The Night Listener and Others (39 page)

It was the same with Scrooge, for I had secreted in the coarse oats with which he prepared his gruel a goodly portion of the dried leaves of
Nepeta
cateria, that flowering plant more commonly known as catnip. Scrooge reacted to it, indeed overreacted. I had expected to see a playfulness possibly approaching drunkenness, but instead the herb produced in Scrooge’s human/feline blood the equivalent of an opium dream which proved not merely beneficial but utterly transformative.

The results may be seen in Dickens’s final stave, nor does he elaborate one iota the magnitude of Scrooge’s rebirth. He was indeed a changed man, and totally for the better.

He now has a multitude of friends. The family of Scrooge’s nephew and the Cratchits are frequent visitors to our new house, and I myself have learned forbearance, for my tail is frequently regarded as a toy by young Timothy.

And I have softened in other ways as well. For though I was initially Marley’s cat, I have become in every way Scrooge’s. When guests and friends have departed after dinner, we sit by the roaring fire on winter nights, Scrooge in his comfortable chair, and I on his lap, made ever more capacious by good food and drink. I lie curled up, and he happily rubs my belly, which is always full of hearty victuals and sweet cream. In spite of myself and my independent and solitary past, I purr.

And, when no one is present but the two of us, so does Scrooge.

—For Laurie, Christmas 2006

1. The more proper “ailurophobia” was not coined until the early 20th century.

The Final Verse

Okay, this on? Yep, red light, guess I’m good to go. I carry this thing around in case I get any song ideas, never used more than the first few minutes of a tape, so this’ll be a first. What I’m gonna do now is tell how I came to get the last verse of “Mother Come Quickly,” and also what really became of Pete Waitkus. Then I’m gonna tuck this away in my safe deposit box, and maybe someday everybody’ll know the
real
story. So here goes.

Now you oughta know this anyway, but “Mother Come Quickly” is one of the best-known songs in popular music, a sure-fire classic. It’s traditional, and because of that everybody and his brother’s recorded it. It was around as a folk song for a good many years before it was really a hit, which was when Peter, Paul and Mary put it on their first album. It was that year’s “Tom Dooley.” Joan Baez did it on one of her first records, Bob Dylan used just the tune and put his own lyrics to it. There’s even been rock versions of it. Kurt Cobain did it on that
Unplugged
show, lotsa others. And country and blue-grass, hell yes. Doesn’t matter it’s really a woman’s song, a lot of guys sung it—Johnny Cash, George Jones, even ole Hank did it live, but he never recorded it. Became a bluegrass standard after Bill Monroe brought it out on Decca in the fifties. The Stanleys, Jim and Jesse, hell, even I did it back when I was doing straight country.

Course, I’m bluegrass now—then
and
now, since I started out as one of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, playing rhythm guitar and singing lead for two months way back in the early seventies till Bill realized that good as my singing was I wasn’t never gonna get that Lester Flatt lick, that
bum-bumma-dooba-dooba-do
that had become such a part of his sound. I could play it medium tempo, but real fast I hit it maybe two times out of five, and the other three it sounded like chickens dancing on the frets. He let me go, but not before one of them Nashville smoothies seen me and thought I had the voice and looks to make the big time.

He was right. In a few years I was just
holding
the damn guitar, letting the backup pickers play the tricky licks. Yeah, I had a shitload of songs on the charts back then—and I did “Mother Come Quickly” on my album,
Billy Lincoln Sings Songs From the Home Place
. That was around 1983, when I was starting to slip. Record sales were down, they weren’t asking me on the Grand Ole Opry anymore, concerts weren’t selling, and Columbia dropped me.

So I went back to bluegrass. Any port in a storm, and things had gotten pretty damn stormy by then. I’d spent a lot more than I’d saved, and what I had saved I’d put into dumbass investments. I played guitar with Doyle Lawson for a time, doing the festival and church circuit, and finally started my own group, Billy Lincoln and the Blue Mountaineers. We did okay, got a contract with Rounder, where a lot of the best bluegrass acts were, and sold enough CDs to hang on.

