Dock Boggs
Down a Lonesome Road : Dock Boggs, Life in Music
"Let us now praise famous men." Dock Boggs belongs among them.
Most of his life was lived in the obscurity this Biblical passage
celebrates. He deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he
believed his God expected of him. Never a conventional life his was
also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost
instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.
Dock worked forty-five years in coal mines; only for a short period was
he able even to imagine he might make a living as a musician. Like
many miners he refused to be a company man, a particularly
courageous stance in those days when the coal companies held
tyrannical power. He spoke out, resisted, named his own course, and
followed it. From the early pre-World War I days he was a believer in
union, in the United Mine Workers, quick to educate his fellows in the
early 1930s about a company attempt to thwart the creation of UMW
local by offering a company union in its stead. "Emmet," Dock told the
miner promoting the company union, "that paper you got ain't worth a
dime. Anything the company's head of and rules and runs, why it isn't
gonna do the men very much good." He survived all the years
underground without suffering either injury to his limbs or to his spirit,
a feat which bespeaks luck and brilliant skill. He never bowed to the
subtle arts or flagrant acts of the powerful who controlled his work
world, the communities he lived in, and the political structure.
His music tangibly registers Dock's gift for impressing his own design
upon experience, his refusal to accept anything simply as it was given
to him. The musical talent was not, I think, like a graft setting apart an
otherwise ordinary man. It was, instead, integral to all his ways of
being. It was also an achievement both taken from him and
renounced. And so his music must have been a haunting and
frustrating and puzzling possibility for him during the almost thirty-five
years he lived without playing or singing.
Dock Boggs became famous in the conventional sense twice in his life-
-became known, that is, to a public beyond his home precincts of Wise
County, Virginia and Letcher County, Kentucky. In 1927 he recorded
eight songs for the Brunswick recording company in New York City and
a few years later, four songs for Lonesome Ace in Chicago, a one-man
company which went under in 1929, shortly after the recordings were
made. Dock's hopes for a recording career went with it. He was initially
discovered exactly as most important mountain musicians were.
Recording executives, in this case from Brunswick, traveled through
the Southern mountains auditioning talent to create recordings for a
whole new musical market of country folk and rural migrants to the
cities. Their tastes and interests were being discovered and catered to
by the new recording industry, and by radio, beginning in the mid-
twenties and reaching a peak in the first years of the Depression. The
Brunswick people came to Norton, Virginia, to set up at the Hotel, and
of some seventy-five musicians who came forward, Dock was one the
few banjo players. His distinctive sound apparently caught the talent
scouts from his first notes. They needed to hear him play only a few
bars of his "Country Blues," a rearrangement of a traditional song
entitled "Hustlin' Gamblers,' and of "Down South Blues," a song he had
adapted to his voice and the banjo from a blues record. His being
recorded constitutes an important chapter in the documentation by
commercial record companies of the history of the Anglo, African, and
ethnic American musical traditions.
This first musical career was short despite Dock's several efforts to
record more and to make of music his source livelihood. His second
encounter with the world's fame lasted longer, though it did not occur
until the 1960s, the last decade of his life. Several of his Brunswick
sides enjoyed an underground reputation among students of American
country music, a small group at first but one aware of the cultural
riches available on early commercial recordings. Charles Seeger, John
and Alan Lomax, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Gordon, and
Harry Smith were among the members of a group who kept alive Dock
Boggs's music in a cultural world distant from the rural cultures which
generated and continued to sustain such music. The folk revival of the
1960s generated new collectors who searched out practitioners of the
vernacular music of White and Black Americans: new musicians never
before recorded were brought before the college-age and urban
audiences that supported the revival, and many musicians, known only
through older recordings or lore, were located and again brought to
performance before an audience very different from the rural folk and
working-class city dwellers whose music this actually was.
So it was that Dock Boggs's second career began. Three weeks after
Mike Seeger located and met Dock in June 1963 at his home in
Norton, Virginia, Dock made the first of what would be many festival
appearances in the next seven years--at the American Folk Festival in
Asheville, North Carolina. These seven years also included three
Folkways albums of his music (reissued on SF 40108), far more than
had been recorded in the late Twenties, and an album of excerpts from
Seeger's interviews with Dock..
This essay draws upon nearly forty hours of interviews with Dock
taped by Mike Seeger. The tapes record a range of situations and
reflections: Dock's and Mike's first meetings; the first festival
appearances and Dock's nervous introductions to his songs, as well as
his later, personally and musically more assured, performances; times
at his home in Norton, Virginia chatting casually over meals or in cars
en route to one or another musical event; reminiscences about his life
and the sources for his songs and his style; and several intense,
intimate, troubled talks with Mike Seeger, the man Dock came to see
as his closest friend after their unexpected meeting in June 1963.
Those have been the primary sources for the following chronology and
interpretation of Dock Bogg's life and music.
Dock often roughly estimated occurrences and would suggest that a
particular event happened "twenty-five years ago," or "twenty-five,
thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago." Establishing exact dates or the
correct spellings of place and people's names has sometimes eluded
me, but I often have been able to do so, either by reconciling material
in several interviews or from independent sources. Two such dates:
Dock worked his last shift in the coal mines on April 29, 1954. More
difficult to verify is the exact date when Dock pawned his banjo to a
friend and thus gave up making music. In the 1960s he repeatedly
commented that he had not played for twenty-five years and spoke of
having just begun to play shortly before Mike Seeger appeared.
Twenty-five years before 1963 would have been 1938, but Dock had
ceased being an active musician a good while before that year.
The evidence for a specific date is fragmentary, but Dock implies in
one statement that he pawned his banjo during a "bank holiday" in the
midst of the Depression. He needed cash desperately, he remembered,
and none of the banks were open. The bank holiday may well have
been the one of early spring 1933, just before F.D.R.'s inauguration,
when virtually every bank in the country had closed to prevent runs on
their funds. The economy was so straitened in the Southern mountains
by early 1930 that Dock was unable to continue playing for money.
People simply had no cash, let alone surplus funds to support buying
tickets for dances. Recordings were even a greater luxury. After Dock
recorded four sides for the Lonesome Ace Company in late 1929 he
was able to sell them locally only a short time. By June 1930 he was
forced to return his stock to Lonesome Ace for a credit of $70, the cost
at wholesale of some 140 recordings.
