by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
He must have thought he was invincible.
• • •
In late fall of 1940, RCA Victor started issuing Roy’s records on its Bluebird label. “New San Antonio Rose” was first, backed with “I’d Die Before I’d Cry Over You,” a song credited to Juanita Moore. The navy blue label read “Roy Hall and his Blue Ridge Entertainers / String band with singing.” The records sold as fast as five-cent hamburgers in Roanoke, where Kittinger’s music store couldn’t keep them in stock. Roy Hall was popular on radio, live, and on record. He was a multimedia juggernaut before the media was very multi.
The twins were getting a good response to “Little Sweetheart, Come and Kiss Me,” which would soon be released on a 78. They were intrigued by Western-flavored melodies and cowboy songs. The chord patterns were more complex than fiddle tunes, and the harmonies that those Western guys sang were tight as a horse’s bridle. Their favorite Western band of all was, of course, the Sons of the Pioneers.
When Clayton and Saford heard “Cool Water,” it was as if they were hearing music for the first time in their lives. They had grown up with cowboy culture, from the movies to the garb, but only now were they getting into the music that Roy Rogers and his former band were making. “Cool Water” sounded like a tour de force to the twins. It was a story of a cowpoke barely surviving a trek through the desert, the mirages playing tricks on him. The singing was multilayered, with rising background vocals and harmonies.
The Sons of the Pioneers’ songs “Way Out There,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “He’s an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande” were phenomenal. The twins learned those and wanted desperately to sing them during show dates, but Roy wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t mind Western songs—he had even recorded “Way Out There” with Jay Hugh, although he left out the yodel—but his band had a signature sound: bluesy fiddle and Dobro, twangy vocals, and solid swing. He was taking hillbilly music where he wanted it to go, and it wasn’t west.
No matter, the twins kept learning those Western songs. Saford even bought a portable disc recorder and started making his own records. Learning those complex, layered harmonies improved the twins’ singing, especially Saford’s lead vocals. And singing would be a good skill to fall back on once he lost his fiddle-playing job to Tommy Magness, which he eventually did.
• • •
The band photos tell the story. The first photo of Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers that ever appeared in Roanoke, the one published in the Roanoke Times to herald their arrival, had Tommy Magness in it, even though he’d been out of the group for more than a year. After they’d been in Roanoke awhile, Clayton and Saford began showing up in the numerous publicity shots that were mailed to newspapers, printed in songbooks, and plastered on posters. The twins posed for their own portraits, Saford clutching a fiddle, Clayton a banjo. In many of the photographs, Clayton wore what appeared to be a string tie or bolo, but it was actually a skinny strap with a hook on the end that fastened to the back of his banjo. He wore his banjo strap like a necktie, almost every day, as a part of his attire.
A number of singers joined the band for brief stints, so there are numerous pictures with Jay Hugh Hall and Woody Mashburn, another North Carolina boy who sang with Roy off and on. Clayton used to tease Woody by calling him “Lucky,” because, in Clayton’s estimation, “You’re lucky to be with a band as good as us.” In these shots, Clayton and Saford are smiling broadly displaying mouthfuls of beautiful long, white teeth that resemble piano keys.
In later photos, we see Tommy, standing with a fiddle tucked under his jaw. Saford crouches in front with a guitar.
In all the years I knew Saford, and after all the conversations we had about music, fiddle playing, the war, Roy Hall, and Tommy Magness, he never spoke of how it happened. How did Tommy take his job? Turns out, Saford surrendered it.
How could he not give it up? You don’t hire Tommy Magness and hand him a guitar. The Yankees didn’t trade for Babe Ruth and just use him as a pitcher. Roy Hall had a cleanup hitter in Tommy, but he didn’t want to mess with the starting lineup. So Saford took the pressure off of Roy and requested the change himself. The whole situation had been tough on Saford. He’d listen to Tommy practice the fiddle before show dates, just to keep his skills sharp, and he knew what the other boys must be thinking: “Why isn’t he the fiddle player?”
