Perspectives On Country Music, a Documentary Video, and My Serpent-Handling Friends

 Just yesterday, I talked about two articles I was reading - one was on my dissertation committee member's article on the "Four Ugly Step-Sisters" and the other was on an obscure Pentecostal sect in my home state of West Virginia called the Neverdies.  It is my valiant attempt to add more cerebral content to my writing, and I wanted to sort of continue that today as there are a few things I would like to talk about.  I have a feeling there will be a lot more discussions like this, and that is OK.

To post a couple of corrections, I was referencing Chase the Devil and that segment in the film on the banjoist Virgil Anderson.  Turns out I need to make a couple of corrections.  For one, Virgil was from Kentucky, and not North Carolina.  Second, he worked in lumber camps in his younger years, and not in the mines.  But, the context is still the same, so I will now talk a bit about the rest of the film.   

Chase the Devil was a part of a video series called "Beats of the Heart" that dealt with cultural musical forms in various parts of the world.  It was released on the Shenachie Music label as a video series, and was originally produced in 1983.  Overall, the film is quite good, and it does give a general overview of the region of Appalachia as a whole.  I have it now on DVD (I had originally bought it on VHS years ago but upgraded later) and it is also available in its entirety on YouTube.  What I particularly liked about the video was that it also overlapped Appalachian religious traditions with the culture in general, so you have a little bit of secular music in there too as it relates to the context of the topic.  There is, for instance, a couple of scenes featuring an old reclusive miner who converted a coal tunnel into a house, and there is a bit of racy content on it - the old dude has an ex-rated calendar of a topless woman, for instance, hanging on his wall.  That was surprisingly not unheard of for older men of that generation though, as even my own paternal grandfather had a bit of a surprise of his own slipped behind a picture in his stuff that I inherited from Dad - the picture is of a big naked Hawaiian girl, which was a bit of a shock to find.  I am not sure why even otherwise decent old guys would have the occasional naked picture in their possession at that time - perhaps it was a reminder of how they sowed their own wild oats or something when they were in the military.  I never saw a point in anything like that, as I figured just having a normal picture of the woman I love was suitable enough.  After a while, you just seem to understand that it is a sort of "to each his own" thing and you accept it without carrying on that weird tradition yourself.  Another secular scene in the video had to do with a honky-tonk in some rural Tennessee town somewhere - a bunch of the locals were out on a Saturday night just drinking and dancing to some bad country music, and although they looked like they were having fun, the place itself just looked like a dive.  Of course, the song that the bad band was playing was the old "Honky Tonk Angels" song, which was, I suppose, fitting for the setting.  I grew up around some of that as a kid, and it never appealed much to me although the majority of the people who went to them were just local folks seeking a place to hang out, find a date, or just for something to do in an otherwise small town without a lot going on.  Of course, occasionally you'd get a guy or two that had too much to drink and a fight might break out, but it was rarer than many would think.  However, I never had much interest in "honky tonk culture," as a quiet jazz club was always more my thing and still is.  I don't fault many relatives and close friends I grew up with who liked them though, and I understand the culture behind it as it is part of me too.  Let's talk about that for a minute.

