Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  I know that country men and women, real musical bluegrass players and dancers, live in the hills above Townsend, Tennessee and I have been told that some of them meet once a week in an abandoned schoolhouse they have taken over as a venue for their music-making. They don’t perform to a ticket-buying crowd, just for their own pleasure, but visitors are welcome.

  I arrive at the Rocky Branch Club at nine in the evening and the place is kicking. What was once a school corridor lined with lockers and maps of ‘Our State’ is now filled with people who…well it has to be said they really do resemble a most outrageously old-fashioned casting agency’s idea of hillbillies. There are men with long beards that you feel must be called Zeke (the men that is, not the beards) who dance in clogs or with heavy taps on their shoes. Swaying to the music in patched dungarees there are youths with long necks, enormous Adam’s apples and splayed-out teeth and I see women with no teeth at all who look as if they had seven children before they were twenty.

  From each room off the corridor, each quondam classroom, there issues a sound. And what a sound.

  For an hour and a half I wander from room to room dizzy with delight. This is what I had come for, authentic hillbilly music and dancing, performed simply for the pleasure of it.

  This music is made by stringed instruments only. It derives, and my word you can hear it in the five-note plaintiveness of the melodies, from Celtic folk music, the jigs and reels of Scotland and Ireland. Guitar, bass, mandolin, fiddle and banjo–there you have your basic bluegrass combo. All the percussion comes from hard driving strums, plucks, picks, slaps and scrapes.

  I find a boy called Jack whom I’d spotted hammering brilliantly at the piano on his own. Now he’s playing the guitar. I marvel at the outrageous virtuosity and arrogant strut with which he plays. The moment he stops he becomes a model of southern politeness and downhome humility.

  * * *

  TENNESSEE

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  TN

  Nickname:

  The Volunteer State

  Capital:

  Nashville

  Flower:

  Iris

  Tree:

  Tulip-tree

  Bird:

  Mockingbird

  Motto:

  Agriculture and Commerce

  Well-known residents and natives: Andrew Jackson (7th President), Andrew Johnson (17th), Al Gore, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, John (‘Monkey Trial’) Scopes, Sergeant Alvin York, Frances Hodgson Burnett, John Crowe Ransom, James Agee, Shelby Foote, Alex Haley, Cormac McCarthy, Hermes Pan, Cybill Shepherd, Kathy Bates, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Renfro, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, Johnny Knoxville, W.C. Handy, Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, Chet Atkins, Pat Boone, George Hamilton, Johnny Cash, the Carter Family, Dolly Parton, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Allman Brothers, Isaac Hayes, Justin Timberlake.

  * * *

  Guitar slapping, tobaccy chewing Jack.

  Welcome to Rocky Branch, son.

  ‘How many instruments do you play?’

  ‘I play the guitar, sir. I play the banjo. I play the mandolin. I play the piano. Just not the fiddle, sir. I don’t like the fiddle. Help yourself, sir.’

  The ‘help yourself’ refers to a pot of something moist, black and rank which he has pushed under my nose.

  ‘What the…?’

  ‘That’s tobaccy, sir. Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I gave up smoking, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That ain’t smoking tobaccy, sir, that’s for chewing.’ He pinches out a fat wad which he plugs into his cheek.

  ‘How old are you Jack?’

  ‘Seventeen years old, sir.’

  ‘And how long have you been chewing tobacco?’

  ‘Well, sir…’ he lets a long line of drool fall into a tin, pinching off the string with a ‘pwop’. ‘Ever since I was four years old. My grandma taught me how.’

  The crew tells me later that he was winding me up, but I’m not so sure.

  In another room I find Jay, a great banjo-picker who despite looking a little less…well, a little less…rural than the bat-eared, crew-cut Jack, is actually a warden in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With him is Stephen, a fiddler who plays with a group that includes a garage mechanic and a retired professor from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

  ‘I play three-finger,’ says Jay. ‘I can’t do clawhammer.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I say, having no idea what he is talking about.

  ‘How about we play Foggy Mountain Breakdown?’

  And they do. They play without pretension or theory or any self-conscious sense of heritage, they play because they belong to the music that has grown from these woods and hills and they play, like dogs who are orally intimate with their own parts, because they can.

  Security.

  Appalachian tap.

  Ducks!

  I want to go further into the woods, through the Smoky Mountains and into North Carolina which lies on the other side. But first I make a detour to Memphis. I am drawn by the lure of ducks.

  No establishment in all the South is more proud of its traditions of graceful hospitality and Old World courtesy than the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, whose lobby is said to be where the Delta ends (or begins, depending on which way you are travelling).

  A handful of fine ducks live on the hotel roof. Every morning they are escorted by the Duck Master (a permanent Peabody staff appointment), to the elevator. A crowd will have gathered downstairs ready for them. At exactly 11.00 a.m., as the opening bars of John Philip Sousa’s ‘King Cotton’ roll majestically from the hotel’s PA system, the elevator doors open and the ducks waddle grandly along the red carpet to the lobby’s marble fountain where they will remain romping until 5.00 p.m. when a similar ceremony in reverse sees them march out to the elevator to be taken back up to their rooftop roost.

