Kentucky Traveler (14 page)

I was heading down to the dressing room when a voice belting out a Stanley Brothers song caught my attention. I looked up on stage to see who it was. It was a scrawny kid with big, thick glasses. He was playing guitar, backed by an older boy on banjo and a couple other guys. The song was “My Deceitful Heart,” one of the last records Carter and Ralph cut for the King label. It was a real sad song. This boy sung it like he meant every word. I loved the way he sang, and I just stood there and watched. He was about my age, maybe a little younger, but there was a maturity in his voice. He knew what he was doing. In between songs, he knew how to talk to the crowd, and he could handle himself in front of a mic. He was comfortable up on stage, but he wasn't a show-off. His voice touched you; he had something special.

They called themselves the East Kentucky Mountain Boys. I wondered where they were from and why I'd never heard of them. They did some more mossy old bluegrass numbers, like “My Little Girl in Tennessee” by Flatt & Scruggs. But it was “My Deceitful Heart” that stayed with me. I couldn't believe another boy my age knew a Stanley Brothers song and was able to pull it off like a pro. He sure won me over, and the crowd, too. But the judges went for the razzle-dazzle. We all got put down by the little ponytailed twirler and her flaming batons. She took top prize.

Afterward, I went to the dressing area down in the basement. Me and this boy ended up down there at the same time, and we started talking. I was happy, since I wasn't sure I'd ever see him again. I wanted him to know he wasn't the only kid in eastern Kentucky who loved old-time, honest-to-God mountain music.

“Man,” I said. “I really like your singing.”

His face just lit up. For such a small kid he had as big a grin as he did a voice.

“Well,” he said. “I love your fiddle playing and the singing you did with your Dad.”

“Who do you like?”

“I like the Stanley Brothers,” he said. “Who do you like?”

“I
love
the Stanley Brothers! Ralph and Carter are my favorites!”

We were practically shouting we were so excited. You have to understand how unusual this was. It'd never happened to me before. I'd never met anyone my age with such a deep love and knowledge for the music of the Stanleys. Turned out we were both fifteen, even though he sang like someone much older. We were excited to find out we both had our sixteenth birthdays coming up in July. That meant we'd soon get our driver's licenses!

“Well, do you know this song?” he said, and started singing Carter's lead:
“Darlin', do you really love me?
” And I jumped right in on Ralph's tenor part:
“Are you the girl I used to know?”
We sang like we'd been singing together our whole lives, and we kept at it, song after song, for close to an hour. We were in our own world. We were like brothers, at least it felt that way.

That's how I first met Keith Whitley, and we got to be great friends. Me and Keith hit it off right from the start. It really clicked that quick. Some things happen that way. You feel it in your bones, and you just know. There was a bond between us. We stayed that way from then on, right up until the day he died.

It turned out that Keith lived only thirty miles or so down Route 32, in Sandy Hook, a little crossroads just over the line in Elliott County. The more we talked, the more we realized how much we had in common. He was a child prodigy, too. He was only four when he started playing music in public. That's when he won his first talent show, singing a Marty Robbins song in a cowboy outfit. By eight he was a guest on the Buddy Starcher TV show in Charleston, West Virginia, and now he had a band with his brother Dwight, the older boy I'd seen playing banjo.

I guess it shows how closed off and isolated we were out in the country back then. Brushy Creek was only a half hour away by car from Keith's place, door to door, but it could have been halfway around the world. I'd never met Keith, and I'd never heard of the East Kentucky Mountain Boys. He'd never heard of me or the Skaggs Family band, either. And here we were singing like long-lost brothers. He loved the fact that he now had a like-minded friend who knew the old songs. And when he found out I played mandolin, too, he got even more fired up.

Well, we didn't waste any time. I invited Keith and Dwight over to my house that weekend. We figured, hey, we sung pretty good together, so let's get to know each other and see what happens. Mom fixed supper, and we had a great time picking and singing, with Dad adding his guitar to our little band.

The next weekend, I went over to Keith's house in Sandy Hook and had supper with the Whitleys. They were a lot like our family, even down to the home-cooked meals. I loved his mom, Faye, and his dad, Elmer. Miss Faye sure knew how to cook. We were sitting at the dinner table, and I was on my best behavior. When you are eating supper at someone else's house for the first time, you don't say much unless you're spoken to first.

