by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
“Malaria fever,” Clayton said. He had relapsed.
Saford got Clayton back to Mamo’s house, where she treated him with hot biscuits, honey, and tea. Clayton kept asking for water as he slipped in and out of consciousness for three days. Finally, his fever broke, and he recovered his strength quickly. At least this time, no one was ordering him to drag his sickly frame out of bed and back to the battlefield.
By the time the weather turned cool in late 1946, the twins had squandered their mustering-out pay without anything to show for it. No school, no jobs, no career track—nothing. Even after everything they had been through, they were still no better off than when they were seventeen, mostly uneducated and lacking prospects. The furniture factories of Bassett began to beckon again.
Meanwhile, their old pal Tommy Magness, who had not gone off to war, seemed to be doing just fine. No one knows for sure why Tommy wasn’t called upon to serve. People have told me he had health problems, a weak heart, perhaps. Clayton told me that Tommy didn’t fare well on the army’s psychological tests and was farmed out. He had a wife and daughter, too, but so did a lot of other guys who sailed into the great void and never returned. Whatever the reasons, Tommy Magness fiddled while war raged. Shortly before Roy’s fatal wreck, Tommy had gone to Louisville to play on the Early Morning Frolic Show on WHAS. While there, he got an offer to join a band led by another fellow named Roy—Roy Acuff.
Roy Acuff was the biggest star in country music, which still wasn’t called country music. He was the headliner of the Grand Ole Opry, which had moved from Nashville’s old War Memorial Auditorium to Nashville’s even older and larger Ryman Auditorium in 1943. Thousands of fans bought his records and packed his traveling tent shows. He made movies for Republic Pictures. Tommy appeared in Roy’s flicks Sing, Neighbor, Sing and Night Train to Memphis.
Tommy quit Acuff in 1946 to put together his own band. That’s what he told Clayton and Saford when he drove down to The Hollow and invited them to join his group, Tommy Magness and the Orange Blossom Boys. He had a deal with WDBJ to start a new radio program, and he wanted the twins to fill out the group’s lineup.
Good fortune had found them again. They got a second chance at their big break.
ROANOKE
Tommy Magness and the Orange Blossom Boys, 1947
In 1947, the twins joined the band “The Orange Blossom Boys” with Tommy Magness … [who] did two radio shows each day on radio station WDBJ.
—MOM, AGAIN, FROM THE GENEALOGY BOOK
Clayton and Saford were thrilled to get back to Roanoke. The streetcars still rumbled down Campbell Avenue, the Academy of Music still hosted concerts, and WDBJ still broadcast from its Kirk Avenue studios. To top it off, they were back on the radio, playing music. It was as if the twins had just awakened, Rip Van Winkle-like, from a five-year bad dream to find themselves back where they had always been, as if they’d never left … as if the war had never happened.
But as comforting as the familiar surroundings were, things weren’t exactly the same. Roy Hall was dead, for one thing. Clayton and Saford had to mesh with new bandmates, which included a young hot-shot slide guitar player named Slim Idaho, and Warren Poindexter, a fine Roanoke singer and guitarist whom the twins barely knew. They knew Warren’s wife, however. Near the end of the war, Warren had married a young, pretty war widow in Roanoke—Reba, Clayton’s old girlfriend. If Clayton felt awkward about the situation, he never said so. Besides, he’d have a new girlfriend soon.
Tommy had never led a band. Sure, he was the most famous musician to ever play in Roanoke, because not many Magic City musicians could brag about starring in movies with Roy Acuff, but he was a first-string fiddler who had played second fiddle to his bandleaders. Put him in a band headed by Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, or Roy Hall, and he was a fiddlin’ madman. How good would he be running his own show?
Pretty danged good, early reports indicated. The Orange Blossom Boys were fantastic. Tommy’s fiddling was the musical centerpiece, but he was nearly upstaged by the incredible Slim Idaho, who made that electric, three-neck, pedal steel guitar wail. The twins were familiar with hillbilly and Western tunes, but this band could swing like any fiddle band from Texas or jazz combo from New York. Their sound was quite contemporary for country music, circa 1947. The ever-versatile twins sang together and comprised the rhythm section—Saford on guitar, Clayton on stand-up bass. Tommy’s fiddling was fancier and faster than ever. The Orange Blossom Boys, who, naturally, employed “Orange Blossom Special” as their theme song, were like no band Roanoke had ever heard. On March 3, 1947, they made their debut over good old WDBJ, with the familiar voice of “Cousin Irving” Sharp at the microphone.
