The Music Of Virginia’s Crooked Road

by Dave Seminara on

It’s Thursday night in Fries, a lonely little, old mill town in Southwest Virginia with a population of 484 souls. I’m with my wife and two boys at the old Fries (pronounced FREEZE) Theater listening to a jam session with a room half full of senior citizens. Admission is free, donations are accepted and hot dogs go for a buck and a quarter at a makeshift concession stand in the corner of the room.
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There are 15 musicians sitting on plastic chairs in a circle under harsh fluorescent lighting, most of them senior citizens, and as they tear into their first tune – a catchy little instrumental number powerful enough to wake the whole slumbering town – I realize that there is nowhere in the world I’d rather be than right here in this old theater listening to a room full of soulful country folk playing the music that’s in their blood.


Fries is our first stop on The Crooked Road, Southwest Virginia’s 253-mile music heritage trail, where old-time Appalachian music and Southern hospitality are alive and well. My boys join the seniors on the makeshift dance floor and before I know it, we’re part of the gang, tapping our feet to haunting renditions of tunes like “Ashokan Farewell,” made famous by Ken Burns and his series on the Civil War, and “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow.”

I’ve paid big bucks in various corners of the globe to see famous musicians whose entourages are bigger than this whole room, but I can’t recall ever enjoying an evening of music the way I’m savoring every melodic moment of this one. My sons introduce us to Ray Vaughan, a 76-year-old house painter wearing a mesh John Deere hat who is showing them how to dance. Vaughan tells us that Fries is the birthplace of Henry Whitter, the first musician to record a country song on a 78 record. His grandson still lives in town.


Vaughan tells us that people in Fries live, breath, eat and sleep music. He’s one of 11 children and each played an instrument.


“The young kids around here mostly go for other types of music,” he admits when I ask why there aren’t any young people in the room. “They’ll pick it up as they get older though. This music here won’t ever die ’cause the songs are just about livin’ the way life is in this area.”


We chat with some of the musicians and learn why they sound so good: they jam here every Thursday night and look forward to it all week long. I ask a few of them, all in their 70s, why they do it and each has essentially the same answer: it keeps us young and it’s who we are.

On Friday, we venture an hour further southwest to Floyd, a delightful small town with country flair and an artsy vibe and make our way to the Floyd Country Store to check out their famous Friday Night Jamboree. The place is, as its name suggests, an old general store with ice cream, food, music and other products for sale. But the place is full with an eclectic mix of locals and travelers, some from as far away as Scandinavia and Australia, to listen to old time music and dance to their heart’s content.

After a gospel outfit completes a pleasant, hour-long warm-up set, a band called Roscoe P and Coal Train takes the stage and electrifies the crowd, which packs the compact dance floor. Everyone wants their photo with Leo Weddle, a regular who wears bib overalls and has but three teeth left.


“I’m pretty much famous,” he tells us. “I’ve danced with people from all over the world. You can’t imagine how many people have taken my picture.”


Weddle tells us that his wife died of cancer four years ago, and he had a rock removed from his gall bladder in 2009. The worst part of the debacle was that he wasn’t able to make it to the jamboree for a good six months. He says that he now has to get kidney dialysis three times a week, but he never misses a Friday night at Floyd’s Country Store.


“Old Time music is in my body,” he says. “I was raised up with it. It’s in my bones. We’re born that way.”

The music is so infectious that we join the crowds on the dance floor and even my little boys practice their flat-footing with a little help from the locals. I wonder why the band we’re listening to isn’t famous and why it costs just $5 to get in. But maybe that’s exactly why the scene and the night are so unforgettable. If I had just one night left on earth, this is exactly where I’d want to be.


On Saturday, we head west on the appropriately crooked Rt. 58 west through a delightfully pastoral landscape to Hiltons, a tiny little country settlement just a stones throw from the Tennessee state line for a concert at The Carter Family Fold. The Carter Family is more or less royalty in the world of country music and the Fold was established next to the old family homestead in 1979.


As we step into the Fold and pay our $7 cover charge, I gravitate to a snack bar that’s manned by a pair of blue-haired volunteers. For $1.50, they serve me the best slice of coconut cake imaginable, and the night only gets better when The Whitewater Bluegrass Company, a terrific five-piece from Asheville takes the stage. The crowd at the Fold is a bit more local than in Floyd and a few of the seniors in the audience have blankets draped over their laps to ward off the autumn chill.


Children flood the dance floor and one woman does a waltz with her dog Opie. She tells us that he was found at the Fold nearly dead and has become something of a mascot in the place.

