From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road. Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties. Heading west from Charlottesville toward Staunton across the mountains in the valley of Virginia and the Shenandoah River, turn north through the small industrial town of Crozet past orchards of apples and peaches and fields of corn and rye to a small country store in the fork of the road which is White Hall. From there the road winds ever closer to the mountains northward some twenty miles to Bacon Hollow. This region is bounded on the west by the southernmost section of the Skyline Drive and nestles into the gaps and coves which reach up to the Shenandoah National Park line near the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main road is met by many dirt and rocky roads which reach up into the climbing crevices of the Great Blue Ridge on the left and down into the lesser mountains and foot hills back to the east. This is the place and the home of the people I have come to know so well. Bacon Hollow to a great extent recalls and represents itself. With its picturesque name it typifies rustic Americana, contemporary but archaic. So From White Hall to Bacon Hollow describes a journey in time, not of a person but of a people, and of their culture and ways.
My first visits to this area were in 1957. At that time I lived some one hundred miles away in northern Virginia in the Washington, D.C., area. I was a member of the National Symphony Orchestra and nurtured a considerable interest in American folksong, spending much spare time listening to the field recordings kept at the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. I was first presented the opportunity to do some first hand collecting by Roger Abrahams, now professor of folklore and literature at the University of Texas (now at the University of Pennsylvania), and the late Paul Clayton Worthington, folk singer, collector, and recording artist who stayed between engagements in a small rebuilt log cabin in Brown's Cove. It was in Brown's Cove that I first heard folk songs, ballads and tales from Marybird McAllister. In company with Roger and Paul, I would listen far into the night recording what seemed an endless stream of tunes and stories on a small portable tape recorder. My trips to Brown's Cove became frequent, whenever time off from my symphony playing and teaching would permit, and I began to meet and record others in the area. On occasion I would make trips to other sections of the Blue Ridge in southern Virginia and North Carolina. On later trips I traveled and collected folk songs in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Kentucky. But the nearness of the Brown's Cove area and my growing familiarity with its ways and friendship with its people made it my favorite place to collect, visit and enjoy the friends I had made there.
My first attraction to this area was its rich store of folksongs and ballads. I had become aware of and interested in folksong through commercial recordings of “folksingers” and published collections in popularized paperback books. This early fascination was amplified by the abundance of serious works which I found in the Library of Congress along with recordings made in the field by early collectors of singers who were unpretentious practitioners of a folk art. The next step logically was to hear such artists first hand in their natural surroundings and my trips to the Brown's Cove area gave me my first opportunities to do so. In addition to the great pleasure of hearing the old songs and ballads from people who came by them in the traditional manner, the locale provided extra dimensions and impact. The singers were accompanied by crickets, mockingbirds or the clucking of chickens, and I listened looking into the face of the singer rather than at the spinning disc in a record listening booth at the Library of Congress. There was also time for conversation and tales, often anecdotes relating to the song--how it was learned, why it was a favorite or what it reminded the singer of in his own life. The people were friendly, I loved the songs, and the country was totally relaxing in its gently aged beauty. Beyond all of this, it was heady stuff indeed for a young enthusiast to be visiting, the same area--perhaps the same houses--as had the great early collectors like Cecil Sharp fifty years before.
This area had been among the first visited by serious collectors of folksong and had continued to be collected throughout the years. This caused some comment among the younger folklorists that the region was over-collected or “ burned out” as a source of material. Since I was a working musician and at best only a part-time or hobbyist collector unable to visit more remote areas or make extended field trips, I continued to visit the area and casually build up a collection of local lore. As I became more and more familiar with the area and closer to its people, it became obvious to me that those who overlooked it as a collecting source were wrong. There was a serious cross-purpose developing. This small region had been abundantly and continually collected for nearly fifty years but only by collectors passing quickly through, inquiring about songs, listening to songs, jotting down songs for their collections and then moving on. Only the songs had been collected or “over-collected.” I did manage over several years to find a few songs which were not previously collected in this region and to find some unique and very beautiful versions of some of the older ballads, but the area is truly well represented in the many collections of Southern Appalachian folksong.