When you grow up in a certain culture, there are things that feel comfortable or familiar, but sometimes can feel one way but not both.  I was born and raised in Appalachia, so the culture is part of me.  I know the good, the bad, and the ugly, but also know a lot of just neutral aspects of it that were just there.  Even with things you don't particularly like personally, if they are part of your culture you still know them and understand them, and for me the honky-tonk is one of those things.  I am not a fan of country music for one thing - once you get beyond the realm of Riders in the Sky, the Sons of the Pioneers, or Bob Wills, you lose my interest - and that makes me a bit different from a lot of the people I grew up around.  I don't hate on country music, and if someone likes it, then enjoy it - I don't judge people's musical tastes and I hope they afford me the same courtesy.  That being said, I can tolerate country music as background noise, and in that respect it doesn't bother me.  As a kid for instance, Mom and I had no television in the house, and often the only entertainment we had was the local radio station, which happened to be WELD-AM in Fisher, WV, a tiny town on a back road just outside of Moorefield going southwest toward Petersburg.  With the exception of some local news, religious programming on Sundays, and a good "Polka Party" program on Saturdays, the format of WELD was all country music.  Even if you were like me and didn't particularly like the music, it was just part of the background and you dealt with it.  Country music was just a part of the local culture whether one liked it or not, so it was a matter of peaceful coexistence.  Also, I had started to develop a music interest of my own in vintage big bands, so I had avenues to escape if I wanted to listen to good music as I would soon have my own record player as well as a clock radio my dad gave me one year for Christmas that served me well for years.   Mom also had her own record player as well, and she was into this older 1950s-1960s country music - she loved Jim Reeves, Ray Price, Stonewall Jackson, and people like that, and she would listen to those records a lot too, often drinking and sitting around when she did.  I more or less ignored a lot of that as well too then, but on occasion there would be just a bad country song that would grate on my eardrums like nails on a chalkboard, and I want to talk about one of those now. 

I have been rewatching the old Designing Women sitcom series, which I do have on DVD but they are easier to watch on Hulu streaming.  I got into season 6, where Suzanne goes to Japan and the obnoxious Sugarbaker cousin Allison comes into the picture (what had happened was that Delta Burke, who played Suzanne and did an amazing job developing that character, had left the show and was replaced with Julia Duffy - Duffy loved playing these entitled, stuck-up nasty yappy little women and she was talented at playing characters you loved to hate).  During this time, Julia also loses her long-time love interest, the attorney Reese Watson (in real life Hal Holbrook was actually Dixie Carter's husband, so the chemistry was there naturally I believe) and then finds out she may have to have a hysterectomy and is admitted to a hospital where a strike is going on.  A long-haired and somewhat unusual doctor named Hacker (who is played by a no-talent country artist at the time named Gary Morris), is the surgeon chosen to do the procedure, and fortunately for Julia, she doesn't have to have that done.  However, she and Hacker develop this relationship because apparently his bedside manner is so compelling Julia falls for him, and one of the things he does is bring his guitar into the room and sings country songs to her (go figure - a country singer playing a surgeon singing country songs!).  While the dynamic is good acting, the song this guy sings is what really was grating on the nerves, and the name of the song is "Make the World Go Away," a song written by a guy named Hank Cochran around the year 1960 and then recorded by Ray Price in 1963.  Mom had that record, and Lord have mercy, she about wore it out.  The song is just bad - it was written for the honky-tonk, and its lyrics are so depressing you want to drink yourself into a stupor just hearing them.  Worse than the lyrics though is the tune - that tune is the most ghastly piece of music I think I have ever heard, and of course they would have to feature that song in this episode!  Looking at a bit of biographical information on Cochran, the dude was married 5 times, and he also owned a honky-tonk himself called Tootsie's Orchard Lounge in Nashville, and judging by the way he wrote that damn song, he must have been drinking up his profits.  This is also the guy who discovered weed-warped Willie Nelson too, so that says a lot.  If every copy on record of that damnable song were collected and incinerated, I would think the world would be a better place - I really hate that song!  My mother though loved it, and I remember as a kid hearing her play that thing over, and over, and over - the more drunk she got, the more she listened to it, and then she'd be singing to it too.  It would be around that time that I would plan on being somewhere outside the house so I would not have to hear it.  And, for a while that worked, but then fortunately I got my own record collection and could drown it out with some good music like Sinatra or Louis Prima.   To read this, you may think I hate country music, and most of it I do, but on occasion there are some good compositions that come from the genre that are worth notice, and I wanted to mention a few of those.

