Kentucky Traveler (20 page)

I think the accident weighed heavy on my mom. Not too long after, we were heading out to play at the bluegrass festival in Hugo, Oklahoma. I was getting ready to go, and Mom came in the kitchen and had me sit down there with her.

“Honey,” she said. “I've had an awful dream. And I don't want you to go to Oklahoma with Ralph.”

“Mama, I've got to go,” I said. “I can't miss the show. Ralph's counting on me.”

Then she started crying, begging me not to go.

“I had a dream that you all had a wreck on the highway and you were killed. If you go, you'll come back in a pine box. That's what I saw.”

“Mama, it's just a bad dream. Don't you worry, I'll be careful.”

Well, she wouldn't give it up. She was so sure of what she saw in the dream. She was crying and crying. I hadn't seen her so tore up before.

“Mama, do you really believe this?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “You know I don't get like this unless I really see something.”

So I picked up the phone and called Ralph at his house. We were supposed to meet at the bus in the afternoon. I had a two-and-a-half-hour drive to get to Coeburn.

“Ralph, I can't go to the show this weekend.”

“You sick?”

“No, sir. My mom's had a really bad dream, and what she saw is that we had a wreck on the highway and I was killed. I think I'll be fine, but she's tore up over it. I'd better just stay here.”

“Rick,” he said. “When your mama has them dreams, you need to listen to them dreams and do what she says. That stuff's real.”

Not too many boss men would have been so understanding. But Ralph was from the mountains, same as my mom, and he was validating her. He was raised up like she was, and he knew dreams like the dreams my mom had were a gift to see, and ain't nothing superstitious about it. The next weekend, Ralph and the band were back from Oklahoma, and we were headed to another date. We were going down the road, and I was talking to Roy Lee about the Oklahoma show. He said, “What's the reason you didn't come to Hugo with us?” Ralph hadn't said anything to the band about my mama and her dream.

“Well,” I said. “My mom had a really bad dream about us going. Let me ask you a question—did you have any close calls on the road last weekend?”

“There was something happened, now that you mention it,” Roy Lee said. “There was a big ol' box fell off a truck in the middle of the road, and man, we had to swerve like crazy to miss it.”

In recent years, I was thinking about how Ralph handled that situation, how he respected my mom and her dream. And I got to thinking about a song he and Carter recorded in the '60s, one of the last records they made before Carter died. It was “Dream of a Miner's Child,” in which a little girl has a bad dream and says, “Daddy, don't go to the mine.” And he goes into the mine because he has to go to work to provide for his family, and he gets killed. The little girl had foreseen what would happen.

It takes a pure heart and a real humility and innocence to see that kind of stuff. My mom had it, and Ralph believed.

Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine. You are a stranger, and you're a pal of mine
.

—“Hello Stranger,” by the Carter Family, 1937

E
verybody talks about love at first sight. Well, there's also love at first sound. You don't hear about it as much, but it happens all the time. Especially with musicians.

Take A.P. Carter. He was a young fellow in the mountains of Virginia, out peddling fruit trees door to door. One day in 1914, A.P. stopped by a farmhouse and heard a beautiful voice ringing out. It was sixteen-year-old Sara Dougherty singing on the front porch. He fell in love with her singing, and later on, he fell in love with her. That was how the Carter Family got started.

Something like that happened to me, too. When I first met my girl, we were just about the same age as A.P and Sara. Only I was selling records instead of fruit trees, and she was from Texas instead of the next hollow over.

I was working with Ralph, and we were at a bluegrass festival in Kilgore, Texas. It was my first time in the Lone Star State. Part of my job as a Clinch Mountain Boy was selling records at the merchandise table. It was the biggest responsibility me and Keith had on the road, and we went right to it after every show. Curly Ray set up his own record table nearby, because he didn't trust nobody else to sell his solo albums and souvenirs. Curly Ray was a born salesman, too, and he really loved hawking his stuff. Keith and I saw this job as a way to make a little extra money. We had to haul boxes of the old eight-track tapes and the LP albums with the heavy cardboard sleeves to the tables, and there were plenty to haul, 'cause Ralph was in the studio cutting records every chance we could get. Seemed like there was always a new Rebel release boxed up and ready to go whenever we hit the road. It kept the table busy.