His many references years later to when he gave up playing indicate
how slowly his hopes died. It may well not have been until sometime
around 1938, the "twenty-five years ago" of 1963, that Dock finally
resigned himself to a life in the mines. The banjo, temporarily pawned
to a friend in 1933 in expectation that such hard times could not last
much longer, would not be his again until retirement. Choosing then to
revive his banjo-playing, Dock's only expectation would have been the
recovery of memories of a time when he hoped for a different life. How
long before Mike Seeger's visit he had retrieved the instrument is not
clear. Sometimes he said it had been only a few weeks earlier, at
others that he had been practicing for about six months after almost
thirty years of not playing. His recovery of his astounding technique
and of many of his songs so that he could record and perform
immediately after meeting Seeger was, in any case, a remarkable feat.
It attests to both will and a superb musical talent. A musician of such
quality might conceivably, after so many years, bring back his music
with a few months' intensive practice, but I would guess that Dock in
fact had labored longer, perhaps from 1956, the second year of his
retirement.
Recollection has its own rhythms, times when details and textures
flood the mind and times when it seems parched, barely able to mark
the simplest chronologies. The mind turns back upon itself differently
in response to another's questions than it does to its own seemingly
random ruminations. Mike Seeger's questions direct the early
interviews, along with his effort to reconstruct a basic outline of Dock's
life; as time passed and the relationship between the two men
deepened, Dock seemed to return to what most concerned him: the
rupture in his musical career and its causes; his religious beliefs and
practices, particularly in terms of whether his playing music was sinful,
as some of his community insisted; and his anxieties about a return to
active music-making. This essay takes its focus from these recurring
elements in Dock Bogg's and Mike Seeger's conversations over six
years.
Some Patterns and Context
Dock Boggs' life as a coal miner has an historical importance equal not
only to his musical achievement but also to that of any of the powerful
and famous who so often dominate history textbooks. To explore and
to celebrate his role in the common life of his fellow workers and
neighbors proposes standards of value which violate those still taught
to most Americans in school, enforced at work, and played out in the
media. It is only from the materials of lives such as his that we might
learn the full dimensions of American history. Incarnated in them are
the dilemmas and promises of a democratic society that continues,
however falteringly, in a struggle to realize itself. Dock's were the
struggles carried on by working-class Americans: to discover and
possess a measure of dignity, to earn a living in an economy which
denies steady and decent work to most, to hold a marriage together
against the strains and humiliations, to leave something of worth in
and for those who come after.
Dock worked the mines from the time he was 12 until he was 56, 1910
to 1954. In those forty-four years he and his fellows knew brief
periods of prosperity. What requires respect and comprehension is
their capacity to sustain themselves in a constantly disrupted
economic world. For a while, jobs would be plentiful and the pay good,
as in the years just prior to and following World War I, enough so that
many were able to unionize, itself a sign of stability and of workers'
economic independence. At other times jobs would be scarce, the
union destroyed or weakened, the pay barely enough, conditions so
bad that in times like the early Depression miners who had work were
compelled, in return for starvation wages, to accept near feudal
dominance by the coal operators. The second War brought prosperity
again for seven to ten years, then a new wave of mechanization threw
almost three-quarters of the miners permanently out of the industry.
By the time of Dock's retirement he lived in one of the most
economically depressed regions in the United States. The young and
able-bodied migrated out to find work, the aged and the injured--an
especially large group in coal communities--remained, often in terrible
poverty and loneliness.
He was a churchgoer in middle age, perhaps originally in deference to
his wife Sara. In a local culture serious about Christianity and spiritual
experience, men commonly revived religious loyalties at that time in
life when earthly consolations seem more elusive and less dependable
than those of the Lord. Dock experienced conversion in 1942 and for
eight or ten years lived a regenerate life. He was ordained a deacon of
his church, supervised the Sunday school at Hemphill, Kentucky where
he then lived, and sought generally to live a Christian life of faith and
good works: "I lived a pretty straight life for eight or ten years. . . .
Attended church regular. And was a worker in the community for the
betterment of living and getting along and to help people." "My mind
was more on heavenly things or the Bible. . .or doing something for
my fellow man. . .than it is ever been before, you see. I didn't pull
away money I had maybe I would have spent for whiskey, why I
would give it to someone that needed it worse than I did. Many a time
me and John Miller. . . we'd take carloads of stuff to people's houses
where maybe the man was down sick and didn't have no wage, wasn't
drawing no Social Security, wasn't drawing anything you see. And
probably he maybe hadn't worked in the mines in years for to have
anything."
Times of blessed assurance come rarely, and there was much in Dock's
personal history and in the suffering so abundant around him in the
1950s to undermine assurance. Whiskey had brought relief many
times in his life, easing his nervousness about being on stage or
recording, relaxing some of the persistent tension of a worklife
exposed daily to great and unpredictable danger, and offering
recreation and camaraderie in an environment Dock often
characterized as savage. It was hard to keep off it. His worklife ended
abruptly, not a retirement so much as permanent unemployment, and
this must have caused many worries, especially in the first few years
when had no pension because he was only 56. He was dependent on
Sara and her vegetable garden and whatever savings they had. Had
he wanted to work, he could not have. He spoke little about these nine
years in his conversations with Mike Seeger. Sometime during them he
decided to gamble that he could recover his music and that someone
might care to hear him again. Time may well have weighed on him and
led him to the music as a way to pass it. The motive was deeper, I
suspect: his memories had time to take shape and bring him an
acutely felt regret about the course of his life. His Christian faith held,
but not his sense of peace. He struggled until his death with
depression, puzzled by his own spiritual backsliding, ambitious for his
music and its immortality, wondering if his passionate re-engagement
with music explained his loss of the felt presence of his God.
His was a history--but for his art--like the histories of most working-
class Americans. Struggles and victories were experienced in
fragments and uncertainties; material competence was so hard won as
to make much else in life luxurious or plainly unimaginable. Owning
and keeping some self-respect were precarious acts. Dock once
explained that he had stayed a coal miner because "That was the only
kind of work I was qualified for and understood and I could get the
best jobs they had in the mines. . . . They never cursed me." His pride
in his skill was made irrelevant when the mines mechanized; the
record he had earned became a matter of indifference in a work world
that no longer had need of him. Never having been cursed was what
was left, knowing you had been one of the few to draw a modest line
limiting the power of those who would expropriate even a man's self-
respect. And there was his music, or at least the memory of a turning
in his life that might somehow be repaired, switched, an entrance into
a world with different standards of regard and respect.