At first my own approach was probably like that of other collectors in its preoccupation with the songs only. Despite the modern convenience of tape recording I would inquire about songs or ballads and then switch the machine off and on as an informant began and finished a song. This produced a series of songs and ballads strung out on a strand of tape, and once it was taken back to the city to be replayed, it was just as impersonal as the spinning disc of the library field recordings. I could of course remember the location, the personality of the singer and whatever he or she had said leading up to the singing of a certain song, but I had really only collected a song. I also found that some singers were seriously distracted and ill at ease about the obvious presence of the machine and its constant need to be switched on and off. I began to find that the results were much better if the recorder could be placed to the side and left to run unobtrusively and eventually forgotten. The results gained in this manner were greatly superior and well worth the tape “wasted” between songs. Then in replaying the tape along with the stories, asides, and digressions, I found that the songs themselves retained more meaning and impact for me. In recording, I began to encourage this background and verbal enhancement rather than press the singer on to the next song. The proportion of material on tape swung from only songs to a great deal of talk and reminiscence with only an occasional song. This shift of emphasis became known to my friends and was encouraged further by Roger Abrahams whose belief in 'in depth' collecting as opposed to what the terms 'strip mining collecting' of only one genre or type of folklore, is reflected in his own work. So my latest forays into the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area have been taken up with recording tales, riddles, sayings, beliefs, local and family history and all the other things which constitute an oral portrait of what the people there know, remember, and believe. These trips have resulted in a decreasing content of songs and ballads, but a growing amount of the stuff of which this book is made. It is a cross section of oral knowledge, a folklore history of their home place told by the people who have lived there all their lives.
I have not, nor could I have if I wished, abandoned by primary interest in the old songs and ballads. My friends there have not forgotten my original interests either and I am referred there as “Mr. Foss, that song man,” or sometimes “the fat man that hunts up old songs.” They keep bringing up the subject of the old music knowing this will please me but they seem much more at ease knowing we may only sit and talk without the fear of being pressed to perform continuously. So the literally hundreds of songs which I heard and recorded in the area are now spaced on the many spools of tape with all the conversation and yarn spinning which gives a much fuller and more accurate picture of their interests and lives. I have found this most satisfying as a collector. My own abandonment of a monolithic collecting technique has let me get to know the people better and my recurrent visits to my friends have allowed us to visit and talk “in depth” in a way which no “strip mining collector”l; could.
The area from White Hall to Bacon Hollow is old even in those terms used by historians. I feel obliged to mention some of my fellow visitors to the region, although they predate me by most of three hundred years. As with most frontiers, the succession of aliens passes through a predictable sequence: explorer, hunters and trappers, exploiters, settlers, clergy and government, merchants, and finally those whose special interests push them into the area for profit, study, recreation or curiosity.
The first white man of record to reach the Virginia Blue Ridge was one John Lederer, sent there to explore by the territorial Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, in 1669. This seems to have been an isolated incident, and there are no records of further exploration for another fifty years, at which time (1716) a later Governor, Alexander Spotswood, led a band of fifty fellow gentlemen and cavaliers across the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley. This was more an “outing” than an expedition of geographical and historical significance. However, the exploits of “The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe,” as they were dubbed by their leader, Governor Spotswood, encouraged the first land claims and patents obtained from the English crown in the foothills of the Virginia Blue ridge. If indeed the knights of the Golden Horseshoe followed what is today called the Spotswood Trail (Virginia Route 33) from Charlottesville westward through Swift Run Gap, they were the first English visitors to the White Hall- Bacon Hollow region.
The earliest settlers of importance to the area were members of the Brown family. The patriarch of the Virginia Browns was Benjamin Brown, who began acquiring land in Albemarle County in 1747. He amassed six thousand acres of what was to become known as Brown's Cove. Included in these holdings was a tract patented to him by King George III in 1750. Benjamin died in 1762 leaving eleven children most of whom bore names reflecting their father's fondness for alliteration: Brightberry Brown, Bernard Brown, Benjah Brown, Barsillai Brown, Bezaleel Brown, etc. The descendant of most continuing importance seems to have been Brightberry, who is said to have begun work on his homeplace, later to be named “Headquarters” in 1769. Brightberry Brown was responsible for building Brown's Pike, a toll road which passed from the mouth of Brown's Cove up across the Blue Ridge and into the valley to the West. The road was used until 1934 when the Shenandoah National Park was opened to the public and halted traffic across the mountains except by federal highways. A chain put up across Brown's Pike where it crosses the Skyline Drive can still be seen at Brown's Gap overlook.
During the Civil War the old house was lived in by one of Benjamin's grandsons, Thomas H. Brown. On June 9, 1862, following a battle at Port Republic, “Stonewall” Jackson brought his brilliant Shenandoah Campaign to a close and left the Valley to join Robert E. Lee at Richmond. That night he pressed his army eastward up the slopes of the Blue Ridge and descended via Brown's Pike into Brown's Cove past the home site of Thomas H. Brown. Legend says that Jackson used the Brown home as a command post to organize his army for their move to Richmond. Since that time the place had been called “Headquarters.” Thomas H. Brown is said to have turned his inventive skill to making and fitting artificial limbs for those who lost arms and legs during the war.
