With his humorous blue eyes, lightning wit, and love for a story, Uncle Reg reminded me of Mark Twain. Reg loved to travel, yet he was as deeply rooted in his home in the Catskills as Twain was on the Mississippi. As a teenager, I loved to sit up late with my uncle listening to his console-model radio. If we couldn’t find a baseball game, we listened to country music on faraway relayed stations with exotic call letters: WSM Nashville, WWVA, from Wheeling, West Virginia—even a faint, crackling station from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
My love of country music dates from that era. Patsy Cline, crooning her effortless, throaty “I Fall to Pieces.” Heehawing Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. And, of course, the late, great Hank Williams Sr. All rural America was stunned by Hank’s death from a drug overdose on New Year’s Day, 1953. Even the nationwide mourning decades later when the NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. hit the wall at Daytona—WE LOVE YOU, DALE proclaimed handlettered cardboard signs in country dooryards from Alabama to the Northeast Kingdom—did not resonate in the little cafés and roadhouses and small-town barrooms of America like the shocking news that Hank Senior, not yet thirty years old, was gone.
My favorite song in those days was Hank’s “Kaw-Liga (The Wooden Indian).” As my uncle and I listened to the story of the lovelorn cigar-store chief who fell for the carved maiden “over in the antique store,” Reg told me that on our long-planned cross-country road tour, we’d dip down to Nashville, look up Kaw-Liga, and get our picture taken with him. Maybe even have a snapshot taken of us standing by the baby-blue Cadillac Hank died in on that fateful New Year’s Day. Some years later Country Charley Pride would do a better rendition of “Kaw-Liga.” But no one ever achieved the same broken-voiced, brokenhearted, atonal authenticity, with that country song or any other, as Hank.
As I drove into the rapidly expanding precincts of Steve Earle’s Guitar Town that afternoon, heading for my event at Nashville’s Davis Kidd Bookstore (now, sadly, defunct), humming a bar from Johnny and June Carter Cash’s “Jackson,” it occurred to me that all of the country songs I loved best told a story. Many of these stories celebrated the lives and homes of people nobody else cared about. Long-distance truckers. Barroom singers. Coal miners and dirt farmers. Down-and-out rodeo riders and hoboes and death-row prisoners.
Like those country music singers in the fall of 1964, I wanted to tell the stories of the loggers and hill farmers and whiskey-runners and moonshiners of the Northeast Kingdom. Though I didn’t fully know it, my long apprenticeship, one that all writers and songwriters must serve, not only to their craft but to their material, had begun.
That fall, Phillis and I took weekend canoe trips down north-flowing rivers through the most spectacular fall foliage on the face of the earth and hiked up Jay Peak (pre–ski resort), where we could look out over the mountains of four states and much of southern Quebec. We explored Victory Bog, a vast area of wild swamps and boreal forests. We lollygagged for a whole day at the Orleans County Fair. For hours we moseyed through cattle barns decorated with fall wildflowers in sap buckets, marveled at the fruit and vegetable displays in Floral Hall, loitered along the midway to the bright loud carousel music—I’m off to join the circus. We happily inhaled the mingled scents of cotton candy, beer, fried food, crushed grass, more beer, manure from the animal barns, exhaust fumes from the spinning rides, and more beer. We loved being in love and together at the fair. As twilight fell and the colored lights on the game booths lit up the dusk like Christmas, we proceeded to the grandstand to watch the Joie Chitwood Hell Drivers. Later we drifted to the far end of the midway, where I ogled the “girls” at the three girlie shows—five or six hard-featured, tired-looking women in slit-sided robes swaying to the brassy loudspeaker music on makeshift stages outside gaudy tents.
“Mosher!” A voice I recognized all too well was hissing my name from the press of men lined up outside the Paris Revue tent.
It was Prof, tricked out in an old raincoat with the collar turned up, a fedora with the brim pulled down, and an outlandish red muffler. He couldn’t have called more attention to himself if he’d dressed up in a clown’s costume.
