Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

1. Family

F E < Family I think it would be nice to begin with the story of how Daddy and Mommy met. None of us kids knew about that until one day in the sixties when we were on the road—the Stoneman family band going from place to place, as we did, to play show after show. We were riding along, and, well, I was bored. I said, “Daddy, how’d you meet Momma?” I can remember it like it was yesterday. “I heard her give her first cry, that’s how.” “You did what?” “I heard her give her first cry.” “How was that?” I said. “You all weren’t related, were you?” “No! Don’t you ever say that! That’s against the laws of God, no!” “Then how did you hear her give her first cry?” “Well, you know my Daddy, Elisha Stoneman, was a mountain preacher around the Galax area. And any time a woman that was with Family 2 / pressing on child . . .” (Daddy never used the word “pregnant.” He would say “in a family way” or “a woman that was with child.”) “Whenever a woman that was with child was having trouble giving birth, they would call the minister. They had the midwife but they always called the preacher and the doctor if the situation was desperate. Well, my father set forth ’cause Bill Frost’s wife, Pattie Frost, was having a bad time. I was about eight or nine years old, and I got on the back of the horse with your Grandpa Elisha. It was a crisp fall night and I was cold, and we rode all the way across the mountain ’til we got to a cabin. The cabin had just two rooms, with the kitchen off from it. This was the usual way. The kitchen would be off from the other rooms because of the heat in the summertime, and in case of fire. So I walked up on the rock porch with Grandpa Elisha, and a man met him at the door that was real nervous. It was Bill Frost. Off to the right you could hear a couple of women in the room with Pattie Frost. Well, your Grandpa Elisha was taken into that room and I stayed in the sitting room. I sat down, cross-legged, Indian style, in front of the fireplace, and was warming myself, and rubbing my hands. I heard a lot of praying going on—hellfire and brimstone, really getting down into it. Then I heard a baby give a loud cry, and soon they brought it out wrapped in a blanket and gave it to me, and told me to pray with all the people in that sitting room for it to have a long life. So I held that baby and prayed. And the baby turned out to be the woman I would later marry, your mother!” “Gosh!” : So that was how my parents met. It was in 1900. Now to my grandparents. The one grandparent who was not there in that cabin was Daddy’s mother, Rebecca. She had died, which is maybe why he was so cold that night, not having the proper clothing. Daddy said she was a very quiet, very strict southern lady. He remembered her being terribly sick and then dying of what they called childbed fever. Grandpa Elisha remarried, but he and this wife finally ended up in a parting of the ways, so Daddy never really had the warmth of a mother in his young life. Grandpa Elisha was a serious man. He did not believe in fiddle play- pressing on / 3 ing or banjo picking. He thought the fiddle was of the devil because it made you want to dance and sing and “frolic.” Grandpa Elisha didn’t believe in “frolicking.” I think he was not a very easy person to get along with. Starched—that’s the word for people like that. They don’t want this, and they don’t want that. He thought everyone had to go along with the church or you would die and go to hell for it. My mother’s parents were totally different. Bill Frost, the other man in the cabin, my other grandpa, not only believed in frolicking, he was a ringleader, being one of the finest old Virginia fiddle players around. He told me he played for lots of the frolicking in the cabins in the Galax area. They’d roll back the rug and everybody would dance, and he and a couple of his buddies would pick and sing all night. He said the men were not allowed to drink in front of the ladies, but they would usually have hard cider or something stashed away in the springhouse. So there would be a lot of trips out to the springhouse before the evening was over. The whole idea was to pretend they were not partaking—though when their eyes got red and they got to reeling a little bit, well, it’s hard to believe the ladies were as dumb as the men thought they were. Grandpa Frost and his buddies would also play music in the churches. Most everybody thought that was okay, to play your fiddle or your banjo in the church meeting for the gospel hymns. Grandpa Frost was not only a great musician, he was a great storyteller . And I adored him. When I was little and my parents and us kids had gone to live up in Maryland, Momma used to send me back to the mountains in Galax for three months in the summer. Grandma got in the habit of going to bed around dark, and then me and Grandpa would go out on the front porch, and Grandpa would tell stories. He specialized in scary ones. One night he said, “See right over yonder, that little clearing? Well, once there was a cabin there, and a man lived in it with his wife and three little girls. But he got messing with some woman and he wanted to leave his wife. So he set the house afire, and he locked that door where they couldn’t get out! He killed his wife and three little girls!” I shivered. “When I was a young man,” Grandpa continued, “I’d go courting at night over the mountain. Now if I wanted to make a shortcut coming 4 / pressing on back, I’d have to pass through that clearing, but all the people said it was haunted, and that at night you could hear the screams and cries of that woman and those little girls. “People refused to go near the place. And my momma kept saying, ‘Bill Frost, you come up through that clearing again, them haints is gonna get you!’ Well, I didn’t pay much attention to her, your great-grandmother . So, on one particular night I had just come over the hill with my horse down into that clearing. It was a full moon night, so bright you could see everything, and the nighttime mountain sounds—those hills were alive with sound. “I looked over to the hearth of that old burnt-out cabin, and there was this white thing sitting there! “Here I am on my horse, with this oil lamp shining on this spooky white thing! I rode closer. ‘Who is it?’ I said. Nobody answered. ‘By God, who is it?’ I cried. And I was about ready to shoot. But I got off of my horse and walked over and by the barrel of my gun lifted the sheet right up. And there was my momma’s face! I almost shot my mother! She was trying to scare me! She waited for me, all that time, by herself down in that terrible place with all those wailing haints!” That night when I went to bed I smothered myself with blankets. Grandma Pattie Frost wasn’t always telling stories. But when she said something . . . well, we knew it counted. One time Grandma said a really strange thing to me. I was about eight or nine years old. All of a sudden she looked at me real funny, right in the eyes, and she said, “Aman who will have children and will not support and take care of his little ones, he’s not a good person. He’s not favored in the eyes of God.” It was as if she saw my whole future. On to the younger generation, Daddy and Mommy. I think Daddy’s childhood was pretty harsh, no mother and riding around the mountains with Elisha. But after Daddy married Hattie Frost, Momma, things started looking up. One day when he was walking by a store, he heard a record of a friend of his singing, Henry Whitter. Daddy thought he could do better. So Momma encouraged him and encouraged him, and he went up to New York and he convinced those record people to try him. And that led to him doing lots of recording sessions in New York, sometimes with Momma, and sometimes with other people. They mostly sang the pressing on / 5 old traditional mountain songs, but they occasionally sang current ones, such as the one about the Titanic (which it seems Daddy wrote part of, or at least arranged in the way that became famous): Oh it was sad, it was sad / It was sad when that great ship went down / Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives / It was sad when that great ship went down. That song was a big hit in 1925—people said it sold a million copies. In these recording sessions Daddy would play guitar, and there would be other traditional instruments—banjo, mandolin, fiddle, autoharp—and a lot of great harmony singing. The first “records” they made were really wax cylinders. Then after the wax cylinders came those old 78s. Daddy recorded with a number of different companies, including Edison’s. I still have a few checks with Edison’s name on them. New York was of course a big challenge for a mountain preacher’s son. Daddy would often tell about the time when they were almost arrested . He took his band into a big New York bank, and they were carrying their instruments with them. Then suddenly it sounded like there was a loud air raid and policemen ran in from all sides. They thought they were going to rob the bank because robbers used to keep machine guns in fiddle cases. My poor innocent Daddy was protesting, “No, no! They’re just instruments! We’re just hillbillies from the Blue Ridge Mountains!” Maybe it was experiences like that that made Daddy decide it would be good if the record companies came down to Virginia! Anyway he was the one who arranged the famous Bristol Sessions. In 1927 he got Ralph Peer from the record company to come to Bristol to record the local musicians. They put ads in the paper announcing the auditions and mentioning all the money Ernest V. Stoneman was making by recording his songs. So lots of country musicians showed up, including the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Many people say the Bristol Sessions were where country music was born because those musicians went on to be superstars in the thirties and forties.And then in the sixties the Carter family songs were picked up again in the folk revival, songs like “Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side.” All that is true. But it’s also true that Daddy and Momma recorded more songs at the Bristol Sessions than anybody else. At the recent celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bristol Sessions, the town named a road Stoneman Family Drive. 