“He loves music,” she said. “He’s here every Saturday night.”

I can’t help but conclude that Opie is indeed a very lucky dog.

IF YOU GO: I would start a Crooked Road music tour in Fries, on a Thursday night at the Old Fries Theater, then hit the Floyd Country Store on Friday and on Saturday, I’d check out the Fold or I might look for some live music in Galax, a great little town that hosts the world famous Old Fiddlers Convention every August, right in the heart of the Crooked Road. I also recommend a stop at Heartwood, a great place to eat, drink, listen to live music and pick up souvenirs made by local artisans. It’s right off of I-81 in Abingdon.

There’s also a live show every Friday night at the Rex Theater in Galax, but if you go there, you miss the Friday Night Jamboree in Floyd. The Hotel Floyd is a great base if you can get a room there; if not the Hampton Inn in Galax is also a good option.

[Photo and video credits: Dave Seminara]

In Bali With Baggage: Madai

by Jonathan Goldstein on

[read earlier parts of “In Bali With Baggage” here]

Is it possible to avoid the snare of Bali’s cheap drink, massages, great food and beaches to hit the countryside and visit temples? It seems like it’d take some will power. But as indicated in earlier installments, I come from educational film stock. Not amusement park ride stock so, not to brag or anything, but I think I can handle it.

I approach one of the stands on the street that advertises tour guides. For not very much money at all, I’m told I can rent a car with a driver who would take me around all day, from morning until night, showing me rice fields, volcanoes, farms, villages and temples. I ask if I can get a driver who speaks English and they assure me I can. But then the next day, they send me Madai.

Madai can only speak about a dozen words of English but with them, he does a great job of expressing regret for being 15 minutes tardy. He’s in his early 20s and has a very sympathetic face that he’s able to make even more sympathetic by crinkling his brow in a universal show of “what can you do?”

I get into the back of his minivan, feeling like a visiting dignitary. About a half hour into the trip, Madai speaks for the first time. He stops the car and points at a billboard. He mimes snapping a photograph and then points at me.

It appears to be an advertisement for a restaurant. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I take a picture of it.

During our road trip, many of our conversations go like this: after seeing men on the street wearing festive looking paper party hats, I ask Madai why this is.

“For wood,” he says.

“Wood?” I ask. “To carry wood on their heads?” I tap the top of my head.

“Wood. Wood.”

“Wood?”

“No! Not wood. God.”Our route is made up of one-lane highways, and Madai likes to pass as often as is possible. And this is something he seems to almost exclusively do on turns – sharp ones – while going uphill.

Along the road it looks like this: rice field. McDonald’s billboard. Junkyard. Rooster. Hovel. Luxury hotel. Beautiful natural vista. Children playing in the dirt. A temple. Graffiti for rock bands like Rancid.

There are also many signs advertising products that use the language of “the soul.” Even a dish detergent might employ “Journey of the soul” in its ad copy. (The night before, I came across a drink made of vodka, cranberry, pineapple and lychee syrup called “the soulgasm.”)

DH Lawrence said of Americans that they do the most impossible things without taking off their spiritual get-up. But I would argue that that isn’t just an American thing, but is the essence of being human. Right now, Madai is driving along, tattooed, smoking, toggling between radio stations that play Hindu chants and dance music. The spiritual lives alongside the workaday in an easy way that I can’t seem to grasp.

Madai pulls into a coffee plantation and introduces me to the manager. She makes an attempt at explaining to me kopi luwak, which I’ve never heard of before. Later I will look it up online and learn that it is the caviar of coffee and can go for $35 to $80 a cup; but just now, as she explains it to me, I can only think something is being horribly lost in the translation.

“The cat,” she says, “he eat coffee then he poo and it is very superior coffee.”

“What do you mean ‘the cat poo?'” I ask.

She points to her ass. She smiles. She is cute smiling and pointing to her ass.

I know I’m missing something – that she can’t actually be pointing to her ass. Maybe her hip? It’s a “hip” coffee? “Poo” is Balinese for “top rate”?

But we keep going back and forth, the pantomime becoming more and more explicit, until the conclusion is inevitable.

“You mean the cat shits out a coffee?” I ask.

We laugh and laugh as she nods her head, yes.

“Wow,” I say. “There’s no way I’m going to drink a cup of cat shit!”

“It doesn’t smell like poop,” she says sternly. It seems I’ve gone too far, stepped over a line. Still, each time she says the word poo, she points to her ass. We both do.