The usual fate is to live with pain and unhappiness, brief fulfillments,
self-doubt, the terrible patternless slipping away of our days in
discrete unrelated moments and acts. Outwardly Dock's life passed like
most others, though his manifest independence and his refusal to
acquiesce to the coal operators mark him as exceptional and as a man
who would be so whatever the occupation or class. Through his music
he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and
startling and acute than we are usually able to feel. His music held the
daily, marked its depths, and through the harshness and passion
intensely present in his voice, gave it shape:
Said all I can say, I've done all I can do
And I can't make a living with you,
Can't make a living with you.
Musical Influences and Social Changes
Speculations about what impels artists rarely do justice either to their
art or to the wonderfully perplexing human mystery of it. But it can be
valuable to reconstruct the process by which a particular artist
acquires the craft basis for his expression. Musical biography of a
figure like Dock Boggs has other merits. Not enough is yet understood
about the history of American country music, its evolution, or the
specific innovations within its traditions which steadily reshaped the
music from the late nineteenth century to the present. Many musicians
in the vernacular traditions have some distinguishing stylistic
signature, but few are consistent innovators or inventors who build
upon and extend significantly the expressive range of the music they
inherit. Dock was one of these few.
Dock Boggs lived in a place and time of particularly intense and fast
change. Youngest of ten children, he was born on February 7, 1898 in
West Norton, Virginia, a railroad and mining center not yet a decade
old. The motive and shape of economic change in the region were
already settled by his birth: industrial capitalism dominated by a single
extractive industry in which most owners directly pitted themselves
against workers. The few other enterprises in the region were too
marginal to complicate or soften the starkness of the conflict in the
coal fields. His older siblings could have known a sharply contrasted
way of life. Some were children when the senior Boggses were nearly
self-sufficient farmers in the relative isolation of the Southern
mountains before the railroads were built to develop the timber and
coal in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Before Dock's birth
the Southern mountains protected an economy slowly being integrated
into a regional market economy. Cash was scarce and people's
expectations and relations were relatively steady and sustained.
Dock's father bore the brunt of transition from a settled and agrarian
life to earning wages and living in a small industrial city. The senior
Boggs, born in 1849, moved from farming to blacksmithing and
carpentry, two useful skills in a railroad and mining town. The oldest
children must have shared some of the shocks of the many changes:
the abandonment of three farms, each one successively smaller than
the last; accommodation to the rhythms and authority structures of
industrial work; the adjustment to urban-like environments and a
diversity of peoples, mountaineers from different locales, African
Americans from all over the South, as well as European immigrants.
By the time Dock was born the family possessed only the remnants of
an agrarian past. Dock's experiences were shaped entirely within the
rawness of the new industrial world. The pace of change was fierce.
When he went into the mines in 1910 the coal industry was on the
verge of one of its periodic surges of expansion. New rail lines were
being rapidly built, more coal camps and mines opened up throughout
the region, and more African Americans and immigrants came to the
region in large numbers to provide the labor. The boom was
particularly strong in the border counties of eastern Kentucky and
south-western Virginia where Dock lived, and it would not abate until
1921-22 with a minor depression, prelude to the greater one.
Older musical cultures were changing as much as the economic and
social structures. Here Dock worked both as a progenitor of change
and as a transmitter of older practices. Music was an important part of
his family's daily activities. At least three of his older brothers played
the banjo and sang: John, the oldest son, Dave, and Roscoe. His
sister, Jane, the oldest child, also sang and played the banjo. And
Dock recalled his sisters Annie and Laura as memorable singers. His
father was also a fine singer. He played no instruments but he "could
sing by note," that is, he could read music, an ability to be remarked
in any vernacular musical culture because people normally learned and
played by ear. Lee Hunsucker, Laura's husband and a Holiness
preacher, was also an important musical influence, teaching Dock
many of the sacred songs in his repertory.
All of the musical members of the family sang in styles that had
persisted for at least several generations and, in some cases, for as
long as a century or more. The banjo, their instrument, had been
incorporated into mountain music more recently. Originally an African
American instrument, it entered Anglo-American musical worlds
through the minstrel show and probably reached the mountains
around the time of the Civil War. Modal tunes common to mountain
fiddle and ballad music could readily be accompanied by the banjo.
Except for Roscoe, all the Boggses played banjo in a style that had
been stable for at least a generation. The banjo was frailed in the
"knockdown" or "clawhammer" style. Banjo and fiddle combined made
a string band of sorts, though solo banjo was the preferred instrument
to accompany songs. The oldest songs in Dock's repertory, the ones
longest in tradition, he learned from his family: "Pretty Polly," "Poor
Ellen Smith," "John Hardy," "Cumberland Gap," "Little Ommie Wise,"
and others. Some derived from English ballads, others from American
broadsides, a few--like "Ruben's Train"--date from the late nineteenth
century and would have been new to Dock's much older siblings.
This music belonged to the occasions of an agrarian life. Songs passed
the time and could tell amusing and diverting stories. Banjo and fiddle
entertained large family and community gatherings like the play
parties and dances that followed cornshuckings, bean-stringings,
molasses stirrings, house and barn raisings: "maybe they'd have a
dance or a bean-stringing, or a gathering where there'd be a bunch of
young people . . . there'd be six or eight or ten couples to dance . . .
times I remember it commencin' nine or ten o'clock in the night and
dancing plum `til after daylight. And maybe not having anything to
dance by--just an old banjo. Played three or four old-time banjo
players to death nearly, they'd be near plum out for `em to shake
their foot by. . . ." Even after the Boggs family settled in Norton,
portions of the old life remained available in the rural areas nearby.
Dock played in such communal settings, but during his most musically
active years--in the Twenties, a new context for music-making became
available. Some musicians could begin to imagine making a livelihood
of what had before been simply an integral part of community life.
Commercial radio came into being. In its first decade it depended
primarily on live broadcasts and, in its need to fill hours of time, open
to every kind of performer. Initially independent of radio, though soon
increasingly tied to it, was the emerging record industry, equally
hungry to discover musicians and musics through which to expand a
nascent market. Dock's music could now become a commodity
consumed apart from a community of familiars, by an "audience"
engaged with "performers" who would, in time, themselves become
commodities of a kind. Audience though they might become, many of
Dock's listeners, and those who bought his records in the 1920s,
continued to share a cultural and occupational world. They were
miners, occasionally other industrial workers, and those still trying to
live on the land, though for most of them farming provided only a
part-time alternation with wage-paying jobs.
