Shenandoah Breakdown

You turn at the fruit stand on Route 7. The country road curls slowly downward through wooded east Virginia hills to the Shenandoah River. Ridges of rock poke their backs through thin topsoil in the scattered fields, and to be knee high by the Fourth of July, the corn crop will have to double its size in two days.

The road abruptly becomes a gooey mix of tar and dust and gravel, twists with the land through a few final bends and spills out onto a 40-acre patch of bottom land bordering the green river. Beyond the fence that runs along the road are two big fields divided by a tree line, and one is already filling up with pickup trucks, campers, trailers, converted school buses and cars. Alongside many of them, orange and green and brown tents have already sprouted.

The folks are settling in for three days at the Fifth Annual Berryville, Virginia, Blue Grass Music Festival.

The sign above the gate says:

Watermelon Park

No Alcoholic Beverages Permitted

A dozen campers and cars are strung out along the road in front of the gate, waiting to pay the admission price--$12 a head for all three days--and then politely scramble for a good spot to camp. Inside on the field, a couple of jolly Georgia boys with epic beer bellies and genuine red necks spot a driver in the line with hair like you'd expect to see on a city boy.

All smiles. "Hey there, buddy, hey you there," one yells, rubbing his barbershop bald head, "how about loanin' me some of that there hair of yours?" Grins.

"Sure thing," shouts the city boy, also all smiles. He grabs a handful and waves it. "How much you want?"

Everybody smiles as hard as he can, and finally the line moves up a long notch.

• • •

The blue-and-white concrete bandstand, about the size of a boxcar, sits to the right of the gate on the shaved top of a little knoll, facing the river through a grove of old sycamores. The Shenandoah here is clean and fast, waist-deep in the middle. Where it bends, the park ends in a spear-shaped tip with a tiny sandless beach. Two dozen kids have already discovered the pool of quiet water there, held by a wide rock ridge that rises and runs barely underwater across the river. Below the ridge lies 30 yards of soft rapids, just wild enough to tempt any kid with an air mattress into shooting them, but about as dangerous as sunning on the bank with the bluegrass widows who sit there watching their kids swim, talking about everything but bluegrass.

Onstage, The Lewis Family is winding up the three hours of hymn singing that opened the festival. It's hymn singing bluegrass style, naturally, get-up-and-go Gospel, banjo picking for the Lord. In front of the stage, in the shade between the big trees, a ragged rainbow of aluminum chairs is growing in arched rows. You're supposed to bring your own seats, but in case you didn't, there's a flatbed truck full of empty apple crates over to the side, and they'll do better than the ground. There aren't more than 300 people watching the show now, but by nine o'clock Saturday night, when The Earl Scruggs Revue comes on, the number will nudge 8000. The space up close to the bandstand has been staked out and claimed for hours, and there might as well be a sign: serious bluegrass lovers only--damn little talking in that section, filled mostly with middle-aged country people in drip-dry Dacron shirts and cotton shifts. Many of the men study the picking and fiddling with eyes squinted and jaws set, like hanging judges hearing evidence at a murder trial, cassette tape recorders whirring on their knees. You don't get to hear live bluegrass much, and they're going to hear it all.

Over to the right of the stage, a tired-looking long-hair stands by a board covered with the buttons and bumper stickers he has for sale. He's a student at Ann Arbor and in the summer covers the bluegrass circuit, having just got in from Bill Monroe's weeklong festival in Beanblossom, Indiana. He digs bluegrass, he says, doesn't know why, he just digs it. The buttons say I Luv Bluegrass, and his bumper stickers invite everyone to Get High On Bluegrass.

• • •

"We've got a big family Bible that's usually marked for fifty-nine-ninety-five," Little Roy of The Lewis Family reminds everybody from the stage, "but we're sellin' it here for twenty-five dollahs."

• • •

The concession stand is to the right of the stage, and to its right is a small white fruit stand that's temporarily become the festival office. Inside, Carlton Haney, the down home promoter who invented bluegrass festivals six years ago, is talking over a minor problem with one of The Country Gentlemen while a mandolin player named Frank Wakefield, unattached, looks on. Haney is short and solid, a friendly man in his mid-50s. After bluegrass, he most dearly loves talking to people and does it in a backthroat North Carolina accent undisturbed by the patch of top front teeth he's missing.

