Randy Fitzgerald

In the year of our Lord 2007, it’s hard to find a place of absolute quiet-a place without the noise of traffic, of cell phone rings, of passing conversation, of TV and airplanes and construction.

Once a year we find that place at The Cabin on the Ridge in Southwest Virginia, near Mouth of Wilson. We’ve been coming here in early August every year since 1990, to the best of our recollection, to this pre-Civil War log house with its long-greyed foot-thick timbers notched into one another, held together for generations by some concoction of mortar seemingly turned to stone by time. We come to sit on the wooden glider just in front of the woodbox on the front porch. We come to play a little bluegrass in the afternoons with friends who come over from the Fiddlers Convention 30 miles away in Galax, or to read books in the afternoon breeze off the mountains.

Mostly, I think, we come for the quiet. Most days just about the time dusk turns to evening, the silence is profound. We sit on the porch, acutely aware of all our senses in ways we never are in the city. Sometimes Barb and I play, “Do you hear what I hear?” I might have to focus hard to hear an evening cricket far down in a field ahead of us, or she eventually is able to make out a night bird up the mountains behind us. The hardest sound to hear, perhaps because it tends to blend in with your own breathing, is the faintest rustle of the leaves of a silver maple when the air is so still you can’t see branches move.

When we play our game, Barb says her ears have to “squint” the way eyes do when you really want to see.

Not that the cabin isn’t a feast for the eyes as well. The view from the porch is both pastoral and extravagant. In the mornings two horses play in the front field, a brown one and a pinto. They race each other around the fence and simultaneously get down on their backs and roll around in the grass like circus performers.

Then there are the butterflies in all colors, the tree full of green apples along the dirt road approach, the blackberries and wine berries glistening on their vines. These are a few of the aesthetic pleasures, but then there is Mother Nature’s showstopper: a mountain of unbroken green stretches from the horse field in front of us, up, up, up to the clouds. It’s our own private mountain undisturbed by house or roadway or power lines or any sign of civilization. The view from the cabin must be much what it was during the Civil War.

Not much changes in these hills, and that, too, is part of the charm. If you don’t know Southwest Virginia, let me encourage you to come here before time discovers it. Grayson County is a good place to start. Each year when we come we try to spend a few hours on the Appalachian Trail and a few more making the 18-mile (all downhill) bike ride from high above Damascus down the Virginia Creeper Trail.

Compared to the isolation and serenity of the cabin experience, the Galax part of our week is an assault on the senses. The banjos and fiddles and bass vibes command the air and the ear; the funnel cakes and popcorn, the blooming onions, the smoke from the Australian grill bring the nose to life.

Back at the cabin, it is the smell of Christmas trees that dominates. The Cabin on the Ridge is situated smack in the middle of a Christmas tree farm, an important and pervasive industry in the hills around Independence and Volney. Late at night, through the bedroom window, Christmas comes in early on a breeze of cedar and fir.

All the things we love here are made more poignant this year by the thought that this may be our last stay at the cabin. After almost 20 years of coming to this place, dating back to the time when our children were still in elementary school, we decided this year that perhaps a stay on the top of a mountain at our ages … without a telephone or any neighbors in hollering distance, where a cell phone is useless and a rescue squad who knows how far away … is tempting fate. The very isolation we have craved and so enjoyed is now a bit intimidating.

While we’ll never stop coming to Southwest Virginia and the Fiddler’s Convention in August, it may be that we’ll just have to carry the peace that is the Cabin on the Ridge in our memories.

When I said in a recent column that Barb and I had made our annual trek to the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax in early August, I put off saying that, for the first time in our 19 consecutive years of attendance, we-along with the hundreds and hundreds of other actual and would-be musicians who turned out-got on stage and performed.

 

We definitely belong in the “would-be musicians” group.

 

There is no terror more pronounced than stepping out on a stage with an audience of about 25,000 people. (Actually, 40,000 attended the event, but I feel sure that a lot of those left the bleachers when they heard us coming.)

 

Year after year we have sat in our folding chairs in front of that stage and the big yellow tent behind it and wondered what those folks lining up behind it, out of sight, waiting their turn, were thinking and feeling. Now we know.

 

They were having a great time, right up to the moment they were next in line to perform. Then not so much.

 

Once your part of the endless line moves beneath the big tent, you’re not allowed to practice anymore, so there’s a lot of opportunity to talk to those around you, to the banjo and guitar players, the fellow lugging the big bass, the lady violinist, the kid who’s a whiz on the mandolin. They all come with accents from New York to Australia, North Carolina to Japan. It’s always amazing to find out how far bluegrass has traveled since Bill Monroe pretty much thought it up back in the 1940s.

The thing you don’t want to do is get in line behind a group dressed alike. If a group comes with stage costumes, you don’t want to follow them. It’s also best not to follow a musician with a beard. Those mountain folks can really play.

 

The best beard this year did, in fact, belong to the best fiddle player, Richmond’s own Aaron Lewis, fiddler extraordinaire for the very rambunctious group “Special Ed and the Short Bus.” Aaron was the crowd favorite and the clear winner of the fiddling competition. And “Special Ed” was one of only two groups that I saw get a standing ovation the whole week. You definitely don’t want to follow “Special Ed” onstage.