6 / pressing on Later we’d always tease Daddy when he’d play those old records, because all the songs were sad. I’d fall on the floor and pretend I was dying. And he’d say, “Dadblame it, if you don’t get up and quit acting like that, I’m gonna knock you plumb across the room! You can laugh all you want to. I made more money than any of you’ll ever make!” We would also tease him about his guitar-playing style, which was very simple. His strum was boom chick boom chick boom chick chick chick. Played with two finger picks and a thumb pick. The thumb is the leader. When he played the autoharp, it was basically the same thing—three picks and the motion came from the wrist. Anyway, Daddy was right. He did make a lot of money, was one of the richest men in the area. Then the Depression hit, and people couldn’t afford to buy records. Since he was a kind man, he had signed on to a lot of loans for his neighbors in Galax. So the family went from high cotton to sheer poorism. I call it poorism because anybody can be poverty-stricken, that’s nothing. The kind of poor my family was was way beyond that. At one point in 1932 the sheriff got in the car with Daddy, about to repossess it, the one thing my parents had left, until Daddy outwitted him. Daddy said that he’d give it over as soon as he could stop, just behind the fence up ahead. But the fence, as he knew, was the county line, so the sheriff had no lawful right in the other county. Daddy got to keep the car and continue on his way. Which was a good thing because my mother and older brothers and sisters (I hadn’t been born yet) were also in the car. Daddy was moving the family up to the Washington area to live. There he was hoping he could get jobs with the government or with churches doing carpenter work. And he did. He was a very busy man, at times doing four jobs at once. But none of them paid much, and sometimes there was no work at all, so the family remained pooristic. He would also be trying to earn more by playing music in the evenings. There were a lot of other people from around Galax who had gone up to the Washington area to find work, and they of course liked his kind of music. Daddy was very clever, and he came up with several musical inventions . One was a box that he put the autoharp on so it sounded much louder—the box worked like a resonator.Another was a special pick. The normal picks would just fly off with the kind of playing he was doing. pressing on / 7 What he designed was a pick that went up the finger. I was part of that invention. I used to bring him things to see, like old toys I had found. And one time I said, “Look at this toy, Daddy. It’s got a wire in it.” He said, “Wait a minute, let me see that.” He took his pinchers out and he studied the wire and looked at his finger. And then he made a pick with a spiral. I remember watching him, a little kid standing by his chair, proud that I was able to bring him something that he liked and needed. The pick’s now in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Anytime when he wasn’t working or playing music, he was reading. He especially liked geography. He used to say you can’t go wrong with geography books: “Land’s gonna stay that way unless an earthquake comes.” Turned out he was right. Later he won twenty thousand dollars on one of those quiz shows, The Big Surprise, answering questions on geography. I’ve saved my mother for last, the newborn baby that cried so loud in the cabin. People never gave her enough credit. It was always my father getting all the glory. Which is great. I’m really proud of him. I’ve always felt I was a very rich woman, and I was a very rich little girl, because I had a father like him. But my mother, Hattie Ivana Frost, also deserves a lot of credit. She played banjo, the old-time mountain style, brilliantly. She could tune the banjo eight different ways. Grandpa Jones on Hee Haw brought that up to me, and I went home and asked Momma about it. “Yeah,” she said, “he once told me he wished he could tune the banjo as many ways as I could.” And she was the fiddle player on many of Daddy’s records. The reason I get so upset about Momma not getting credit is because I do not understand it. This is how they wrote up the Bristol Sessions in the paper—“And a young matron played the fiddle with Ernest Stoneman”! Aside from being a great musician, Momma was very beautiful and very sweet. When she was a young girl, she was engaged several times. But she wasn’t just a gallivant. She was a true lady. She was very fashionable , took care of herself, had her face fixed all the time and her hat to match her purse, and her purse to match her shoes. Even when we got very poor, she took care to look the best she could. And she was very strict about manners. For instance, ladies should never sit with their legs apart. You always have to put your knees to- 8 / pressing on gether when you cross your legs—you have to touch your other ankle. Momma made sure I learned that well. One day I’d been playing horseshoes with the boys. And I came in and I went “Well, I beat them!” and I sat down so my ankle was crossing on top of my other knee, the way a man sits. Momma reached over and grabbed me: “Don’t you ever do that again!” That night I got the worst whupping I ever had, cried