In the 1960s, his appreciators were college students and professionals
in towns and cities far from the coalfields. Something called "folk
music," had become one of the musics of choice among parts of an
urban, professional populace with no roots in any part of the South. He
sometimes wondered, pleased though he was that they valued his
music, what grounded their interest. This change in his audience
represented almost as deep a shift in cultural context and history as
the movement to music-making as a profession. For Dock it was also a
more disorienting change than the earlier one, demanding and
frightening as that may have been. His place as a musician in his own
working-class culture had been taken, in his thirty-year absence, by
younger musicians whose innovations moved country music beyond
where he had taken it. Bluegrass and country-and-western styles, and
rock-and-roll, all derived from the same vernacular roots as his, were,
by the 1960s the popular idioms among his own people.
Dock's capacity to move across these different settings and groups
testifies not only to his having greater musical gifts than his siblings,
but also to his having acquired his music in a environment
characterized by the interactions of an astounding variety of cultural
groups: African Americans from all over the South, Hungarians,
Italians, Greeks, Poles, Ukrainians, to name only a few. Each
embodied different musical traditions. Added to the mixture was the
presence of people from other, formerly isolated, parts of the Southern
mountains who brought rich local stylistic traditions, different songs,
and alternative verses to familiar ones. A world of bounded and
comprehensible sounds had erupted. Some "old-time" mountain
musicians found much of these new musics only cacophonous, but
every musician, whatever his or her cultural group, could not help
picking up something from at least one of the others. The interchanges
were not equal in frequency or quality. Mountain musicians exchanged
most with those from other parts of the mountains simply because less
translation was required. The ear and pulse did not have to be
reoriented. African Americans and native-born whites also influenced
each other greatly in the new milieu. Non-English speaking immigrants
maintained many of their own musical traditions for at least a
generation, but they seem never to have much influenced the rapidly
evolving musical scene in the Southern mountains. (Whereas in
Louisiana and Texas various European ethnic musics intermingled
freely with their Anglo- and African American counterparts, eventually
to create a distinctive synthesis.)
In the mountains the presence of so many culture groups and sub-
groups created a rich and exhilarating musical world. The explosive
combinations of styles, instruments, and new songs that resulted
constituted an expressive feast, and one of the great periods of
creativity in American musical history arose from it. New social
constructions and the coming of a fully industrialized capitalist
economy also meant that every mode of expression was being tested
and pressed by experience requiring new form and eliciting powerful
feeling. Innovation and synthesis were also promoted and accelerated
by the needs of commercial radio and records, themselves institutions
of the new.
Early in his musical development Dock Boggs was drawn to African
American music and to styles and songs brought to his region by white
musicians traveling up from Tennessee and from other sections of
Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Sound recordings became an additional
source. We know that recordings provided at least one of the routes
through which the blues reached and moved Dock. They also promoted
a more rapid exchange of styles and songs among Anglo-Americans
within the region. He learned "Railroad Tramp" from a record, probably
from the version made by Ernest Stoneman in 1927, and he knew
Riley Puckett's singing only through records. His fascination with
African American music most distinguished his music, however, and
stimulated his creation of a banjo style which combined elements of
African and Anglo-American instrumental styles.
Dock's reminiscences evoke a small boy entranced by music and with
an ear already sharp and original enough by the age of nine or ten to
seek new sounds beyond the family world.
Two especially magical stories about his early musical experiences
involve African American music and musicians and signify his intense
attraction. In one he remembers back, perhaps to quite early
childhood, to one of his first hearings of "John Henry." "There's a
Negro [African American] used to walk from Dorchester to Sutherland,
and on weekends he'd take his guitar and be walkin' up the track. . .
where I lived. . . I'd get out and follow him. . . his name was Go
Lightening. And he was very nice and kind and I'd beg him--I was just
a little boy, of course music always thrilled me when I was a boy.
Seemed like I just could hear a piece, a sad piece, a lonesome piece,
why it'd thrill me from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. And
so, I'd walk along after him, I didn't have no nickels and dimes to give
him. . . course he picked and he'd take up a collection... but I'd beg
him to sit on the end of the ties, and I'd follow him plumb from
Needmore. . . to Sutherland a lot of times to get to hear him play two,
three, four pieces and I a lot of times heard him play "John Henry" and
I learnt it partly, learnt some of the words from him." Other white
mountain musicians of this generation tell similar stories about the
first time they heard a black musician; their vivid recollections register
how striking the music was.
Dock's other story specifies the primary influence on his banjo style. It
probably occurred at about the time Dock started working in the coal
mines. Though he was only twelve, the fact of his working full-time
would have given him the kind of freedom and the knowledge to "play
hooky," as he put it, at night and go from Norton to Dorchester, the
mostly black neighboring coal town. Dorchester then had about three
thousand residents, just before World War I. Most worked the coke
ovens, jobs so dangerous and unpleasant that they often were
reserved for black people and immigrants. One night Dock decided to
go over to hear an African American string band at a dance. The
instrumental combination, familiar now to any bluegrass fan, was then
unusual and memorable: a mandolin, banjo, guitar, and fiddle. Dock
told this story many times. In each version he portrays himself
hovering at the edges of a crowd of African American dancers and
listeners, or as hiding outside and overhearing. He most noticed the
banjo player: "I heard this fellow play the banjo. . . . and I said to
myself--I didn't tell anybody else--I want to learn how to play the
banjo kinda like that fellow does. I don't want to play like my sister
and my brother. I am gonna learn just how to pick with my fingers. . .
. It was several years before I got hold of a [banjo]."
Near this time one of his brothers brought another Dorchester
musician to the Boggs' house. Jim White was a blue-eyed black man
who played in a brass band. But he also played banjo and picked the
tunes note by note, the style Dock was already drawn to, in contrast to
the knockdown frailing style used by Jane and John, his two oldest
siblings. Dock's rendition of "Turkey in the Straw," itself a tune in
African American tradition, followed closely what he remembered of
Jim White's playing it.
Even before large numbers of African Americans settled in the coal
counties of central Appalachia, black musicians had traveled through
parts of the mountains leaving traces of their music in the practice of
some mountaineers. Some were peddlers, others exclusively
wandering minstrels, some were early railroad workers. Black folk
music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced
white country music profoundly. Neither proximity to black musicians
nor the coincidence of hearing the music itself, however, explains why
some white musicians responded directly to this world of sound and
rhythm and others did not. Blacks and whites throughout the South
had been exchanging music for at least two centuries so that what had
once been distinctively West African or British now represented two
intimately related, mutually derived musics. Yet Dock's engagement
with African American music remains exceptional in its intensity and
particularity.