 

You also don’t want to follow any group with kids. The Galax audiences give huge support to the kids who play or try to play, so the best thing you can do if you’re a “would-be” is to find a kid to join you onstage.

 

We brought one with us. Our band’s musicians included former Richmonder Mary Bear, her grandson Nathan (our kid) and Barb and me, plus a couple of backup singers. That way we filled the Fiddler’s Convention requirements of at least three bluegrass instruments, including guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. The Convention has a number of very specific rules for participating, including how many minutes you must play and what songs can be played. Fortunately, there are no rules about how well you must play.

 

We tried to get daughter Sarah, who again this year flew in from Texas for the week, to join our group onstage with her banjo, but she resisted. So imagine our surprise when she told us at the last minute on Friday evening that she would be playing instead with an old-time band from Richmond, the Jib Jabs, managed by Stavros Carlos.

 

Barb and I were excited to hear that news and went down front with a camera to get her picture onstage. The announcer came out and said, “Here’s Jib Jab, playing “Shave and a Hair Cut, Two Bits,” and out came a half dozen young people from Richmond with various instruments, Sarah among them. I just had time to say to Barb, “I didn’t know that was a real song,” before the band literally played just those seven notes, “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,” and left the stage. Fortunately, the Galax audience does have a sense of humor.

 

As for our group, we sang “Will the Circle be Unbroken?” Actually, we sang it twice, both Friday and Saturday nights. The second night the announcer asked us backstage, “You’re going to sing the same song again?”

 

And Barb said, “It’s the only one we know, and we don’t know it very well.”

 

So sad. So true.

 

We were pretty bad, but we got some applause, and if you want a laugh you can find us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov6Rc8w8Ifk. .

 

I didn’t realize until I saw this video that while I was up there shaking in my boots, voice quivering as I sang, hardly daring to look out at the multitudes below me, Barb was to my left happily waving at folks, swaying back and forth to the music, and smiling like a crazy woman as we sang about the undertaker carrying a poor mother away in a hearse.

 

She was obviously there just to have a good time.

 

Finding yourself in Memphis during Elvis Week is an interesting experience, especially on a day when the temperature promises to go to the highest level in the city’s history–a heartstopping 109 degrees.

That’s the day I’m in the middle of as I write this, happily holed up in a well-air conditioned room at the Peabody Hotel downtown, and extremely pleased that I don’t have to be out among the die-hard Elvis fans who began gathering at the entrance of Graceland before eight this morning for the candlelight vigil scheduled for tonight.

The fact that Elvis fans would wait in this heat for 10 or 12 hours doesn’t surprise me, though. We were at dinner last evening alongside two ladies (one from Las Vegas and the other from England) who each had Elvis’s face tattooed on a shoulder–good likenesses but that much artwork must have been painful.

I came to Memphis for other purposes this week, but I have to say I’ve been enjoying this week-long tribute to Elvis 30 years after his death. Barb and I have taken in several concerts by the Jordanaires and the few remaining band members who played for Elvis along the way, most notably drummer D. J. Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore, who was with Elvis in the early days, when he appeared at Richmond’s Mosque in the mid-fifties.

We also went to a charity event one night, at which Priscilla Presley appeared and spoke, and we shared the Peabody lobby today with Larry King, who ushered the famous ducks to their daily swim in the Peabody lobby fountain.

And everywhere we go, there are the fans. I gather there are about 75,000 of them this year, and so many are from across the seas. The Peabody elevator is always full of different languages and accents, and every restaurant and coffeeshop is packed with folks sporting Elvis tee-shirts, purses, hats, sideburns, pompadours, and this morning, 100+ degree temperature notwithstanding, one pair of blue suede shoes.

Earlier this week we did drive out to Graceland, thinking we might take the house tour again since it’s been a while since we last went through, but that was a joke. There must have been 1000 people in line for the tour buses and at least half that many more queued up inside at the ticket windows. So we just spent a few minutes watching the competition of Elvis impersonators at an adjacent mall before the heat drove us back to the car and the hotel.

One of the interesting people we met that day was a Ph.D. in psychology who studies the Elvis phenomenon from a cultural history perspective. She places Elvis high on the list of Americans who have shaped our country’s cultural impact and destiny, but she also has a personal interest in the King. Her grandmother once turned down a dinner invitation from him, and the story is now part of her own family legend.

I never saw Elvis perform–sure wish I had. I don’t buy into all this adoration and worship of him, nor do I believe in the myth he has become, but–no doubt about it–the man could sing. And clearly there was some incredible charisma to him, to keep a dead man alive for 30 years after he’s gone.

One wonders how much longer the Elvismania will continue. I notice
that on the profitablity scale of dead entertainers, Elvis slipped this year for the first time to #2, behind Kurt Cobain.  But somehow I have the feeling that 30 years from now, Kurt Cobain won’t be creating near the kind of frenzy that I’m seeing in Memphis this week.

At least for 2007 and some years to come, the King lives.