Bobby's Birthday Portraits

By now, everyone knows Marshall resident and Bluegrass wonder, Bobby Hicks, celebrated his 80th birthday on July 21 with a concert on the island in Marshall. It was nothing short of a wonderful day for the music, the setting, the sense of community, and the pride everyone felt in our little place. There have been many wonderful photographs published from the event. Here are a few more to add to the mix. 

Madison County Fiddlers, Roger Howell, Bobby Hicks and Arvil Freeman, Marshall, 2013. 

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Bluegrass Legends Bobby Osborne (left), J.D. Crowe (middle), and Jerry and Del McCoury (right). 

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The Masters of Bluegrass, Marshall, NC 2013

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Bobby Hicks, Marshall, NC, 2013

Seldom Scene - At the Rock Cafe, 1979

At the Rock Cafe, Marshall, Madison County, NC 1979

This photograph was made under the auspices of a Photographic Survey Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts awarded to me through Mars Hill College. Prints from the grant period are now housed at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. This was a period of time when our leaders and our citizens understood the role the Arts and Humanities play in our lives. They teach us about life itself - knowledge increasingly threatened by the present political and social climate in our country.  

Madison County - A Bloody Jewel

Historical Marker, NC Highway 212, Madison County, NC, 2010

Madison County, North Carolina, earned the moniker Bloody Madison in the Civil War, specifically in January 1863, at the well documented, and well remembered, Shelton Laurel Massacre. That terrible and fearful time in our county’s personal past is thankfully long gone. The nickname, however, has stayed with us and some people would say for good reason.

I don’t know if we have more violence and mayhem in Madison than other places of comparable size and demographics, but we certainly have our fair share. Here are a few notable instances from years past. The year before I moved here, 1972, Nancy Morgan, a young VISTA worker, was murdered and left hogtied in her car on Hot Springs Mountain – a case that remains officially unsolved. Five years later, Philip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews murdered two Yancey County men passing through the county on their way to Greenville, Tennessee. The bodies were found some weeks later in an abandoned stone quarry on Highway 208 after the murderers were overheard bragging in a Cripple Creek, Colorado bar about “getting away with murder in North Carolina.” Then there were the elderly Gahagan siblings who were killed in their home near the Belva community and the man who murdered his daughter by feeding her food laced with pesticides. And one only has to look at the weekly arrest report in the newspaper to realize there are people living here, as there are everywhere, who believe violence is the answer to their problems. Wildness and isolation tend to be defining elements for much of Madison County and I think people, non-residents especially, associate those characteristics with the idea of Bloody Madison - a place where people tend to deal with their own problems.

              Convicted Murderers, Phillip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews, being led from the

Madison County Courthouse to the jail, Marshall, 1978.

There has been a concerted effort over the last fifteen years to temper the county’s image and it has since been reborn as The Jewel of the Blue Ridge. This extreme makeover corresponds with the construction and opening of I-26 and efforts to make the county more appealing to developers, small businesses, and new residents; a program that was largely successful until the economic collapse of 2008 altered the dynamic. Since then, most new, gated communities have gone belly up and the initial flood of new people has slowed. One has to wonder if those developers, as they ponder their red-inked balance sheets, or the county itself, as we mourn our bloodied landscape and lost tax revenues, still think of Madison as a jewel.

It’s not that I dislike the name, The Jewel of the Blue Ridge, or what it represents. I know I live in a jewel of a place - safe and comfortable, with generous, welcoming people. But I also know this can be a hard place to live and that it’s not for everyone. A jewel connotes a certain ease, a station in life, that doesn’t quite mesh with our sometimes hardscrabble reality in Madison County.

 Welcome Sign, Highway 25-70 West, near the Ivy River, Madison County, NC, 2013

But Bloody Madison continues to ring true for me - not the mayhem and violence associated with it, but the name itself. It’s a name with guts and character. For me, it speaks of wildness, and isolation, and a certain unknown, or unmapped, quality. We live in an environment where the natural world plays an influential role in our daily lives. Those influences – the air, water, and soil, the quiet, the mountains and forests, and the culture itself – are the Jewel we speak of. They are our reasons for being here. But without care, attention, and an openness to change, or simply because the world can be brutally unforgiving, as it was in 1863, that jewel can be tarnished and dulled, and oftentimes is Bloody.

Victims, Phillip Paludan. An excellent book on the Shelton Laurel Massacre.

The Kingdom of Madison, Manley Wade Wellman. Popular history of Madison County.

Mystical Madison - The History of a Mountain Region, Milton Ready. A new non-academic history by Professor Emeritus at UNCA.

Sodom Laurel Album - Rob Amberg

The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia - Rob Amberg

Benjamin - Felice trentatre compleanno.

Bambino numero uno con la varicella.

As parents we are loath to admit this,

But our first children hold a special place.

In our hearts.

In our minds.

In our imaginations.

For men, if the first is a son, they become

the gift of maturation. In them,

the manchild and man to be, we

see ourselves, all we were, and

all we must become.

It’s sobering.

You do what you can and

weather the chickenpox, the rat house, the divorce, and new life.

You took steel drum class in high school,

instead of my choice of Latin.

But took Italian in college. I so like that.

We grow older and into our own selves.

In ways and places no one could have predicted.

And we leave, and come back, and meet up.

And we always like what we see.

Alla casa de le topi.

 In Arizona e in Portland, Oregon.