The program began with Slim Idaho making a train whistle sound from his slide guitar. The rest of the band kicked in, and Tommy fiddled the second part of “Orange Blossom Special” (the superfast part). Cousin Irving introduced the show and ordered up a hot fiddle number from Tommy, whose playing was outrageously good. His repertoire had expanded considerably over the last four years. He played such complex songs as “Alabama Jubilee” and even sang the verses while Slim wrung wailing high notes from his steel guitar. Tommy dusted off old favorites “Katy Hill” and “Black Mountain Rag,” tunes he had known since he was a boy. On “Black Mountain Rag,” he double-timed the final verse and it was all the band could do to keep up. Clayton slapped the bass ferociously. Saford and Warren chopped time on guitar. This band was tight.
The Orange Blossom Boys played every morning on WDBJ, raising the musical bar each time. Requests came in for “Arkansas Traveler,” “Devil’s Dream,” and plenty of other numbers they didn’t even know. Tommy would call Clayton up to the microphone and announce “Clayton, I believe it’s time for me and you to do one … and I don’t believe I’ve done this one before!”
Clayton would laugh and say, “It don’t make no difference,” and the two of them would sing and play “Columbus Stockade Blues” as good as if they’d sung it a hundred times. The Orange Blossom Boys were good. Fan mail and requests for show dates poured into WDBJ.
It was just like the good old days, perhaps even better. Maybe the last five years had just been a bad dream.
• • •
Several years ago, I traveled a winding road over Windy Gap Mountain to visit Dorothy Wilbourne Spencer at her brick ranch house in Franklin County, Virginia, a home cuddled by gardens, flowers, and large shade trees. I asked her a question that had stumped me for quite a while: What on earth were you thinking when you married Saford Hall a second time?
Her answer was the only one that could have shocked me.
“We were never divorced,” she told me.
That went against the family legend.
Maybe Saford told Clayton that he was divorced, or perhaps Clayton just assumed that was the case since Saford didn’t seem to be in any hurry to shuffle back to Roanoke. Maybe Clayton knew his brother was still married. Whatever the truth, when Saford returned to Roanoke, he and Dot got back together and picked up where they had left off, except that she was now in her twenties, and she demanded that Saford behave better and treat her better than he had done before the war.
Clayton had no girlfriend, but Tommy and his wife, Tootsie—whom he’d finally married after divorcing his first wife, Ruth—aimed to fix that. Just a few weeks after Clayton returned to Roanoke, Tommy and Tootsie set up a double date among themselves, Clayton, and one of Tootsie’s nieces, a pretty young girl from southeast Roanoke who lived high on a hill behind Mill Mountain. They fixed him up with Reba’s baby sister, Elinor.
Elinor! The bratty kid who had been such a nuisance to Clayton when he dated Reba. She had tagged along and annoyed him on dates for two years. Elinor! Yes, he had written her a few times from the army, but that was only because she had written him first, and responding was the courteous thing to do. How old was she now, anyway? Fifteen or sixteen?
Old enough, it turned out.
Elinor met them at the door of the ramblin
g old house on Gladstone Avenue where Clayton had spent many happy hours courting Reba. She wore a white skirt and a white top with a wide aqua and pink stripe that swooped down the front. Her wavy brown hair fell in waves across her forehead, and her curls in back dangled to her shoulders. She had wide blue eyes, a cute button nose, and ruby lips. She looked all grown up, at least to Clayton. He was smitten.
• • •
The foursome went to a movie downtown and stopped for a bite to eat afterward. They ate hamburgers, then Tommy drove everyone back to Elinor’s house, where they … oh, fiddlesticks. Let’s just cut to the chase. Elinor and Clayton got married three months later.