Until he got his first banjo Dock played on Roscoe's. Roscoe taught
him "Cuba" and was musically and personally closer than John, the
much older brother. Roscoe's banjo-playing may have shaped Dock's,
since he also favored picking the notes: "Brother Roscoe, he didn't
pick the `knockdown' way but he just picked with one finger and a
thumb. . . and some pieces he picked pretty well." Homer Crawford
provided the other identifiable formative influence. An itinerant
musician and photographer from Tennessee, he taught Dock "Hustlin'
Gambler," the basis for "Country Blues." He also showed Dock some
more of the D tunings Dock favored. Other musicians were also
sources but most came after Dock had established his basic style: Jim
Begley who taught him "Scottische Time," and Byrd Moore with whom
Dock played on and off for fifteen years and from whom Dock learned
parts of his version of "Careless Love." Each had in common a banjo
style (though Moore usually played the guitar) that emphasized picking
instead of frailing, and thus the melody instead of the harmony.
For Dock his serious playing did not begin until he was married in
1918: "Commenced playin', I played for parties, bean stringin's, first
one thing and another where they'd have a party in the country. . . . I
was just a`playing for the fun of it. . . ." Sometimes he played alone,
at others with a guitarist like Byrd Moore or Gus Underwood, a fellow
miner, or Charlie Powers, one of the musicians of The Powers Family.
It may also have been during these ten years before he recorded that
Dock had a small string band with a father and son named Holland,
two fellow miners.
The years from 1918 to 1927 were hard ones. Dock and his wife Sara
in the first years of their marriage enjoyed what would turn out to be
their greatest economic prosperity. Dock had a contract job in the
mines in 1918, an arrangement through which part of a mine was in
effect leased to him. He gave it up, however, because Sara wanted to
move near her family. Hard times followed, for the Boggses and for
the whole area, when the market for coal became depressed after
World War I. They moved several times between southwestern Virginia
and eastern Kentucky, wherever there were jobs in coal. Wages got so
depressed that Dock couldn't make a living mining and went into
bootlegging. Mountain people had for years depended on making
liquor to cushion economic depression, but it was also a rough
business: "You know I never was bloodthirsty, wanting just to kill
somebody. But I come awful near to gettin' killed and killing people
myself. But back then you had to be [ready] to stand firm on what you
was. If people thought they could walk on you, they'd absolutely do
it."
The dangers of bootlegging were, however, only a symptom of the
strained social and economic fabric of a region so rapidly developed.
Population had increased enormously within a generation through the
immigration of people of very different cultures. A subsistence agrarian
culture had been replaced by an industrial order. People had to create
new social forms to organize their lives and their capacity to do so was
at least checked by the persistent boom and bust cycle of the coal
industry, forcing them to move again and again in search of work or to
endure working conditions of such savagery that few social restraints
could hold. Violence filled the Boggs's lives. Dock himself engaged in
several gun battles, was ambushed, his life threatened by a local
sheriff. He also fought bloody and often drunken battles that left him
or his opponents disabled for days. In one he broke a finger so badly
that he couldn't load coal for a month.
This violence was not, as some writers would have it, an inexorable
element of "mountaineer" character. The conditions for dependably
ordered human relations did not exist because of the governing
political economy. These were years when the operators uprooted the
United Mine Workers wherever they had achieved organization and
repressed any attempt at unionization. Men and their families were
unprotected. Miners were forced to work long days for low wages.
Injury and death were common. The coal owners often openly
disregarded the well-being of the miners and this only reinforced other
factors subverting people's capacities to maintain order in their own
terms. There was too much death. "There's so many of my buddies
and my friends that I worked with that are dead, and gone, done dead
and gone, so many of them killed in the mines, several that's been
shot and killed."
Dock's married life had its own troubles. He and Sara discovered, early
in the 1920s, that she could not have children. He drank, played
music, bootlegged, and otherwise carried on like a "rambling man,"
the admiring and damning term used in the region for any musician.
Sara strongly objected to some of these activities, the music
especially. And Dock did not got along with her family. Matters were
tense enough that at one time Dock badly beat one of his brothers-in-
law and, at another, he feared being killed by his wife's relatives.
Music played no clear role either in sustaining or enmeshing Dock in
these days. His recollections about most of the Twenties rarely focused
on it. He continued to play, adding slowly to his stock of songs,
perhaps even practicing with some regularity. No evidence exists to
indicate that he had any great ambitions for his music. When Dock told
and retold the story of his audition for the Brunswick people in 1927,
its central element was a tone of surprise and naivete--as though the
whole experience had just "happened" to an untutored country boy
accidentally blessed with musical skill.
Talent scouts were just beginning to comb the Southern mountains for
prospects, so Dock may well have never thought of making records,
though I suspect otherwise. The eight songs he recorded are sung and
played with the kind of power only available to a musician deeply
involved in his art. Everything we know about Dock's musical life from
young boyhood on indicates he was persistently engaged in it and
ambitious. He once commented that his brothers and sisters "were
limited to just a few pieces, four, five, six maybe ten, twelve pieces is
all they could play. And after I got me a banjo of my own I
commenced trying to reach out and learn other pieces." In a chaotic
decade music may not have proved a stable center for Dock, but it
seems to have supported the hope, however inchoate, of escaping the
worst of his life while it gave him the means to express some of the
exactions and terrible beauties of his daily experience.
Music as a Livelihood
His audition at the Norton Hotel in late 1926 or early 1927 changed
Dock's life. Coincidence, not any conscious intention, characterizes
Dock's story of how he came to be in Norton that day. An insistent
friend told him about the auditions for Brunswick, one who knew Dock
well enough to reassure him he could do well. Dock did not have his
own banjo with him and had to borrow a cheap one from a local music
store. Later in life Dock described the audition as though he was fully
aware that it marked a divide: before it he commonly "pitched out
money" to "fellows playing music. . . I always liked music and thought
they was way ahead of me." "I was just a'playing for the fun of it...."
These words hint at the changes in his consciousness once he took the
step of auditioning and obtained a recording contract. It meant
recognizing his own musical skill and seriousness; it also entailed a
shift in his sense of relationship to the people to and for whom he
played. Playing "for the fun of it" in response to friends' and neighbors'
invitations to dances and other communal activities was very different
from making records and playing wherever one could make money.