At this festival, we had to park the bus way up in the woods, because there wasn't any place close to the stage. So after the show it was up and down the hill and back and forth to the table in the hot summer sun for me and Keith. I'd already taken off my stage clothes, hung 'em up in the bus, and put my jeans on. Let me tell you, it felt good to get out of those polyesters. There were some more record boxes to get to the table, but Keith still had to change his clothes and said he'd handle the last few loads.

I headed down to the record table ahead of him. I stopped for a minute, catching my breath and hoping for a breeze to cool me down. Through the woods, I could hear a band playing on the stage down the way. I recognized the song, one you didn't hear very often. It was “When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall,” a sad old Bill Monroe tune from the '50s.

I heard voices singing, sweet as angels, drifting through the stand of tall trees:

When the moon shines on the Blue Ridge Mountains
,

And it seems I can hear my sweetheart call . . 
.

The sound gave me goose bumps. I set my boxes down and started following that sound, walking through the trees to get closer to the stage. I started walking a little faster, and a little faster, until I was almost running.

I finally made it out of the woods to where I could get a good view. Up on the stage I saw this young girl about my age, playing guitar and singing. She was part of a family band, with her mom singing harmony, her sister on bass, and her dad on mandolin. I watched for a while. I wondered why I'd never seen this group before. It was the first time I'd ever heard girls singing and playing bluegrass music.

Then I realized I'd better get back and help Keith at the record table. I hustled back through the woods where I left my boxes, and by the time I made it, he was finishing setting up. All of sudden, two girls walked up to the table. I could see right away they were the same two girls I had just watched on stage. They were looking mighty fine in their stage dresses. The one with the lead voice came right up to me and said, “Hi, I'm Sharon White!” and the sister, the one on stand-up bass, went right up to Keith. “Hi, I'm Cheryl White,” she said.

“We wanted to meet you guys,” said Sharon. “Me and Cheryl saw y'all at the Bean Blossom Festival, and we said to each other, ‘When they come to Texas, we're gonna go up and say hi.'”

“Well, I sure like your singing, too, Sharon,” I said. “I heard you up on stage with your folks a while ago, and y'all really sounded great.”

She had a great big smile. When she heard what I said, she blushed. I smiled right back, not knowing what else to say.

Sharon told us all about her family band, Buck White and the Down Home Folks. Buck, her dad, played mandolin and sang with her mom, Patty. She played guitar, and Cheryl played bass, and of course they all sang in simple, pure harmonies. They were from Texas but lived in Arkansas. She said they had just put their house up for sale in hopes of moving to Nashville. They really wanted to make a go of it in the music business.

Cheryl and Keith really hit it off. Keith was a better talker than me, and he was making her laugh. After just a few minutes, though, the girls looked at each other and said they had to get back to their mom and dad. They promised they'd stop and see us at the next festival. And just like that they were gone.

Of course, back then, there was no way of keeping up with people you met on the road, no Facebook or Twitter or any of the stuff kids have today. So I took it upon myself to see that fair young lady again before we left the festival grounds.

I was looking for an excuse when I remembered the Monroe song that she and the family were singing when I first heard her voice. After the evening show, I walked over to their little campsite. I said my hellos to all the Whites, and then I asked Sharon if she could write down the lyrics to that song. I told her I needed the words so that me and Keith could learn it.

“Yeah, I can do that,” she said, and there was that sweet smile again. She was just as innocent as could be. Years later, her mom and dad used to joke with me about it: “Ricky, you knew every word of that song, didn't you?” Honestly, I didn't know
all
of it . . . just the chorus.

