th High-Strung & Knife-Happy Hillbilly Blues Revue

     We buried my Grandma up at Lindside in Monroe County, West Virginia today.  It’s been a week full of high highs and low lows.  I mean…I’m trying to buy a house.  The inspection went better than I could have hoped.  It looks…good.   

    We’ll close on April 2nd if everything goes right.  It’s a big deal.  The only other time I bought a house, sixteen months later Katrina blew through New Orleans and destroyed everything I owned that was in it…and the house…and the car in the driveway…and the house next door with the Live Oak out of my backyard.  I was on vacation in West Virginia so all I had with me was a guitar and a weeks’ worth of socks and underwear and shorts and t-shirts…um…and a bunch of books.  My friend Amy saved my cats and drove them to her folks’ house in Tennessee.  I stayed in Asheville, NC for a while and ended up in my Mom’s attic here outside of Raleigh.  I got to Raleigh seven years ago…

     So I have this weird disproportionate anxiety about buying another house.  Dunno if I can tell you why…

     I looked for eighteen months and finally found something lovely that I could almost afford (with a lot of help).  I love this house.  I swear I’m not remotely superstitious, but the fact that the house is on Myers Av. and that my Grandma’s Mom was a Myers was sort of oddly comforting to me…or maybe just encouraging, somehow.

     She died on Tuesday.  My Grandma.  I’ve been going home every couple of weeks  since July to see her and sing to her and talk to her…though, mostly, as optimistic and friendly and welcoming as she was, she didn’t really remember me…but she loved the music and she was gracious about it and if she thought I was imposing on her she never let me think it…

     I sang at her service today and my hands shook so bad I couldn’t hold the chords and I started weeping in the middle of the song…

Well, I broke up a little anyway…weeping kind of brushes up on my manly manhood in a way I don’t like…it was embarrassing, you know, because I’m a trained professional, but I was purely there with her for a minute and the feelings were clean…

     I sang her “Save a Seat for Me.”  I learned it from Nat Reese.  He died last year…so I reckon now I’ll sing it for both of them…

     That was me today - the gospel-singing hillbilly atheist carrying one sixth of a terrible burden from the chapel to the hearse in a black suit with a pink shirt and tie.  Pink probably wasn’t her favorite color…she probably liked a lilac or a lavender better…but they dressed her in pink before they put her in her tacky white and bronze coffin…and pink was definitely her husband Frank Niday’s favorite color…I wore a pink shirt and tie to his funeral too.

     And we drove in a long procession through Mercer County and briefly into Virginia and out to Monroe County.  I rode with my cousin Rachel and her husband Aaron because I like them best and so I could smoke in the car.

     It was windy.  Beautiful and cool and windy…

     We laid her down to rest on the hillside at the Bradley Cemetery in Lindside, West Virginia next to my Grandfather Franklin.  Frank’s first wife, Stella, is buried there.  And her cousin Opie - who was my Grandfather’s older half-brother. 

     Opie’s daughter, Thelma, is buried up there too - I mean, Hell, all of them are buried up there and they all have great stories…

For instance, Thelma designed this intricate bucolic scene of rolling-hill-farm-life in West Virginia for her gravestone and when it was done she was so proud of it she had it carved into black granite and kept it in her living room for the five or six years before she died.  It sort of broke my heart to see it on the hill and not in front of her fireplace.

     She married into the Booth family.  They always claimed that theirs was the family that owned George Washington Carver when he was a slave - if it’s true…well, ick…and, okay, sort of cool for the historic association to the family when all the rest of the circumstances are vile…and if it’s not true…?  Well, you’ve got admire the repellant audacity of the lie…

    And there were Sarvers and Hamiltons and Nidays and McGhees and about a dozen Andrew Jacksons…

     Joseph Addison Niday is buried up there.  He was Frank’s Dad.  People called him Joe-Ad.  I have a little cousin - I guess he’d be a second cousin since he belongs to my cousin Rebecca…she named him Tristan-Addison…it makes her insane when I call him Tri-Ad…he’s four…

