by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
Around Thanksgiving, Tommy received word that KWKH wanted the Orange Blossom Boys. The band would be moving to Louisiana. Ready for a change, Clayton and Saford switched their musicians’ union cards from the Roanoke chapter to a Louisiana local chapter. Dot and Elinor were not as enthusiastic about the move. Both were born-and-bred Roanoke girls reluctant to leave their families. The Orange Blossom Boys still had shows to play and radio programs to broadcast, but they made no secret that they were leaving soon.
The band had one major show date remaining on the calendar before the end of the year—a multiband affair at the majestic Roanoke Theater on Jefferson Street. They played their final morning radio program and said farewell to all their fans and all the folks who had written the radio station to make requests. They talked about the show that night at the Roanoke Theater and encouraged listeners to tell their friends and neighbors to come on down.
Somebody must have forgotten to tell Tommy. Five minutes before the curtain went up on the Orange Blossom Boys’ final performance in Roanoke, the man whose name was at the top of the bill was nowhere to be found.
The boys in the band weren’t sure what to do at first. The theater manager informed them that this was the second time a headline performer had been a no-show that day. The Roanoke Theater had canceled an afternoon program because the scheduled performer never showed. (Forevermore, Clayton and Saford claimed that the first dude who stiffed the Roanoke Theater that afternoon was Hank Williams, who would have been twenty-four in 1947 and whose first records came out earlier that year. Clayton told me that ol’ Hank had passed out drunk at the Ponce de Leon Hotel and never made the gig. When the legend becomes fact, as they say …) The theater manager wasn’t about to scrap another show, especially when the house was already full.
“Y’all get out there,” he ordered the band. “Y’all don’t need Tommy. You do the show!”
Saford led the band on stage, served as band spokesman, called the tunes, and got the show on the road. Really, the Tommy-less Orange Blossom Boys had no trouble playing a show. Clayton and Saford could’ve carried a four-hour show by themselves. But this was ridiculous. Tommy had let the Orange Blossom Boys down many times over the last nine months with his drinking and his absenteeism, but this took the prize. Why were they uprooting their families, moving south, and sacrificing everything they had worked for, when Tommy could easily throw it all away in Shreveport and leave them stranded? When Clayton and Saford took the stage without their bandleader that night, they asked themselves those questions.
As the show rolled along, the band heard a scuffle backstage. Tommy had burst through the back door, drunk as a mule, wearing a heavy coat with cans of beer stuffed in every pocket—side, front, inside, anywhere he could hide a can. He opened his case and dropped his fiddle on the floor, where it reverberated with a wang, bang, pi-tang sound of pegs popping loose and strings unraveling. He picked it up and dragged the wrong side of his bow across the deadened strings. Just before Tommy made it to the stage, the theater manager corralled him in a bear hug and hauled him to a dressing room, barricading him inside. Tommy pounded on the door furiously, cussing and hollering, as his band played on without him.
The Orange Blossom Boys kept their composure and played the rest of the show without interruption. They thanked the audience for being so supportive and said they looked forward to a time when they could play for all their Roanoke fans again—which they realized would not come any time soon. The Orange Blossom Boys were done. They all knew it, Clayton, Saford, Wayne, and Warren. Everybody, that is, except Tommy.
When they sprang Tommy from his dressing-room holding cell, Tommy roared that he was glad he was leaving this Podunk town.
“Boys, we’ll be on our way to Louisiana tomorrow!” he shouted.
Clayton corrected him.
“I’ll tell you two who ain’t a-going with you,” he said. “Not with you like this.”
They all quit. Tommy was undeterred. He headed down to Louisiana anyway. Clayton told people that Tommy recruited Jay Hugh Hall to go with him, but when they got down there, they were turned down by the KWKH management.
Tommy moved to Nashville and found work with Roy Acuff again. Within months, he was back in the movies, appearing with Acuff in Smoky Mountain Melody. That boy always landed on his feet.
As for Clayton and Saford, they had always landed on their feet, too. They had quit school as teenagers and went to work in a furniture factory, only to have Roy Hall rescue them from Bassett and hand them a music career. They had fought in some of the fiercest battles of World War II, but each managed to come home in one piece. They had squandered their savings and their opportunities after the war, but Tommy Magness came a-calling and made them stars again. Every time they fell, someone showed up with a net.
But not this time.
The twins worked briefly with their old pal Woody Mashburn in the Wanderers of the Wasteland, crooning such Western songs as “Happy, Roving Cowboy,” “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and the mournful “He’s Gone Up the Trail,” which sounded like a eulogy for the twins’ career:
He’s gone, he’s gone up the trail
His old guitar is still
He’s gone to meet that heavenly band
That’s led by Buffalo Bill
That group folded, too, and Clayton went to work at Johnson-Caper Furniture Company in southeast Roanoke. He and Elinor still lived at her mother’s house, where Clayton read the Bible every evening. On November 30, 1948, Elinor gave birth to a baby girl, Sharon Renee. Mamo came all the way from The Hollow to see her new grandbaby. The next day, Saford and Dot stopped by the old Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Saford was ebullient over the sight of his twin brother’s baby girl. He called her “Wee-waw.” He called her that for the next fifty years, except for the times he called her “Nay-kid,” which I assume played off the name Renee, an embarrassing nickname, to be sure, because it sounded like he was saying “naked,” as in jaybird.