Dock, having successfully auditioned, in effect entered a new cultural
situation which separated him from merely local performers and began
to define him professionally as an entertainer.
Once the opportunity to record became a reality, Dock seems quickly
to have grasped that though it he might make a very different life for
himself than he had ever imagined. At stake was not only escaping the
coal mines, but, more transformatively, being able to devote himself to
what he loved. He soon became intensely ambitious for musical
success, aware of his ability and its worth. He refused, for instance, to
make more than eight sides for Brunswick at the first recording
sessions in New York in 1927. He thought he was not being paid
enough and decided to put the company off until he could demand
more money. He was, nonetheless, offered contracts for two additional
sessions and the freedom of choosing his own musicians for them. His
deferral tells a great deal about Dock's complex sense of himself, of
his music, and of his chances for commercial success. The other
musicians Brunswick had brought to New York from the Norton area,
Hub Mahaffey, a guitar player, Miss Vermillion, an autoharpist, and Old
John Dykes, a fiddler, were not asked to make more than a few sides
or to return to make more. What enabled him to risk bargaining with
Brunswick and the confidence that he would not be dismissed as just
another country musician? He had never been to New York City before,
or even outside the small part of the Southern mountains where he
was born. Only a few months before, at the audition, as he
remembered it, he was among the least skilled musicians.
His boldness is more impressive when one knows something of the
anxiety and uncertainty Dock felt. He became so tense before
auditioning and again before the recording session that he needed
whiskey to relax. The tension came, he explained, because he "didn't
have hardly enough nerve to try out myself" and "felt like 30 cents of
scrip with a hole punched in it." Few things were so worthless, but his
metaphor may only apparently explain his tension. He already
understood what recording could bring him: "Well I felt this way
kindly, I thought that I might get started. . . happen to put out a
record that would make a hit, that I might [get] to where I have an
opportunity, I might never have to work in the mines no more. . . . I
figured. . . I could make it makin' music and I wouldn't have to work in
the mines anymore."
Dock had, I think, developed a sense of possibility very different from
what his local culture readily made available. His quick and tough mind
was also powerfully imaginative. He was a nearly inveterate musical
inventor. These gifts included the capacity to grasp new situations and
project himself into them. Radio and records were only beginning to
offer the bases for commercial success for musicians like Dock. The
concept of being a "professional" did not yet have any reality in his
cultural territory. Success for musicians like him required more than
adaptability; it also involved shrewdness, a musical style with a
recognizable personal signature, and an imagination for reaching and
even bringing new audiences into being.
The distance Dock began to travel in a few months in 1927 is probably
beyond the comprehension of anyone but musicians who, like him,
were embarking on this new career. A few markers exist. Before Dock
auditioned at the Norton Hotel he had never even seen a microphone,
an instrument as central to the new media of radio and of records as
the banjo he picked. The early microphones were crude and neither
required nor responded to much craft in their use, but many
vernacular musicians could not adapt to them or to the absence of a
live audience. The microphone signified the transition from a musical
culture of direct and intimate contact between the artist and his
community to one built upon amplification, projection, and the
continual shaping of an audience one might never directly encounter.
When Dock went to a Norton clothing store before the New York trip
and asked its owner to help him dress so he wouldn't look "too
country," he registered another dimension of the change and his ability
to anticipate its requirements. Dock's awareness of how city folk might
regard him could simply have been a gesture of insecurity; it was also
at least a sign of some sophistication about the differences between
urban and rural cultural practices: "Well I don't know what hardly to
think. I was kindly uneasy about making the trip, afraid that I would--
well I was so countrified. I'd never been anywhere. Naturally I was
kindly uneasy I couldn't act right or couldn't--wouldn't get by hardly."
Old John Dykes embarrassed Dock on the train trip and with the
Brunswick people by acting the stereotypical country bumpkin. Dock's
wish to separate himself from such behavior was not an
acknowledgment of the superiority of city ways, but another instance
of his openness to change and his capacity to mediate between old
and new within himself.
When he returned to Virginia from New York, he went back to the
mines. For a short time life on the surface went much as it had for the
past decade. The Brunswick records were issued, four in all, with two
songs on each. They sold especially well in southwestern Virginia and
the near counties of Kentucky. Dock had been in demand as a
musician before this time, but the records spread his reputation
further and conferred a new status on him among both old and new
admirers. More people asked him to play, and he spent many nights
playing late. He played by himself or found someone in the audience
who could back him on the guitar. His transformation into a full-time
musician was not complete. He did not ask for money when he played,
although the hat may have been passed on some occasions. "I would
have been ashamed to. . . I used to feel, to take money for playing"
reflects the persistence of older expectations. Contracts and
managers, radio shows and one night stands, and the creation of a
band instead of making do with pickup accompanists may all have
been on Dock's mind in late 1927, but he had yet to organize his
musical activity in these terms.
He was, though, reaching towards making music his livelihood. He
began to play schools, a new setting for country musicians, one that
developed after they began making records. People wanted to come
out in the evening or on a Saturday afternoon to hear musicians whose
records they had heard or who they knew had recorded. Schools
provided a setting neither exclusively for kin and neighbors nor yet the
fully anonymous public auditorium characteristic of later country
music. Dock also began experimenting with gathering a band. He
played with guitarist Clintwood Johnson, a friend and fellow coal
miner. Shortly after the New York trip Dock played a school date near
Gates City, Tennessee with Hub Mahaffey, Old John Dykes, and Miss
Vermillion. Discussions of becoming a permanent group collapsed over
Dykes's insistence on only a fiddle and banjo duo. Dock, more
responsive to the newest developments, wanted the "better sound"
possible with a fiddle, banjo, and guitar.
These steps toward becoming a commercial musician accompanied
others. He practiced more regularly: "I was more precise in making my
notes, I didn't make as many mistakes." Recognizing he needed to
expand his repertory he set out, quite self-consciously, to do so. This
makes between 1927 and 1929 the probable time when his brother-in-
law, Lee Hunsucker, taught Dock so many of his songs. The "Preacher"
sang religious songs from the Holiness tradition and from the quite
different Old Regular Baptist tradition. Dock learned about a fifth of his
repertory from his brother-in-law's sacred songs. Lee also owned a
collection of some 300 records and a record player, something Dock
did not have until the late 1950s. It seems likely that Dock at this time
began deliberately to learn songs off records he had heard at Lee's
house.
