepper shirts wherever they played and promote Dr Pepper ceaselessly and shamelessly on the radio and during performances. Roy managed all the money. He took a little bit from each member—himself included—to pay for gas and promotional posters. By the end of the week, none of the band members was taking much cash home to the boardinghouse. Roy Hall had a shelf filled with trophies won at fiddlers conventions and radio stations, he had made records for the Bluebird label, he had sackfuls of mail that he liked to pile on the ground for the band’s publicity photographs, and he had a kick-ass band that boasted great singers and players. But other bands had all those things, too. He needed to turn things around, and fast. What he needed was a pick-me-up … and he got it from a soda pop. Dr Pepper was opening a bottling plant in Roanoke, Virginia. The owner wanted a hillbilly band to promote his beverage on a powerful radio station called WDBJ.
Roy received a telegram from a fellow named Wright in Roanoke. Someone in Roanoke had heard Roy Hall’s group in Greensboro and recommended them to WDBJ. The Blue Ridge Entertainers’ previous experience with the company made them a superb candidate for the new gig. Dr Pepper officials requested that the group send a transcribed audition disc to the Roanoke offices immediately.
The Blue Ridge Entertainers cut a disc at WAIR, which consisted of about fifteen minutes’ worth of tunes, comedy bits, and copious Dr Pepper plugs.
A few days later, Roy got another telegram. The Dr Pepper bosses liked the audition. They requested that Roy Hall and the Blue Ridge Entertainers report to WDBJ studios on Kirk Avenue in Roanoke within two weeks. Management was offering a contract of $500 per week—a weekly salary of $100 for each band member.
If he’d had an airplane, Roy would have flown to Roanoke. The boys played their remaining North Carolina show dates in early April, finishing late on April 13, 1940, after which they loaded up all their clothes and instruments into Roy’s DeSoto and Bill Brown’s Ford. The twins were returning to Virginia but moving to a city they knew less about than they had Winston-Salem. The DeSoto wouldn’t crank, so the boys all got out and assumed their usual positions behind it. They pushed it until it was rolling fast enough for Roy to pop it into gear and fire up the motor. If it hadn’t started, they would’ve pushed it all the way to Roanoke. Anything for $100 a week.
• • •
Roy Davis Hall had left the cotton mills of western North Carolina in 1937 when he was thirty years old and started a new life as a musician. He had learned guitar on the front porches and in the kitchens of houses strung along the factory village of Marion, North Carolina. The town was thick with musicians, men who worked like dogs all day in the Clinchfield Mill, then picked up guitars, fiddles, and jars of home brew at night. Clyde Moody, a terrific singer, was from East Marion. Fiddle-playing Steve Ledford was from up the road in Spruce Pine. Zeke Morris and Hicks Burnette were musicians and songwriters from nearby towns. Dobro man Jack Stewart was a regular at Roy’s picking parties. With musicians as abundant as cotton bolls, Roy got good quick.
By the time he turned thirty, he’d already packed in enough living to fill three lives. He was born in the North Carolina mountain town of Waynesville in 1907. The Halls were a large family, and as soon as the boys w
ere old enough to take care of themselves, they struck out on their own. The family moved to Marion in the 1920s where Roy’s daddy, Wade, took a job in the cotton mill. Roy left home at fourteen and worked hard-labor jobs throughout the wild western Carolina mountains. He made his way across the country, working as a lumberjack in Washington and on a fishing boat in the Pacific. He returned to North Carolina in his twenties and operated heavy machinery for road-building crews blasting tunnels through the mountains. He ran a store and got married and divorced. By 1935, he had come full circle and was back in Marion working at the Clinchfield Mill.
Like most Depression-era factory towns, Marion was a rough place after dark. The local saying was “ain’t no kin after six o’clock,” which meant you were as likely to get into a drunken knock-down drag-out with your brother or cousin as you were with a stranger. Marion had been at the vanguard of the labor union movement of the 1920s. Workers at Clinchfield and Marion Manufacturing went on strike in 1929, only to have their efforts crushed by company bosses and hired guns.