The Country Gentleman is mid-30, handsome and serious. If Merle Haggard had had a really hard life, he'd look like Charlie Walter. He's pointing to a row of tents and tables piled and hung with bluegrass goods for sale, a backwoods shopping mall running 100 yards toward the river. It seems The Country Gentlemen have a table where they're selling Country Gentlemen records, but some independent capitalist is selling everybody's records, including records by The Country Gentlemen, and he's underselling them by a quarter.

"You just tell 'em, Charlie, that they can't do that," Haney says. "You can't tell 'em what to charge for other people's albums, of course, but you can tell 'em that they can't do that to you. I told them people last year I didn't want 'em to come back."

• • •

Ralph Stanley is introducing a song to the Friday-afternoon crowd. He's been on the road playing banjo for 25 years, and you can hear every mile in his voice. He was half of The Stanley Brothers until brother Carter died five years ago, and you can hear that in his voice, too.

"We want to do a sacred song now, we always include some hymns on our program, and this is one that's in our latest album we get a lot of requests for it, and it's the title of the album. Jack Cook you got a lot of albums on the table over there, why don't you tell 'em about a couple of the albums." "Thank you, Ralph, we do have a new hymn album out, the one Ralph just said. It's got a lot of good songs on it, it's been out about three weeks, and we have an album over here, the last show that Carter and Ralph did together, recorded live on stage from Beanblossom, Indiana. And it's on Ralph's private label, you can't get it in the store, and it'd be a good keepsake Carter does the m.c. on it and the applause is on it, so if you'd like to have one of the albums, why, we'll have 'em on sale right here. If you'd like to, come by, and like Little Roy says, if you come by and shake hands with us, have some money in your hand...."

• • •

The pantheon of bluegrass is a long list of unfamiliar names: Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys, The Stanley Brothers, Reno & Smiley, the Lilly Brothers with Tex Logan and Don Stover, Jimmy Martin, The Osborne Brothers, The Country Gentlemen. As a national American obsession, their music ranks right up there with hog calling. The few people who care about it live mostly in the Southeast, with a few others scattered through the Ohio Valley and east Texas. For the rest of the country, bluegrass consists entirely of the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies and the sound track from Bonnie and Clyde--both performed by Flatt & Scruggs, the only bluegrass group that people who live in high-rises have ever heard of.

Which makes sense. Bluegrass goes back to the country, a country that barely exists anymore. The sound is out of the mountains, high lonesome harmonies sung in a rough moonshine blend above a galloping banjo and a hard-running guitar, sweetened with a mandolin and a fiddle that chugs in and out of the thick of things, all in time to the string bass. Many of the songs are traditional, some dating back to English ballads, and many celebrate values just as old. The sacred songs are strictly fundamentalist: You stay right with the Lord and He'll stay right with you, and it's part of His plan when He takes a loved one away. God isn't even sick, let alone dead, in bluegrass music. Of the nonsacred songs, the most memorable are about equally divided between absolute sentimentality, Mother's not dead, she's only a-sleeping', and tough fuck-everybody-but-me anarchy, Morphine run me crazy, cocaine'll kill my baby, nobody's business what I do. Love your mother and fight all night.

It's not the sort of thing that's going to fill Shea Stadium, even though it may be the closest thing we've got to a living folk tradition--and a beautiful one if you listen right. But it's a music with such" a limited appeal right now that even so-called country radio stations seldom play it. A hit single by Bill Monroe, the much-loved father figure who started it all, will sell about 50,000 copies. When Ralph Stanley stands up in front of 8000 people at a festival, he's looking at nearly a sixth of his entire market.

• • •

The Friday-afternoon sun slants through the trees. The crowd is bigger now, 500 or 600. In a back row, flanked by his wife and two restless kids, a crewcut fiddle lover in a white T-shirt raises his hands to whoop over a tasty fiddle break by Tex Logan. His kids look at him like it's just another crazy thing the old man does. His wife looks like she wouldn't mind if he didn't enjoy himself quite so much. They don't see it, but about 30 feet to their left, a girl in an Army shirt, looking too gray and somber not to come from New York, focuses her Nikon F with a 135mm lens on them. Click. Instant folklore.

A few minutes earlier, m.c. Fred Bartenstein, a good-looking kid in his 20s with a slight Southeast drawl, introduced the group. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic moment. This is the first time in over a year that the Lilly Brothers, Tex Logan and Don Stover will appear on the stage together, and the first time ever at a bluegrass festival...." The group comes out, and Logan is the stylish standout with an L. B. J. Stetson, a prosperous bounty-hunter's mustache, string tie, dark neatly cut Western suit and cowboy boots.