Whether it was because of his new responsibilities as a father, or because the Magic City had lost its enchantment, or because he simply wanted to get out from under his mother-in-law’s roof, Clayton felt compelled to move. He longed for a little cabin in the woods, and he set out to find a country homestead where his young family could live far from the noisy streets and hot pavement of the city.
After he found just such a place, he regaled Elinor with fantastical tales of a land where the peaches and apples grew so large that you only needed two to fill a bushel box. The trees were all tall and green, the mountain streams clean and cold, and the people as friendly as any you could hope to meet. He wanted to live out his life in the only place he felt truly at home: The Hollow.
THE
HOLLOW
Clayton and Renee, circa 1953
In 1949, the band broke up, and Clayton, Elinor and Renee moved to Ararat. Later, the next year, they bought a cabin in the Mount Bethel community of Carroll County.
—MOM, FROM THE CARROLL COUNTY GENEALOGICAL BOOK, 1994
Only the old-timers still called it The Hollow. People below the mountain got their mail through the Ararat post office, which was ten miles away along roads that curled like blacksnakes.
Clayton, Elinor, and the baby rented a little cabin on Wards Gap Road for a couple of months before Clayton put a down payment on a tiny house and ten acres of land on the Carroll side of the Carroll County–Patrick County line. In January 1950, the young family moved into their four-room home made of black-painted logs chinked together with concrete, a cabin without heat or running water. An outhouse stood in the side yard. The front yard was dominated by a large white oak tree that would rain acorns down on a revolving fleet of broken-down rattletraps Clayton would own over the years. A long chicken coop sat at the bottom of a hill behind the house, just above a stream. Water for drinking, cooking, and washing was drawn from a well. The spartan accommodations provided quite a culture shock to Elinor, a young woman from the city who was used
to the urban luxuries of bus lines, streetcars, ice cream shops, and indoor toilets.
She was a trouper, though, an independent gal willing to give this new lifestyle a try, especially since Clayton seemed much happier in the country. It wasn’t easy, especially the whole business of doing your business in an outhouse, not to mention the threat of being chased by hogs. Clayton’s brothers Sam and Mack lived on adjoining properties, and they kept hogs and grew peaches and apples. Sometimes the hogs escaped and wandered up to the house. One afternoon while Clayton was away, Elinor was in the side yard when she spotted one of the hogs coming her way. Scared silly, she made a break for the outhouse, where she locked the door and holed up for the rest of the afternoon. Each time she opened the door a crack to see if the two-hundred-pound porker was still there, the beast waddled up and rooted around outside. Elinor stayed put until Mamo arrived and found her daughter-in-law barricaded in the johnny house. Mamo nearly died laughing when Elinor told her that she feared the hog would eat her.
Clayton took a job with a construction company that kept him away from home for a week at a time. He painted buildings at the gunpowder plant in Radford, an hour away. He stayed at that job for nearly two years, living away from home four nights a week. Elinor kept the home fires burning with help from Mamo, who stayed at the house and looked after Renee while Elinor worked at a hosiery mill in Mount Airy. Elinor was independent, she knew how to drive a car and she taught some of the local girls how to drive, even if it went against their husbands’ wishes. Clayton came home on the weekends, and he and Saford and all their brothers and cousins who were musicians played music in Clayton’s living room every Saturday night—usually all night.
Clayton eventually quit the Radford job and found work at National Furniture in Mount Airy, where he could come home from work every night.
• • •
Saford came home, too. He and Dot split up for the last time in 1950, and he left Roanoke for good.
Their marriage didn’t end for any single reason, but there wasn’t a single reason for them to stay together, either. Dot was no longer the teenage girl whose domineering mother had convinced her that the handsome singer would make her a happy woman. She had long outgrown any schoolgirl infatuation she might have felt for Saford, and he had never done anything to make her happy. Saford showed no desire to improve, except for a short stint when he worked toward getting his high school diploma. He quit after only a few months, but he didn’t tell Dot. She found out from Saford’s buddies that he had actually been hanging out downtown when he should have been in class.
The end wasn’t that hard. Saford simply came in one day and informed Dot that he was moving back home, to his real home. She wasn’t invited. She wouldn’t have gone, anyway. In a way, the breakup of her marriage felt like little more than the ending of a high school romance, which is what it sort of was for her, considering how young she was when she married Saford.
After the divorce, Dot married her old boyfriend from high school, the boy she had dated before Saford, the only boy she had ever really loved. They had two sons and Dot lived a long, happy life, playing piano in church and teaching piano to Roanoke children. After the boys had grown, she and her husband moved into the country, where even as she was dying from cancer she worked an hour or two every day in her flower beds, pulling weeds, cutting dead blooms, and never looking back to that time when she had been a child bride married to a high-strung musician and soldier boy from some place called The Hollow.
