A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music

4. Carla Gover: Mountain Edge

Carla Gover Mountain Edge Highway 66 is a two-lane, serpentine road that winds through the hills and hollers of Clay County in Eastern Kentucky, past dilapidated tobacco barns and open fields of kudzu and ironweed. Like many mountain roads, this one follows the water, its gray curves mimicking the bends and twists of the Red Bird River below , passing through the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them communities of Eriline and Spurlock. Nine miles and countless potholes later, the highway ends in the small town of Oneida, population 2,627. But more interesting than the road’s final destination are its tendrils that splay out along the way, forking off into hollers with Appalachian names such as Jacks Creek and Banks’ Branch. Homes of every type speckle the hillsides of these communities— trailers, cabins, clapboard shotguns, bricked ranch-style houses, even a garish McMansion or two. As these styles of homes imply , families in this area are preserving the old mountain ways to varying degrees. It was easier forty years ago, long before Facebook , iPods, and cable television became stiff competition for porch sitting, passing along family stories, and making music. 74 4 75 Carla Gover This was the backdrop of old-time musician and songwriter Carla Gover’s childhood in the late 1970s, when she visited her maternal grandparents on weekends and during the summer months at the family homeplace on Banks’ Branch. Although she lived only two counties away with her parents in Letcher County, there was a world of difference between the two places; Banks’ Branch was a step back in time for the young girl. Her grandparents ’ house had burned, and they were living in a trailer with no running water, a notion that Carla found somewhat exotic. “We got the water from a spring up behind the house,” she recalls. “This was actually cool, because it meant that we kept a bucket and dipper by the door for drinking, and dishpans in the sink for washing hands. As a kid, I didn’t see that as an inconvenience—I thought it was fun.” She roamed the mountainside behind the trailer with her cousins ,runninginbetweenthebirchesandredbuds,hermaneofblonde hair thrashing behind her. But their buoyant play would soon turn somber as they came upon a series of rock houses. “Grandma explained that those were where our Cherokee ancestors lived, before our white ancestors came to Kentucky. [We] would pretend we lived up there and we’d gather plants from the woods to stock our pretend larders,” she explains with a broad smile. Below the trailer was a large bottom field that contained the garden, and just beyond it was Banks’ Branch itself, a deep, meandering creek that Carla describes as “the only toy we needed.” She and her cousins spent entire mornings and afternoons there, whiling away the time by balancing on the footbridges that spanned the branch in different spots and wading in the clear waters, hunting for crawdads with sticks and strings. After a substantial supper of soup beans and cornbread, complemented by fresh vegetables from the garden, the family could often be found walking the holler, stopping in to visit relatives 76 A Few Honest Words who lived nearby. An image comes to mind as Carla reminisces about these evenings: as the fading sun dribbled down through the translucent roof of beech leaves, her grandmother would express her thanks for another day by singing her favorite hymns, such as “Family Reunion” and “Just a Rose Will Do.” Her plaintive voice echoed down the holler, a fitting coda to the cares of the day. I’ll go to a beautiful garden At last when life’s work is through. Don’t spend your money for flowers Just a rose will do Hymns and church music were among the first songs Carla remembers hearing. And because her family was affiliated with a variety of Christian denominations, she was exposed to a wide range of musical styles. “My grandmother went to Holiness, my grandfather went to an Old Regular Baptist, my mother just went to the First Baptist, and my brother went to a Methodist,” she chortles. “The Holiness was my favorite music.” Carla and her grandmother often spent their Saturday nights at a one-room Pentecostal church made of gray cinder blocks that sat just off of Highway 66. She sat transfixed in the pews as the preacher strode up to the podium, cracked...