In Memory of a Beautiful Sound
Originally published in the August 2023 edition of The Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies.
The Rhine
For months, as the bitter winter transitioned into a cold spring, he marched through western Germany holding a machine gun, a prayer, and extra supplies when they managed to make it through. Weeks since they bathed, his unit ate a dish coined shit on a shingle every day, day in and out, for what seemed like time immemorial. The beech and alder trees along the Rhine not resembling any of the trees back home in the Ozarks.
After taking a piece of shrapnel in the hip, Q.P.’s prayer was answered. He left those forests filled with the stench of death and destruction. He came home with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and mental wounds that would stay with him until the day he died. Shortly after returning home to the states, he, like many other vets, released his pain and the constant echoes of shelling through the strings of guitars and mandolins.
The Ozarks
Hidden in the crooked valleys of the Ozarks’ Blue Mountain Range, the isolated community of Mountain View didn’t get paved roads until the mid-1960s. Amid America’s post-war folk revival, the sounds and songs of the mountains swept the nation in a wave of popularity. Folks like Quentin Pershing and Helen Imogene Warren, my Papaw and Granny, traveled to informal, weekly gatherings called hootenannies. At the hootenanny, they and other community members picked the guitar, played instruments, told stories, and sang ballads.
Lost somewhere between memories of war and the rolling hills of the present, the Warrens found their sound. I suppose that’s where the story begins: a trinity of hope, chance, and an answered battlefield prayer set to an up-tempo bluegrass tune.
Born in 1919, Papaw arrived to country farmers dealing with the Spanish flu and a plunge in crop prices. Shortly after his tenth birthday, Black Tuesday occurred, ushering in a decade of the worst economic downturn the world had ever seen. Almost destitute, the Warren family survived the Great Depression by farming, hunting, and fishing off the land they lived on in Tumbling Shoals, Arkansas. It was the same plot Papaw and Granny still lived on to that very day.
Then there was Granny. Born in 1931, Helen Imogene Seymore also lived through the Great Depression. She quit school in the second grade to start picking cotton, an experience she later reflected on as an adult in a song entitled “Redland Dirt Where Cotton Don’t Grow.” Her love of music was generational, a cultural tradition passed down to her from her father, Zebulon, a front porch picker with a penchant for entertaining. Setting up makeshift recording equipment on front porches, the Seymore family regularly gathered around with families to write, sing, and perform, transforming the pain of hard times into good memories of music and camaraderie.
Papaw sat in his old dining room chair, creaking with every movement. Dressed in worn overalls, bent over his guitar, slowly tuning it. As a 75-year-old, hair white as snow, he was still mentally sharp, his arthritic hands adept and capable, having had a lifetime's mastery with his instrument of choice.
Mountain Music & The Red Barn
Suddenly the house was full of this particular, unique sound. It sounds like a mix of Celtic folk music or an old Irish jig that's transformed, lost to generations of remote mountain people. It's crafted into a melody reminiscent of a rolling train or moving water that reverberates around a room right into the soul. It’s bright, fast-paced, and warm. Simple yet full of sound – a fusion of folk, country, and bluegrass styles mixed with a tinge of the delta’s blues, blended with regional lyrics. It's a genre people either love or hate.
When they weren't raising a family or writing music, Granny and Papaw loved performing and entertaining. They performed at the Red Barn, an old country western hall in Heber Springs, Arkansas, that would come alive on Friday and Saturday nights. The Red Barn was a place of community where the old-timers could meet up, tell tall tales and even bigger lies, and two-step their cares away to the interlacing sounds of fiddles, banjos, dobros, guitars, and mandolins. Located down a steep hill by the old Optimist ball fields, it was aptly named for its red tin exterior and white gabled roof.
It was there that Granny would shine. Reminiscing about different aspects of country life, she sang narrative ballads about lost loves and lustful glances, about cotton plants and convicts from Cleburne County, her mama’s biscuits, and her daddy’s family. Standing a little over five foot tall, Granny Warren believed in bedazzled, shiny clothes and a strong shade of lipstick. A stage presence, if you will. Something that will make the Baptists talk amongst themselves Saturday night before they come waltzing in for forgiveness come Sunday morning.
After performing, singing heartfelt and hand-penned songs to the accompaniment of a five-piece band, she would glide out in a red silk blouse and matching lips. Mingling, mixing, and general politicking were some of her best skill sets. Paired with her fearless nature, watching her work over the crowd was enthralling. As the next band took the stage, she made her rounds. Saying hello from table to table, she would inquire about families while thanking folks for attending. Granny took the opportunity to explain that the Red Barn was only around due to their support, and donations were gladly accepted. She was so successful in collecting donations that it led to the creation a non-profit organization called the Heber Springs Folklore Society.
The Christmas Rabbit
While Granny wrote about the experiences she longed for, Papaw's lyrics revolved around intimate personal experiences. He often recorded spoken words set to music since he was barely literate. One such story, "The Christmas Rabbit," recounted the Warren family's worst winter in the 1930s. A long, hard winter and fall’s early arrival caused the summer crops to be poor. Nearing Christmas, the Warrens had only a few scraps to serve to celebrate. Papaw set traps out on Christmas Eve while praying to God. Christmas morning, he left on foot, telling his family he would return with a rabbit to serve. He checked each trap, only to find them empty - except for the last one - where he found the largest rabbit he had ever seen. The joy of that one meal during such difficult times stayed with him his entire life. In his elderly years, he recounted it as his favorite Christmas memory and shared it with his children, his grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Throughout the nineties, my grandmother worked endlessly to raise funds and obtain land rights and the grants needed to build a new music center for the Heber Springs Folklore Society. Located at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, its creation was meant to aid in preserving the region’s musical heritage. Shortly after its completion, my grandfather suffered his first heart attack, ending years of playing music with my grandmother on the public stage.
