A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music

11. Dale Ann Bradley: These Prisoning Hills

Dale Ann Bradley These Prisoning Hills Deep within the Appalachian Sound Archives at Berea College lies a worn videocassette of a rare film. Shot with inferior quality film, the images appear faded and grainy on the thirteen-inch television—the swish of a frilly mauve dress that was probably a flashing salmon color in real life, the tip of a blurry cowboy hat from a singer performing on a rustic stage. When it was released in 1966, John Lair’s Renfro Valley Barn Dance made no splashes in Hollywood. Despite the movie poster boasting the tagline “It’s the biggest singin’, dancin’, fiddlin’ show that ever burst out of Renfro Valley!” the film was ten years past its prime, more at home in the string of country music revue flicks of the previous decade (think Ferlin Husky and June Carter in 1958’s Country Music Holiday). But John Lair—the crotchety entrepreneur who created Renfro Valley in 1939 as a music center to rival Nashville, Chicago, and Cincinnati—was not interested in being on the cutting edge of cinema. This was, in many ways, an act of preservation, a thumb of the nose to the changing times. Nearly fifty years later, Lair’s Renfro Valley community has been modernized somewhat, adding a new barn for concerts, a 179 11 180 A Few Honest Words re-created shopping village, and an RV park. The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum stands on an adjacent lot, housing memorabilia and exhibits devoted to artists such as Loretta Lynn, the Everly Brothers, and Lionel Hampton. Yet even in the midst of these recent accoutrements, an air of loneliness permeates this sweeping valley, wafting through the rows of kitschy shops and surrounding the old barn and its fabled stage. Renfro Valley is a haunted place. When Dale Ann Bradley takes the stage in the old barn on a Wednesday night, it is hard not to see the ghost of Lair and his revolving cast of performers, many of them Kentuckians, lurking in the wings: Red Foley, Martha Carson, Homer and Jethro, Whitey Ford. But the specter standing nearest to Dale Ann is the great Lily May Ledford, founder of the Coon Creek Girls, one of radio’s first all-female string bands. Dale Ann and her music are direct descendants of Ledford , both in sound and in name. Her career largely began, after all, when she was hired in 1991 as lead singer of the New Coon Creek Girls and signed to a five-year contract at the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. Since the group’s dissolution in 1997, Dale Ann has recorded a string of critically acclaimed bluegrass albums and racked up four International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Female Vocalist of the Year awards. And if that’s not impressive enough, fellow Kentuckian and bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs has proclaimed, “I think Dale Ann Bradley is an awesome singer. It’s heart and soul with her.” Her latest album, a stirring set of songs titled Somewhere South of Crazy, is poised to continue that streak. “I’ve got to get away,” Dale Ann declares in the title track, a carefree number cowritten with country music legend Pam Tillis, who also contributes a seamless harmony. She resumes that theme of wanderlust in “Leaving Kentucky,” with lyrics that echo “Heritage,” the 181 Dale Ann Bradley magnum opus of the late, beloved poet James Still, and its oath, “I shall not leave these prisoning hills.” The hardest thing she ever did Was leaving Kentucky Though the mountains were her prison They would always be her home If you detect a backstory in these lines or in the slight quiver in Dale Ann’s voice as she trills the word home, you would be right on the money. She has left her native state twice. And she has returned as many times. When she moved as a young wife to Jacksonville, Florida, in the late 1980s, she had what she calls “a big old dose of culture shock, big time.” She shakes her head and lets out a wide grin before taking a swig of stout coffee laced with cream. We are talk- “I think Dale Ann Bradley is an awesome singer. It’s heart and soul with her.” —Ricky Skaggs (Photo courtesy of Compass Records) 182 A Few Honest Words ing at a truck stop just off I-75 in Renfro Valley, and the...