Thomas H. Brown died in 1872 and “Headquarters” was acquired by Almond Bruce, the grandfather of Lloyd Powell and Hilma Powell Yates and also the uncle of Marybird Bruce McAllister. Perhaps a simplified chart of this genealogy will be of assistance:
(brothers)
Almond Bruce --married--Sarah Powell
Polly Shiflett--married--Larkin "Turkey" Bruce |
| |
| |
| |
| Cordelia m.1st cousin Eugene Powell
| "Aunt Deely" |
| |
Marybird |
Tex Hilma
Lucy Lloyd
6 other children 5 other children
Tales of the Civil War abound in the White Hall to Bacon Hollow region and they frequently take on a near-eyewitness flavor. Marybird's father Larkin Bruce was a young man during the War, and many of the residents speak of knowing veterans of the Virginia campaigns. One Brown's Cove resident, Thomas Frazier, wrote a strangely subjective little book about his recollections of the War years, The Olive Branch price fifty cents.
Most of the residents of the area were fiercely independent and felt no allegiance to the Confederacy. The mountaineers were small land-owners who owned no slaves and were not inclined to leave their homes to fight for what they considered to be the interests of the wealthy. One name, Major Mason, passes through the local tales of the Civil War like that of some great ogre. He was a conscript officer for the Army of Virginia and traveled through the region to press young men into service. Tales are told of traps he laid and evasions he was victim to, but his name is remembered with the immediacy of some timeless bogeyman.
Beginning in the early 20th century the area was visited by a series of folksong collectors. The first was the Cecil Sharp, who, assisted by Miss Maud Karpeles, made collecting trips into the mountains in the summer months of 1916, 1917, and 1918. These efforts resulted in 1932 in the publication of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians -- a book that has served as an invaluable reference and a model for some folklorists. According to this journals, Sharp visited the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area from September 20th to 28th in 1916. He lists this segment of his travels as being from Charlottesville to Brown's Cove and resulting in the collection of forty-two songs. The relatively low yield of material in so rich an area must be laid to the slow modes of transportation (Mr. Sharp and Miss Karpeles went from farm to farm mostly on mule back) and the laborious process of transcribing texts and tunes by hand during countless repetitions of a song. Working at that rate, Mr. Sharp could have fruitfully spent a dozen years in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow region alone. Instead he and Miss Karpeles spent 46 weeks, visited 5 states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia), heard 281 singers, and collected 1,612 tunes representing some 500 different songs and ballads. It is easy to understand his activities when we read in his own words of his wonder and surprise at finding such a rich and untapped store of a commodity which he feared was nearing extinction in his native England.
It is of importance at this point to mention Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., who was a collector of ballads and folksongs specifically of Virginia. He was not a collector in the same sense as Sharp, that is a field worker and face-to-face gatherer of songs. (NOTES?) He was more in the mold of Francis James Child, the great collector-editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that is, he served to gather and organize, to sift and evaluate the field work of numerous amateur, hobbyist and professional collectors. As early as 1929 he produce Traditional Ballads of Virginia; in 1949 he published Folksongs of Virginia and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, all three under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society. A courtly gentleman “of the old school”, he was professor of English literature at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a great span of time. It was professor Davis who was Paul Clayton Worthington's teacher at the University during the 1950's and inspired Paul's interest in balladry and folksong.
Two later collectors who visited and worked in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area were Richard Chase and professor Winston Wilkinson whose manuscripts are now kept by the University of Virginia. They were the first collectors to record the songs of some of the finest singers in the region, Ella Shiflett and Victoria Shiflett Morris as early as 1935.