When they played show dates, folks in the crowd who recognized Tommy hollered for “Orange Blossom Special.” Roy told the fans maybe next time. He wasn’t going to embarrass Saford. Still, Saford’s pride had absorbed enough body blows to stop an ox. Finally, he went to Roy and suggested that Tommy take over as fiddle player. The twins would get to sing more duets as part of the new lineup. Roy Hall wasn’t going to hide a vocal talent like Saford Hall on rhythm guitar.
Saford’s sacrifice meant that Roy Hall now had the best damn band he’d ever led.
In April 1941, the Blue Ridge Entertainers played the biggest stage of all—the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. At that time, the Opry was held every Saturday night at the old War Memorial Auditorium, whose roof leaked the night the Blue Ridge Entertainers showed up. The boys met most of the Opry stars, such as Uncle Dave Macon and the show’s founder and announcer, George Dewey Hay, the self-anointed “Solemn Old Judge,” who was neither solemn, old (he was thirty), nor a judge when he started his radio barn dance in 1925. He renamed it the Grand Old Opry two years later.
The Blue Ridge Entertainers played their hit, “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die,” and let Tommy strut his stuff on “Orange Blossom Special.” Roanoke’s finest held its own in the hillbilly music capital of America.
Tommy Magness had been a fine fiddle player during his first stint with Roy. After nearly two years of performing with Bill Monroe, he was now a great fiddle player. His tone and timing were sharper, his bowing more fluid and precise. He was a master of what Monroe called the “little bow”: Instead of fingering several notes during one elongated pull or push of the bow, Tommy would change directions with seemingly every note. His strokes were short—during fast numbers, his wrist moved back and forth as rapidly as if he were shaking out a lighted match. Monroe had loved that style and had featured it prominently on one of his first hit records, the incendiary instrumental “Katy Hill.”
Tommy’s fiddling led the Blue Ridge Entertainers into overdrive. He brought a wealth of new tunes to the band—“Fisher’s Hornpipe,” “Black Mountain Rag,” “Devil’s Dream,” “Lost Indian,” “K.C. Stomp,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Back Up and Push,” “Grey Eagle Hornpipe,” “Lee County Blues,”—the boy must’ve known three hundred tunes! Of course, “Orange Blossom Special” worked its way back into Roy Hall’s repertoire. The band had to put in extra time to learn the new material and to get their fingers in shape for Tommy’s machine-gun style. Within months, Irving Sharp would comment on the radio about Tommy “really working those fingers and sawing that fiddle half in two.”
The boys enjoyed themselves. Tommy and Clayton knocked around town when they had free time. It was through Clayton that Tommy met Tootsie. Her real name was Vada, but everybody called her Tootsie—her brothers, her sisters, and her nieces, which included Clayton’s girlfriend Reba. Tootsie Poindexter was Reba’s aunt, the baby sister of Reba’s mother. Tootsie was in her midtwenties, with thick black hair and chipmunk cheeks, a real beauty. In a matter of months, she and Tommy were an item. Tootsie and Reba went to most of the show dates around Roanoke to serve a warning to other girls that these boys were taken. Those other girls didn’t always take the hint, though.
• • •
After Roanoke shows, Clayton, Reba, Tommy, and Tootsie often grabbed a midnight bite at the City Lunch on Second Street, around the corner from the radio station. The City Lunch was a main hangout for the band, especially during the week, when they’d sip coffee and eat breakfast following the morning radio program. Two Greek fellows ran the place—Jimmy and Victor—and they loved the Blue Ridge Entertainers, if only because they we
re hearty eaters. During one early morning radio program, Saford happened to mention he was headed to the City Lunch right after the show. Ray Jordan, WDBJ’s manager, heard the on-air quip and informed Saford he had just given the City Lunch a morsel of free advertising—except that it wouldn’t stay free for long. “That was a plug,” Jordan told Saford. “It’ll cost you.”
One morning at the City Lunch, Tommy spotted a beautiful waitress with reddish hair. He saw her from across the restaurant, carrying a tray of blue-plate specials to a table. Tommy spun around at the lunch counter where he and Clayton sat and looked down, acting as if he didn’t want to be spotted.
“My God, it’s Ruth,” Tommy muttered.
“Who’s Ruth?” Clayton asked, apparently too loudly for Tommy, who shushed him.