Fred Bartenstein is a junior at Harvard majoring in urban planning, and Tex Logan has a master's in electrical engineering from MIT. His current hitching post is a Bell Labs think tank in New Jersey.

• • •

By Friday night, with the stage lit bright and the moon rising high above the hills, it wasn't hard to tell that this was something more than a gathering of Baptist dirt farmers. Most of the 4000 people in front of the bandstand had logged their share of miles in pickup trucks, and many had faces weathered by too much hot sun and raw wind. But scattered among them--isolated clumps of chaos in a field of well-mowed heads and white shirts--were 200 or 300 freaks, dread long-hair dope-smoking freaks with peace symbols and headbands and power-to-the-people handshakes. Weirdo radical revolutionaries sitting next to right-wing racist bigots. Always read the label first.

The small fields of energy where they came together seemed surreal in a hopeful way, even if the mood wasn't precisely lions and lambs. There was no hostility, but a lot of very interesting glances got exchanged, and a number of the freaks decided that staying on the edge of the crowd wasn't such a bad idea. For the most part, it was a musical truce: I come here to listen, and you come here to listen, so let's us listen.

• • •

Depending on who you were, the hit of the evening was either Bluegrass 45 or the New Deal String Band. Bluegrass 45 consists of five ole boys from Kobe, Japan, who play traditional bluegrass--or "brewglass," as they called it. They came out like a vision from a 1961 fraternity party--all madras sports coats, ties, black stovepipe slacks, white socks and penny loafers--and sounded just like a bluegrass band, shitkicking fiddle and all. The crowd immediately shifted gears from critical consideration to Southern hospitality, cheering and clapping for music they would have yawned at if it had come from Ralph Stanley. Like Sam Johnson said of dogs walking on their hind legs, it's not that they do it well, it's that they do it at all.

• • •

The New Deal String Band didn't come on until almost midnight, and people used to getting up at dawn just don't stay up that late, so the crowd had thinned considerably, leaving large patches of empty lawn chairs as territorial markers. The timing was no accident. Bluegrass 45 was one thing, but the New Dealers, with hair to their shoulders and East Village duds, look like a hard rock band with the wrong instruments. Hip bluegrass. They speeded up the bedtime of several good people with a bluegrass version of Bob Dylan's One More Night--greeted with the only genuine boos of the evening, from five or six offended purists--and told the longhairs who they were by introducing a song saying, "We're gonna do this one now, it's a old bluegrass tune we learned from The Coasters....

"I took my troubles down to Madam RuthYou know, that gypsy with the gold-capped toothShe's got a pad down at Thirty-fourth and VineSellin' little bottles of love potion number nine."

One long-haired couple gave up after 12 solid hours of bluegrass and walked slowly back along the dark rocky river path to their campsite, two sleeping bags spread out on the sandy ground between the saplings and small trees along the riverbank. Two old friends they hadn't seen for a year were with them, and they sat around a little fire until late, drinking good cold prohibited beer and finding out about each other again, while the distant jam onstage echoed through the hills.

• • •

It turned out Saturday afternoon that this was a convention, not a festival. The two fields next to the bandstand were packed with tight haphazard rows of pickup campers and tents, and latecomers were threading through them to a third field half a mile from the stage. And, like Mary Martin says, the fields were alive with the sound of picking.

• • •

A wide canvas flap has been strung between two campers, and in its shade two banjo players, two fiddlers, a mandolin player and a guy on guitar are making plenty of music. One of the fiddlers is a young, skinny, shoulderless boy about 16, and at the moment he's seriously proving he has his licks down, paying to join up. The older fiddler encourages him by laying back on rhythm for two or three long tunes before showing him how a man does it. One banjo player is shirtless and shoeless, wearing only khaki cutoffs, wire glasses and a beard. He's trading runs with a guy who could be a small-town insurance salesman, well combed, in a plaid cotton shirt and ample trousers with cuffs. Between tunes, the insurance salesman comes over and asks to see a particularly pretty run that caught his eye, watching hard until he's got it down. The mandolin player has the slack jaw and tight eyes of a real red-neck, but it's doubtful that Lester Maddox would approve the shoulder strap on his mandolin, a gentle pale blue, embossed with alternating white doves and peace signs.