Some of the family names still found in northwest Albemarle County and Greene County date from pre-Revolutionary times: Brown, Frazier and Jones. Other names commonly found are Walton, Powell, Sandridge and Wood. But by far the most commonly found are Morris and Shiflett. This makes the tracing of relationships very difficult since various branches of the family are only very distantly related but share the same name. Robert Shiflett (designated “Raz's Robert,” i.e. Erasmus' son Robert, to distinguish him from the region's numerous other Robert Shifletts) speculates that the family was originally descended from French mercenaries brought over by Lafayette to aid the colonies in their War of Independence. [webmaster's note: this has proven to be incorrect] This is not contradicted by the first reference to a Shiflett I have been able to find, a Joel Shiflett listed as a landholder in Albemarle County in 1789. Another early reference is to Frances Shiflett, daughter of John Shiflett, named as wife of Bland Ballard who died in 1809. Many of the singers mentioned in this book bear the family name Shiflett or are directly related to or married to Shifletts. Marybird Bruce McAllister was the daughter of Polly Shiflett Bruce. Mary Wood's husband was a Shiflett. The following is another simplified kinship chart which shows the relationship of some of the most outstanding folksingers in the area. Their names are underlined.
brother
&
sister
Ben Shiflett married Icey Shiflett
| Wyatt Shiflett married Rebecca Shiflett
| |
| |
Mack m. his 1st cousin Florence
Melvin Morris m. Effie Ella
Inwood Morris m. Victoria
Carrie
Flora
There are numerous Shiflett-Shiflett marriages and numerous Shiflett-Morris marriages. Robert Shiflett, for example, is one of seven children of Erasmus Shiflett and Ludy Morris.
The exact reasons for such a concentration of traditional songs and ballads within a small area are impossible to state. If the Shiflett family was of French lineage until the Revolution, then their vast store of British lore must be adopted, possibly form such sources as the Morris and Brown families. Then there are those talented singers and story tellers who are from other lineages. Here the common ground is not family but community. It seems from my own experience collecting folksongs, not only in Virginia but over much of that territory covered by Cecil Sharp, that the richness of the folklore harvest is related both to family and community. In the area from White Hall to Bacon Hollow these two factors come together most strongly and the result is correspondingly beneficial to the folklorist. To these two factors we must add a third: the gifted individual. While it is no coincidence that so many fine singers are members of the Shiflett family, I met and talked with many, many Shifletts who did not sing and disavowed any interest in the old songs. Likewise, although the region is culturally homogenous over the past two hundred and more years, not every member of the community practices, is interested in, or even really aware of all its traditional arts. The old stereotype of every log cabin ringing to the tunes of the antiques ballads is not and probably was never true. Family and community provide the environment, the rich soil, but the gifted individual like the good farmer, “makes the crop.”
The area has undergone drastic changes within the past forty to fifty years. The flow of the people, their families and their culture seems to have avoided diversion through all the wars from the Revolution to World War I, through all the national upheavals from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. Change has always taken place, but now, like our own technology, it is accelerating. The most drastic changes have come from the opening of the area to outside influence and contact. This seems to have hinged on two almost simultaneous happenings. First was the opening of the Shenandoah National park, which displayed many of the landholders of the region and made easy access by road. Second was the coming of radio, that automated voice from afar that made self-constructed entertainment and diversion unnecessary. I find the telling of the coming of radio by Mervin Sandridge a terribly sad part of what for me seems a happy book. So with change, the practitioners of the old ways begin to seem first outdated, then quaint, then curious, then past and gone. And those things which were common (if not universal) modes of life are now considered dwindling folk arts.
One of my favorite “hillbilly” stories is of the young city fellow who decided to visit a distant relative in the mountains. The man drove from town on a highway which eventually became a two land blacktop, then a gravel road, and finally a path of two ruts winding through the hills and valleys. He had to abandon his car at a stream and cross on a narrow wooden footbridge and proceed along a rocky path up the steep mountain side. He came to a deep crevasse which had to be crossed by a foot log covered with slippery moss. Then he pushed on laboriously for miles through tangled thickets and up rocky cliffs. Finally he spotted his destination, a small cabin perched atop a steep peak across a deep chasm. He had to take this final step of the journey by swinging across the space on a dangling vine. After much time spent getting up his nerve, the young fellow took hold of the vine and swung over to the peak where the cabin was. Now still trembling and frightened with his shoes muddied and clothes torn he exhaustedly made his way up to the door only to find a note tacked there. . . “gone to the country.”
Every time I visit Mrs. Hilma Yates this story comes to mind and I laugh to myself as the road passes from interstate superhighway through degenerative stages till a hand lettered sign “To Yates” points off the road down a twisting rutted car path full of boulders and deep holes which test the underpinnings of the sturdiest vehicle. After two-thirds of the trip as experienced by the young fellow in the story and just as the car would have to be abandoned, there is Mrs. Yates'. You couldn't get there by mistake. You must really be looking for Mrs. Yates' place to find it. And although I've been there many times and stayed for as long as a week at a time, I've never been there for a day that someone did not come to visit. Not just neighbor folk from down the road but people from Charlottesville and Staunton and from as far aways as Florida and Illinois. There is a steady stream of tortured vehicles bouncing up and down the ruts “To Yates”. Mrs. Yates is a friendly and hospitable person.