I often wonder what my grandparents' goals were with their music. I think it was their way of telling the present world about their past, connecting with others, and expressing more emotion during an era when that may not have been as socially acceptable. Through playing music, my grandparents taught me about their culture and the vulnerability of artistic crafts. They taught me what it's like to stand together on a stage or alone when life needs you to. Their music became my music. Their stories, memories, and songs became the foundation for my childhood.
I said goodbye to my grandmother for the last time in front of a Cadillac pink casket, alighted with a rainbow display of flowers. Glancing toward a side table to my left, my eyes fixated, resting on a black-and-white photo taken some quarter century before. On the left stood Granny, a leather strap draped over her shoulder, eyes cast downward to the neck of her guitar, permanently singing into the microphone. Papaw sat on a stool beside her, looking steely-eyed out toward the crowd as he played the rhythm to her lead. I thought back fondly to the music of my youth.
The Disfarmer Photo
I reckon Granny spent most of her life wanting to be somebody special on the stage or in the world, never realizing she already was. Years after she died, I found her photo. A crisp black and white shot in 1943 by Mike Disfarmer, a local portrait photographer. His portraiture work provided an introspective look into the rural south throughout the Great Depression, depicting the lives of families, farmers, and fighters of a generation at war. Full of emotion, Disfarmer captured the soulful expressions of his community members. Community members like Helen Imogene Warren, a teenager at the time, posed alongside her family wearing a hand-sewn floral dress with soft brown curls framing her face. I was astonished when I first found the photo displayed in the International Center of Photography collections – as a historical piece of Americana. After the shock wore off, I cackled up a storm, thinking and knowing how much she would have loved being on the stage – no matter the medium.
Music is just like language. It's constantly changing and morphing; it ebbs and flows, adapting to new norms. Folk music is a highly regionalized language. The pickers and players were historically isolated for generations in remote mountain communities, up in the hills, down in the hollers, and deep in the coal mines and coastal swamps. Audibly, there are only a few differences in the musical presentation. However, lyrically, each song presents a unique story about life in that region, making its preservation important. Every region has a story, and its people all have a song.
My biggest fear growing up was that this sound, their sound, would be lost to changing times. I hear twinges of the sounds I grew up on in a reemergence of folk-country artists with bluegrass roots. Whenever I hear it, it makes me happy. It means the past generations succeeded in something else, something more meaningful and something arguably more complex: they passed their craft on.
We laid Granny to rest next to Papaw out at Chastain Chapel. Her parents and their parents before them were buried in the same field. There's at least fifty or sixty of my kin out there. With over a hundred years and five generations, all the granmommas, papaws, aunts and uncles, and cousins near and far. All lying in a field of bones that another grandaddy established.
I'd point 'em to those grounds if someone asks me what folk is. Up on a hill, under the old oak and pine. Or, as Granny would sing, "in the red clay dirt where the cotton don't grow."
The Roots of Folk
All these years later, I can still hear the jangle and the upbeat twang pulling at the heartstrings. I still see the twinkle in Papaw's eye and hear Granny's excitement as she sang the lyrics of their life.
The Quapaws, one of the original tribes that inhabited the region, were known as the Arkansas or people of the "south wind." The people of a state named after a Native American tribe play banjos, a West African instrument, along with a mountain dulcimer from the hills of Appalachia. Their style of music is based on the fiddling and lyrical tradition of the Scottish and Irish.
In that sense, folk music is everyone's music. Everyone's story. It doesn't matter where you come from, only what you have to say in those verses about the human condition, the heart of life. It's a personal affliction, an honest conviction of the soul, only expressed with the truest words imaginable. Folk is a state of mind, a way of life. It's the story and sound of us, passed down from generation to generation.
I'm so thankful for what a beautiful sound it is.
References
Central Arkansas Library System. 2022a. “Flu Epidemic 1918.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. January 22, 2022. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/flu-epidemic-of-1918-2229/ .
— 2022b. “Early Twentieth Century, 1901 through 1940.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. December 14, 2022. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/early-twentieth-century-1901-through-1940-403/ .
City of Mountain View. n.d. “Mountain View History.” https://www.cityofmtnview.org/history.
Disfarmer, Mike. 2016. Margie, Ethel, Helen. Photo-Gelatin Silver. International Center of Photography. New York, New York. https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/margie-ethel-helen .
”Hootenanny.” 2016. Grammarist. March 11, 2016. https://grammarist.com/interesting-words/hootenanny/ .
Kennedy, William Thomas, and Tonya Arlene Kennedy. 2023. Warren and Seymore Family Musicians Interview by Jessica Dye.
Smithsonian Music. n.d. “Folk Revival.” Smithsonian Music. https://music.si.edu/spotlight/american-folk-music/musicians .
Turabian, Kate L. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Ninth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers. 9th ed. University of Chicago Press.
Warren, Helen. n.d. Not Guilty.
— n.d. Redland Dirt Where Cotton Don’t Grow.