Obviously, Western Swing goes without saying - Western Swing is good stuff!  But, there are the occasional gems that come from country music which are not bad songs, and in the right hands they have potential.  For instance, I will be the first one to admit that Hank Williams Sr. was actually a talented songwriter - his tune "Jambalaya" makes an excellent big band and jazz arrangement (particularly Billy Vaughn's rendition of it - stellar record!).  Other country songs also make good classic material as well, with one in particular being the song "One Has My Name."  Now, the subject of the song is not the greatest - it is about a man who is cheating on his wife and struggling to figure out which one he really loves more, the one bearing his last name or the one who gives him a bit on the side as a diversion.  But, the tune of the song is nice, and it has potential.  Another song I actually see as a good country song is an oldie that was recorded by a guy named Cal Smith in the early 1950s entitled "Walkin' the Floor Over You."  The song itself is about a lovesick guy who is missing his girl so much that he loses sleep over her, which isn't exactly unrealistic (love does that to people).  However, the tune of the song is catchy, and I am frankly surprised more big band, pop, and jazz musicians never picked up on it.  And, perhaps one of the best hit country records came out in the 1940s when Eddy Arnold recorded "Bouquet of Roses" - that is actually not a bad record in all honesty.  And, lest I forget, a Lawrence Welk discovery, Lynn Anderson, recorded a very good modern country song in 1969 entitled "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" - I actually liked that one too.  And, also last but not least, I would be amiss if I didn't recognize perhaps one of the greatest guitar virtuosos that ever lived, that of course being Chet Atkins.  Chet Atkins though is widely respected by a lot of musical genres, as he was just, well, phenomenal.  These are a few examples of country recordings I would personally find to be appealing, but there is one more aspect to this I wanted to mention as well.

Nashville is considered by many to the the country music capital, but what many people don't realize is that a very excellent and famous bandleader also was based in Nashville, and ironically, some of his compositions ended up in the repertoire of country musicians later.  The guy I speak of is of course the pianist/bandleader/composer Francis Craig.  Craig had perhaps one of the best - if understated -orchestras of the era, and he is also the guy who is credited with discovering a lady named Dinah Shore too.  There are two major hits associated with Francis Craig - the first was his 1947 composition "Near You," which was also made a hit for pianist Roger Williams about a decade later.   The second was a song called "Beg Your Pardon," which he did a decent recording of with his own orchestra in 1948 but in my opinion the recording that bandleader Frankie Carle released the same year was the better of the two.   In ensuing years, a number of country music stars would record both of those as well, and the songs have become pop standards.  Nashville would also become the hub for a major group of country instrumentalists too who had talents of their own too that extended beyond country music - Chet Atkins of course was one of that group, but it also included pianist Floyd Cramer, trumpeter Danny Davis (who formed the Nashville Brass, which was essentially a country/western big band), saxist Boots Randolph (who became so popular that his famous recording "Yakety Sax" became British comedian Benny Hill's theme), and legend Grady Martin, who I believe at one time also forayed into the big band realm with his Slew-Foot Five in the early 1950s.  The melting-pot of American culture would naturally have led to some cross-fertilization of big band, jazz, and country music, and that is why like jazz, country music is uniquely American.  In that regard, it plays an integral part in regional history of our nation, and despite my personal tastes, it is worth still examining as a historical and artistic phenomenon. 

