When The Music is Over

By Greg Evans

Often on pale yellow Sunday mornings, quiet, slow days where urgency and movement are equally quiescent, my daughter and I would head out to a little white country church built along a serene two-lane country highway. The small church overlooks some of the the last remaining tranquility of the rural south, surrounded by confederate dead, worn gravestones with faded and long ago forgotten names. We drove along with windows down. Jed Stone blaring from radio. For a minute I felt like we were flying. Until I saw the bulldozer. Reality can really stomp a natural blast of romantic euphoria. We park in the church's parking lot and exit our car, the gravel crunching under our shoes. We are dressed in our Sunday best for the man upstairs. Trying to build up some goodwill after last week's buffett of sin.

I feel the warm sun on my face and heavy, nostalgic winds blowing across the adjacent fields that seem to pick up force as it passes through the graveyard, as if propelled by a gothic slingshot. The air smells like hay. My carefully parted and spruced hair, now resembles a rug (postiche). A small red, abandoned, one-room school house sits on the edge of the property, and I could swear I saw a face in the window. Nobody has been in there though for 100 years or more.

I like being out in the country, at this particular old church, and listening to the silence, smelling the farms and seeing the good rural folks I consider friends, though we don't get out there too much these days.

It is on such occasions, when we aren't working, that we leave the bustling metropolis that is Johnson City, and the maniacal development, and rapidly growing population of maybe 80,000 and counting, for a trip back in time. When I first arrived, I believe the population was around 59,000 or so. Times change, things evolve. Who am I to interfere? Nobody cares or much notices anything is out of the ordinary, or that the kingdom of fear has settled upon us like a pestilence. People just seem to accept things as they are, as they gradually become the status quo. They figure it was inevitable, and thus, no cause for alarm. The German people behaved in a similar fashion, when the Brown Shirts rounded up the Jews, Catholics, and Gypses and gassed them all with herbicide they borrowed from Monsanto and Mr. Green Thumb.

I saw trouble on the horizon early on. I think I was the only one too. It scared me into writing a strongly worded article that I hoped would eventually stirup enough resentment for people to tell the city officials enough was enough.

However, when I sent this article to the Johnson City Press, ten years ago, warning them that Johnson City was on the verge of becoming a shadow of metropolitan Witchita. They scoffed. I tried explain that when the music is over, the lights will turn off. Those are Doors lyrics, arguably complex, but in this case, it is a fairly straight-forward metaphor. The lights are the charm of the wild, and rural southern culture of the Appalachian foothills, snuffed out like a candle. This backwoods, hillbilly culture and the tangible landscape untouched for millions of years now being transformed to one synonymous with cookie-cutter drear.

The article never went to press. It was aggressively deleted, and I never heard another word back. I didn't expect to I guess.

It wasn't long after that I became somewhat paranoid that I was being followed. For a good two-month stretch, my cameras caught questionable movement around my property, but it could have been the bears or some Overhill Cherokee. Things settled down eventually.

We head out to the church sometimes to join my daughter’s mother’s side of the family, one of her sets of grandparents, for an authentic rural southern service, followed by a traditional meal of whatever happened to be served: biscuits and sausage gravy, scrambled eggs in bacon grease with cheese, stewed possum with sweet potato and buttermilk fried squirrel, sausage patties and bacon strips. Sometimes there was wild roasted turkey, slow-cooked and braised orpington, crispy chicken, country-fried ruffed grouse with an Alabama white sauce variation, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, casseroles of every description, dessert, and good ole southern gossip and storytelling.

The church is located outside the small town of Jonesborough, identified as the oldest town in Tennessee. Their preservation efforts, no doubt challenging, have been noteworthy, particularly along Main Street, although the area is becoming merely a vizard of what once was, as the countryside around it, less than a mile down the road, is rapidly disappearing at the hands of avarice.

You may think my apoplectic tone is exaggerated. However, there are no words that could adequately illustrate the sheer hyper-development that plagues this area, even during a gully-washer. It could rain for 40 days and 40 nights and through it all, flooding included, the developers would be building.

Progress used to slow down in places that time seemingly forgot. “Things ain’t what they used to be,” a common phrase you hear uttered like a half-hearted battle cry. Outside my daughter’s grandparent’s house is an old blacksmith’s shop, still standing since before the Civil War. A veritable plethora of such structures once stood along this and other old country roads such as Hairetown. Most are gone now, replaced by this new metamorphosis they call, progress.

Up until a few years ago, until the passing of some of the greatest generation, Ralph, Betty, H, and several others, I was lucky to be able to listen to their stories of the past regularly told around the old hand-carved kitchen table. They'd reminisce on hardscrabble childhoods on farms off remote dirt roads, delivering cargo to troops in the South China Sea during World War II with the merchant marines ("There ain't no biscuits and gravy in Nippon"), and remembrances of life during the Depression, or Prohibition in the rural south. "My daddy made corn liquor right here on this property. Once that sun dipped down below the hills, my daddy would move that liquor and bring home money. Times were hard then. We did what we could to get by," Betty said pointing out across the yard separated by an old fence and beyond it, a field and a barn (which was also their property).

“That's right, "Ralph said, "And as kids we walked to and from school each day, rain, snow, and cold. We never complained once. There were no buses. After school on hot days, we’d hurry over to the crick for a quick dip before heading home to do chores: milking the cows, feeding the pigs, collecting the eggs, and gathering corn cobs to heat the kitchen stove. We were always busy as cats on a hot tin roof,” Ralph said. “No air-conditioning back then.” 

They spoke of working the land to grow crops to can for winter, weaving baskets and other useful things, and then walking the 10 or so miles along the railroad tracks or traveling by horse and cart to the market in Johnson City to potentially sell, but mostly barter, for items they needed.

“My daddy made moonshine. Right here in these mountains to make ends meet,” Betty said.

They had no running water or electricity. The homes were heated on frigid mountain days and nights by the 4x4x8 cords of oak, hickory, and maple they chopped, stacked, and stored. “We were strong back then. We had real men’s muscles. Not those fake gym muscles,” H said laughing.

“You got that right, H,” Ralph said.

“You reckon,” Jenny echoed.

“The Depression came and went. Here and there we’d notice scarcity, but it didn’t affect us too much. We had so little money anyway. We couldn’t jump over a nickel to save a dime. We lived mostly off what we grew and the animals we raised,” Ralph said. “At least that is how it was for my family. Our house was once the only house on this road. My daddy built it. It was a dirt road back then, too. No lights as far as you could see except for the stars in the night sky. I was born in the front room. During the warmer months we didn’t wear shoes. We saved them for the colder-weathered months. And we only got to eat a small piece of candy once or twice a year. Kids today have no idea. But that’s just how it was and we were grateful for having shoes when we did, or for that one piece of candy per year.”

“One afternoon," Betty chimed in, "we had to put that chicken in the pot for supper. Mama made me go get him. But I never liked doing it. We took his head clean off and he took off a runnin’ and we chased this headless chicken around. Can’t let him hide, that was supper!” There were laughs and hoots from around the table. Several of the adult kids and their spouses and children had come into the kitchen and were listening to the stories.

“Growing up in the rural south, especially through the Depression, we didn’t have much. But nobody did. We all worked hard. And we were all happy. I think I was happier back as a kid with nothing, than kids are today with everything,” Ralph would say with a twinkle in his eye. All that is left are the memories. But all good memories.” 

“Rose-colored ones,” Betty said. And they both laughed.