She takes me out back to a cage in the forest where inside I see a civet – a jungle cat – sleeping, surrounded by what appears to be berries.

I don’t want to insult her, the cat, or their livelihood and so botulism be damned! What is spirituality anyway if not a willingness to see past the material to the realm of ideas? And so I say yes to a cup of coffee that CNN once referred to as “crappacino.” And it doesn’t taste bad at all.

Check back tomorrow for part eight of Jonathan Goldstein’s series “In Bali With Baggage,” or follow the daily-updated thread here.

[Photo credit: Flickr user tiltti]

Leopard Responsible For 15 Deaths In Nepal

by Kraig Becker on

A remote district of Nepal is being terrorized by a man-eating leopard that officials believe is responsible for more than 15 deaths in 15 months. Worse yet, the creature is expected to continue preying on small villages that border its habitat unless steps are taken to exterminate the animal.

The big cat’s latest victim was a 4-year-old boy whose remains were discovered in the jungle, not far from his village, this past weekend. According to CNN, two-thirds of the leopard’s victims thus far have been children under the age of 10. Most of the rest were older children, although the cat has killed a 29-year-old woman who had wandered into the forest alone.

Officials from Baitadi, the district in which the kills have taken place, believe that they are dealing with a solitary cat or possibly two leopards at most. They also fear the number of human deaths may be greater than 15 as the animal’s habitat falls along the border with India, where similar leopard attacks have been reported in recent months as well.

The hunting of wild animals is strictly prohibited in Nepal, which means villagers in Baitadi can’t normally go hunting the leopard. But specialists from the Department of Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Kathmandu have admitted that this particular animal will have to be put down. Its continued preying on humans over a prolonged period of time indicates that it is a dangerous animal that isn’t likely to discontinue its unusual hunting practices. To that end, CNN reports that a bounty worth about $300 has been put out on the animal, whether it is captured dead or alive.

Typically thoughts of Nepal conjure images of snow-capped peaks and high mountain passes, which makes it easy to forget that the country also has some very wild lowland areas too. Those areas are home to a wide variety of wildlife species, including elephants, rhinos, monkeys and even tigers. That abundant wildlife has made those regions popular with tourists, who can get an unexpected safari while visiting the Himalayan country.

[Photo credit: Rute Martins of Leoa’s Photography via WikiMedia]

In Bali With Baggage: A Night

by Jonathan Goldstein on

[read earlier parts of “In Bali With Baggage” here]

I will give travel this: it gives us an excuse. It allows us to get away with things we never could back home. In Bali I can have beer with my breakfast. I can take three baths during the day. I can spend a great deal of mid afternoon time staring at a tree and thinking about trees without the risk of running into an old friend from high school or an ex-girlfriend’s father who always suspected I was a flake. Travel is permission to be absurd, to play, to make believe, to see that all things are make-believe. With its technicolored currency, Balinese rupees seem like the money in a 1960s LSD-inspired board game. It seems like the kind of money Ringo would use to buy magic seeds in “The Yellow Submarine.” By which I mean to say that we are reminded in travel that even the things we take most seriously, that we see as irrefutable metaphysical bottom lines, are relative. When we travel, we look at ourselves differently in the mirror. We talk to ourselves differently in the shower. We dream differently. What does it mean to dream upside down, on the other side of the Earth?

It is with these thoughts in mind that I decide to explore Bali’s nightlife. I should here say that I am not the type. My “going out” shirt makes me feel like I’m wearing a sandwich board that reads “What’s the use?” and bassy dance music makes me feel like I’m locked in a Polo cologne saturated car trunk. But partying is serious business in Bali. And partying means getting F’d up. Magic mushrooms are legal and bars have banners hanging outside that say things like, “All you can drink 100 k” which is about ten US dollars. And there’s “sexy partying,” too. In a horrible place called “Double D” there’s a huge poster on the wall with a quote from Michael Jordan, “Playing every games [sic] like it’s your last.” And just below it, a man approaches trying to sell me Viagra. He calls me brother as the song “Ice, Ice Baby” blares from ceiling speakers.

The streets of Bali seem to throb with bass. It’s the kind of thing that normally sends a “Retreat! Retreat!” message to my brain. When I think about all the things that bassy dance music has kept me from – the women I might have met, the pants I could have bought in stores I was too terrified to enter – it just seems unfair. Not tonight, though. I won’t let it.I sit down at a place called The Espresso Bar and watch a Balinese man phonetically sing the deep tracks from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” It is across the street from a place called Bounty, a foam bar disco with a sign above the door that reads, “Snow on the Bar Party.” Since I’m all in, I cut out and head to my first foam party, but when I get there it isn’t like I imagined. The floor mostly looks like an apartment laundry room when one of the machines has overflowed. There are suds, but you’d probably have to roll around on the floor like a rutting pig to get the full effect.

