With Hal Clark and Jim Deuvendeck at the Heritage of America Festival
Wichita, Kansas,1975
When I was around 13 or 14, I bought an upright piano for $5 from the
Gibbons, who lived a couple of houses down and across the street from us on
Daines Drive in Temple City, California.
I walked over there with my dad’s handle-less handcart (called a “dolly,”
but I doubt whether anyone else alive now would know the word in that sense). Somebody must have helped me lift up the old
upright piano while someone else kicked the dolly underneath it. But once it was balanced precariously on the
tiny dolly, I carefully shoved and guided it back home over the bumpy asphalt
street and long driveway to our detached garage, where my dad had built in a
small room—originally my brother’s bedroom when he was a teen, and then my
music practice room after my brother moved out.
This was the best $5 I ever spent in my life. The sturdy old full upright was a gift from
the musical spheres humming through the universe. Its bass was a rumbling, mellow, resonant
thunder, and the upper register was clear, ringing, and bright, but not tinny
or obnoxious. It was a hell of a piano.
About this time, I heard the Weavers’ 1955 Carnegie Hall album
(recorded on Christmas Eve, but blessedly devoid of Christmas music). I don’t know how or why I found that album. But, inspired by it, I bought a pocket-sized “Burl
Ives Songbook” (which had just been published in 1953), a wonderful collection that ranged from the
Revolutionary Period (“Heart of oak are our ships”) through the dust bowl
days. At the back of this book, I think,
there may have been diagrams on how to construct the chords that decorated the
collection’s lead sheets, and that’s how I learned what chords were, how to
form them on a piano keyboard, and how they supported a melody. I worked my way through the Ives book,
banging out newly-learned chords on the piano, and singing out with the abandon
that comes from knowing you’re alone in a garage.
Eventually I moved on to John Lomax’s epic “Our Singing Country,” which
in turn led to the discovery of Smithsonian Institution recordings and
especially Folkways Records—Jelly Roll Morton, Sven Bertil Taube (traditional Swedish
songs with guitar accompaniment), Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, and the gritty union
songs of Pete Seeger.
After a while, I picked up a big collection of the songs of Rodgers and
Hart at the Arcadia Public Library, and by playing (and “singing”) through it,
I learned the mysteries of the more complicated chords characteristic of the
great American songbook--i.e., Broadway show tunes and, to a lesser extent, Tin Pan
Alley pop music. That library also had
an LP recording of “The Boys from Syracuse,” which remains my favorite Rodgers
and Hart musical comedy.
Back to folk music. Because of my background in the folk genre, I could sniff fairly
dismissively at the Kingston Trio’s relatively slick adaptations of traditional
songs—though I did enjoy their modern comic songs, like “The
MTA” and “Merry Minuet” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp6dsKleGpU).
Later, when I went to Los Angeles State College, I
met two fellow students named Larry Rich (whose wedding several years later I described in my April 1, 2015, blog entry) and Pat Pelfrey.
Both of them grew up just a few blocks from my house, but in a different
school district, so that we had never met until we got to college.
As it turned out, Pat Pelfrey’s family taught me quite a bit more about
American folk song. Here’s why.
The Pelfreys, or at least the Pelfrey parents, originally hailed from
Four Mile, Kentucky, which is located in Hazard County, the site of much strife
in the mills and coal mines of the 1930s and 1940s. As one of
the union songs from that time and place puts it,
They say in Hazard
County
There are no
neutrals there.
You either are a
union man
Or a scab for J. H.
Blair.
Which side are you
on?
Which side are you
on?
Out of this desperate milieu, Pat’s father, Paul, became a union
organizer. I’m not sure now which union
he worked for, but I seem to remember it involved ceramic and/or brick makers. He was a member of both the B’nai B’rith and
the NAACP, which made him unique in my limited experience of the world. Later, after I had moved to northern
California for graduate school and gradually lost contact with the Pelfrey
family (but not Pat), he and Mrs. Pelfrey moved to Mississippi to organize laborers, and I remember Pat
telling me that the KKK had burned crosses in their front yard, and they had also suffered in other ways for their politics
and cultural values.
Even so, I regret to say that I was most impressed by the fact that Mr.
Pelfrey called everybody—man, woman, boy, or girl—by the name “Jerry.” I suppose females thought he was saying “Gerry.” Incredibly, it worked. In a room crowded with Jerry after Jerry, and/or
Gerry after Gerry, we always knew which Jerry/Gerry he was talking to or about.
From time to time, the Pelfreys were visited by family members still
living in Kentucky. These included Uncle
Red (a lean, silver-haired, patrician lawyer) and Uncle Harold (a short, bald,
rotund school teacher), along with wives and cousins. Inevitably, they’d gather for a night-time
party, and to one of these they invited me, along with their pal Mr. I. W.
Harper.
