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I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground: Chesley Chancey, George Childers, and Mabel Cawthorn: Banjo Picking and Family String Bands
- University of Georgia Press
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I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground CHESLEY CHANCEY GEORGE CHILDERS, AND MABEL CAWTHORN: BANJO PICKING AND FAMILY STRING BANDS : N HISLAST YEARS Chesley Chancey had to get around on a wooden leg and one good leg; yet he managed to do some traveling with his younger brothers, Joe and Ralph, playing the mountain music they had learned as boys in Gilmer County. Chesley and Eva Chancey lived up a holler in the Boardtown section, several miles from the county seat of Ellijay; one room in their house was filled with yard goods that Eva used in the garment-making cooperative she formed with several other women when they became fed up with the low wages and bad conditions in the local textile mill. I visited "Bear," as he was called by his brothers, for the last time in June 1980, only a few days before his death. His banjo picking, and his memories of life and music making in the mountains, came through as strong and pure as the good moonshinewhiskey he had made in his younger days. He started by telling me that he played the jew's-harp at three then went on to the French harp (harmonica)and organ, before starting the banjo at five. I asked who the musicians were in his family. "Well," he answered, "it was handed down to me from my greatgranddaddy , Charlie Simms . . . on my mother's side of the house, and fiddlin' Ira Simms, that was his brother." From GilmerCounty, "they was raised partly in what we call Hell's Holler. And right across the hill over here there's a big creek we call Fightin' Town, and you go on just a little futher, turn up, and you go into the Devil's Den. Well this is so. So you can just lay it out from that. That's so." "I don't doubt it," I found myself saying. "It makes sense." "That's the truth, that's the names of that settlement back there: Fightin' Town Creek, the Devil's Den, and then Hell's Holler. And the next creek's Tongue Creek." I asked if folks mostly farmed back then. "Yeah, they farmed, and their livin' was give to them in these mountains. There's plenty of fish and plenty of game. . . . The mountains were full of wild hogs, full of big chestnut timber as big through as that television there—bigger. Chestnuts fell on the ground in the fall of the year, and a lot of places you couldn't walk for 'em, collect a pile of chestnuts, and their hogs, their cattle, their sheep and everything got fattened down on them, so they didn't have to feed nothin'. Just a little bit to get their stock through real bad winters. . . . 'Bout all they done is fish and hunt, and played music, drunk good whiskey." I said I didn't know whether to ask about the whiskey or the music first, and he laughed. I decided to inquire about where he got his style of banjo picking. "Well, I'd have to say that I picked my style up from a man we called—now we had two George Holloways—but I picked up my style from the one they called little George Holloway.And I switched from there to a feller by the name of Bob Watkins. And I switched from there to a feller by the name of Felton Looper. And then the restof the tunes I play, some of them I made up myself, some I learnt from others." I asked about Land Norris, who was from Boardtown, and made records in the early days of country recording, in the twenties. "Yes, I knowed Land Norris, knowed him well, but I never did try to foller his style none. He won the championshipof Georgia, playin' the banjer, and they just shipped him up to New York. He went to makin' records." I sensed that Chesley felt that there were better banjo pickers around. 158 / Wish I Wasa Mole in theGround I [44.201.96.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:54 GMT) The Chanceys ofBoardtown. Chesley, Ralph, Don, and Joe. (Gilmer County, 1979.) I wondered if they had small string bands back then. "Most of the time," he explained, "when a man played then, it would be the fiddle and a five-string banjer, or just the banjer by itself. A five-string banjer is the only instrument you...