• • •

At the end of the park downstream from the little beach, the woods along the bank start getting thick. In the last clearing, the sweetest music of the festival got played. It started late Saturday afternoon, at the campsite of a lean bearded guy who played a beat-up guitar that sounded valuable. He was sitting on an apple crate opposite a dobro player with a prosperous gut and a canary-yellow cowboy hat. A dobro is a beautiful instrument, a guitar inset with a shining circular metal plate that's got a complex pattern of openings cut into it, like an elegant Turkish hubcap. That was apparently why a media-looking friend of the guitarist was hovering around with a camera, and looking very handy at it, getting in there tight on the dobro. Another media-looking friend stood by close, puffing on a fat joint with chocolate papers--almost the only visible dope at the festival--and getting way into the music. Occasionally the dobro player caught a stray whiff of the grass and shot a puzzled glance at the joint, not like he smelled evil killer weed, more like, What kind of cheap tobacco you smokin', son?

They picked together for an hour. And just as the dobro player started shifting his ass like he'd have to be leaving shortly, Doyle Lawson of J. D. Crowe and The Kentucky Mountain Boys wandered in with his guitar. With the scar on his upper lip, Lawson looks a little like Stacy Keach. He said he'd been looking three hours for someone to do some real picking with. Two sets onstage apparently just got him going.

Word of good jams must travel fast. In ten minutes, other musicians started drifting in with black instrument cases, tuning up and jumping in. One of the first was a short, sun-tanned, 40ish fiddler with an electric-blue shirt and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He frowned and fiddled like a son of a bitch for two hours in the woods--and then turned up later onstage, backing none other than Earl Scruggs.

By sunset, a great golden shine on the river, so many musicians were circled around the two apple crates that they had formed layers, like uneven rings on a tree. A plump kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a pink eager face strolled over, casual-like, not too interested, not his fault he happened to be lugging his bass fiddle with him. The New Deal String Band, camped a little way upriver, one by one decided not to miss this, even though they had picked half the night before onstage.

Half a dozen guitars, as many banjos, two dobros, three mandolins and a fiddle--all lickety-picking along, fast and smooth and happy. It was clean, ain't-things-just-goin'-fine country music, not bluegrass, and the little crowd that sat and stood among the tents, slightly outnumbering the musicians, loved it. One of them, a young balding Pennsylvania lawyer named Pat, obliged a new acquaintance with a running who's who of the personael: Tut Taylor, antique-instrument collector, in the canary-yellow hat; Vassar Clements on fiddle, doing sessions with John Hartford; Leroy Savage on guitar. The skinny guitarist who started the game was Dave Bromberg, a New York studio musician who turned up on the last two Dylan albums, now producing John Hartford's latest.

"They're picking some hard stuff here," Pat said. "Not like that shit they're feeding the Okies on the bandstand."

• • •

When Bob Dylan showed up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with electric guitars and a new sound laced with rock, the hard-core folkies booed him off the stage. Maybe that was in the back of Carlton Haney's head Saturday night as he introduced Earl Scruggs, the Special Guest Star of the festival.

"He's one of the world's greatest musicians. Now, we're gonna ask you to listen to the show, or if you don't want to, you can go over to the side. If you're stayin' here, you're gonna listen and show respect for the show.... Twenty-five or thirty years ago, there was a man took a banjo and played it different from other men, and they told him then it wouldn't work, they told him then he didn't know what he was doin'. The banjo never could be played like that. It was not to go with singin', it was to go with square dancin'. But he didn't believe 'em, they never convinced him. He went to work with Bill Monroe, and he's the man that taken the only native American instrument and adapted it so it could be used in country music, and music around the world. And when the history of music is written, this man's name will be among the Top Ten that's ever lived."

A ripple of noise down front jarred Haney out of his history. "You'll be quiet, or we'll ask you to leave now. If you want to hear what I've got to say, you can be quiet; if you don't, you don't have to stay. I've spent a lifetime bring-in' you these, and you're gonna listen or be quiet! I want you to hear this man, we have longed to have him at a festival."

The cheers and whistles from the crowd meant that Haney had temporarily won. But there was something in the air. And anybody wondering why had only to look onstage, where the equipment men were setting up an electric piano, guitar amplifiers and a set of drums. Earl Scruggs wouldn't be playing pure bluegrass tonight.