I watch a guy seated at a table who could pass for an old boiler repairman in a Mike Leigh film. He is seated with a woman who looks like a Polynesian weather girl. What is the story here? The man is actually picking his nose right now. Like he’s back home watching TV.

After spending most of the night pretty much hiding behind a cigarette machine, I realize that in Bali or back home, I’m just not much of a nightlife kind of guy. I decide that tomorrow I want to see the other side of Bali – the spiritual side. Tomorrow I want to see temples. Tomorrow is a new day and the great thing about a new day is that it actually is a new day.

Check back tomorrow for part seven of Jonathan Goldstein’s series “In Bali With Baggage,” or follow the daily-updated thread here.

[Photo credit: Flickr user Carl Ottersen]

Notes on the Great Manhattan Blackout of 2012

by David Farley on

The machine has stopped. The night after the hurricane took a bite out of the Big Apple, I lay in my West Village apartment dangerously close to three tea lights trying to read. I couldn’t concentrate on the book, though. The silence was too distracting. I could feel myself descending into my own personal darkness. Without electricity, hot water, heat, and cellphone service, the loneliness ran deeper within me than anything I’d experienced in a very long time. Like there was an impenetrable fortress wall around me; a solitary confinement sort of alienation; or, worse, a purgatory-like solitariness, as if I’d been condemned to live in this blackened paralysis for the rest of my life.

It sounds dramatic, but the machine really had stopped, to paraphrase the title of a prophetic 1909 short story by E. M. Forster. The sci-fi tale is about a society in the future who lives underground and in isolation from one another; they communicate via instant message and video using something called “the speaking apparatus.” Their quotidian existence, their very being, is totally dependent on this Kafka-esque machine – until one day it inexplicably stops and no one really knows what to do or how to interact with each other.A hundred and three years after Forster’s story was published, it’s safe to say we’ve become very used to being connected to the machine. In 2012, if we’re lonely we need only hang out on Facebook or Twitter or watch last night’s “Daily Show” online, transporting us away from ourselves, making us feel connected to something larger, and/or giving us something we’re becoming alarmingly in need of: self-affirmation.

I woke up the next day and the apocalypse that Forster portrayed hadn’t happened. But clearly New York City was in disaster mode. Electricity, someone told me, could be found north of 26th St. So I began walking north to Midtown, joining a steady stream of people marching toward where the machine was still feeding a population desperate for milk. I strode by mobs of people waiting for infrequent busses running up Sixth Avenue. Others tried to flag down cabs, which were low on fuel and in high demand. One woman on the corner of W. 18th St. and Sixth Ave., stood with her cab-hailing arm in the air, next to her sat an aquarium, her 5-foot pet snake waiting patiently for its ride.

In the distance, I could see it: flashing of lights. Streetlights. Electriciity. “Normality.” I crossed over 26th St. and it felt like being transported into a Technicolor world, a magical land where things buzz and flash and produce commodities. I left SoPo, South of Power, behind and strode right into the 21st century, leaving in my trail a cold medieval world lit only by fire. Are there unicorns in Electricland? Maybe. Can I get coffee and check my email on my cellphone there? For sure.

I spent my days working at the Midtown offices of the travel magazine AFAR, who generously let me camp out in their conference room so I could access the machine. I showered at Midtown locations of New York Sports Clubs. After that first day, the magazine’s co-founder and CEO, Greg Sullivan, wanted to descend into the eclipse that is my neighborhood, to see what a once-dynamic part of the city looks when it’s frozen in a technology-less tenebrosity. I immediately volunteered to play Virgil to his Dante and show him around this newly made obscure nether world.

We strolled the narrow, winding streets of the West Village. It felt like – it was – a ghost town. We occasionally passed other explorers, unable to make out a single physical characteristic of each other. We finally retreated into a bar, only lit by candles, but half full with festive drinkers who proudly wore a we’re-in-this-together spirit on their sleeves. Without the machine to keep us distant and distracted, strangers seem more wont to talk to one another.

Afterward, I went back up to my apartment. After another 24 hours of the deafening machine-less silence, I had begun to become more used to it. I lit some candles, opened up that book I’d been reading the night before, and read until I fell asleep into the dark, quiet Manhattan night.

[Photo by Jeremy Kressman]