Hilma enjoys her stream of visitors and often boasts of the distances they come to visit. Her favorite recollection is of two men who drove in from West Virginia on a bet. One, who knew he had a sure thing bet the other that he knew a woman who could thread a needle with her tongue. They drove up the torturous road and Mrs. Yates performed the trick which she had learned in a school for the blind children set up by missionaries in the district.
Mrs. Yates, almost totally blind, goes about her “in house” tasks in a confident and steady bustle. Any visitor is sure to be presented with heaping plate of biscuits with home churned butter and apple butter from a neighbor's kettle. Meals inevitably include “hog meat” of some kind, fried apples and thick pan gravy. No one remains hungry at the Yates.
Hilma seems to be as much a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains as the hills themselves. She was born at “Headquarters,” the big house that was once the center of the large Brown landholding. She still lives on the old place in a log house which was once the overseer's home in slavery days. The original house consisted of a large main room, a kitchen and dining room and an upstairs loft of bedrooms. This has been added to over its long span and now is a ramble of rooms and additions which house the family as well as boarders and visiting friends. Hilma's immediate family includes her brother Lloyd and her husband Al. Al was an outsider, not from Brown's Cove or even from Virginia. He came from the far away north, from Maine. He came to Virginia, fell in love with Hilma and with the Blue Ridge and stayed. Al does all manner of carpentry and odd jobs. Except for an occasional difference in speech pattern or accent, he is indistinguishable in hospitality and graciousness from Hilma, Lloyd and all their neighbors whom Hilma refers to as “ us hilly billys.”
Lloyd Powell is Hilma Yates' brother and the same congenital disease that had blinded Hilma has robbed Lloyd of all but a faded bit of vision. Lloyd takes care of all the outside chores from working the garden and chopping firewood to milking the cows and slaughtering the hogs in the fall. Lloyd is a very quiet man who will spend hours just listening to the songs and stories which pass about in the front room of his and Hilma's home. Lloyd is a consummate story teller and likes a joke or tall tale as much as anyone. If properly encouraged, especially if he is unaware of the recording machine, he can spin out a yarn with masterful timing and pace in a voice so soft and modulated that it is like a musical performance. His speech is a striking example of local dialect. Even a short response to a query about what he is doing in the garden--“Pullin' up weeds”--will rise and fall as gently as the hills.
For years, Lloyd unswervingly resisted all attempts to get him to sing. He protested that he knew no songs. Finally after literally years of coaxing, he admitted to knowing a few songs which he learned when he was young from some fellows passing through. But they were “not fittin'.” Finally after a great deal more badgering and having been solemnly assured that the recording machine was not anywhere near, he agreed to sing--“Now this song is called, 'Pull up yore dress and I'll do the rest, under the bamboo tree!'”
Marybird McAllister served as my initial point of contact and the focal point of my interest during my first trips into the Brown's Cove area. She is the archetypal mountain woman. Her age (“I'm the oldest one in Brown's Cove.”) and life story have combined to make her almost an anachronism, the last of a species on the verge of extinction. Marybird could neither read nor write. (“Ma and Pap never sent me to school. I wish they had of. I know I could of learnt.”) She was married at fourteen and bore eight children. She was forced to care for her children alone for a long period during the absence of her husband, Lem. She carried in her mind a large repertoire of songs which she constantly added to, and she never grew tired of singing, playing her banjo or listening to others make music.
In her late years she boarded with Hilma Yates, a first cousin once removed, and it was at Mrs. Yates' that I spent many evening listening and recording the songs Marybird pulled from her long memory. Sometimes Marybird would ask us to write a letter for her. Her dictation would be a blend of personal notes, sayings and homilies quoted verbatim, and rhyming couplets extracted from one or another of her songs. The result was much like a literary crazy quilt like the ones she sewed together from countless scraps and pieces.
Marybird's perfect foil was Hilma's husband, Al. The two spent countless hours in intense bickering. Al, a transplanted northerner from Maine, was not totally attuned to Marybird's Southern mountain ways and beliefs. The constant smoldering feud intensified upon the arrival of a television set at the Yates. Al would become livid when Marybird broke into an old ballad right in the middle of one of his favorite shows. And Marybird resented the intrusion of such a disruptive device (“He turns that thing on and you cain't make music in here.”) She was delighted to point it out to visitors, however, and her concept of its electronic intricacies was startling. “ Watch Al there, he can turn them knobs and make 'em sing or dance or whatever. Makes 'em do whatever he wants.”