Like A.P. Carter and E.V. Stoneman, two of the most successful
country musicians to make the transition to commercial radio and
recording careers, Dock turned to another source to expand his stock
of songs. He began to collect "ballets," (or "ballots") lyrics of songs
written down on paper. Neighbors and friends offered them to him,
sometimes with a tune they could sing or hum, at others with a
request that Dock make a tune for them: "Whenever I heard anything
I liked, I'd write it down." He didn't take every song he was offered,
instead he wanted only songs that "touched my heart." He had, this is
to say, by sometime around 1928 an achieved awareness of his own
musical personality.
These actions, decisive though they were, did not mean Dock was able
to embrace wholeheartedly a professional musician's way of life. His
reluctance to take money was not the only sign of allegiance to older
cultural practices incompatible with a musical career. Secular music
had long been condemned as "the devil's work" by several influential
religious sects in the mountains. His own parents belonged to one such
sect. Dock always had a tangled conscience about his secular music-
making being sinful. Long before the advent of commercial recordings
and radio, especially gifted musicians were suspected of being
"rambling men," unreliable, transient, too loose about the conventional
forms of family and economic life. The coal mines and railroads had
already destabilized many of these by Dock's time. Industrialization
also brought new institutions, or expanded old ones, to which
musicians were especially exposed: whore-houses, speakeasies,
gambling dens, and dance halls provided more dependable income and
professional settings for musicians than did schools, restaurants,
family gatherings, and other respectable settings. To make a living
musicians had to be on the move. Their hours were irregular, drinking
the norm, stable family and work lives hard to maintain.
In the months after the New York recording session Dock entered this
new life. He continued to work in the mines regularly enough so that
he could proudly recollect that "[I] never lost a job over my music or
[for] being absent for my music." Music had become, however, his
absorbing passion. Sara spoke against its claims and risks, a role she
was to take throughout their life. Dock sometimes bitterly r
resistance but she articulated, I think, not only her own opposition, but
also uneasiness Dock in some measure shared. The life was difficult in
its irregularities; for someone who cared for the music as much as
Dock, performing was exhausting; and while the money could be good,
it was undependable. Drinking and brawling were common, and Dock's
attraction to both was great enough that Sara worried about his
survival. She apparently kept at Dock, for he resolved to quit to
silence her. His resolution came in late 1927 or early 1928. It was to
be a short retirement, but it anticipated the coerced one that would
last until 1963: " My wife she didn't want me to play, didn't want me
to record anymore, didn't want me to be out and gone or go to
dances, anything like that and I got me really annoyed and decided I'd
just quit playing."
They moved to Mayking, Kentucky, Dock seemingly having made up
his mind to be a coal miner for good. His ebullience about his own
creativity and musical opportunities would not allow foregoing his
hopes after such a short trial. His ambitions were not long in finding
occasions. Charley Powers, an old friend and an experienced guitarist,
came to Mayking to work in the mines. Soon he and Dock were playing
together. And as Dock later told it, people soon found where he was
and began writing him to ask him to play. The invitations came so
frequently and with them, Dock having come to accept money for
playing, such an abundance of cash that Dock had to choose between
mining and music. He went to the superintendent of the mine at
Mayking: "`Henry, we're just going to have to quit, quit one or the
other, making music or quit the mines.' I said, `We're making a lot
more money making music than we make in the mines anyhow.' He
says, `I think you're a damn fool in the first place for even coming
back in the mines after you had a start and made records and people
do like the way you play.' I said, `I wouldn't take my head in the
mines if I could do that. I don't guess we'll be back anymore.'"
Dock bought a Gibson in 1928, the best banjo made. He also quickly
formed a band, "Dock Boggs and His Cumberland Mountain
Entertainers." The musicians were all from Dock's home territory:
Scott Boatwright on a guitar from Scott County, Virginia; Melvin
Robinette, a prize-winning fiddler and like Dock from Wise County,
Virginia; and Charley Powers, also a native Virginian, on guitar. Dock's
greater reputation because of his recordings made him the headliner.
His high hopes and seriousness were evident in the decision to hire a
manager--Steve Blair, a young lawyer in Whitesburg, Kentucky, to find
bookings and manage the receipts. Crowds came to country theaters,
schools, and stores, in significant part because of Dock's reputation as
a recording artist. The band did well, often taking in between three
and four hundred dollars a week.
The talents of each individual promised a kind of blend out of which
successful ensembles can come. Scott Boatwright was an excellent
guitar player with a pleasant, smooth-sounding voice; Charley Powers
had been performing in a band since his boyhood; and Melvin
Robinette was one of the outstanding fiddlers of his day as well as a
skillful singer. These gifts combined with Dock's unique sound on the
banjo and the raw intensity of his singing ought to have given the
band an extensive repertoire and a distinctive style. Everyone in the
band was an experienced entertainer, and it is not surprising that
people still remember some of the comic routines. Dock and Melvin
seem to have been especially inventive in this regard. And Dock did
two routines with special appeal to the many coal miners who came to
hear the band. He developed a kind of dance imitating coke workers
pulling the coke, and another mimicking his own occupation of many
years, coal loading. These, too, were audience favorites. The band only
stayed together for the first half of 1929. The chief cause seems to
have been the differing ambitions of each of the men. Dock and Scott
continued playing together for the rest of that year. Charley Powers
retired altogether from music and soon left the area. Melvin Robinette
soon followed him into retirement.
The flush times were also coming to an end. Dock could not have
known how dependent his expansive sense of opportunity was on the
now fatal final boom of an inflated economy. The three years, 1927-
1929, during which he moved towards a musical career were the most
prosperous ones of the decade, even in the coalfields. National
companies like Brunswick, RCA Victor, Vocalion, and Okeh competed
for new musicians, customers, and markets. Radio stations came into
existence with hours of air time to fill. People like Dock's neighbors
had a little surplus to spare for an occasional record or a ticket to an
evening of music at the local school. When Dock went to Chicago
sometime in the summer of 1929 to record for Lonesome Ace, he
reasonably assumed this would be but one of many recording sessions
to come. He had been promised more sessions by Brunswick and other
companies had expressed interest. In October the collapse came. The
effects were gradual for many Americans, but in the Southern
mountains the Depression came swiftly and severely. When the two
Lonesome Ace records were issued Dock was able to sell about a
hundred through the Kentucky coal towns of Neon, Fleming, Hayman,
Jackhorn, and Mayking, but within a few months "there wasn't no
money to buy, even if they wanted that [music]." "Times got to be so
tight that there wasn't any money to borrow expenses for yourself to
go anywhere and you couldn't draw no money working. One day a
week in the mines you done good to have bread on your table to eat."
