JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
writings
At a Fiddler’s Grave, Lewis County, Kentucky, July, 1997
Head of Grassy, Kentucky. The farm was once a “hub” for this part of southern Lewis County. There was a general store, a post office, a sawmill, and a blacksmith’s shop here until the mid 1960s.
He’d surely been driven (for he didn’t drive) up and down the blacktop behind me on the way to some back country gig up Old Trace or back past Kinniconick. If I’d been walking down that road on a summer’s evening in 1967, it’s likely I might have heard the clear, lonesome strains of Portsmouth Airs or Pumpkin Vine issuing from Buddy Thomas’s fiddle, as he sat playing on the front porch of my grandfather’s farm house. Local folks driving by, would have slowed down, honked their horns, and waved.
My grandfather and I playing on the front porch of the stone farmhouse at Head of Grassy in 1975.
It’s been five years since I last visited Head of Grassy, my grandfather’s farm in the foothills of the Appalachians. Grandpa is delighted that I’ve brought my fiddle, and that I’ve been working hard at learning some traditional ‘old-time’ tunes. All morning, he’s been telling stories about Buddy. Now, he’s gone off to take his afternoon nap, and I’ve been thinking about walking up to Camp Dix, to the cemetery, to see Buddy’s tombstone.
The old stone house had housed the post office.
I set off after lunch across the west pasture with a little white hound dog nipping at my heels. Two enormous turkey buzzards circle in the haze above the valley, and as I make my way up the dusty road to Morgan Cemetery, and begin to look for the Thomas plot, I feel a curious sensation that the present moment might be about to open out into some kind of strange epiphany. The July heat and humidity are oppressive, but under this stand of oaks, there is a faint breeze. It will be quiet here, I think, but it isn’t. A bare-backed teenaged boy revs up his dirt bike and roars ups and down the fence row of the adjoining farm. He has a look of desperation about him. As if he knows there is simply nothing he can do to create enough excitement on this unbearably hot, midsummer day. He looks back over his shoulder at me each time he turns the bike around. So much for my epiphany. Finally, he’s called away to chores, and the cicadas begin to buzz in the trees.
Morgan Cemetery, Camp Dix
Ahead of me, through the haze and beyond the tombstones, a line of cows moves slowly into the field which leads up into the dense woods of Tygart Ridge. I’m surrounded here by Bloomfields, Buckners, Garrisons, and Richmonds, families who have farmed in Lewis County for generations, back to the Civil War and before. Behind the rows of modern polished marble stones are foot-high jagged ones, roughly hewn from the sandstone of local creek beds. The crudely chiseled epitaphs have mostly weathered away, but the dates of death, without exception fall within the years of the Great Depression. Several of the newer stones have been obsessively decorated with plastic bouquets mounted on ornate ’arbors.’ One marks the grave of a local boy who died in a car crash. An image of his Ford Mustang has been lovingly etched into the stone next to his high school yearbook portrait. And here at last, is Buddy’s stone, featuring a carved fiddle, and his inscription: “Buddy” ELWOOD CARL THOMAS 1935 - 1974. And next to his stone, his sister Leona’s. She was an accomplished guitarist who played with Buddy on his landmark Rounder Records album Kitty Puss. She died in 1988.
Buddy died of a heart attack, at thirty-nine. He’d become a celebrated figure in these hills by then, and had only just finished recording Kitty Puss, a collection of some of the hundreds of traditional fiddle tunes he had “under his fingers.” He was raised in a remote hollow some miles from here, and had begun to learn his repertoire as a boy, listening to his mother whistling tunes she had learned from her father, who’d been a respected fiddler in his time. Buddy had been born with what everyone used to refer to as ‘a birth defect’, water on the brain, I think. He was short and stout, with a very large head. I have some photographs I keep in my fiddle case, which my father took in 1965. In the first, Buddy is sitting on the sofa next to the coal stove, in the middle of a ‘session’ with Grandpa and Uncle Joe Stamper, who are obviously playing their banjos at full tilt to keep up with Buddy’s miraculous bowing arm. In the foreground, my sister and I, and our cousins Danny and “Sister Babe”, sit mesmerised by the spectacle.
I remember that I felt the whole thing to be more than I could really get hold of. I loved the sound and the rhythms I heard, but though I could follow the melody lines, I could never, for the life of me, remember any part of them later. These hornpipes, reels, jigs, and laments have always carried for me, a mysterious and elusive charge. They are, by turns, tender, rollicking, jaunty, and heart-rending. Many of their titles, like Onion Tops and Turnip Greens, Bell Cow, and Jaybird in a High Oak Tree refer to ordinary life on the farm, but they seem to have come from some remote time and space, where the humblest of subjects are elevated to a level of timelessness.
Hard not to tap your feet to a reel...
As I try to learn these pieces now, I have begun to realise just how rich they actually are. There is complexity and sophistication here, trills, and ornaments and chordal patterns that can be traced back to the French, German, and Scottish immigrants who made their way down the Ohio River and settled in this region throughout the19th century. Buddy made a deliberate choice to preserve these aspects of the music, and though he was also an accomplished Bluegrass player, and was familiar with contemporary styles, he and his family still inhabited, preferred to inhabit, the conditions of another era, in which these vibrant tunes were stitched directly into the fabric of everyday life.
The virtuoso sawing away beneath my grandfather’s Kentucky long rifle.
I’m standing here now, looking up the valley beyond the cemetery. Ripples of heat are rising from the blacktop and I’m thinking about all this music and what’s in it. Whippoorwills are certainly in it, calling in unison on a summer’s night, and roosters crowing all day, and chickens scratching in the dust. There is a long-handled broom in it, sweeping the porch, and the smell of tobacco drying and coffee brewing, and potatoes being peeled. There are horses galloping, coon dogs yelping, rough fish darting through quiet pools, thunderstorms, and a box turtle crawling across the wet gravel road. There is gunpowder, cornbread, corn mash, and tractor engine oil, copperheads and rattlesnakes, and there is sweat from more back-breaking work than I care to imagine.
My grandmother and her oxen in the early 1920s.
The lonesome, sonorous sounds of shaped-note hymns are there, and a radio tuned to The Grand Ole Opry. There is a growling old man and a fussing old woman. There are big black mules in it, snaking logs out of the timber, and oxen pulling a plough through the red ochre earth. Some of it is out of tune, and there are notes missing, and the corners are sometimes shaved off, but every last bit of it is played from the feet up.
Visitors to the general store, who’d arrived on horseback, 1930s
There aren’t many left around here now who play this kind of music. Watching television in the evening has largely replaced sitting in a field or in a woodland, working up a tune to play at a dance. As I walk back to Head of Grassy, I feel sleepy, and maybe more than a little sad, but I have a wonderful old melody playing in my head. Buddy surely knew it. Its a jig in 6/8, a piece I’ve only just learned, called Something Sweet to Tell.