We did “Mother Come Quickly,” not like the ballad version the folkies did, but more up-tempo, driving bluegrass, the way Monroe did it. In fact, let me do it now, just so you can hear what the song was like for the first seventy or so years, before the last part…came along, so to speak. I’ll do it like a ballad, because I want the words to stick out, and because that’s how I’m gonna do it tomorrow night…

I come from a lovin’ family

That lives where the two creeks meet.

One day from the east a young man came

Who wooed me with words so sweet.

He found me in my dark holler,

Brought sunshine to my night,

Wove daisies and violets through my hair,

He was my heart’s delight.

Mother come quickly, Father come quickly,

Brother and Sister, see.

The only man I ever did love

Is hanging in front of me.

Now that’s the first verse and the chorus, so right off the bat you know something bad’s gonna happen. It goes on…

Oh, the days passed by and still he came

And he asked me to be his wife,

But my family told me I never must be

Wed any day of my life.

You are a lovin’ daughter,

My father said to me,

But before you wed I’ll see him dead

And hangin’ in front of thee.

So now you got your paternal opposition, and right away you know the kids are gonna get into this, because whatever
their
parents want, hell, they want the opposite too. But now
weird
shit starts happening…

They found a girl beside the creek,

A knife had pierced her through.

And the blade stuck fast within her breast

Belonged to my love so true.

He was not guilty of the crime,

Nor would he run away,

For the threat of hanging scared him not

And with me he would stay.

Okay, now we got a dead girl in the picture, and she’s stabbed by this gal’s lover’s knife. Only he didn’t do it. She says
he was not guilty of the crime
. I always thought maybe he told her he didn’t and she believed him, or maybe she knew some other way. Still, guilty or not, she wants him to get out of there, because she loves him, she doesn’t want to see him hang…

I begged him to go and save his dear life,

But alas he would not flee.

With the moon in the sky they hung him on high,

And the guilt sat hard on me.

Mother, come quickly, Father, come quickly
.…

…nd blah blah blah, final chorus. Up till now. She loved this fella, her dad didn’t approve, so maybe Dad framed him with his knife and got him hung, and the girl feels guilty about it. But you notice something? The last verse only has four lines, not like the other ones that have eight.

That’s where the rumor got started that there was more to the song than what everybody knew. When it got hot with the folkies in the early sixties was when the rumor really started growing. There was this story that A. P. Carter of the Carter Family had found the whole thing but wouldn’t sing it, and some folks claimed they’d heard Mother Maybelle confirm it, but I think that’s bullshit. But Roger Waitkus—that’s the old guy who first collected it way long ago—he never said nothing. Never even said where he got it other than that it was Appalachian traditional or some such.

Waitkus was a queer duck. He was the biggest rival to John and Alan Lomax as far as collecting songs, but he didn’t go out of the country or out west and down to the Delta like the Lomaxes did. He just did the mountains—the Appalachians and the Ozarks, that whole Scotch-Irish-English tradition, looking for every variant he could find, and of course anything new that hadn’t popped up before.

He started way back in the twenties and thirties, and had his own little dynasty too—his son Carl was doing stuff around the same time as Alan Lomax, and then there’s…his grandson Peter. I met Pete when he was a little kid, and I always got along good with him. He had a bad case of hero worship for me, because, hell, there I was, little older than a kid myself, playing on stage with the father of bluegrass. I kind of took to Pete, he knew so damn much for a kid. We lost track of each other when I went country, though I got Christmas cards from him, and I’d always write him back.

It sort of meant something, getting cards from him, because to most folk he was real standoffish, like his old man and his grandpa had been. They did what they did, and published a book from some little college press every few years. I never knew a thing about Roger or Carl’s wives, though they must’ve had them. But Pete thought of me as a friend because we’d been friendly when we both were much younger.