“That’s my wife,” Tommy spit out.
Clayton practically shouted, “Your wife!” Tommy punched him in the arm. Clayton whispered, “Your wife?”
All this time, Tommy had been running around with Tootsie while married to another woman. Apparently, neither woman knew about the other. Tommy was only twenty-four years old, but he already had quite the checkered past.
• • •
Tommy Magness was a character whose story ought to begin with some miraculous, spontaneous creation—like a lightning bolt striking a maple tree and leaving behind a baby and a fiddle among the smoldering splinters. Or maybe he met the devil in a bar and swapped some good ol’ homebrew for a magic fiddle. But, really, there was no miracle or myth surrounding Tommy Magness. He was just a tater-fed Georgia farm boy who liked playing fiddle more than hoeing corn. His story is pretty much the same as every other mountain music maker’s—he grew up in the proverbial musical family—although his path to glory took an occasional dogleg turn.
Tommy was born in the north Georgia hills of Mineral Bluff on October 21, 1916. His daddy favored the banjo and his mama the mandolin. His big sister learned fiddle by watching their mother pick tunes on her mandolin, an eight-stringed instrument tuned the same as a fiddle. When Tommy was old enough to stand, he balanced himself on a chair and held the banjo neck while his daddy plucked the strings. He watched his sister play the fiddle and imitated her by sawing corncobs together like one was the bow and one was the instrument. His daddy was a farmer, but Tommy never took to farm work. As a boy, he’d hide behind the barn and make his own pretend fiddles out of cornstalks and horsehair.
His daddy once made a fiddle for Tommy and his sister, which they eventually fought over and broke. But Tommy upgraded to a better one and was soon good enough to play for customers at Hampton’s Hardware in the nearby town of Blue Ridge. He joined a little trio that played around Mineral Bluff and across the state line in Copperhill, Tennessee. Fiddlers sprouted from the north Georgia landscape like tall pines, and Tommy learned from all of them. One of his favorite tunes was the old-timer “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” a Southern favorite for which he cross-tuned his strings into an ancient-sounding drone.
Tommy believed there was magic in that old tune. As a teenager, maybe earlier, he had traveled with a band to Atlanta, where things didn’t go as planned and the fellows went hungry. Desperate and starving, the boys decided to walk home—a hundred-mile trek. As they walked, Tommy took out his fiddle and tuned it for “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” He stood by the side of the road and began playing. One of his fellow foot soldiers berated him.
“What in the world are you trying to play, with us starving to death?”
Tommy never missed a note. Sure enough, within a few minutes, the parents of one of the fellows drove past and picked them up. There was magic in the fiddle. Maybe it was then that Tommy Magness realized that the instrument could take him places.
He played at talent shows and jumped onstage with radio fiddlers. His family moved to North Carolina, where his mother died, and then they returned to Georgia. When Tommy was sixteen, a young pregnant woman claimed that he was the father of her baby. He left town before the baby was born.
He ran off to North Carolina, where he bounced around from band to band. He worked at a mill and joined a family string band led by Carl McElreath, whose daughter, Ruth, was a crackerjack guitar and fiddle player who won her share of blue ribbons at fiddlers conventions. She was so good that male musicians tried to ban her from competing. Her family obliged and left her at home one day when they headed to Asheville for a contest. Ruth was outraged, so she hired a taxi to Asheville and won anyway. Tommy loved her spunk.
Tommy and Ruth married and had a daughter, Faye. But Tommy would never settle down. He played music on radio stations in Asheville and Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he hooked up with Roy Hall. They recorded “Orange Blossom Special” and moved to Winston-Salem. In 1939, Tommy won a national fiddling championship, whipsawing through “Orange Blossom Special” faster than a locomotive. His victory got him noticed by Bill Monroe.
So Tommy left Roy and became part of Monroe’s first edition of the Blue Grass Boys. He recorded with Monroe in October 1940, which turned out to be a pivotal week for Tommy’s career. Tommy fiddled “Katy Hill” like a man trying to break the land speed record for fiddling. He sawed the blues as Monroe sang “Muleskinner Blues” and Clyde Moody sang “Six White Horses.” That same week, he played twin fiddles with his hero, Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, for a recording of “K.C. Stomp.” The next day, he told Roy Hall he wanted to rejoin his band. Talk about a productive week.
When he finally became first-string fiddler for the Blue Ridge Entertainers, Tommy Magness was almost untouchable. In a few years, fiddlers like Chubby Wise and Art Wooten would be better known, but in 1941, Tommy Magness was as good a fiddle player as there was in the country. By the time he was twenty-five, he had made the first recording of “Orange Blossom Special,” waxed historic recordings with Bill Monroe, and had won a national championship. Plus, he was a family man; not only did he have a wife and a daughter, but he had a girlfriend, too. He had it all.
His young wife had tracked him down in Roanoke, where she lived awhile and landed the job at the diner. When it became obvious that she and Tommy would not reconcile, she moved back home to Georgia with their little girl. At the time, Tommy had no plans to ever leave Roanoke. He had no plans at all, really.
• • •
To be young and living in Roanoke was more than Clayton Hall could have ever hoped for as a hungry, barefoot boy in The Hollow. He had money, a car, a girl, and music. Roanoke was now thick with bands. Radio stations were popping up all over the state, all of them wanting live music. If there was ever a golden age in Clayton Hall’s life, the spring of 1941 was it.
Saford finally seemed content with his lot in life. He was confident with his new role in the band, and he seemed relatively happy and settled with Dot. The two lovers were cut from different cloths, he the fatherless fiddler from the Virginia backwoods, she the refined Catholic schoolgirl who played piano, but the relationship seemed to be working. They had their rough spots, such as the time Saford took Dot and her parents to The Hollow to meet Mamo. The sight of cabins and live chickens was unnerving to Dot and Lottie, and they didn’t know what to make of Saford’s sixty-year-old mother, who preferred long dresses and black shoes and who wore her hair pinned back in a bun. Dot’s daddy, however, took to the new surroundings immediately. Within a matter of hours, he and his son-in-law had sniffed out a still and had sampled copious amounts of good, clear corn liquor. Mr. Wilbourne enjoyed himself to the extent that he had to hang his head out the car window the entire drive back to Roanoke.
Dot wasn’t thrilled with Saford after that episode, but he always made it up to her. He bought a Wilcox-Gay record-cutting machine and the two of them made their own records at the Wilbourne house. The aluminum-based Recordio discs were covered with a red lacquer and cost forty cents each. They looked like the colored vinyl 45 rpm records that would become popular years later. Dot played the piano and Saford sang old numbers such as “Molly Darling” and “I’ll Love You Till I Die.”
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The spring of 1941 was so idyllic for Clayton and Saford that it was hard for them to notice that the rest of the planet was collapsing. The Germans controlled Europe and had bombed the daylights out of Great Britain the previous summer and fall. The Japanese were destroying China and had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, intended as a warning to the United States to stay out of the Pacific. People were dying by the thousands in major cities and upon rocky atolls no bigger than Roanoke. But in Virginia, the mountains glowed with iridescent redbuds, dogwoods, and wild cherries. In the Magic City of Roanoke, two poor bastards from The Hollow had finally caught a break, and they made the most of it. During that gilded spring of ’41, Clayton and Saford were truly happy.
It was easy to see why they might want to forget the fact that, just a few months earlier, they had both registered for the first-ever peacetime draft in the history of the United States.
World War II ended all the band’s dreams in 1941.
—MOM, PUTTING IT BLUNTLY IN THE GENEALOGICAL BOOK, 1994
It was an awful wreck. Clayton had taken Reba and her younger brother, Henry, Jr., down to Bassett to visit his brother Mack; Mack’s wife, Vera; and their little boy, Jack. Clayton drove home fast. He always drove too fast. He ran off the right side of the road somewhere just across the Franklin County line and overcompensated as he yanked the car back. The car skidded, ran off the road, and flipped. This was 1941, so no one had ever heard of seat belts, and air bags were the stuff of science fiction comic books, but everybody survived. Henry broke his wrist, and Clayton was bruised and banged up bad enough to need crutches, but they all made it. It was a good thing Henry had been the designated chaperone instead of little Elinor. She might not’ve survived such a spectacular crash.