By the ’30s, the textile labor movement was dead, but Roy had his own way of outsmarting bosses. He was a good baseball player, and he managed a team of mill hands that played other local textile teams. Roy was catcher, an important position because he could call for what he wanted the pitcher to throw, move infielders around, and basically control the flow of the game. Catchers are leaders. When Roy’s team was set to take on the squad from Valdese, the best team in the textile league, one of his bosses made Roy an offer: “Roy, if you beat them boys, we’ll spend two days at my place on the lake and we’ll have a fish fry and we’ll just pull one”—as in, “pull a two-day drunk.” The offer was basically a joke, because Valdese was expected to clobber the poor old Clinchfield Nine.
Roy had a game plan that didn’t involve batting practice. Instead, he instructed his older brother Jerry and teenage brother Rufus to pack up dozens of bottles of home-brewed beer and take it to the Valdese ball field early on game day. The temperature that afternoon approached ninety degrees, so Jerry and Rufus packed the beer in an ice-filled washtub and sold it to the Valdese club at the low, low price of two bottles for a quarter. By the time the Clinchfield club arrived, the Valdese boys were three-and-a-half sheets to the wind. They couldn’t hit, pitch, catch, or stand in the batter’s box without wobbling. Roy’s team pummeled Valdese, 10–0, earning Roy a weekend party at the lake on the boss man’s dime.
Roy looked for angles and opportunities. Music looked like a good line of work to get into, except that he couldn’t play. He swapped an old pistol for a guitar and began following his music-playing buddies to dances. He’d go hear the Callahan Brothers or the Morris Brothers, or pick on Clyde Moody’s front porch. Roy’s younger brother Jay Hugh learned guitar, too, by playing Roy’s guitar at night when Roy worked the late shift. The Hall boys were fast learners. They played dances and sang together and were presumptuous enough about the music business to write to the RCA Victor recording company to see when exactly the company would like for them to come make records. Incredibly, the company invited the untested brother act to come to Charlotte and record for its Bluebird label. On February 16, 1937, Roy and Jay Hugh Hall recorded twelve songs in Charlotte.
The results were phenomenal. Even though they were influenced by other smooth-singing brother groups, the Halls’ cotton-mill rawness tore through. Armed with just two guitars and an occasional mandolin, Roy and Jay Hugh played and sang with reckless abandon. They recorded the requisite love song and sacred number, but that first session was dominated by gritty songs from a pair of mill workers. “McDowell Blues,” “Spartanburg Jail,” and “Hitch Hike Blues” were all rough around the edges. The best song they recorded was their first one, the party-till-you-drop number “When It Gets Dark”:
I don’t know whether it’s so or not
But they tell me this town’s red hot
When it gets dark
When it gets dark
Sounded like Marion. The song is fantastic, mostly because of Jay Hugh’s twangy tenor harmony and manic guitar solos. Rock and roll was twenty years away, but Jay Hugh had that same kind of wild spirit.
• • •
Not long after the session, Roy and Jay Hugh left Marion, even though they owed hundreds of dollars to friends who had loaned them money to help them gain a toehold in the music business. The Hall Brothers, as they were known on record and in person, played on the radio in Asheville, North Carolina, and Spartanburg, South Carolina, until Jay Hugh left to join Wade Mainer’s group, Sons of the Mountaineers. Roy formed his own band. Recognizing his shortcomings as a musician, he built a band that he could take farther than he could get on his own. He would be the boss man who gave orders, the catcher who called the pitches. Roy hired Bill Brown on slide guitar, Wayne Watson on bass, Clato Buchanan on tenor banjo, Bob Hopson and Talmadge Aldridge on guitars, and a young fiddle player he’d met in Spartanburg, Tommy Magness. The Blue Ridge Entertainers were born.
Roy was a perfectionist when it came to the band’s look and attire. Tommy, a rough-around-the-edges north Georgia boy, didn’t have proper dress clothes, so Roy bought him a new white shirt and dark pants. Roy had first heard Tommy at a date in Charlotte, where he had impressed Roy with a new fiddle tune he’d learned either from the radio or from other fiddlers. Tommy played the fire out of it, ripping through it like a locomotive, shuffling his bow so fast it made smoke rise from the strings. Roy had never heard the tune, which had been composed by a pair of brothers from Florida, Ervin and Gordon Rouse, who played it all over the Southeast but had never recorded it. When Roy hired Tommy, he wanted to record that tune—“Orange Blossom Special.”