What's Appropriate - May Not Be for Everyone

The Madison County Stories exhibit was taken down last week at the Madison County Arts Council. I’ve spoken of the exhibit in previous posts so I won’t repeat myself here. But the Project did raise questions that go to the heart of Art and Documentary Expression. As a Visiting Artist with Duke University, my role was twofold – to mentor the young Madison and Duke women in their efforts to document life in Madison County through photography, and to continue my own long-term documentation of evolution and change in the county. 

When hanging the exhibit at Duke University last fall, the question of appropriateness was raised about three of my photographs I wanted to include. The images, two from a Harley motorcycle rally in Hot Springs and one from the Madison County jail in Marshall, showed women, or depictions of women, in stages of undress. I anticipated concerns about these three particular pictures, but in my mind, the photographs were legitimate views of present-day life in Madison County – no less true or believable than my photographs of parties, rodeos, preachers, and farmers that were included in the show.

 

Biker Rally, Madison County, North Carolina, 2012. 

I do think the photographs represent a side of the county that many people wish didn’t exist, and would choose to ignore, hoping it might simply go away. Similarly, the photographs could be interpreted as demeaning toward women, a point difficult to argue against. One person deemed them pornographic. Another was concerned that potential funders of the project would find them distasteful and refuse future support. Others felt the pictures would upset the sensibilities of children and parents whose work was also in the exhibit.

Community values do play a role in an artist’s mind and I did not hang the photographs in either venue. The children, their parents, and the larger community were my primary concerns. Unlike a blog, where someone can choose to read it or not, the exhibit would have offered no opportunity to avoid the pictures. We live in a conservative place, and while most residents are aware of, and indulgent of, alternative behaviors, they don’t want to be reminded or associated with it.  Are the pictures pornographic? I don’t think so. Raw? Yes. Difficult for some people to look at? Yes.

 

Biker Rally, Madison County, North Carolina, 2012.

 In the Old Madison County Jail, Marshall North Carolina, 2011. 

Documentary expression – photography, film, sound - is rooted in reality, a representation of the world around us, and oftentimes that reality can be hard to look at. But what is a documentarian's, or artist’s, purpose? Is it to satisfy existing perceptions or offer new ways of seeing? Should it follow the safe and predictable or risk displeasure and controversy? Is it to challenge, or reinforce, the status quo? These are always difficult and palpable questions – made more so when dealing with the lives of real people in one’s home community. Many factors influence the decision to show, or not show, particular images. But if one goal is a truthful and complete portrayal of place, how does one choose to leave some things out?

I've Got The Zuma Blues

Imagine my surprise at walking into Zuma, our local coffee shop in downtown Marshall, and finding a middle-aged black guy playing electric guitar and singing Chicago Blues. But there he was, Al “Coffee” McDaniel, and not only was he singing and playing the Blues, but he was doing it really, really well. The man has got the gift.

This latest addition to the Madison County music scene is to be a regular Monday night affair at Zuma and yet another feather in owner Joel Friedman’s cap. Friedman has been hosting the very popular Thursday night Bluegrass jam with the legendary fiddler, Bobby Hicks, for the last few years, but Blues Jam represents a significant departure from Madison County’s musical norm.

As most of us who live here, and many people who don’t, understand, Madison County is steeped in musical tradition – balladry, old-time, country, and bluegrass – and is considered a “source” community by music scholars for those genres. Recently though, with the arrival of hundreds of new people to the community including numerous first class musicians from other musical genres, our melodious parameters have been expanding. One of those musicians is the noted, and widely respected jazz keyboardist Steve Davidowski who is the mover and shaker behind the Monday Blues Jam. Davidowski is known in music circles as an early member of the Dixie Dregs, a jazz, southern rock, bluegrass, and classical fusion band based in Athens, Georgia. Since moving to Marshall, he has graced the town with his impromptu piano playing, walks around town with piccolo in hand, and his wonderful yearly benefit concerts for Neighbors in Need. This past Monday, in addition to McDaniel, he was joined by John Herman on bass, James Wilson on drums, and John Hupertz on harmonica. Local singing sensation, Ashley Heath, also sat in and did a full throttle version of Stormy Monday. With this new sound in town, Marshall residents can be assured that Mondays will not be stormy, and Tuesdays won’t be bad either.

Top, Blues Jam at Zuma Coffee with, from left James Wilson, John Herman, Steve Davidowski, and Al McDaniel.

Middle, Ashley Heath singing Stormy Monday with McDaniel, Steve Davidowski on sax, John Hupertz on harp.

Bottom, James Wilson on drums, John Herman on bass.

Van Griffin

Van Griffin at the Rodeo, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 2012

Van Griffin died last night.

I didn’t know Van all that well, but what I knew of him I liked.  I met him a few years ago through his son, Toby, and would run into him with frequency in downtown Marshall, or on the Bypass, and always at the rodeo and county fair. He was forever  ready to talk and was always generous with me – never refusing a request to make his photograph.

Van was a common man; and I say that in the most complimentary of ways. Easy to be around, no pretensions, funny, fun-loving. Here in the mountains, people would say he was a good ol’ boy. He kept chickens, lots of chickens, and regularly won prizes for them at the county and regional fairs.

This morning as I write this, I know Van is at peace after a long illness. I think of his family – his wife Ruth, his children – Toby, Keith, and Jan, his grandchildren – Levi, Jordan, Savannah, and Kaitlin, his brother Coy and his sister Jacksie. Death is always hardest for those left behind, but I know we will carry memories of this kind, graceful man with us for a long time and those memories will cause us to smile.