The first time I went to one of these gatherings, I didn’t know a soul
except Pat, who was chatting with inquisitive kin, so I sat at the piano and
started playing Broadway tunes. This was
early in my life, so I pretty quickly ran out of musical-comedy numbers and
started to sing (and bang out on the piano) my pretty sizable repertoire of
folk songs. The first of these that I
ever did for them was called “The Longest Train”:
The longest train I ever saw
Ran around Joe Brown’s coal mine.
The headlight passed at six o’clock,
The cab come by at nine.
The prettiest girl I ever saw
Was on that train and gone.
Her skin was fair and her eyes were blue
And her hair, it hung way down.
That long steel rail and that short cross-tie,
They carried her away.
‘Twas transportation brought me here,
I’ll be coming home some day.
Well, that’s what I would have
sung. But as soon as I got through the
first verse, everybody in the room—and I mean everybody in the room—started to sing with a startling, softly
nasal twang:
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines,
I shivered the whole night through.
You caused me to weep, you caused me to mourn,
You caused me to leave my home.
Little girl, little girl, don’t lie to me,
Tell me where did you stay last night?
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
And I shivered the whole night through.
I no longer recall the exact words they sang, since there are dozens
and dozens of version of this song—some African-American (as by Leadbelly),
some Bluegrass (by everybody from Bill Monroe to Dolly Parton). But it was the first time in my life in which
a whole roomful of adults knew one of the songs that I had learned from the
Ives and Lomax books, and could sing it straight through.
Encouraged by the response to “In the Pines,” I started to play and
sing dozens of others, and the Pelfrey clan frequently would sing along with
me, urge me on with appreciative shouts, or take time from family conversations
to politely applaud when I’d finished a ditty.
One night, Mr. Pelfrey (Paul) came up to me while I sat at the piano,
put a hand on my shoulder (a common Pelfrey conversational move), and said, “Glenn,
play us a song with the sound of marchin’ feet.”
I did “The Banks Are Made of Marble,” and several of the Pelfreys sang
the chorus with me:
I’ve seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land,
And I’ve prayed we’d get together
And together make a stand.
That we might own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door.
And we might share those vaults of silver
That we all have sweated for.
That was a crowd favorite in a union family (although Uncle Red, the
lawyer, always seemed a bit subdued with them, or perhaps amused and tolerant),
and they also enjoyed some protest songs about mill owners and such:
Old man Sargeant,
Sittin’ at his desk,
The damned old fool
Won’t give us no rest.
He’d take the nickles
Off a dead man’s eyes
To buy a Coca-Cola
And an Eskimo pie.
—from “The Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues”
One evening, after I’d finally run out of songs and drunk a bit too
much of Mr. Harper’s bourbon to continue without swearing at missed chords and
forgotten lyrics, rotund Uncle Harold came up to me, put his hand on my
shoulder, and said solemnly, “Glenn. . .if you wake up ever’ morning with a
bluebird on your shoulder. . .,” and then sat down on the sofa and fell
asleep. Eventually, I decided that this
old adage must end “. . .then you’ll have birdshit on your pajamas.”
But I would never have used
such language among the Pelfreys. They
were far too polite for such talk, and in particular, Pat’s mom “Aunt Lacey”
would surely give me what for. One
Saturday morning, while Pat and I sat in their house’s darkened living room
watching a broadcast of a basketball game on their black-and-white TV (east
coast games were then shown as early as 9:00 a.m. on the Pacific Coast), Aunt
Lacey came into the room, looked at us, and said “Hmmph. You boys have straight your raisen.” This linguistic puzzle stunned me, and even stumped
Pat, who after all had grown up with her.
“Ma’am?” he said (being just as country courtly as the rest of that
crowd). She replied, with exaggerated
slowness and stress, “You. . .boys. .
.have. . .straight. . .your. . .raisen!” And then she left the room.
Pat and I looked at each other blankly.
Eventually, after much speculation, we surmised that she was saying
(probably) that we had departed from the manner in which we had been reared: we
had strayed our raisin’. Pat went into the
kitchen to confirm this with her, and came back nodding his head. We were amused but abashed.
But the most memorable exchange came with courtly Uncle Red, who was by far the least animated or whimsical of Pelfrey conversers. “Uncle Red,” I asked him one night as the
party happily babbled on around us, “exactly where is
Four Mile, Kentucky?” “Oh,” he replied languidly,
“about five miles out of Hazard.”
This was a wonderful family, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to
sing with them, and listen to their stories, and hear the sound of a diverse family
who enjoyed each other’s company. And, of course, to
learn that folk music could actually be folk music.
* * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * ** * *
* * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * *
(1) I have since
learned that one of the original cast members of “The Boys from Syracuse” was
Burl Ives.
(2) Pat Pelfrey himself became a successful lawyer, based in Louisville, and even argued a case before the Supreme Court of the United States.
(3) I never learned how to spell "Deuvendeck." Quite possibly, I'm not even close. But he was an incredible banjo player who later moved to San Francisco, I think. If you know him, please ask him to drop me a line.