Once during a break in singing and recording the TV was playing away. A popular crooner came on the screen in one of those dub-over arrangements where three harmony parts are pre-recorded. So there was the singer mouthing his one melody line as out poured a perfectly blended quartet arrangement of his own voice. Marybird sat bolt upright and her dim old eyes brightened and she sat in rigid attention till the number was over. Then Marybird, who in her youth must have been a magnificent singer sighed, “Lord, I never knew anyone could sing like that.”
Robert Shiflett is a well read man who gives the lie to the stereotype of the illiterate hillbilly who unknowingly perpetuates the folk tradition. He is an inexhaustible talker, story teller and conversationalist. He is mechanically gifted (he has made rifles from scratch by hand tooling the barrels and all working parts). He is constantly trying to find more efficient ways to perform menial chores (some neighbors call this “laziness”) like shelling walnuts by driving over the tough husks with tractor tires inflated to a pre-calculated pressure. He collects things from coins to antiques. He combines equal parts of fragile health and hypochondria. He has an acute awareness of those things he is heir to and his role in passing them on to his friends and his children. He is also the only person I “paid&$148; to sing folksongs for me.
I was told about Robert Shiflett by Paul Clayton Worthington and Roger Abrahams who were frustrated in being unable to get him to sing for them, although he discussed and even recited some fine old ballads including one that Worthington described as a &$148;very unusual version of 'The Gypsy Lady' with all sorts of internal rhyming.” I confidently boasted that I would visit with Mr. Shiflett and succeed where they had failed. Throughout my first several visits we talked and talked and talked, but all requests for the singing of ballads received the same reply, “Just can't sing anymore, can't get my breath, my lungs are too weak. But I used to sing a great deal.”
During these long but frustrating talks I learned of Mr. Shiflett's other interests and of his background. I remembered an unusual coin my father had given me, a Confederate Commemorative Half Dollar, and asked Mr. Robert if he had one such. When he said he did not, an idea dawned on me and upon my next visit to the area the fifty cent piece was in my pocket. I went to Mr. Shiflett's neat white frame house and was invited in as usual for coffee and small talk. I fished out the coin and handed it over with the comment that since I was not really a coin collector and he was, I wanted him to have it since he appreciated its worth more than I did. He took it and seemed really touched as he put it with his other pieces. But more important I had touched some spring of rapport between two people who value things that most other people only use or ignore. Robert Shiflett without any further persuasion commenced to perform some twenty five songs, ballads, fiddle and banjo tunes. His lungs held up fine.
“Uncle Dick” Walton is something of a Renaissance mountain man. He has all the talents and skills of the country gentleman, frontiersman and hillbilly. A fine musician and leader of his own string band, he is also a breeder and shower of quarter horses, a skilled hunter and a fine story teller. He tells on himself the perhaps apocryphal tale of going to the general store at nearby Standardsville to find the usual gathering of locals. He proceeded to regale them with a description of his previous day's hunting exploits. “I swear we must of shot a hundred of them ducks as they flew over that corn field. We couldn't keep the guns loaded fast enough. I tell you fellows, we got us enough ducks for three of four years down there in the freezer.” At this point a man unknown to “Uncle Dick” stepped up and stuck out his hand, “We haven't met yet, I'm Cole Bates, and I'm the new game warden in Greene County.” Without hesitation “Uncle Dick” warmly shook the other man's hand, &$147;Well, glad to meet you. I'm Dick Walton and I'm the biggest goddamned liar in Greene County.”
With such friends as those in the Brown' s Cove area, each unique, it is impossible to have a favorite. But I have enjoyed my acquaintance with Mervin Sandridge as much as anyone else I've known. Mr. Sandridge is a cultural schizophrenic, a helpless victim of transition and change with one foot firmly in the past, the other firmly planted in the present. Mervin combines equal parts of practical farmer and cattle grower, balanced with ancient skills, beliefs and bittersweet nostalgia. His attempts to verbalize his feelings about things often betray this duality in a most colorful way. On spells and witchcraft, “Yeah, folks used to believe in all that but I never did. But I've seen things with my own eyes and if you see it yourself you gotta believe it, and I believe it.” On old charms and cures, “That's what they believed in an' maybe it worked. it HAD to work. If it didn't they wouldn't o'kept doin' it, you know.” And as an example of combining antique superstitions with twentieth century institutions, “During moonshine days they used to watch buzzards. They say whenever you see one of these German buzzards, that was a big old buzzard that just flaps his wings real slow, the law was going to come in an raid and get your barrels. So they put out watchmen. I've sat and watched many a day, and, God, I'd nearly freeze.”