    I met Thelma’s sister Vernie for the first time since we buried my Grandpa up there back in 1987.  I was sixteen then.  She’s a bad-ass like Thelma was…fearless and funny and generous and a little mean…I guess I have a little thing for much older women…

     We stood over Stella’s grave and argued about how many of their children died in childbirth…let me say that differently…for the most part they all died in childbirth or within weeks…Vernie was sure Stella died having the first child…but Thelma told me she helped at three of the births and I have papers for one of those and two more…somehow out of all of this we’re sure of five kids…there’s some evidence that there were as many as four more (probably only three, but maybe four)…

     We’re going to get together July 15th and talk some more at the Bradley Family Reunion - but I’m going to go up sooner so we can show each other our genealogies and compare them…meeting her as a grown-up was the best thing that happened to me today, I think…

     While I was gone someone hacked my performing-work e-mail and sent ads for Viagra and time-shares and mail-order-brides and whatever else other kind of bullshit to everyone in my address book…

…they spammed people who hire me for things from my address with my signature on the bottom…

ugh.

     I wish I had someone to share this with.  I reckon this is what it feels like to be lonesome.

     I think we have the same nose.

My Friend Jean Hanna Davis sent this to me via Faceworld.  Her daughter included me in a project she made for school about blues in West Virginia - me and my friend Nat Reese were featured.  This makes me good and real goddamned proud.  She’s a hell of a good girl and a fine singer in her own right…Jean ain’t so bad herself…

Joe is Jean’s husband.  Hanna’s somewhere between nine and fifteen (not my fault…every girl under thirty looks like she’s fifteen to me)

Jean Hanna Davis:

My Grandma, Marie with her Grandma, Mary Jane Hager.  The two men standing are both Charlie Clarks…the older of the two was Marie’s Dad.  He played the fiddle and the mandolin well and had a reputation for being able to play anything with strings.  The baby was the first of my Grandma’s children, Barbara Allen…

Child 84C:  Bonny Barbara Allen

84C.1	IT fell about the Lammas time,
	When the woods grow green and yellow,
	There came a wooer out of the West
	A wooing to Barbara Allan.
84C.2	‘It is not for your bonny face,
	Nor for your beauty bonny,
	But it is all for your tocher good
	I come so far about ye.’
84C.3	‘If it be not for my comely face,
	Nor for my beauty bonnie,
	My tocher good ye’ll never get paid
	Down on the board before ye.’
84C.4	‘O will ye go to the Highland hills,
	To see my white corn growing?
	Or will ye go to the river-side,
	To see my boats a rowing?’
84C.5	O he’s awa, and awa he’s gone,
	And death’s within him dealing,
	And it is all for the sake of her,
	His bonnie Barbara Allan.
84C.6	O he sent his man unto the house,
	Where that she was a dwelling:
	‘O you must come my master to see,
	If you be Barbara Allan.’
84C.7	So slowly aye as she put on,
	And so stoutly as she gaed till him,
	And so slowly as she could say,
	‘I think, young man, you’re lying.’
84C.8	‘O I am lying in my bed,
	And death within me dwelling;
	And it is all for the love of thee,
	My bonny Barbara Allan.’
84C.9	She was not ae mile frae the town,
	Till she heard the dead-bell ringing:
	‘Och hone, oh hone, he’s dead and gone,
	For the love of Barbara Allan!’

Fanny Marie Niday died today.  She was 94.  She was my Grandmother.  She was my favorite.  On Saturday we’ll go bury her out at Linside in Monroe County, West Virginia next to my Grandfather Franklin Niday.

This is Frank and Marie Niday in Mercer County WV in 1934 - I believe this was their wedding day photograph.  He was born in 1907.  She was born in 1918.

You should have heard her laugh.  She had a laugh like silver bells and wet fruit and young love…

I told some stories tonight that I forgot I knew…

This is a note to remind me to write them down here so I don’t forget them again…

Tell the story about the time you and Jim Smith was running the open mic at Checkpoint’s off the Quarters and Willie Nelson and Clarence Brown came in and backed up all the hopeful young kids and told them which of their songs was good and smelled from ten feet away better than the best dope you ever paid money for….