Well, I took one bite of the green beans, and I just blurted out, “Oh, gosh, Miss Faye, you cook with lard just like my mama!” I didn't mean nothing by it, really, it just came out. I was worried maybe I'd said something that could offend. Miss Faye didn't mind a bit, and in fact she thought it was funny and started laughing. “I sure do, honey,” she said. “And I'm glad to hear you like it.” I was so relieved she took what I said in the right way, and it really made me feel welcome.

M
eeting Keith was a milestone for a lot of reasons. One of the most important was it sent me back to my first love, the mandolin. I'd kind of put it away and concentrated on fiddle for a few years, but the mandolin was key to the sound me and Keith wanted to create. It was the sound the Stanley Brothers had in the early days, when Pee Wee Lambert played mandolin in their band.

With the singing, we had a blend that came natural. Keith sang lower than me in a baritone, and he took lead vocals and played rhythm guitar. I sung real high back then, as much as I'd grown, so I took tenor harmonies and played mandolin. When we did the high trio songs, Keith's brother Dwight would join in, and I'd jump up to the high tenor.

The Stanleys played with an old-time lonesome sound, more pure mountain style. Me and Keith were just drawn to that lonesomeness. The way Carter and Ralph sang was the highest expression of what was already inside us. We wanted to make music that was pure and beautiful, too. When you're at an impressionable age like me and Keith were, you get fixated on a sound. That's the way you learn music and hone your skills, by imitating the old masters and learning from them. And for us, it was Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and, most of all, the Stanley Brothers.

There was a lot of material for us to learn, 'cause I'd hit the jackpot with a stash of Stanley Brothers records. Not long before our family had left Columbus to come back to Kentucky, I'd gone to a record store with my dad. This store had a bunch of albums of reissued early Stanley Brothers records I didn't even know existed. I went through the stack like I'd struck pirate's gold, and I asked Dad if he'd let me get the ones I didn't have. There must have been near a dozen, and back then records were about five bucks apiece.

Dad didn't say a word. He pulled from his wallet a folded-up hundred-dollar bill that he'd stuck down in there in case of an emergency. I don't know if he really thought this was a bona fide emergency or not, but he took out that creased bill and gave it to the cashier. He got back some change, but I know he must have spent sixty dollars or more on Stanley Brothers records that day. He didn't waste a dime, though, I can tell you that! That stack of records was a gold mine. This was vintage material that had been out of print for years. It was incredibly rare stuff I'd never heard before.

With Keith, I had somebody my age to share this precious treasure with. We'd listen to the albums and play along for hours on end. We knew every vocal phrase and instrumental break, even the mistakes. Back then, it was straight to disc in the studio: These were live performances, no overdubs. Hearing those rare Columbia recordings was like falling in love with music all over again. I especially loved Pee Wee's mandolin, which was straight from the heart and always on the mark. It was all feel, so delicate, so bittersweet. Kinda haunting, too, like moonlight in a hollow. Most important to me at the time, Pee Wee's playing was simple, straightforward stuff, technique-wise.
Now that's a mandolin I can aspire to
, I thought to myself. So I just practiced till I got it. Like Dad used to say, “One more.” I'd drop the needle again and again and wear out the vinyl. Fifty years on, I never get tired of hearing this music. I still get inspiration from it. I have it all on my iPhone and listen to it almost every day.

Keith and I studied the album covers, pictures, and liner notes: We knew who played and sang what. Our favorite was the reissue of their earliest 78-rpm records made for the legendary Rich R Tone label, which had a photo of the band in 1946. This was probably the first group shot ever taken: Ralph and Carter and Pee Wee and the fiddler Leslie Keith. They're in an old house in Bristol, Virginia, holding their instruments and striking a formal pose behind a microphone in this room with old-fashioned wallpaper. What stood out was their intensity. No airs, no attitude, no foolishness, just pure focus. Just mountain kids crazy about music, same as us. They looked so young and so serious, and we could totally identify with them.

