Merlefest and Home Grown Music

Twenty-five years ago music icon Doc Watson created Merlefest, a bluegrass festival that memorializes his beloved son Merle who was killed in a tractor accident not all that far from my house.

Every year for four days, music lovers by the tens of thousands share with each other the love Merle Watson had for bluegrass, country, and just plain old mountain music. They flock from all corners of North Carolina, all states of the union, and countless countries across the seas.

Can you pick me out in this picture? I was there, listening. Somewhere. And this was only one stage among fourteen possibilities.

One afternoon I sat in the traditional tent listening to Pete Wernick tell about the many jam sessions he had participated in during the festival and how that alone is worth the experience. After all this is not just a listening event. It's also a BYOB festival, Bring Your Own Bass (or guitar or fiddle) and part of the joy is making music with each other.

Just like what I heard doing this project.

Making music and jamming was a part of growing up at Pilot Mountain School. I caught story after story from former students who learned to play guitar or fiddle or bass just being present during jam sessions at the school. One principal who lived there, in the building (that's worth yet another blog post) opened the doors in the evening to men of the community to join him making music. They came in from the fields or the furniture factories or the state hospital, off work, ready to connect. Of course, they didn't label it as that, didn't even consider that what they were doing was powerful.

But it was.

It was so powerful that fifty, sixty years later they remember and speak in hushed, reverent tones, tears in their eyes. Music was in their soul. Music stretches through ages so that in a schoolhouse with a dozen or on a hill with thousands, there is a connection.

We should all seek out the music.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Author Visit

This morning I'm going to nearby Lenoir Rhyne University to attend the Afternoon With Lynne Cherry session of the school's Visiting Writer Series. Ms. Cherry is an environmentally conscious writer of children's books. I was thrilled to use two of her picture books in my fourth grade classes and my students were super enthused about their projects based on these books.

I want to soak up her wisdom. I want to hear from her how and why she created these two wonderful additions to children's literature. I want to talk with her and tell her how my students reacted to her message and the impact her writing made on me as well.

Pilot Mountain School children were fortunate to meet a fairly reknown author, Bertha Moore McCurry, who wrote under several pen names. She would make author visits to the classrooms and work with the children to improve their writing. I wonder what she said about the how and the why of her writing. But wait, I know the why. She left that answer in a legacy of books, Christian themed books, where her characters lived their faith as examples to follow. Her children's literature series on the three Baers became quite popular back in the fifties. Yes, Baer is spelled correctly, the last name of a set of triplets who got into a variety of sticky situations.

Both ladies achieved what every writier dreams of: They brought a message that left an impact on their readers. What more could an author want from her writing?

So today, just like the eighth grade students on their graduation day back in 1956 when Bertha McCurry was guest speaker, I will sit back, listen, drink in the words Lynne Cherry speaks. I can't wait.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Spelling Lessons

I could use some old fashioned spelling advice right about now as my schoolhouse project is winding down. I'm in the final editing stages and it's not all fun and games. It's tedious and detailed. For example, take the name of an early school in the community. Heavner. Or is it Havener? Or Hevaner? Or, as handwritten on the back of this 1925 class picture, Hevener.

Much to my dismay, it's all four, depending on which source I use. Some little man back in the 1920's sat at a meeting taking notes in the school board minutes and guessed at the spelling, quickly jotting down the word, not even considering the problems some obscure author would have almost a century later.

I'm picking the superintendent's spelling - Heavner. I hope he could spell!

Spelling instruction at Pilot Mountain School was by memorization or by phonics, depending the decade and the latest trend. One person I interviewed said she never learned phonics or letter sounds, that she can't to this day, figure out how to spell an unfamiliar word. If she hasn't memorized it, she can't spell it. Another man said the opposite. He learned to spell using letter sounds, made perfect scores on all his weekly spelling tests every year and has the certificates to prove it.
 
Between the two spellers, there's ten years and a deep division in teaching methods. Why Johnny can't spell? I see why. This project made it clear.
 
Catch of the day,
 
Gretchen

Play Equipment

As I've worked on this schoolhouse project I've been amazed at the individuals who have stepped up and shared stories with me. Last fall, quite by accident, I met the man who purchased the play equipment when the school closed. It was in his backyard, well used through the years of his children and grandchildren. Would I like to see it?

Would I ever!

My husband and I ventured to his house a couple of weeks ago, camera in my hand, fully intending to take pictures to use in the book. I was underwhelmed, if there is such a word. I don't know what I expected, but this is what I got:

It was sort of sad, sitting there neglected at the edge of the woods in his back yard. His children have grown and don't want it any more. Their children have grown and the newest generation has much more exciting equipment to occupy their time and energy.

But oh, the memories I've heard about that one little merry-go-round. About girls tucking in their skirts so they wouldn't fly up while they spun around. About pushing and jumping on and going in circles. About wasting time in the mornings watching the buses arrive.

I have found one photo that gives life to this merry-go-round.

Yes, proof of happiness.