The thing to know about my family is that we don’t waste any time when it comes to romance. We marry young and start popping out babies. My grandmother was sixteen when she married a twenty-eight-year-old combat veteran on June 14, 1947. She was seventeen when she gave birth to a daughter, my mother. My mom was seventeen when she married and when she had me. I, however, broke with family tradition in a major way and actually waited until my midtwenties to marry, and I didn’t become a dad until I was forty. Mamo, of course, never married, but that didn’t stop her from having those babies.
Clayton and Elinor were married at a parsonage in southeast Roanoke. Elinor’s older brother Marvin was Clayton’s best man; Marvin’s young wife, Ada, was Elinor’s maid of honor. According to the newspaper announcement, the bride wore a white, tailored gabardine suit with matching accessories, and a corsage of white roses and stephanotis. She carried a white “prayer book,” according to the paper, covered with a dangling stream of flowers, and she wore a strand of pearls. The newspaper doesn’t say that the groom wore a snappy suit with suspenders.
Clayton, ever the big spender and hopeless romantic, spirited Elinor away on an unforgettable honeymoon in that famous young lovers’ getaway known as The Hollow, where they spent the week with Mamo and one of Clayton’s nieces. That was the first time Elinor met Mamo, and the teenage city girl had no idea what to make of the old woman in long dresses whose hair was always piled into a bun. The Hollow seemed so foreign and strange to Elinor, Clayton might as well have whisked her away to the Philippines.
• • •
Elinor Glynn Holland Hall was—still is—a silly little girl crystallized in amber, the baby of her family. Her rambling, oft-repeated, somewhat absentminded, stream-of-consciousness, free-association style of conversing and storytelling has been as endearing to her relatives and friends as it has been occasionally irritating. Grandma doesn’t have a filter. If a thought or story pops into her head, it comes out her mouth, usually in great detail, often repeatedly. Her memory, even in her golden years, is remarkable. She remembered every stitch and stripe of the white skirt she wore the night of her first date with Clayton, the same way many years later she would remember every medication Clayton was supposed to take and when he was supposed to take it.
So I can only imagine the stories Clayton heard that first night he took Elinor to the movies. She surely filled Clayton in on everything he had missed the past five years.
She must have told him that Reba had lived with her new husband, Donald Roman, in Kentucky until he was called overseas. She and her baby son, Donnie, then moved back to Roanoke, where in July 1944 the family got the news that Donald had been shot down over France. Every day after she got the news, she asked Elinor to go to the mailbox and bring back a letter that said it hadn’t happened, that it was all a big mistake and that Donald was alive. Elinor did as she was told, but no letter ever came. Soon, Reba married Warren Poindexter and had a baby girl.
Elinor’s biggest news, of course, was about how her daddy had died of an enlarged heart in 1945. He had come home from work one evening feeling ill and had asked Elinor to help him upstairs. He made it to the bathroom and vomited blood. After that, the doctor put him on a diet of prunes and black coffee, but he died anyway a year later, which meant her mama had to go to work at a mill in town. Not long before he got sick, her daddy had discovered a lovely cemetery while hunting near his old home place in Franklin County, and he had come home to tell Mama about it. When that eastern sky splits, he told her, that’s where I want to meet the Lord. The place was so beautiful and the view of the mountains so spectacular that he bought plots not only for himself and his wife, but also for all four children plus their future spouses. He’s buried there now, Elinor surely told Clayton, in that place called Mountain View. Isn’t that a beautiful name? Wouldn’t you love to be buried forever in a place called Mountain View?
I can hear her now—because, believe me, I’ve heard all those stories before.
The newlyweds’ honeymoon in the country lasted only a few days. They returned to Roanoke quickly so Clayton could get back to playing music.
• • •
Clayton and Elinor moved in with Elinor’s mother on Gladstone Avenue—and that’s when things began to change.
Slim Idaho left the band first, taking his innovative steel guitar with him to the Old Dominion Barn Dance on Richmond’s WRVA. Within a year he was dead, killed in a motorcycle accident at age twenty-three, leaving a legacy as a pedal steel pioneer that lives on until this day.
Tommy hired Wayne Fleming, the twins’ old buddy from Bassett, to play steel guitar. Wayne had played on the Grand Ole Opry before making records with Ernest Tubb.