• • •
Clayton taught Sunday school at Mount Bethel Moravian and sang in the choir. His ability to speak with confidence in front of large crowds earned him the responsibility of filling in for the preacher when he had to be away. Clayton quickly became a pillar of the church and of the little community that surrounded it.
The good Moravians would have been surprised to know that their favorite son was coming unglued.
Elinor saw signs of Clayton’s temper early on. She knew he was the jealous type, so she didn’t show him the newspaper clipping Reba had sent her about one of Elinor’s old boyfriends. The young man had become an actor and was about to appear in a movie. But Elinor let it slip one day that Reba had sent her the news clipping and Clayton blew his stack. He tore through drawers in an old rolltop desk and tossed papers and letters all around the room.
“Where is it?” he demanded to know. “I want to wipe my ass with it!”
This was not the Clayton that Elinor had known when she was a little girl, the kindhearted country boy who would sit on the sofa with her sister and just talk for hours, the boy who read the Bible and discussed the book of Revelation with her mother. Fortunately, that Clayton was still around most of the time. But occasionally his anger boiled over and changed him, the way a full moon turns a man into a werewolf.
The person who really brought out the beast in Clayton was—who else?—Saford. Saford had his own temper issues, among his other problems. One day while the two of them played music on a cousin’s porch, Saford grew irritated with Clayton’s playing and smacked Clayton upside of the head. Clayton dropped Saford with one punch to the nose, and then he went home.
Mamo told Elinor she never could understand why her babies fought like they did. “I reckon every once in a while they have to see which one is the better man.”
They even fought in front of Clayton’s daughter, who was just a child. Little Renee watched her daddy and uncle rolling in the dirt, beating each other senseless, and she laughed. She thought that they were playing cowboys like in the Westerns.
• • •
Clayton and Saford made their peace the way they always had, by playing music.
Ralph Epperson, the twins’ old pal from Blue Ridge School, who as a boy had been enamored with the technological revolution that was radio, had built the first commercial radio station in the area. The station went on the air in 1948 with a pledge to feature local talent and community news. Located at 740 AM, the station’s call letters were WPAQ, not because it was an acronym for some slogan (like “We Piddle Along Quietly,” for example) or the initials of a person’s name, but because Ralph had been told that the letter Q really stood out in call letters and would make his station easy to remember.
Their professional days were behind them, but Clayton and Saford played on WPAQ frequently in the 1950s with a variety of bands. They taught a group of local pickers the old Roy Hall hit “Can You Forgive?” and recorded it live in the studio. They even formed a hot country band called the Swingbillies that made records for Ralph Epperson to play on the air.
By the mid-1950s, the music the twins had been playing their entire lives finally had a name: “bluegrass” music, named for Bill Monroe’s band the Blue Grass Boys, a unit that had debuted in 1940 with Tommy Magness on the fiddle. Monroe’s brand of up-tempo, acoustic-powered mandolin-and-banjo-led music had earned him the distinction as the “father of bluegrass,” a title he held until his death forty years later.
The Hall twins were never called the “brothers of bluegrass,” but they remained popular in their home community.
• • •
Tensions rose again. This time, though, it was over a woman: Saford’s new wife, Clovie, whom he’d met at the furniture factory where they’d both worked. She wasn’t bad looking—she had auburn hair and wore glasses—but she came with baggage. She had a cute little boy named Larry, even though she had never been married before. The thing that unnerved Clayton, was Clovie’s deafness. Clayton could not understand why Saford would be smitten with a deaf woman. (If he had stopped to think about it, though, a deaf woman might be the only type who could stand to live with Saford for very long.)
Clovie went out of her way to communicate verbally, which meant she talked loudly and was often incomprehensible. She knew a little sign language—but nobody else in the family did, so what was the point?—and she often threw her hands about wildly as if gestures would help her be understood. Clovie’s gyrations annoyed Clayton, who, e
ven though he was a bona fide world traveler, was still burdened with backwoods aversions to people who were different.
“You don’t love her,” he told Saford. “You can’t love her. I’ll never understand you.”
“I love her just as much as you love Elinor,” Saford shot back.
Clayton managed to keep his prejudices to himself, mostly, especially around Clovie. He was too decent of a man to be mean to anybody. Besides, when Saford married Clovie and moved into a little house just a couple hundred yards from Clayton and Elinor, it didn’t take long for Clovie to become a loving, accepted member of the family. She had a good heart, and she loved all of her new nieces and nephews. She liked Clayton and Elinor immensely and showered Renee with gifts of clothes, dolls, and coloring books. Her little boy, Larry, was adopted by all the cousins as if he was blood kin. Maybe Saford’s new family would fit in after all.
The next thirty years truly were “The Hollow Years.”
—NOT SOMETHING MY MOM WROTE
The genealogy-book version of Clayton and Saford’s lives conveniently skips over this period. Not that it wasn’t chock-full of wonderful moments—the brothers settled into quiet lives raising their only children (Clayton, a daughter; Saford, an adopted son), working at another furniture factory, worshipping in a historic Moravian church, making many new friends, traveling to the beach when money wasn’t tight and a car was roadworthy, and playing music every chance they got. If either one of them was here today, they might claim those years were among the happiest of their lives. But they’re not here and they would be lying.