Mary Woods Shiflett is a widow with children of her own to raise and a place to look after, but she sets a standard for work that is a legend even among her hard-working neighbors. Every day that weather permits going up into the mountains she cuts lumber with her gas-powered saw. this new-fangled device is her only concession to age and replaces the old crosscut two-man saw she used to sue. Besides, it has the advantage the she can cut alone. Miss Mary has trouble keeping help. (“Mary Shiflett can outwork any three men there is,” as one of her friends put it.) In the Fall Miss Mary slaughters and butchers hogs, then smokes the meat for use on her heaping dinner table. During October and November she makes about twelve kettles of apple butter. Her “kettle” is a huge copper vat which holds six bushels of apples and a hundred pounds of sugar yielding fifty gallons of sweet brown apple butter. Twelve such kettles full represent about thirty working days of picking, peeling, slicing, stirring and canning. At night when most folks are glad of the end of the days labors Mary makes quilts. Bending over the cleared dinner table she hand ties the previously sewn tops creating an endless variety of the colorful rustic quilts which are the basic bed-warmers during the cold mountain winters. Miss Mary completes over two hundred a year. After keeping sufficient for her own family's needs she sells great quantities of quilts and apple butter to neighbors and to people who come especially to obtain the taste and feel of the old timey things.
In addition to these “jobs” Mary takes in boarders who are subsidized by the state government to live in private homes. At different times I have visited when she had a dozen orphaned youngsters or a house full of semi-invalid old people all sharing and benefiting form her enormous energy and strength. Because of this a great number of people consider Miss Mary 'family'.
After hearing numerous tales of the legendary George “Hearn” I was delighted to learn that he had a granddaughter still living in the region. After much difficulty in locating her house on a road that seemed to require endless topping and getting out to open cattle fences, I finally met Nora Herring Shiflett. She lives on a lovely but isolated farm with her husband Hobart Shiflett, and they share a dedicated but 'no-nonsense' reverence for the old times and ways. Hobart takes obvious delight in showing off and demonstrating various old farm implements such as an antique hand reaping hook. Nora speaks with quiet authority about the problems and techniques of tending house and making do in the isolated hills both today and in her grandfather's time. She speaks of old George in a most common-sense manner and only seems slightly amused when confronted with his somewhat sinister reputation. But even Nora is without much detailed information about old George's background. “I have heard people say that my grandfather's father come down in from the South but I never did hear from where he come.” She speaks of his reputed ability to lift spells and cure miseries in terms of migraines and rheumatisms with her grandfather acting as some skilled folk pharmacologist. “I've heard the family say, my father and one of his sisters say, that he learned some from some Indian he was with.” Throughout the afternoon I spent a pleasant visit with Nora and Hobart hearing about the old times and the weather and the planting with gentle debunkings of the legends every time the subject of old George was brought up by me. As they finally escorted me to my car we passed a small patch of greenery and Mrs. Shiflett noticed my curiosity and said, “That's my herb garden.” Mr. Shiflett reached over and picked a sprig. “If you take this here and rub it all up in yore hands like this and then touch some gal you're after, why hit'll make 'em fall in love with you.” Nora just smiled.
David Morris says he was “born right on this place. That was bout eighteen and eighty five.” He walks about his small farm on Waytt's Mountain followed closely by a large friendly dog of untraceable collie and shepherd ancestry pointing out to the visitor his grape arbors, or patiently explaining the various uses of an old spring house, or waves his arm over the high fields as he describes how things have change in his over eighty years. Unlike the austere and bleak hillsides which make up the farms of many of his Blue Ridge neighbors, Mr. Morris' home has a look of gentle solidity. The fields are rounded, not craggy; the buildings are straight and weather-worn, not beaten. This setting and his many years have infused Mr. Morris' conversations with observations which make the listener think that here is some Southern Appalachian counterpart to Ben Franklin's Poor Richard. He is aware of the tall tales and antique ways since they are so much a part of his life, but his comments on them are laced with a humorous and convoluted common sense. “When a person gets drunk and don't know what they doin', how they know what they gonna do? Big difference in a drunk man and a sober one.” Commenting on the telling of ghost tales by a yarn spinning neighbor, Morris said, “Ain't nothin' to hurt you else some wild varmint or no-count people.” And on the local folk custom of planting crops by signs: “Good land and good season is the best sign.”