  I am given the supreme honour of being officially appointed an Assistant Duck Master for today’s ceremony. A certificate and silver-topped (in the shape of a duck, naturally) cane are handed to me as proof of this distinction. I join Oprah Winfrey, Kevin Bacon, Queen Noor of Jordan and a few distinguished others in being so honoured. My duties involve helping the Duck Master chivvy the ducks out of their penthouse and along the roof space towards the elevator. Fortunately there is someone else to wipe up the duck poo left in the corner of the lift.

  Duck poo, unpleasant as it is, has great appeal when compared with what awaits me further north in the city of Knoxville.

  Sharing a humerus moment with Rebecca.

  Cadavers!

  Knoxville, after Memphis and Nashville the third biggest city in the state, is home to the University of Tennessee. There is an academic there that I am anxious not to meet. I am sure she is very nice but I am having second thoughts about witnessing her work.

  I arrive at the campus and drive, as instructed, to a deserted parking lot. I see a grey Honda Civic in one corner. I park my taxi alongside it. A woman gets out of the Civic and comes forward to shake my hand. She leads me to a pair of razor-wired, chain-linked, padlocked gates that stand at the edge of the lot. The gates forbid entry but give no clue as to what might lie within. There is only one sign and it says ‘Private’. Rebecca takes out a set of keys, opens the gates and leads me to a garden.

  While Rebecca locks the gates behind her I look around, not letting my eyes settle for too long on any one feature.

  I am standing in a garden. There are trees, a small hut, flowerbeds, vegetable patches and a path that leads up a hill to a copse or spinney.

  ‘Here,’ Rebecca hands me latex gloves for my hands and for my feet covers made of thick woven paper. As I put them on I become aware of something unspeakable weaving its way into my body through my nose. It is a minute trace of something so evil that even a tiny quantity like this fills me with dread.

  ‘This way,’ says Rebecca.

  I step forward for my tour of the Body Fa
rm.

  In 1971 Dr William M. Bass of the University of Tennessee Department of Forensic Anthropology thought that what his department needed was a way of finding out more definitively how human bodies decomposed and so he founded this facility. Donated corpses of all kinds are brought here to decompose and to have that decomposition monitored and calibrated.

  Rebecca strides up to a black plastic sheet under a tree and pulls it back. ‘You see the larvae and flies here?’ she says enthusiastically.

  ‘Dear God! Oh my…but they’re…that’s…’ I try and stay ‘professional’, whatever that means when you find yourself face to rotted face with human remains that writhe, seethe and hum with tens of thousands of flying insects, bugs and maggots.

  ‘You can pinpoint time of death with astonishing accuracy using insects,’ coos Rebecca, gazing down with affection. ‘Different species of fly and bug lay eggs and hatch in human cadavers at different times. You can be accurate almost to the hour.’

  ‘Like on that TV programme CSI?’

  ‘Quite. But there are other variables that police and forensic labs need. What happens when a body is left in a trashcan for instance? Come along!’ Rebecca escorts me to another corner of the garden and lifts the lid off a dustbin. ‘In a sealed space like this what you get is…’

  ‘…the awful smell in full force. It literally makes me jump backwards.’

  ‘We care for these remains. I will certainly leave my body to this facility.’

  I look down into a brown pool of sludge with a few bones sticking out.

  ‘Liquefaction.’

  Just behind the awful sight comes the awful smell in full force. It literally makes me jump backwards.

  I have, in all my fifty years on this planet, never seen a dead body before. Within the space of five minutes Rebecca has shown me more than twenty, some in such appalling states of suppurating decomposition that it is all I can do not to vomit now at the memory. But it is that smell, that wrenching, clenching, suffocating stench that will never, never leave. Once inhaled never forgotten.

  ‘There’s so much we have to know,’ says Rebecca. ‘What happens to a corpse in cool climates in a car trunk? Or hot climates? Under a table in a house? Under this kind of soil or that kind of soil? What happens when it is burned? Or dunked in acid? We find out.’

  ‘How do you…what makes someone decide to do a job like…?’

  ‘Well, you mentioned the CSI shows? We get thousands more applicants a year on account of CSI. Most of them skedaddle once they discover that the work’s not quite the same as on TV. But those who stay love it. We hear from the police of a murderer who’s caught because of our evidence and our data. That’s a moment. A real moment. And we care for these remains. I will certainly leave my body to this facility.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘Oh yes. Now this cadaver is interesting. She died in a car wreck. Note the smashed right cheekbone…’

  For all my age and experience, there had still been some sweet, small, shy flower of innocence inside me when I arrived at the Body Farm. By the time I leave it has gone forever.

  I am more than ready to head for the clean air of the North Carolina mountains.

  NORTH CAROLINA

  ‘Can one really just stand in a basket and be safely blown about by the wind? There is no way this will not lead to disaster.’

