Precious Memories..How They Linger

Yesterday morning I was watching VH1, the countdown or something, and heard a song I wanted to download. I'm not sure how it happened, but one thing lead to another and somehow I went from getting one Pussycat Dolls song to going on a rampage of bluegrass and old gospel downloads. I think I got every version of "Rocky Top" ever recorded, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Johnny Cash with the Carter family, Mother Maybelle, the list goes on and on.

I liked Bluegrass when I was a little kid, but after my parents divorced and the emotional shit hit the fan, I associated that genre of music with memories of Daddy and if you've read my posts for a long time, you know that's not a happy subject for me. He played banjo (badly) and tried to teach me to play (which was even worse, take my word for it.) I managed to learn half of "Cripple Creek" and a couple of other really simple songs, but I never really got any good at it.

I did go through a phase after I got my drivers license when my best friend Mary Lamm and I would go down to the farmers market in Virginia Beach every Friday night to listen to the "pickin' and grinnin" but my taste soon turned to headbanging hair bands. As I've gotten older, Bluegrass music, with it's soul stirring emotions, had just become more and more painful to listen to.

I think when my grandmother died back last fall and I was forced by the universe to face my father for the first time in twenty-something years, something changed inside me. Getting in his face and telling him to get his hands off me, that he was never touching me again, there in front of his five remaining brothers and sisters, their spouses and more cousins than I can count, on his turf, made me realize that the mental bullshit he's caused me all these years would no longer control my life.

And that is why, for some reason, I was able to listen to the music that used to stir so much inside me again without feeling anxious or afraid, at least that's what I think.

I listened to Ricky Scaggs and his boys doin' "Rocky Top" the justice it deserves and I could see the townsfolk at the street dances, the men in their overalls and John Deere hats, women with uncut hair down to their waists in long skirts and barefeet, clogging up a storm. I remembered seeing photographs of my cousin Herman when he was a little boy, as a member of the local clogging team, performing for President Ford at the White House. That lead to the memory of my Aunt Gail's funeral when Herman, now a grown man with two little youngins of his own, walked up to me, saying,"C'mere cuz," putting his arm across my shoulder and whispering in my ear, "Lean on me, you don't have to pretend to be strong now."

I relived them carrying her casket up the steep concrete steps and up the side of the hill to the cemetery, the way he held on to me as I sobbed, the feeling of being allowed to let go of all the emotions I usually put forth so much effort to keep hidden.

I listened to "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," "Dueling Banjos" and "Cripple Creek" by Flatt and Scruggs. I remembered sitting across from Daddy in the den, he with his over-sized silver trimmed banjo, I with my small, plain instrument, playing the chorus to Cripple Creek over and over, never quite getting it right, my chubby little fingers too soft to press down on the strings hard enough. I remembered him taking a pocket knife and carving lines on the inside of the plastic thumb pick I was using so that it would stop slipping off. It's hard for me to think about the things he did which were kind and father-like, not wanting to mentally discount the evil he did at other times.

As the Carter Family sang "In the Sweet By and By" with that mountain twang, almost whining tone that you seldom hear on professional recordings but which graces every Saturday night church singing you go to, I could see Mamaw sitting on her front porch in her wooden rocker, swaying softly, tapping her foot, her eyes closed, her dainty little hand patting her thigh gently as she hummed along with the radio.

And I cried. Tears flowed like the rivers and creeks that bring sustenance to these hills. I was allowing myself to feel something that I usually fight, trying to bury it away in the back of my mind.

I listened to Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton sing "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" and about Honky Tonk Angels. I remembered how I used to ask Ma for permission to play her and Daddy's albums on the "big" record player and how I'd listen to them over and over again, singing at the top of my lungs, perfectly imitating every note, complete with the mountain twang which, like it or not, was a part of me.

Charlie Daniels playing "Cotton-Eyed Joe" reminded me that my great-grandfather played a mean fiddle. I've heard stories of how he'd play for the dances here in town while Aunt Gail clogged. I knew him, for a brief time. Of course, by the time I came along he was quite old and had little patience for the chubby little girl that followed him around. Unfortunately, my clearest memory of him is pushing his wheelchair around the nursing home when he got too old to take care of himself anymore. His fiddle still survives though, tucked away in a closet at my aunt's old house. It was rumored that it was a valuable instrument, but after closer inspection it was learned that it came from a Sears catalogue, back when everything came from those books. There's even a house here in town that began as a "kit house" from Sears, ordered through the mail.

My Scottish blood, at least part of it, came from his ancestors, along with the German and I suspect, a bit of Melungeon.

Dolly and Brad Paisley singing "When I Get Where I'm Going" really brought it all home for me. Remembering all of those who've passed and knowing, not wondering but knowing that it's a better place they've reached.

By last night, I was pretty sure I had my little tear filled jaunt down memory lane out of my system. Then this morning, I turned on the television and was greeted by the movie "Songcatcher" which is about a city woman traveling to our mountains to collect the songs written by the mountain folk. It was actually filmed just up the mountain from here and has a few local musicians in it. Check it out if you get a chance. The way folks live up in the hills hasn't changed that much since the time that movie is set in. Only now there's usually a satellite dish in every yard.

I'd best get to doing a little housework and baking a cake. No occasion, I just feel like baking. Ya'll have a good week.

Later Taters.