Now, back to Chase the Devil.  The country music culture, as this film notes, is intertwined with the Appalachian culture in general, and as noted by the producers of the film and as Jeremy Marre points out narrating, it influenced local religious music too.  While gospel music and country music are still quite distinct, they did influence each other as is evident by the number of country music acts (the Oak Ridge Boys, the Statler Brothers, etc.) who started out singing as gospel quartets in the churches there.  In most of Appalachia, there are three very distinct religious traditions that had an impact on the development of what came to be known as Southern Gospel - the Baptists, the Pentecostals, and the Methodists.  There are of course other religious traditions in the hills too - in northern Appalachia, the German-roots population there led to both Dunkard Brethren, United Brethren, and some Mennonites who contributed, and in other parts of the region you had Churches of Christ, Presbyterians, and small Wesleyan/Holiness groups like the Nazarenes too.  But, if you look at the religious heritage of most of the biggest gospel groups of the last century, many of them were either Baptists (like the Statesmen - Hovie Lister was a Baptist pastor) or Pentecostals (such as the Blackwoods, who were heritage Assemblies of God members).  That was not lost on the producers of the video either, as the opening segment features a very lively Pentecostal church in Hillsville, VA, and the closing segment features another similar church some 50 miles away in the town of Norton.  In between are the Baptists - mining activist Nimrod Workman, who was a Primitive Baptist, and the singers Dee and Delta Hicks, who were more than likely Southern Baptists of some sort.   Others featured in the video were obviously Pentecostals (Vern Oxford and Larry Richardson, for instance - I really appreciated Larry Richardson's segment, as he had a very refined singing style), and some were no longer religious at all (such as folk singer Hazel Dickens, who later also had an appearance in the film Songcatcher).  And, of course, the serpent-handlers were given a segment, and actually a decent one too - the narrator did not give the location of the church, but it was obviously the famous serpent-handling congregation in Carson Springs, TN, which in the early 1970s when this footage was taken was pastored by a young man named Alfred Ball, who shows up there.  The name of that church was the Holiness Church of God in Jesus's Name, and later on a former member of that church who became a minister in his own right, Jimmy Morrow, started a congregation nearby in the town of Edwina that carried on the serpent-handling tradition.  Jimmy Morrow is one I want to talk about for a bit, as he is fascinating. 

If the serpent-handling tradition was to have a vetted historian, Jimmy Morrow would be it.  He is the first serpent-handler I know of that wrote not only one, but two, books on the movement from the perspective of one who is part of it.  It is highly doubtful if Jimmy ever even finished high school, much less college, but he is also proof that you don't have to be lettered to write a decent history of something.  This guy had an archive in his house of practically every piece of information ever made available on his movement, and he also relied heavily on a lot of hand-written notes he kept from oral traditions of older members of this group.  He took the roots of the movement even back before the 1910 origination of it with George Went Hensley, and according to Jimmy there were people taking up serpents in church as far back as the mid-1800s.  And, he is not just basing his stuff on hearsay - this is a man who documents his sources, and he was so thorough that it would make a Harvard or Oxford historian proud.  I got his first book some years back, and I also was able to actually talk with him on the phone one time.  Jimmy was perhaps one of the warmest and most gracious individuals I had ever encountered, and he loved to visit and talk with people - I think my own phone conversation with him several years back lasted almost 2 hours.  He was a wealth of information on his faith, and thankfully he also had an actual academic who invested in him and took him seriously, the sociologist Ralph Hood.  Dr. Hood was instrumental, as a matter of fact, in getting Jimmy's book published, and unlike some elitist and stuffy academics you normally encounter, Hood actually treated his hosts with respect and he presented in his own work a fair and balanced account of this community, unlike the flakiness that Dennis Covington displayed in Salvation on Sand Mountain or the outright arrogance that Weston LaBarre had in his book on this movement.  Dr. Hood saw Jimmy and other serpent handlers as human beings, and he did not use them as mere research specimens, but he actually befriended them and established good relationships with many of them, including Jimmy.  If more academics would do this, it would make their work more credible.  I know that probably Dr. Hood had his own opinions and they more than likely radically differed with the people he encountered, but he also was respectful and showed an admirable empathy toward the people he talked to.  That goes a long way, especially with mountain people who can spot BS from a "country mile."  Jimmy passed away a few years back, and I actually regret not getting to chat more with him or to meet him in person - he would have been great to have as a close friend I believe, and the world lost a good mind when they lost him.  Fortunately, his legacy lives on in the two books he authored.  The second book I just learned of last year, and it is a smaller sequel to the first and is also not formally formattted - it consists of handwritten pages, but it is still interesting to read.  There are other members of that community I have had the privilege of talking to over the years, but of all of them I think Jimmy was perhaps one of the most intellectually stimulating - he was a man of little formal education and simple speech, but that belied a very fertile mind that was hungry to learn, and for that I think he deserves the honor of being called a historian in his own right. 

This will conclude a lot of these rambling thoughts for today (oy, I just thought about when it comes to putting together this years blog book - a lot of cutting and pasting!),  Thanks for bearing with me, and will see you soon.