Scruggs may have been remembering the 1965 Newport Festival, too. He came out--with his three sons on guitars, Vassar Clements on fiddle and a pretty young lady on piano--and launched right into Nashville Skyline Rag, a Dylan tune. The long-hairs, mostly far away on the edges of the crowd, let out a joyous surprised whoop the moment they recognized their old buddy Dylan, but closer up front the full-time blue-grass fans recognized that they didn't recognize the song and countered the whoop with a low moan of boos--while small groups of offended purists here and there showed how betrayed they felt by packing up their lawn chairs and marching through the audience toward their tents. They didn't come all this way to listen to rock 'n' roll.

You could feel it. It wasn't anything to fight about, but the tension crackled through the air for a few minutes before fading, and in some spots didn't fade at all. When Scruggs followed Nashville Skyline with Dylan's You Ain't Going Nowhere--insult to injury--a couple of hefty farm boys feeling their beer began eying the crowd, looking for someone to slug, the music being as good an excuse as any. Toward the back of the crowd, a clot of would-be hippies were trying to re-create the wonders of Woodstock right behind a row of quiet country people who were trying to hear Scruggs. One of the little Woodstock Nation, a baby-fat teenage girl in hip new hitch-'em-up overalls, was singing along loudly to the music and lurching around in a dance that was probably beautiful if you were on acid or mescaline like she was. If you weren't tripping, it wasn't so beautiful; a blast of artificial energy there it wasn't needed at all. Her girlfriend had a more subdued glaze in her eyes and sat on the ground tossing pebbles and rocks at two empty Coke bottles. She finally broke one, and everybody around her turned to look when it shattered, and the bright shards seemed out of place, too. But she kept working on the second bottle, and one rock, tossed too hard, took a fat bounce and hit the back of a lawn chair. The frail middle-aged man in it shot her a fast angry glance, which she didn't notice, and then turned to his wife. "Fuck-in' hippies," he said. "Fuckin' hippies."

• • •

In the cool silver moonlight, a 30-year-old newcomer to bluegrass wanders toward a fire surrounded by the New Deal String Band and friends. He has a Ph.D. in math from Michigan State and he's in the same Bell Labs think tank that Tex Logan swims in, but it's a big tank and they've never heard of each other. He leans against a Volkswagen bus, listening to the picking and singing, watching the instruments flash in the flying yellow light, grinning to himself. After a few minutes, his old grad school buddy appears at his shoulder, shoving a beer toward him. They sip their beer in the dark, and it's 200 years ago, mountain men coming together in the woods to break the months of silence, among people again, happy and letting loose. America like we wish it was.

• • •

Early false dawn, with thick gray mist rising like cold steam off the river. A thin girl in her 20s sits by a dying fire talking quietly to an ex-academic in a Levi jacket and pants. Their conversation has that special late-night seriousness and intimacy, and they pass a bottle of Ripple back and forth, slowly. But the mood is abruptly brought into daylight by a guy with hair to his shoulders and a good paunch shoving out his orange under-shirt. He comes wandering toward them, smiling, and they recognize him as the mandolin player with the New Deal String Band. When he gets close, he smiles wider and says in a somehow surprising mountain accent, "Yew got any marywana? Ah been tryin' ta get stoned fer three days."

They laugh, and the night's all over.

• • •

"Oh! Lordy!"

It's Sunday-morning shower time in the river for two beer-bellied good ole boys. They come rebel-hooting toward the water, wearing boxer bathing suits and trading hot-damn locker-room shoves. It is a joy to be a hillbilly and alive.

"Know what ah'm gonna do to yew?" hollers one with a grin as they get close to the water. "Ah'm gonna baptize your ass!"

They run unnoticing through the campsite of the same city boy they wanted to borrow some hair from two days ago. Shoving each other in, they splash shouting out into the current.

"Ohhh, Lordy," hoots one, ducking his head, "ah am saved!"

• • •

If you have to leave early, you drive out the gate and up the road to Route 7 with the music from the bandstand still rolling out across the river. And you hear it for a long time after you can't hear it anymore; in random barely heard sounds lurk faint ghostly bluegrass runs. Even leaning back tired in your seat over the wing two hours later, with Washington's serious geometry quickly diminishing beneath you, you can hear hiding in the drone of the jet engines a distant banjo, racing with sweet steps toward home.