…and just talk about “Gate” (you know, Clarence Brown)…he was such a good feller…and always so nice and decent to you…

…and tell the story about the time you got a three-dollar haircut at the Barber College (buzz cut, No. 2 razor on the sides; No. 3 razor on top) and they signed off on you and you had a four inch long tuft of hair coming off your head and you drove around to every mall you could think of until you found a photo booth, paid the money to take four pictures of you - front, both sides and back - and then went around for years showing people those pictures and telling them, “This is what a three-dollar haircut looks like.”

Some of the things I lost to Katrina were things I should have lost years before Katrina…

…and tell the story about falling in love with Amanda without knowing it and then realizing it too late and…feeling like an asshole…and then thinking about about what the second and third acts must look like and realizing what an abomination y’all would have been together…

…and tell the story about the time you started drinking bourbon in Chicago and woke up in a Union Pacific boxcar in St. Paul, Minnesota…and tell stories about hoboing - tell stories about Willie Weir Gray - he was your favorite tramp and he means so much to you…he showed you Tampa Red and John Hurt songs for beer…

…and not even good beer…shitty American beer…

…and then tell the story of your Grandfather, Franklin Niday….you love talking about him…

…and tell the story about your friend Tad and how decent and kind he’s been to you here lately…

…and laugh and tell dirty jokes and don’t let ‘em know for a minute that you’re “laughing just to keep from crying…”  I sure do like to listen to Sonny Terry…and when I did cry a couple times…I mean, not really, ‘cause I’m too manly and autonomous…but metaphorically…well, I know some real good, kindly, lovely people who’ve looked out for me and been generous to me in their friendships…

We have a new kid working for us at the Hardware store…his name is Desmond and he’s a good kid…works hard, does anything I ask him, he’s funny and smart and easy to like…we keep inviting him to come out with us on Thursday nights for a drink after work…we actually have sort of a manager’s meeting at the bar but we’re amenable to indulge the innocent…and….he keeps saying no.  To be fair to him…he had a date one time and he had-the-flu-and-worked-anyway one time and there was a date with another girl…

I told him I was gonna quit asking him because he didn’t seem like a man worth pursuing and he said, “Regardless of the quality of the woman who longs to be held in my arms…and regardless of the shape of her and how she feels under the palms of my hands…Regardless of the call I’ve longed to get from NASA to go on a manned mission to Mars, Lo, even if I and my diabolical minions were invading Mother Russia - I’ll desist from these foolish endeavors and agree to come with you the next time you invite me just so you understand that I adore you, My Coworkers, and I long to accept your invitation…”

…all of it over the radio into my earpiece…

I told him that if he was stupid enough to get involved in a land war in Asia, he was too stupid to drink with us…

…and he said, “Inconceivable!”

I really like working with him.

So, I’m curious…did it occur to you that Desmond is a beautifully shaped black man…?

…cause he is.

and my heterosexuality is intact…

I like a lot of the people I work with.  A lot. They are something in my life that I am grateful for,

Thank you.

Oh…and tell the story about how you won’t turn the heat on and how you drank nine beers, half a bottle of saki, two double Beams and a bottle of Canadian whiskey trying to destroy yourself because of a mean and selfish girl and you came to the next morning under a quilt safe on your own damned couch next to a golden, ticking space heater…I told Danny how grateful I was for my black-out-drunken-self-preservationist brain to have covered us up in our drunken state because “I could’a died of exposure passed out on the floor of my living room…”

He allowed as how the only way that sentence could have been any more hillbilly is if the word “possum” had been in it…

I really like the people who work with me..

…and we really do prefer to be called Appalachian-Americans…

Ian F.G. Dunn took this picture of me with an old wooden camera hidden under a cape from six different angles and then made a composite of them…and this, surprisingly, is sort of what I think I look like to the rest of the world.

nasafanclub:

The fact that my sense of humour is somewhat obscure (and that I’m a space dork) literally had me lmao to this… 😂 by sophia_ray0 http://instagr.am/p/Vaxxncnayz/

…until tears ran down my apple-cheeks…