This picture was taken the last year of the school's existence, 1972-73. These two students represented Mr. Leonard's homeroom in the junior high homecoming court back when the seventh and eighth graders were considered minature high schoolers... "junior" high schoolers to be more exact. They copied high school activities, even the homecoming concept of queen and court.

Junior highs have faded away now, replaced by the more appropriate middle school structure that recognizes this age group as more than a younger version of the teenage experience. But for those students who came through Pilot Mountain School the three years it was a junior high, this pre-teen experience was a joy to remember. I have seen this joy in their faces. I have heard it in the stories I collected.

And I pass it along to you.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Stormy Weather

A tornado!

It might be January, but the weather outside is more like an extreme version of March. Yesterday evening's six o'clock news was full of warnings and tornado possibilities and live eye witness reports. Some of those very reports came from people living in the Salem community that I mention often in my Pilot Mountain manuscript. It's barely daybreak now and the morning news is just posting damage reports.

There were injuries, to what extent I don't know, but no deaths recorded. Homes destroyed, though. Trees on cars. Schools in Burke County are on a two hour delay, but is that enough? Will there be electricity so the children can write about their scary night?

Lessons learned at school today might not be straight from the teacher's well designed plan book, but they will be remembered. And some day, fifty years from now, a story catcher will gather today's stories in her net.

Life goes on.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas Dinner

Yesterday might have been Christmas Day, but Christmas is not over yet. Today is our family celebration on my husband's side. Most everyone will be in this year, everyone except my daughter and her husband in snowy Taos, New Mexico, and her cousin and family in Maryland. We will gather to eat, but not all in one room. We've grown that big. The women get the table, the men get the tv trays, key word, tv.

We have our list of food assigned to bring, the usual meats, casseroles, desserts. Two items on the list stood out to me this year, not just because they sound delicious, but because they have a connection to a story I heard while I was interviewing former Pilot Mountain students. It's a Griffith family quirk that I also found alive and well a hundred miles away in this valley.

The first meal I ate at my future husband's house those many years ago was Sunday dinner. That meant roast beef, a southern tradition. It also meant mashed potatoes. Everyone at the table served themselves an ample helping of potatoes and commenced to denting in a little well at the top of the pile, so I did, too. I'm from the north, western Pennsylvania, and when we had mashed potatoes, we also had gravy. So that first Sunday dinner meal, I waited for the gravy to be passed around. No gravy.

Peas.

Everyone put a generous scoop of green peas in that little well, even dribbled them out like green lava from a crater. Never heard of such a thing as peas on potatoes. Couldn't imagine the taste, either. But there they were, eating peas and potatoes like it was an everyday occurance.

Fast forward a lot of years (and a lot of peas and potatoes) and there I am listening to a man tell how he learned to like peas.  He couldn't stomach the taste of them until his family moved to the South Mountains.

So what happened, I asked.

The first day he ate in the school cafeteria he saw students making dents in their mashed potatoes and spooning their peas into those dents. He was extra hungry that day, he remembers some sixty years later, and wanted to eat everything in sight, even peas. He tried it their way. Liked it. Learned to eat peas with, and then without, mashed potatoes.

So is this a cultural thing? Southern? Mountain? A mommy thing? Or am I just behind the times in culinary delight?

As for me, give me a lonely pile of peas beside, not on, my mashed potatoes.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

New Project

Yesterday I started a new project, not that I have finished the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project or anything, but the timing for this offered a window I couldn't pass up.

My mother's eighty-five year old cousin lives way, way back in the Smoky Mountains (yes, another mountain project) just off interstate 40, not all that far from the Tennessee state line. She has asked me for several years now to write the story of her life as a circuit riding (horseback) preacher for the Salvation Army. As I interviewed her yesterday I couldn't help but connect elements of her story to those I've caught from Pilot Mountain.

One especially stood out...the mountain language. In a previous blog, (click here) I wrote about people who moved into the South Mountains as children and found a culture and its language vastly different from any other.

This cousin is, like my entire family, from the coal mining region of the western Pennsylvania mountains. She left our home village and moved to Pittsburgh in the mid forties, war era. She never felt at home in a big city, always missed her mountains, and eventually moved south when she joined the Salvation Army. She found mountains, and even though these were called the same, Appalachians, these were not the same people. When she first arrived, she could not speak their language, athough they both spoke English. The southern Appalachians, specifically the Smoky Mountains, are very isolating, undeveloped even to this day. The early Scotch/Irish settlers kept to themselves, retaining their customs and their old English accents and vocabulary, wary of strangers with Yankee accents.

Enter this tiny missionary, from the Alleghney Mountains, from the big city, and most important to the locals, from anywhere but Max Patch, North Carolina. They couldn't understand her. She couldn't understand them, not their language, not their customs. She invented her own system of sign language in a necessity-mother-of-invention way. She made comical missteps simply because she didn't understand this mountain life.

Adapting to her new home is only a part of her story. Her faith journey is the rest.

I can't wait to go back and capture more of this exciting story.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen