Then I was closer, and I saw that the fires were charcoal and gas grills, where ground beef sizzled in tinfoil, and hot dogs dripped sputtering grease, and I saw that these people were much too affluent to be Okies and that the guitars they played were Fenders and Gibsons and Martins. They were guitars that Woody would never have been able to afford.
After a while Grady wandered up. I knew he’d made id, since I’d seen him a couple of times in crowds and had seen him playing guitar in a tent with other players, guys with homemade basses and washboards and Jew’s harps and whatever fell to hand. I hadn’t talked to him yet, though.
You learn what you wanted to know?
Doc heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record, I said.
I told you that.
He invented the arrangement, though. It’s his song now.
But he did talk to you. Was I right about him, or not?
I guess you were right, I said.
I thought about it. It seemed to me that Doc embodied the kind of values that are going out of style and don’t mean as much as they used to: self-respect and respect for others, the stoic forbearance that Walker Evans photographed and James Agee wrote poems about. Something inside that was as immutable and unchanging as stone, that after a lifetime in show business still endured, still believed in the sanctity of womanhood, family, property lines, the church in the wildwood, the ultimate redeemability of humankind itself.
Life sometimes seems choreographed from the stage of a talk show, where barbaric guests haul forth dirty linen and a barbaric audience applauds, where presidents disassemble themselves before a voyeuristic media, where folks sell their souls to the highest bidder and then welsh on the deal. It was nice that Doc was still just being Doc, just being a hell of a nice guy.
But Doc’s getting old, and those values are getting old, too. Maybe they’re dying out. Maybe in the end there will just be the music. For there will always be the music. It is what Doc loves above all things: from show tunes like Summertime to music leaked up through time from old, worn 78’s by Mississippi string bands, from the hollow, ghostly banjo of Dock Boggs to the contemporary folk of writers like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan.
All Music that will endure and help us endure. The music will never let you down.
INTERVIEW 2008 — 2009
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JMW I’ve seen several interviews with you recently in various magazines around Nashville. Seems like the most substantive was the one you did a couple of years ago for Water Stone.
WG Yea, it kind of wears me out. I feel like it is hard not to repeat myself. Water Stone sent this woman down. She was nice, said she was from Ireland. She just showed up and stayed for several days. She wanted to tape and to tape and to tape and we rode around in a car talking and it got kind of bothersome since she had been there for three days at that time and I rapidly lost interest.
JMW Yeah, end of interview. When I first met you over at the trailer on Grinder’s Creek I would go home and write up our conversations
WG Yeah, Truman Capote could do it. People were intimidated by the tape recorder. He would test himself. Early on he would tape things then he would write it and then listen to the tape and see how close he came.
JMW You can come pretty damn close.
WG It’s hard to go back and go over stuff. That’s why I’ve never rewritten or tried to go back over that Natchez piece. (He is referring to a book he was working on several years before, a novel about the early days on the Natchez Trace. He had one scene where the characters come up to a swollen river that he thought was the best thing he had ever written. However the manuscript was stolen and has never been recovered.) It just seems like ground I have already covered. I’ll probably do it sooner or later, especially since I don’t have another idea for a novel. I’ve finished Lost Country and now will have to start on another.
JMW I’m trying to remember was Bloodworth’s band in Provinces of Night the Skillet Lickers?
WG No, it was the Fruit Jar Drinkers. I had that woman asking him, “You don’t have a drink on you, do you Mr. Bloodworth”. And it said, “Of course he did.” What would a Fruit Jar Drinker be without a drink?
JMW Weren’t the Skillet Lickers in there somewhere. Were they a real band?
WG They were a great band. They were like the Beatles of their day, like the rural Beatles They sold a lot of records; they were from Georgia. They had a sound that nobody else has been able to duplicate. My brother and I talked about this once. He was a big Skillet Lickers fan and had all these records. They figured out how to have more than one fiddle player and most of the other bands only had one. They didn’t even have a banjo player just guitar and fiddle with an extra fiddle that made it sound different. I want to see if Oxford would like me to write about the Skillet Lickers before people forget about all that stuff.
JMW Are the Skillet Lickers on the Harry Smith album? (Harry Smith compiled and edited the three album Anthology of American Folk Music, commonly known as the Harry Smith Anthology, which came out in 1952.)
WG No.
JMW I don’t think I have ever heard them.
WG They have the best version of Casey Jones I have ever heard and I have heard a bunch of versions of Casey Jones. They were sort of humorous and did country comedy and sometimes they would just do straight songs. There were a lot of people who imitated them, I found that out when I was living in that trailer and I was writing a piece on the Delmore Brothers. I researched a bunch of that stuff about that time and found out about some of the other groups. I’ve got anthologies with songs that sound like the Skillet Lickers.
JMW Did you hear that kind of music when you were a kid, either on the radio or being played anywhere around Lewis County?
WG Nobody wanted to be backward, or consciously backward. The music I heard as a kid came from a stack of records my Daddy had, a bunch of old 78’s: Jimmy Rogers, the Skillet Lickers and the Carter Family. We had an old crank up phonograph. I listened to the radio all the time but I didn’t like country music; I was listening to pop music. When Elvis Presley came along it kind of reordered my world. Not the later Elvis but the stuff he did for Sun Records, that was great stuff. I went from there to folk music. It was what I thought was real folk music but it was like the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters and Peter, Paul and Mary. When I first got into Dylan I went backwards. I read this thing that said a lot of his influences came from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music so I got into that and I ended up going into it backwards.
JMW Harry sure opened that door for a lot of people.
WG Oh yeah.
JMW So now it seems like the Kingston Trio and all that were just doing popularized versions of songs from Harry’s Anthology. Is that right or not?
WG They did some; how they got famous was nobody was buying Dylan records because people thought that he couldn’t sing with his raspy voice. Well Albert Grossman was Bob Dylan’s manager and he thought how can I get this stuff out over the radio so he formed a group. He knew these folk singers around the Village so he put three of them together, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow. So Grossman put them together to do Dylan type songs.