Frankie Morris keeps her small house overlooking the gentle roll of Wyatt's Mountain. The house is neat and clean, with needlework samplers and religious pictures on the walls, and she has an old radio with orange lighted dial. And of course the center of the house is the kitchen. Frankie Morris is constantly cooking, canning, preserving, cutting, peeling and stirring surrounded by bubbling pots, steaming kettles and fragrant ovens. Her pantry contains hundred of jars in neat rows filled with sweet pickles, brine-cured beans, wild cherry jelly, apple butter and bright red tomatoes. A visit to her house with the inevitable invitation to dinner (the noonday meal or lunch to city folks) is an adventure for the eyes, nose and palate. Dinner will feed from two to fifty depending on how many show up that day. Besides Frankie there is always Florence Shiflett, octogenarian boarder, friend and distant relative. Sometimes Frankie's son will stop in for the meal. He is a genial giant of a man who works the fields and hauls timber with a pair of beautifully matched mules rather than with a tractor because he prefers it that way. As many as are working the fields will come in also and be fed.
Mrs. Morris is a quiet woman but will talk with gentle patience in response to the endless questions about how you prepare such cucumber pickles, or what the old times were like or what changes have come to Wyatt's Mountain.
Florence Shiflett was in her mid-eighties when I first met her and she had always lived in the hills above Bacon Hollow. Some folks prefer to talk and sing rarely, and then only if pressed. Florence Shiflett did not talk much, but for her, singing was as natural as breathing. Singing was a pleasant way to pass a visit with friends or even to make one's solitary hours go by more quickly. Whenever I was with her she was constantly singing. Some of her songs, “Who Killed Cock Robin,” “Peggy the Harmless Creature, ” “The Gypsy Laddie-O” and “Across the Blue Mountain” are among the most beautiful I've ever heard.
Jerry Sullivan is a victim of change, a quiet and gentle man caught in the generation gap between the old times and today's impersonal technology. As a boy Jerry apprenticed to a miller and learned that trade. After his master and teacher retired, Jerry Sullivan took over the mill in Shiflett's Hollow just over the Greene County line. There he made his living by grinding the corn and wheat and rye brought in by his neighbors from their farms. He was also responsible for keeping the mill powered by a creek or run which turned a huge metal mill wheel imported form Germany.
Times changed. People began to buy store bread and turned their fields to cash crops. People gradually stopped coming with their grain and finally the mill wheel rusted and stopped. Jerry Sullivan by this time was too old to adapt. He only knew one thing, milling, and had only one home, the mill. When I met Mr. Sullivan he was ninety-one years old. He responded to my questions about the old mill and the old times by giving me a tour of the place. He slid gracefully among the large grinding stones, the maze of gears and the shaker boxes pointing, explaining and answering my questions. It was a most enjoyable and informative couple of hours. As I was saying my good-byes and thanking Mr. Sullivan for his hospitality and patience, he rather timidly asked me a favor.
“I don't see many folks these days and I wonder if you would mind reading me my mail. You see I cain't read none.” I replied that I would be happy to read him his mail. So we walked a short piece down the road to his one room cabin. Once inside he kneeled down and fished out from under his bed a large cardboard suit box heaped and spilling over with every kind of missive handled by the postal service. There were catalogues, social security law change notices, requests for contributions, electioneering letters and pamphlets, and endless accounts at whatever store. Even with this, the afternoon passed by and dark came. We lit a lamp and read on. The box of mail and my voice gave out about the same time. Jerry thanked me and we said our good-byes again. There had not been one personal bit of mail.
Jerry Lewis' contribution to this account is more in the feeling and color he lends to my own thinking about the area than in his words. Jerry is a silent man, but he says, “I've had my hand on every tree and post in this whole county.” He admits to having turned out his share of moonshine and whiskey, “There's been enough whiskey made in Brown's Cove to wash away all the houses there.” But mostly Jerry listens and wanders. As sure as you can find biscuits and fried apples on any table in the area, you will pass Jerry somewhere on the road any time you drive the road. Often carrying a rifle and accompanied by his dog, he seems almost a phantom figure, dark, tall, gaunt, walking beside the road. He moves freely and is accepted into all homes along the road. During many of the long and animated conversations retold in this book, Jerry would enter the room and without speaking, sit, sometimes for hours, and listen. Jerry shows up to help at the apple butter boilings at Mary Shiflett's or to help with fire wood chopping at Hilma Yates', but he lives alone in a tiny shack further up the cove. I don't know anything about Jerry's early life or about his family. Jerry doesn't talk about them and one doesn't pry.
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