In November 1938, in Columbia, South Carolina, Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers recorded eighteen songs for Vocalion, the same label that a year earlier had issued bluesman Robert Johnson’s only recordings. The Blue Ridge Entertainers waxed the Rouse Brothers’ soon-to-be fiddle standard “Orange Blossom Special,” the first time it was ever recorded. Tommy played it fairly stiff that day, with fewer train-whistle doodads and a tighter, grinding shuffle. After a couple of breaks, Roy and Bob hollered out call-and-response verses—“Bob, where you going?” “I’m taking that Orange Blossom Special to Spartanburg, South Carolina!”—and then Tommy took off again, like a crazed conductor driving the musical train down the track. The band thought it had a surefire hit record—that was, until the Rouse Brothers heard about it.
When music historians wrote about the careers of Roy Hall and Tommy Magness many years later, they always included the unfortunate fact that Roy never got to release his version of “Orange Blossom Special.” They found a note buried in the files of record producer Art Satherly, the head artists and repertoire guy for the American Record Company, which owned Vocalion. “Hold release, Rouse Brothers refuse to sign contract,” the note read. On the recording session ledger was written another foreboding note: “Don’t release—Pub. promises trouble.” Translation: The Rouses’ music publisher was threatening legal action if Roy released “Orange Blossom Special.” So he didn’t. The Rouses finally put it out in 1939, which was their right. Roy and Tommy’s version was relegated to the archives.
Roy never seemed bothered by the haggling over “Orange Blossom Special,” especially since the Blue Ridge Entertainers were getting tons of work, both on the radio and on the road. He’d made dozens of records by that point, which generated a little additional income. Things got even better when Roy was introduced to the Dr Pepper people by Marty Lyle, a radio announcer at WSPA in Spartanburg. The soda company wanted to sponsor the Blue Ridge Entertainers, but it needed them to move to Greensboro to radio station WBIG. Soon, they switched to WAIR in Winston-Salem. Tommy and Clato left the group. Roy took a trip to Bassett, Virginia, to find the Hall twins. Times got lean, the DeSoto ran rough, and then, just when it looked like this little ragtag band would dry up and blow away in North Carolina, the telegram came from Roanoke. In April 1940, Roy Hall made the shrewd
est decision he’d made since he traded that pistol for a guitar. If he couldn’t be better than all the other bands, he’d outfox them, the same way he did the Valdese baseball team. He left the cutthroat competition of North Carolina and took his band to the virgin musical frontier of Roanoke.
ROANOKE
Saford and Clayton, 1940
The band flourished in Roanoke.
—MOM AGAIN, FROM THE CARROLL COUNTY GENEALOGICAL BOOK, 1994
Kirk Avenue is a skinny one-way street that stretches from downtown Roanoke’s City Market to Second Street. Kirk is more of a side street, but it’s a route I’ll take on foot if I’m heading back to my office from downtown. I go that way so I can sneak a peek inside the front door of 124 Kirk Avenue, a three-story gray-brick building on the street’s shady south side. Through a glass entrance on the right, you can look down and see four letters inscribed in the terra-cotta flooring: WDBJ.
WDBJ operated here for more than twenty years. In the 1990s, the old second-floor studios were converted into a high-dollar apartment by the current owner. The building was constructed for a little more than $100,000 in 1936 to house Roanoke’s fast-growing radio station. CBS engineers came to town to help design its three studios, ensuring the rooms would be completely soundproof and free from vibration. Live performers dominated the station’s daytime schedule, with classically trained organists sharing airtime with bandana-wearing fiddle bands. This was Roanoke radio, circa 1940, when a band of good ol’ boys from North Carolina came to town and first strode over the terra-cotta WDBJ in the breezeway. Right here, at 124 Kirk Avenue, is where life changed for a pair of hillbilly brothers from The Hollow.