  One of the original thirteen British colonies in North America, North Carolina’s capital city Raleigh is named after Sir Walter, who famously (in popular legend and comedy at least) introduced potatoes and tobacco to the Old Country. The very first English child to be born on American land, Virginia Dare, drew her first breath a year before the Spanish Armada on what is now North Carolinian soil. The area where she was born is still called Dare County in her honour. Near to her birthplace is a town called Kitty Hawk which became very famous 316 years after her birth, when Wilbur and Orville Wright succeeded, one winter’s afternoon in 1903, in making the world’s first controlled, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine. Well not the first, as it happens, but the one that everyone celebrates.

  Heavier-than-air machines are all very well, but I am enthralled by the idea of lighter than air travel. I have never been up in a balloon, but just outside Asheville, NC there is a man prepared to take me up to look down on some of the astounding beauty of this part of the world.

  Asheville, I am pleased to say, is one of the most agreeable towns I have yet visited.

  America, as has been widely reported, is in danger of turning the parts of itself that aren’t protected as wilderness or park into strip-mall hell. Hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of miles of Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Denny’s, KFC, Arby’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, Foot Locker, Ross (‘Dress For Less’), CVC and Walgreen Pharmacies, Home Depot, Staples, Best Buy, Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart, et cetera, et cetera. All strung along the highways, all only accessible by car, all unattractive, all resolutely and horribly the same. The town centres from which these strips radiate are often dead by seven in the evening or have degenerated into ghettos of the poor, the drug-dependent and the gang-affiliated.

  Asheville is different, Asheville is very much a ‘why can’t all towns in America be like this?’ kind of a place. George Vanderbilt chose Asheville to be the seat of his enormous Biltmore mansion, the largest private house in the Western Hemisphere, which attracts an average of nearly three thousand visitors a day. Aside from the Biltmore Estate though, Asheville is a city of variety, style, vibrancy, Bohemian charm and architectural (especially art deco) beauty. I walked for miles along its streets without once seeing a Starbucks or a fast-food franchise. Asheville is said to be the vegetarian capital of America, the Happiest City in America for Women–it has gathered all kinds of soubriquets and top ten listings. It has a University of North Carolina campus and other institutions of higher learning, but its charming, free and infectious liveliness cannot fully be explained by it being a college town: there are plenty of cities in America with far more campuses that have nothing like the appeal of Asheville. The New Age features that have accreted to the town in recent years I can leave alone, but batty as they may be, they are peaceful and unthreatening (except to the intellect and will of course) and perhaps contribute to the unspoiled qualities of this wonderful place.

  I have arrived in North Carolina by climbing the mountain road out of Tennessee and heading for the top of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, where the line between the two states overlooks a view of staggering drama. From the top of the Great Smokies one can look all the way across to another famous range further east, the Blue Ridge Mountains, both ranges still being part of the Appalachians.

  * * *

  NORTH CAROLINA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  NC

  Nickname:

  The Old North State

  Capital:

  Raleigh

  Flower:

  Dogwood

  Tree:

  Longleaf pine

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Folk Dance:

  Clogging

  Motto:

  Esse quam videri (‘To be rather than to seem’)

  Well-known residents and natives: James K. Polk (11th President), Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, George Vanderbilt, Billy Graham, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Edward R. Murrow, Tom Robbins, Maya Angelou, Charles Frazier, Ava Gardner, Andy Griffith, Jennifer Ehle, Michael C. Hall, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Earl Scruggs, Ben. E. King, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, Loudon Wainwright III,

  * * *

  The stunning highway down from the mountains to Asheville is called the Blue Ridge Parkway and I drive through Cherokee country to get there. The Cherokee are regarded by many as the most prosperous of the Native American peoples, the tribe that seems most successfully to have adapted to the conditions enforced upon them since the arrival of Europeans all those years ago. Its chiefs have been heads of petroleum com
panies and have chosen a path of greater integration than other Indian nations. Nonetheless the reservation I drive through, including the town of Cherokee itself, is not embarrassed to sell any number of ‘heap big wampum’ style artefacts.

  With Rick the balloonist, taking off over the North Carolina countryside. Vertigo is replaced by astonishment.

  Ballooning

  I meet Rick the balloonist in Candler, a town not far from Asheville. The weather, he tells me, favours our ascent. Two large fans direct the warm air into the envelope until it is as large as a party marquee. I walk around inside, growing in nervousness. I never had the best head for heights. Can one really just stand in a basket and be safely blown about by the wind? There is no way this will not lead to disaster. The whole science of balloon ascension suddenly appears to me to be radically flawed. Somehow I have been helped into the gondola before I can tell Rick this terrible news.

  Between the fierce roaring bursts of burning, there is complete silence. We rise a mile without seeming to do anything. For the first half-mile I am terrified, vertigo turns my knees to jelly and I want to squat down in the basket. But, as in the West Virginia coalmine, I am too cowardly to admit my cowardice.

  Around us there are mountain ranges and valleys of a beauty so intense and in a light so perfect that it almost makes me sad. I am overcome by a kind of astonished ache for the nobility, grandeur and scale of it all. The ‘smoke’ of the Smoky Mountains and the ‘Blue’ of the Blue Ridge are something to do with atmosphere and plant material. It is not cloud or fog per se, but a kind of hazy blue vapour that clothes these hills. Given that there has to be such a phenomenon, why should it also be so beautiful as to tear at your heart?