When I went back to bluegrass, it was like I’d been born again to Pete. He came to a lot of my gigs and was plumb tickled when I got my own band. He’d give me songs he’d come across and thought might work for me, and I used a few, gave him a nod on the CD credits, or when we performed I’d say, “That song was give to me by a good old friend, Pete Waitkus,” and he’d like that. He was still digging in the mountains for songs the way his daddy and grandpa did—they were both dead now—and he spent a lot of time going over the old tapes and discs and wire recordings they made, seeing what might’ve been overlooked.

Anyway, he calls me last spring and says he wants to see me. He’s all excited, and he says, “Billy, I think I found a key to the Holy Grail.” Well, I’ve seen that Indiana Jones movie, and I don’t know if he’s joking or what, but I say okay, come on over. He lives in Nashville too, so he’s there pretty quick.

It’s quiet at my house since Linda’s gone. She left right after Christmas, but we’ve been keeping it mum. Bluegrass fans don’t like it if you got family troubles, and she’s still singing in the act with her mom and brothers, so we figure we’ll just play it cool before we get an actual separation or divorce.

Pete doesn’t want a beer or coffee or anything, he’s that excited. He can’t even sit down, and he’s up and walking around, and says he’s got the best clue ever about the rest of the “Mother Come Quickly” song. Hell, I figure if anybody would he would, since it’s his grandpa that found it, but I nod like this is great news. Then he starts rattling on.

“Do you know the story of how my grandpa got that song?” he asks, and I tell him I heard it was some old lady sang it for him. “That’s right,” he says, “it was Bertha Echols. She was old back then, and she told him there was more, but it wasn’t hers to sing. That’s all I knew, until…”

And he takes this big old pause like he’s waiting for a drumbeat, and I say, “Until what?”

And then he says he found the original aluminum disc Roger Waitkus made back in nineteen-thirty-something. “I heard the tape transcriptions dozens of times,” Pete says, “but there was
more
on the disc.”

“More of the song?” I asked. I’m getting a little excited now myself.

“No,” he says, “just talk. I put it on a DAT. You got a machine?”

Of course I got a DAT, so he sticks it in there and I hear his grandpa’s voice, and it’s saying, close as I can recall, “Now, Mrs. Echols, it’s very important that you sing the entire song for me. This is an important historical document,” and he’s going on like that for a while, really pressing this woman, and then it gets to back and forth.

He says, “Well, why can’t you sing it for me?”

And she says, “It ain’t mine to sing.”

And he says, “Well, whose is it?”

And she says, “The family. Ask them.”

And he says, “What family?”

And she says, “You
know
.”

And he says, “No I
don’t
.”

And she says, “Yes you
do
, and that’s all I’m a-sayin’.”

And she says nothing and he says nothing and then Pete stops the tape. And I say, “That’s clear as mud.”

“No, she was right,” Pete says. “My grandpa knew it but he didn’t realize it. She’d sung it for him. The answer was right there in the lyrics.” And Pete tells me to listen, and he rewinds the tape and plays the beginning:

I come from a lovin’ family

That lives where the two creeks meet.

At least that’s what I hear. It’s tough, because the old lady is singing kind of screechy, and the recording is crap, all full of hiss and other junk.

Pete turns it off and asks me what she sang. I tell him what I heard and he shakes his head no. “She didn’t say ‘a lovin’,” he says. “You heard her dialect, she’d have pronounced it ‘luhvin’, but instead she sings almost a long O like ‘loavin.’ And listen to the word before too.”

So he plays it again, and damned if it doesn’t sound like “loavin,” and in front of what I thought was A, I can just barely hear, over all the noise, a TH sound.

“What did you hear?” Pete asks.

“The loavin’ family?” I say, feeling stupid. “What the hell’s that, folks that make loaves of bread?”

“The L-O-V-I-N family,” he spells out. “Spelled like lovin’, but pronounced loavin. It’s a name. Not a common one in the Appalachians, but a real one. Louvin is another version of it, like the Louvin Brothers?”