The Depression had reached all around.
Dock did not immediately resign his ambitions and hopes. Probably
late in 1929 he decided to go to Atlanta. The coal mines had no work
and someone told him the Atlanta police force was hiring. He also
knew that P.C. Brockman, the Okeh talent scout, was headquartered in
Atlanta, and the police job may have given him a needed excuse to
make what turned out to be the last venture to rescue his musical
career. He contacted Brockman and was offered a half hour Saturday
night live audition on WSB, Atlanta's country music station and a
major station for the whole region. Dock's desperation can be gauged
by what happened. He froze before the mike so badly that he could
barely force his voice to sound. People who knew him heard the
broadcast and were not sure it was his voice or playing.
This disappointment might well have discouraged most people. Dock,
however, seems to have persisted in hoping for the continuance of his
recording career. He wrote letters to a number of record companies
notifying them of his interest in recording. RCA Victor, as perhaps did
others, responded with interest and a specific recording time in June
1931. For two weeks Dock tried every avenue to make or borrow the
funds to travel to Louisville for the session. No one could spare the
money and he had to cancel. Eventually he pawned his banjo.
He may never have fully understood what wrecked his chances.
Talking with Mike Seeger he sometimes seemed clear about the impact
of the Depression, but at others he implied his musical career stopped
because not enough people wanted to hear his music. Sometimes
bitterly, sometimes lovingly, he blamed his wife. His metaphors
expressed how much he valued what he had lost, as well as how much
he loved Sara: "Whenever my wife turned my damper down, it is
either her or my music, why I thought more of her than I did my
music. And I didn't give up as much as King George did when I gave
up my music. He gave up the throne for Wallis Simpson. I figured I
wasn't giving up no more than what had been given up many times."
Blaming Sara, whatever the tone, may at least have provided Dock
with a sense of control, a feeling that he had chosen to renounce his
musical career for love, or out of weariness with domestic wrangles.
The implication of marital bitterness might have seemed preferable,
even many years later, to a full recognition of the felt impotence and
sense of failure that crippled so many men during the Depression.
Some musicians weathered these years. Knowing this, Dock took
personal responsibility for his failure to persist, returning in memory
again and again to the first years of the Depression in an attempt to
understand what he ought to have done. It may simply have been bad
luck that kept him from being one of the survivors. Had he made more
records before the Crash, had the band stayed intact, or had he,
perhaps most importantly of all, established himself on radio, he might
have made it. It is also possible that his music was finally too intense
ever to meet the requirements of wide popularity imposed by the
economic stringencies of the Depression: "I put so much of myself into
some pieces that I very nearly broke down emotionally." Only
musicians with a more dispassionate address to their music could
survive the intensely competitive conditions that followed the Crash.
Dock, on the evidence of the Lonesome Ace sides, could perform in
such a smoother and more "professional" style, but he may have taken
it up unluckily too late.
Revival and Rediscovery
People dream about second chances as a redemption for
disappointment and failure. Life never lends itself to exact repetition,
and so no one ever experiences such dreams. Dock may have come as
close as anyone can. If he ever gave up hope completely during his
thirty-five years in exile from his music, he recovered it enough to
work seriously on the banjo, at least eighteen months before Mike
Seeger came to Norton in June 1963. Without access to the folk revival
circuit, Dock could only have played to a small circle. The sounds of
country music his neighbors preferred were not his. Dock knew his
once innovative music now sounded "old-fashioned." He could not, I
think, have known there were audiences hungry for such music
elsewhere in the country. Only someone like Mike Seeger could have
brought him to these audiences, given him the musical support and
the appreciation that probably enabled Dock to perform for them.
Dock found a kind of satisfaction, perhaps even a kind of redemption
at moments, in his second musical career. It was a chance to make
good some commitments he had thought he might never be able to
meet. His expressed wish to be 35 years old again registered the
temptation to experience his own musical revival as a second chance,
but it also conveyed his realization that he was at a new turn. "Don't
care about music as much as I did. If I had, I would have kept it up. I
wouldn't lay it down for nothing. I don't think I should have laid it
down when I did, I feel I made a mistake. I'm pleased to get a chance
even to put them old songs back on. I want to put on all the old songs
I've got. I'd love to put them on so that when I'm gone why the young
people they can have them in memory of me." Something haunting,
less than redemptive, surfaces here. Dock's old capacity to read an
audience returned to him, along with his musical facility. The more he
played the college and folk festival circuit, the more he emphasized his
role as a preservationist, a kind of living museum for an otherwise
defunct music. He stressed his playing in an "old" style, "original"
tunes other musicians, country and bluegrass stylists perhaps, twisted
and got wrong.
He loved singing and performing again. A kind of peace sometimes
came with it. But though he became more polished in his
introductions, more able to appear relaxed in performance, he never
felt free with the folk revival audiences. He sensed his status as an
object. Though proud of earning enough money from the music to buy
his first new car, other satisfactions eluded him. He probed painfully to
locate the sources of his discontent. The friendship with Mike Seeger
softened this loneliness. He trusted him in part as a fellow musician,
someone who understood the need to make new songs and to be
recognized as a living musician instead of one who rehearsed
something dying.
There were other stresses: recalling verses he hadn't sung in years,
wondering if his fingers would be nimble enough every night to do
their intricate picking. There was also Dock's own vital rediscovery of
his music. Listening to the records he made in the 1960s is to
encounter a music made anew, marvelously unlike the singing and
playing of anyone else. At his best he might have been singing to his
own soul. Dock may never have been as good as in these last years.
Had he such an awareness, it might not have mattered much. A sense
of permanent displacement seems to have tormented him. This was
not his time or these his people. Joking once about how bad the music
in his church was, he added how infrequently he was asked to play
there. When he played at colleges near his home, few of his
generation came to hear him. In the last years of his life he could not
resolve his doubts about the rightness of his making music again,
doubts exacerbated by anonymous letters from his own community
rebuking him as a sinner for it. He was drinking again, failing in health,
and every time he played perhaps wondering what might have
happened had he kept on in 1929 against all the odds, re-figuring his
life in each song.
To the end he was extraordinary. He let nothing important rest,
thinking about and making new as much as he could of what he felt
and heard. He died February 7, 1971. It was his birthday. His music
remains