Music was everything to us. Keith came from a musical family, too. His mom Faye played piano and organ in church. His brother Dwight learned banjo from his grandpa. It was Miss Faye who got Keith started on guitar, and she said he didn't need much help. She noticed he had the knack. He only had to hear a song but once and he could play it beautifully.

When we met, all we wanted to do was play and sing. We didn't have a fallback plan or notions of doing anything else. Now, the thing was, in little places like Blaine and Sandy Hook, singing with your family or by yourself could only get you so far.

Once we got together, though, it sure speeded up things for us. Now we had something together that we didn't have on our own: a duet. Those harmonies took two voices blending together to do it right. We were a brother team, not by blood but by the bond of the music. When we sang, it felt that strong.

There was a kid named Jimmy Burchitt, cousin of our friend Elmer Burchitt who played with the Skaggs Family band. Jimmy would come up to the house and we'd all play together, me and Keith and Dad, too. We called Jimmy “The White Dove” because he was so pale. He had stark white hair and light pink complexion. He played in the old-time mountain style of Ralph Stanley, and Keith and I just loved that kind of picking. Give him Ralph's “Clinch Mountain Backstep” and he could blister it!

It wasn't long before Keith and I formed a band, along with Dad on guitar and Dwight on banjo. We got a weekly show at a radio station, WGOH, in Grayson, Kentucky, not too far from home. We had to come up with some sort of a name for ourselves. Keith had the idea for the Lonesome Mountain Boys, and it stuck. You hear about all the garage bands in the '60s that sprung up after the British Invasion. Well, we were a garage band, too. Every Wednesday night we'd get together in the garage at Keith's house. His dad, Elmer, would tape everything for two half-hour shows. One was a bluegrass show on Saturday, and there was an all-gospel show on Sunday.

In those days, you didn't get paid for playing on the radio. A show was just a way to get your name out. We had a couple of sponsors, the Foothills Telephone Company and Montgomery Ward, and they paid the station for the airtime. Keith wrote up a little jingle for Montgomery Ward that opened our program. We were broadcast for a hundred miles around. It was good exposure, but what really mattered was having our own band. It was our own little world. In the same way some boys had a clubhouse or a gang or a sports team they belonged to, we had the Lonesome Mountain Boys.

Sometimes Keith would go out and play with Dwight as the East Kentucky Mountain Boys; sometimes I'd play with the Skaggs Family band; sometimes I'd go off and play fiddle with Ray and Melvin, the Goins Brothers bluegrass band. But we always came back together as the Lonesome Mountain Boys.

I remember when Keith was spending the weekend at my house in Brushy Creek. We were out in the yard goofing off and we heard Lassie, our little squirrel dog, barking up a tree in the woods. My dad poked his head out the back door, and he hollered, “That dog's got something treed, and she ain't gonna leave it alone. Y'all go over there and see what's she got!”

Me and Keith let out a big war whoop and climbed the hill and followed the sound. We finally found the tree, and we saw a big ol' groundhog on a high branch, hanging on for dear life. There was Lassie at the bottom eyeing it, and she was going crazy. Now, our Lassie was a mix of shepherd and beagle, and she was a great little squirrel dog. She could see 'em from the longest ways away, and man, she'd take off and chase 'em down. In her mind, this groundhog was the biggest squirrel she'd ever treed.

Me and Keith got so excited we didn't even go back to the house to get a rifle. We grabbed handfuls of rocks and we knocked that groundhog out cold and it fell out of the tree stone dead. Lassie was proud as could be, even though it was twice her size and she couldn't carry it back.

When we brought the groundhog home to my dad, he laughed so hard. He couldn't believe we'd knocked it out chucking rocks. I know it seems cruel what we did. But it was a different time and place. We were just kids back in the mountains, and we didn't know any better.

I have a lot of good memories of those days. It was a carefree time, and we didn't think about tomorrow. To tell the truth, I'd have never predicted Keith would become a country star, and the same goes for me. I couldn't foresee what a brilliant career there was down the road for him, and I know he didn't see anything of the sort for me, either. We were happy just playing music, and that was more than enough. We didn't think about money or what we could make out of music. We just wanted to sing and pick, and get better on our instruments.