for about twenty-five minutes. Another lesson from Momma: “Don’t ever stoop over. You gotta kneel. You bend with your knees and then pull yourself up. It’s not ladylike to do it the other way.” This turned out to be a very useful habit to get into since I would often be on the stage wearing my short dresses and have to pick up a banjo or a guitar lying on the ground. In fact all of Momma’s etiquette advice turned out to be important. When I would be playing honky-tonks and horrible environments, acting like a lady made it safer. What I’m saying is that Momma was a proud southern belle. She learned all this from her mom, Granny Frost, and from Aunt Phinney, Granny’s sister. These were Virginia women, but they were not from the deep deep hills. Even though they went through hard times, they always tried. Grandpa worked in the mines and in the furniture factory, and sometimes he only made a dollar a day, but when Momma was about eight, he bought her a porcelain doll. Before the Depression, as I said, Momma had a good life being married to Daddy. My older sister Grace remembered having pretty little silk dresses and nice shoes. In the thirties, when the Depression hit, you can imagine how it must have been for Momma—to go from high cotton into stark naked nothing. According to family lore, Momma bore twenty-three babies. Some were born dead, but fifteen lived, and thirteen survived into adulthood. And our house in Maryland had only one room. We didn’t have anything but beds and homemade chairs and children. But Momma kept on trying . I remember her painting the old floor. It was a worn-out linoleum, and she painted it with gray enamel—gray, because that was the only color she could get—and then she drew flowers on it, little daisies, trying to make it look like it was bought that way. The walls were made of boards and studs. Me and Momma rolled up papers and took a stick and pressing on / 9 shoved the paper in to keep the wind and the snow out. Then we tried to wallpaper that. Momma said, “We’re gonna wallpaper this place so it looks better and the kids don’t get splinters.” Some people who had some old wallpaper laying around had given it to us. I mixed up the wallpaper paste with my hand, and we put the paper on those old rough boards (you’d have to go around the studs). I also helped her paint a porch, pink because somebody gave us pink paint. It looked like PeptoBismol . And she made a garden. We had nothing but red clay around the house, so we would get dirt from the woods. She’d get wheelbarrows and buckets of that dirt, and she’d start planting. She had flowers in the yard, and two dogwood trees, and flowers in tin containers on the porch. When things would bloom, she was so proud of them. The flowers came from neighbors—she would go for a walk and the neighbors would give her little sprigs. Tears come to my eyes thinking about all this, about how hard she worked, about her hands. She would say, “I can’t even put my stockings on, my nails are so jagged.” She had work hands from doing the scrubbing and taking care of us all. There was so much to do. She’d say she could put her foot on a cradle and push it and hold another kid on her hip and still make the gravy. Momma had Grandpa Frost’s sense of humor. My opinion, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you are in deep trouble. You’ve got to take the hard times with a smile as well as a tear. Momma had that specialty —she would often take something sad and come up with something humorous. It’s another thing she taught me. She’d tell funny stories on herself. One story had to do with back in the early days when they were up in New York recording. (Those trips made a big impression on my parents!) As she told it, she was dressed in silk, and was wearing a long fur-trimmed coat and a beautiful hat: “And I said, ‘Ernest, I just got to have a dip of snuff.’ But there was no store anywhere around to get me a box of Tuberose snuff. So Ernest finally found out from a cab driver that you could get snuff in Hell’s Kitchen. But the cab driver was scared and would only go a little ways into Hell’s Kitchen. Then we had to get out and walk to the store where this Irishman was at.” She paused. “Can you imagine, walking in Hell’s 10 / pressing on Kitchen?” And all of us kids, our eyes got real big, because you could just imagine Hell and it having a kitchen. She went on: “I was holding onto Ernest’s arm so hard. And then a man came up behind us and hit me right in the middle of my back with a stick! It liked to have killed me, but I got my snuff.” The way she took snuff was like everything she did, elegant. She would be dressed up, prissy, and she would take a little bit of snuff and put it at her lip, and hold it so gently, and dab her handkerchief at her mouth. Momma hated whining, and she had a particular hatred for whiney songs. I’d go up to her and say, “Momma, I got a great song, I got a great song.” And she’d say, “Well, sing it, child, jes’ so long as it’s not mournful. Lord a mercy, I swear if I hear another mournful song, I do believe I’m going to faint!” “No, Momma, it’s not mournful.” And I’d start singing that song about a little girl who was out playing on a