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    Quilt, The: And the Poetry of Alabama Music
    Quilt, The: And the Poetry of Alabama Music
    Quilt, The: And the Poetry of Alabama Music
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Quilt, The: And the Poetry of Alabama Music

    By Frye Gaillard and Kathryn Scheldt

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    About this ebook

    With a combination of song lyrics and reflective essays, Alabama author Frye Gaillard and recording artist Kathryn Scheldt pay tribute to the literary legacy of Alabama songwriters. Included here are reflections on the works of Hank Williams, Emmylou Harris, and W. C. Handy, among many others. Scheldt and Gaillard share Emmylou's view that the Americana music coming out of Alabama has been "the literature of the people." In addition to writing about this tradition, these two authors are part of it. In these pages and on an accompanying CD are songs co-written by Scheldt and Gaillard.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNewSouth Books
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9781603063913
    Quilt, The: And the Poetry of Alabama Music
    Author

    Frye Gaillard

    FRYE GAILLARD is the writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and If I Were a Carpenter, the first independent, book-length study of Habitat for Humanity. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.

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      Book preview

      Quilt, The - Frye Gaillard

      The Quilt

      And the Poetry of Alabama Music

      Frye Gaillard

      and Kathryn Scheldt

      NEWSOUTH BOOKS

      Montgomery

      NewSouth Books

      105 S. Court Street

      Montgomery, AL 36104

      Copyright © 2015 by Frye Gaillard and Kathryn Scheldt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

      All song lyrics previously published by Shellkat Enterprises (BMI), in Sync Music (BMI), Dennis Morgan Music (BMI), and One Fish Two Fish Music Publishing (ASCAP). Reprinted here with permission. All songs available at www.kathrynscheldt.com. Portions of Frye Gaillard’s essays appeared in different form in the Americana Gazette and Mobile Bay Monthly. Gaillard has written extensively about Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris in his earlier books, Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music; The Heart of Dixie: Southern Rebels, Renegades and Heroes; and With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions.

      Editors, Jay Lamar and Rachael Fowler

      ISBN: 978-1-60306-390-6

      eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-391-3

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934016

      Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

      Contents

      Part I - The Poetry of Alabama Music

      1 - Georgiana

      2 - Florence, Sheffield, and Muscle Shoals

      3 - Boulder to Birmingham

      4 - Good Ole Boys Like Me

      5 - Down on Mobile Bay

      Part II - The Songs

      6 - Stories

      7 - Feelings

      8 - Good Ole Songs

      Index of Song Titles

      Index

      Contributors

      Part I

      The Poetry of Alabama Music

      Essay by Frye Gaillard

      1

      Georgiana

      On the dusty main street of Georgiana, the Ga-Anna Theater looks as if it’s seen better days—and in fact, it has. Among other things, it’s the place where Hank Williams, a native of Georgiana, delivered one of his early performances, and though the brick exterior looks faded and old, it is, for a handful of artists in the know, a historic stop on the country music circuit.

      A few years ago, the headliner for the first show I’d ever seen there was the Grand Ole Opry’s George Hamilton IV, a legend in his own right, who was paying tribute to Georgiana’s most famous son. Before the hometown folk, the hardest of hard-core Williams fans, Hamilton ran through a sampling of Hank’s hits and a few of his lesser-known gospel numbers, and then introduced his special guest for the evening. He was performing that night with Kathryn Scheldt, an Alabama songwriter who opened her set with something she had only recently recorded.

      Rufus and Hank, co-written by Scheldt in memory of Williams, was also a tribute to Rufus Payne, an African American street singer who had been the musical mentor to a teenaged Hank.

      Made a funny pair down by the railroad track

      Skinny white boy and his friend who was black

      In rural Alabama in the 1930s, it was borderline scandalous for a rough and hard-living man of the streets, especially if he was black, to be hanging out with a young white boy. But, as music historians are quick to tell you, the music that Payne and Williams made together left a permanent impression on Hank, infusing his country sound with the blues.

      I knew as I listened to Scheldt in Georgiana that this was a writer who understood such things, and, without a lot of fanfare, was doing her part to keep that musical tradition alive. Already, I had seen her career evolve over the course of four well-crafted CDs. I had heard her play in listening rooms and other grass-roots venues throughout the South, and had even written a few songs with her, having discovered a kindred Americana spirit.

      The lyrics of some of those songs are included in the pages of this book. But as we assembled them for publication, Kathryn and I agreed that it was appropriate—essential, even—to pay tribute to the poetry of Alabama music.

      We knew we needed to start with Hank Williams, so we headed north one morning on I-65, turning off at Georgiana, to mingle once again with the ghosts. You can feel them there in the half-empty streets, and in the rambling, wood-frame house that is now a museum, dedicated to keeping Williams’s memory alive. As a frail and sickly teenaged boy, he had lived in that house with his domineering mother, Miss Lilly, who took in boarders and, according to local rumors, some of them unkind, did whatever it took to survive. Hank’s father, a shell-shocked victim of World War I, by then was living in a mental hospital, and the desperate loneliness of those days drove Hank’s first forays into poetry.

      The dad I’ve got, you see, he comes but once a year

      I ask him why he stayed away and he said lookie here,

      and tried to take my mind away by pulling at my ear

      Mom wasn’t there, she never is when Papa pays a call

      When she came back I tried to talk, but Mom said that’s all

      Paul Hemphill, one of Williams’s biographers, called those lines a piece of doggerel, and perhaps they are. But they are also a cry from the heart, clear and direct, the foreshadowing from a troubled boyhood of what was to come. The fundamental truth about Hank’s life was that it never got any better. Before he died at the age of twenty-nine, he lived in constant physical pain, the result of a deformity in his spine, and it was one of the things that drove him to drink. But there was also the matter of his lovesick blues—his yearning for a father, his resentments toward an overbearing mother, and his turbulent, sometimes violent marriage to a woman with whom he was desperately in love. Whatever else you can say about Audrey Williams, a wife whose fidelity he had reason to doubt—and whom he once attempted to shoot—she inspired some very good songs.

      In the rural South, a world that in the 1930s and ’40s was already overflowing with pain, devastated by the Great Depression, Hank gave people a way to let it out.

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