The band handled the changes well, at first. Clayton and Saford reverted back to their silly ways and cornpone routines so quickly, you’d never know that two years earlier they were sitting in foxholes, praying not to die. One night while driving to a show date over the winding Catawba Mountain Road outside of Roanoke, the Orange Blossom Boys saw the aftermath of a terrible wreck that involved a truck from the Valleydale meatpacking plant. The twins, bless ’em, saw joke potential. During the show, Clayton stepped up to the microphone and told the crowd that he had just seen the awfullest wreck on the way to the show. A meat truck had been sideswiped by another car.
“Was anybody hurt?” Saford wanted to know.
“No,” Clayton said, “but it sure tore the liver out of that truck!”
Bah-dum-bum.
Of course, Clayton and Saford’s fun times never lasted long. In addition to the fiddle numbers and comedy routines, the Orange Blossom Boys were soon famous for their bandleader’s heavy drinking. The twins had always known that Tommy liked the bottle, but he had kept his drinking under control when he worked for Roy Hall. The few times Tommy went on a bender and was late for a show, Roy would not wait on him. He left Tommy behind a couple of times and told him in specific terms that if he’d rather get drunk than play music, Roy would just hand the fiddle over to Saford. Tommy shaped up right quick.
But now, Tommy was the leader and didn’t have to answer to anybody. Tommy and Tootsie had a little girl, Joan. Even though he had a family and career to consider, nothing wedged itself between him and the bottle. He began missing show dates, even though his name was at the top of the marquee. The ones he made it to, he was often drunk. One night before a show at the American Theater, witnesses saw Tommy in a back alley, swigging liquor from a bottle, chasing it with grape Nehi, and puking the mess back up. He kept up the routine until his liquor stayed down. He was in a bad way. While playing a dance at the City Market Building, a half-full liquor bottle fell out of his coat pocket and rolled across the stage right in front of his fans. He disappointed all who knew him.
• • •
The music the Orange Blossom Boys played was still sensational, however. Roy Hall’s band had set the gold standard in Roanoke, but even his music sounded old-fashioned compared to Tommy Magness’s hot band. Tommy was the Chuck Yeager of fiddle playing—he played so fast, he broke the sound barrier. The way he played “Orange Blossom Special” in 1947, replete with various train sounds, plucked strings, and fanciful shuffles, made his original 1938 version sound like a field recording of a blind ninety-year-old fiddler in the Ozarks. He was supremely talented. When Tommy called for a fiddle tun
e, say, for example, “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” the rest of the band took a deep breath and knew they were in for a track meet. Wayne Fleming splashed copious electrified slide-guitar notes all over the map, Saford chopped a jazzy, swinging guitar rhythm, and Clayton walked up and down the fingerboard of the bass. When the band needed a vocal number, Saford was called on to sing “Foggy River,” a bouncy pop-country number that had been a huge hit for Rex Allen. Saford got more requests for that song than any other, and the lyrics probably suited him better than any other song:
Your love is colder than a foggy river
Flowing over a heart of stone
You left me stranded on this foggy river
Drifting helpless and alone
The Orange Blossom Boys even made one—count ’em, one—78 record in September 1947. Recording for Roanoke’s Blue Ridge Records at the Ponce de Leon Hotel on Campbell Avenue, the band lit through two songs: “Powhatan Arrow,” an original number written and sung by Tommy, was sort of a melodic rewrite of “Natural Bridge Blues” and was inspired by Norfolk & Western’s powerful new Class J passenger train of the same name; and the standard “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” sung by the Hall twins.
The Orange Blossom Boys were good, perhaps even better than Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers. They were better than any band working in Roanoke, or, for that matter, anywhere in Virginia and North Carolina.
That’s why it was such a shame when it all ended so suddenly.
• • •
Tommy had been in Roanoke for more than a year and felt like it was time to move on. He heard about a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana, that was booking hillbilly bands, so he sent them a copy of “Powhatan Arrow” / “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” along with a few radio transcriptions, to see if the management would hire them. The station was KWKH, a fifty-thousand-watt giant that was the most popular country music station in the country.