field when a snake bit her and she died: I hear the screaming of a little girl far away / Daddy come kill this awful dreadful snake. And Momma’d chase me, run after me through the house and all over the yard. Momma was just real spirited. She would, say, be walking in her garden, and everything might be going well for her (and believe it or not, sometimes things did) and she’d be singing, and she’d turn around, and give me that sideways look, and she’d just take her hand and swish the skirt of the old worn-out cotton dress she was wearing. She was a sensuous woman. Though she never talked of sex or used the word sex, she was beautiful and she had a lot of sexuality and she knew it. Momma held her own with Daddy. Of course she loved my father and my father loved my mom, but I often heard him yell and I heard her yell right back. There’s a story about that that they both told me. It took place in 1929, the Crash. Momma didn’t know about it, didn’t know that the bottom had dropped out of everything, so she was hanging up some new lace curtains and three or four of the people she had working for her were helping. And Daddy came in. He had heard about the Crash back up at the store. All the people were running around frantic. He walked in the door, and she was up on a ladder hanging the curtains and saying, “Ah, now that looks good.” Daddy went over and jerked them down on the floor. “We can’t afford them!” Well, she ran and got pressing on / 11 the gun they had in the house, and she aimed at him. She went click, click, click, clicked it three times, trying to get it to go off. Now, I think Momma knew the gun wasn’t loaded since there were children around, but she was making a point. She was letting him know he wasn’t going to treat her like that. Momma was very religious. Daddy was too. He was hardworking and believed in living the righteous way. He didn’t preach to us all the time about God and Jesus. He lived it. But Mommy—I’d see Mommy pray, wring her hands and pray all night long for her children to come home safe. She would pray so hard that she had calluses on her knees. I used to say, “Momma, you have nun’s knees.” Well, I sort of ran over the business of there being all of us children, but of course that was a big part of Momma’s life. I remember once asking Daddy about that. “Daddy,” I said, “I got to thinking how many brothers and sisters I have. How come you all had so many children?” “It was Hattie’s fault.” “Um . . . what do you mean it was Mommy’s fault?” “Well, I tried to help her not have children.” “What did you do?” “Well, during the Depression they used to have a birth control center set up downtown in Washington. One day I went down and stood in line all day with nothing but a piece of chewing gum in my mouth. The women were getting diaphragms. I waited and waited and it came my turn to come up where the nurse was. ‘My wife needs a diaphragm,’ I said. And she said, ‘Mr. Stoneman, you have to go home and bring her down here so we can fit her.’ So I went home and told your mother. She started screaming, ‘Lord have mercy, you’re trying to kill me! You’re trying to send my soul to Hell, that’s what you want to do!’ And she went on raving and staving, saying that the Bible says be fruitful and multiply and it was against the rules of God for her to be fitted for a diaphragm and how dare I go and waste a whole day standing in line for her to be killed because she knew that God would do something horrible to her if she prevented having children when she could have them.” When I think back on my childhood, one of the few major problems I have with Momma was her favoritism to her boys. At the time I just 12 / pressing on accepted it, and now I think that that favoritism goes along with being a southern mountain woman. Anyway she treated the boys special. The girls did the housework. We even carried the water from the well in heavy buckets. The boys would always get out of doing it—“Aw, Ma, we’ll do it after awhile.” “Well, somebody better go get some water here, ’cause we’re running out.” So we girls would have to go. Then we’d have to do the washing, and washing blue jeans on a scrub board is not easy. The boys would just sit there and play music. A lot of men made sarcastic comments on all those children: “Weelll, what did your father do for spare time?” Nasty cracks. But my opinion, that’s the only time my parents had of their own. And maybe that was the only way they knew to show love. I don’t remember them hardly ever holding hands or touching each other or kissing. No romancing. Remember that my daddy didn’t have a mother. And if you’ve been around children, you know how a woman is needed in a boy’s life, to teach him how to show love in little ways to a woman. I think that my parents really loved each other and that making love, being intimate, was very important to them. Momma once said to me, “Lord a mercy, Ernest would come in from New York, or wherever he was playing, and next thing you know, I was in the family way again.” As I said, I was a very rich little girl because of my parents. When I think of the examples they set for me—the courage, spirit, persistence, creativity, morality—well, I’m very grateful. ...