“Fall in here, Mosher,” the old soldier shouted. “My treat!”
I looked at Phillis. “Go ahead, lover boy,” she said. “I’ll wait outside if it’s all the same.”
I’m not sure what I expected to see inside the Paris Revue tent at the Orleans County Fair. Some sort of burlesque show, I suppose. What I discovered was a new side of the Kingdom. A seething mob of mostly drunken men had congregated around a platform to engage in oral sex with the “performers.” “Don’t bite, you old bastard—if you do I’ll piss on you or rip off your ears,” snarled one of the women. A barker wielding an electric cattle prod hovered nearby to keep the drunks off the stage. A somewhat younger woman, Miss Paris Golightly, stumbled out on the platform. From the crowd came a feral growl.
By degrees, it dawned on me that these poor women were not over-the-hill Las Vegas showgirls but very probably sex slaves, transported from one backwater to another to engage in a kind of barbaric prostitution. Later I would learn that most of the women were addicted to heroin or cocaine and were coerced to perform to support their drug habit. Also, that these girlie shows were what kept the fair running in the black. Earlier that week Prof had relayed to the faculty a complaint from a school board member that some of the young women teachers were wearing their dresses too short. I recognized this sanctimonious old codger in the knot of men pushing up to the platform. Two or three of my older students were there as well.
“Only in the Kingdom,” I said to Phillis later that night. “What do you do about something like those shows?”
“Write about them, sweetie,” she said. “You tell the truth about what you saw and hope that sooner or later someone will put a stop to them.”
So, time being a sneaky old bastard, this afternoon I’m in Nashville, turning into the parking lot of the Davis Kidd Bookstore to talk about my new novel from the old Kingdom.
Just down the street from the bookstore was the Bluebird Café, where so many Nashville singers and songwriters have launched their careers, and where, ten years before, I had first met my old country songwriter friend Durwood. His iron-gray hair flowing down onto his shoulders, a double shot in one fist, a foaming draft beer in the other, he beckoned a young singer over to his table, and said, in a voice as rusty as the trailer hitch of a junked tour bus, “Little girl, when you set down to write them purty songs of yours, remember two things. All the best stories are love stories. And don’t never hold nothing back.”
This summer, Durwood was in the middle of a one-man war. His shotgun row house on the west edge of town sat hard by the main line of the Norfolk Southern Railway. For the past several months, one of the rails behind his house had been working its way loose from the ties. Each time a boxcar passed over the unmoored rail, it banged like a rifle shot. Several times through the day and night, the long freights going by turned the entire neighborhood into a battle-zone firefight—bam bam bam bam—for up to ten minutes at a time.
Earlier that week Durwood had decided that enough was enough. As the 7:10 City of New Orleans approached, he leaped out from behind the chinaberry tree in his backyard and peppered the lead engine with a double handful of gravel, like David squaring off against Goliath. I had very much hoped, this evening, to witness a rerun of his performance. Instead, when I arrived, Durwood was on the phone to the Norfolk Southern headquarters in Atlanta. Sotto voce, with his hand over the mouthpiece, he informed me that he did not intend to get off the horn until he reached the company’s CEO. An hour of nonstop shouting later, Durwood hung up with a grim smile. Within twenty minutes, a railroad repair truck was pulling into his driveway.
Nashville is full of singers and musicians who, like Durwood, have persisted almost beyond the point of human endurance. Their persistence and faith were not lost on Harold Who, prodding the Loser Cruiser back to his motel through downtown Music City that night. (Have I mentioned that the shock absorbers were shot?)
No doubt someone had left a light on at my Motel 6 that evening, but like the dash lights on the Cruiser, it seemed to have burned out. Groping in the dark for the doorknob, I began to laugh. It must have been the rinky-dink piano music from the club next door to the motel that reminded me. For the first time in years, I found myself thinking about a battered old piano in a Prohibition-era Northeast Kingdom roadhouse and the chain of events leading to my thirty-year friendship with Jim Hayford.