It didn't matter much either way, 'cause my plan worked. Her mom fetched a piece of paper, and I watched Sharon write down the lyrics for “When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall.” She handed it to me, and I'd got what I came for. Now what? Sharon started telling me about living in Arkansas. Well, I didn't hardly know where Arkansas was. I just knew we drove through it on the way to Texas. I also knew it was a long way from eastern Kentucky. Thinking of the distance gave me a bad feeling. I didn't know when or where I'd ever see her again. Well, about four months later, we were back up in Bean Blossom, Indiana, for the fall festival in November. I didn't know it, but Sharon, Cheryl, and the Whites were there, too. When I saw Sharon, my heart sank.

She was with a fellow I knew, Jack Hicks. At that time, Jack was playing with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. He was from Ashland, Kentucky, and he was a great banjo player. Come to find out Jack and Sharon were dating, and it was obvious they were serious about each other.

Jack and Sharon eventually did get married. Keith and Cheryl dated on and off for seven years, but they just couldn't decide how to make things work with both of their busy careers in music. So they finally broke it off.

I stayed in touch with the Whites. That day at the festival in Texas was the start of a long relationship with the family that has lasted more than forty years. The Whites have been the best friends I've ever had, and it's hard to know where to begin to try to tell you what they've meant to me personally and spiritually.

T
raveling the road with Ralph was quite an adventure. When you're young and come from the sticks, everything seems exciting and new. Having us along made it seem more fresh for Ralph and all the guys in the band. They were well past forty, Ralph and Curly and bass player Jack Cooke were, and they'd already been on the road twenty-five years, so a lot of stuff was old hat to them. Not to me and Keith.

Just to pull into a festival was a thrill. Fans at the campgrounds would be waiting and watching for the bus with “Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys” painted in big letters on the side. They'd jump up from their lawn chairs, run over to greet us, and start waving and shouting as if they'd never seen anything like it before. It was a big deal to them, and for me and Keith, too.

For us, the festival circuit was new turf, and it was so fun seeing cities and towns we'd never been to or even heard of before. We got to meet people from all walks of life. The fans had such reverence for Ralph and the tradition he represented. Seeing the people from the northern part of the country respond so positively to the music of our mountains, well, it just made you feel part of something important. It could be a grind on the road, for sure, but we had a lot of good times, too. Most of the crazy stuff was on account of the jokesters we had on board—Keith and Curly Ray. They'd pull pranks to pass the time, which was part of the Stanley tradition from the early days with Carter. Back then, it was Carter and George Shuffler doing the pranking. In our time, it was Keith pulling pranks on Curly.

By then, Ralph had bought another motor home that he converted into a camper. It had a couple of couches on each side, a couple of chairs with a little table where you could play cards, and a couple of captain's chairs up front. The camper was big enough that we all had just enough room to sit down and relax as we went down the road.

Keith was always seeing how much we could make Curly eat. Sad to say, but sometimes it was our main entertainment on the road. We had played some shows up in Ohio, and we were headed back home on Route 23. We weren't too far away, crossing from Kentucky into Virginia, where Ralph kept the camper in Coeburn. It was around lunchtime, and Curly started talking about how he'd sure like to have a good hot dog.

Ralph said, “Well, what kind you looking for, Ray?”

Curly said, “Maybe a foot-long.”

“Well, how many of them foot-longs you think you could eat right now?”

“I'll bet you I could eat five foot-longs.”

“Bet you couldn't,” said Ralph.

Keith and I chimed in too. “I'll bet you twenty-five dollars you couldn't eat five foot-longs,” I said. “Do you know that is five feet of hot dogs?”

Then Ralph, who started the whole thing, got behind Curly, and that sealed the deal. There was a hundred dollars riding on it.

We were passing through the mountains near Whitesburg, Kentucky, where there is a little place called the Four Way. At that time, it had a little drive-in stop with soft-serve ice cream and hamburgers and hot dogs. We parked the camper, went up to the window, and said we wanted to order five foot-long hot dogs. The man told us that they didn't sell foot-longs.