Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
The paperback cover from 2017
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
If you’re reading this and you’ve ever worked with Leesa or sat in her chair, you know she will not do hair without music. Recently, we had to purchase a new MP3 player for her salon. I loaded it with some songs I had on hand, MP3s of favorites we’d purchased over the past few years. Along with those, I dumped whole jump drive of my songs on the new player, which she seems very happy about.
You know if you’ve seen me since – I don’t know – 2012, I have very little in the way of hair left on my head, and we’ve even begun buzzing that down to the scalp, just short of shaving it. Anyway, maintaining this requires that I sit down in her styling chair every 10-14 days. The last time I was there, a song came on that I had more or less forgotten. It’s called “Angel.”
I wrote the song in 1987 with Mark Chesshir, one of the lead guitarists in the band we typically called The Cody Band. Many of the songs recorded at Mark’s home studio over the years, especially those songs that don’t appear on either Cody Retrospective or Homecoming, Mark and I performed ourselves, playing all the parts or bringing in musical friends when needed or desired. I think “The Light in Your Eyes” and “I Must Have Dreamed” are good examples of this practice.
“Angel” includes the full band, I think. Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass (can’t remember which), and Steve Grossman on drums. My guess is that Mark also played keys. I’m not sure why the song doesn’t appear on either of the albums mentioned above. If I’m remembering right, it was a powerful piece when we played it live.
I would feel the way I feel tonight forever if I could. My eyes are clear, my heart is strong, and love feels like it should. Still, the dawn cannot be held back, and this night will have an end. But as long as you stay, I know I’ll feel this way again.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
When you hear me say, “I love you,” don’t feel trapped and run away. Sometimes when I look at you, I can find nothing else to say. I remember the nights that I have spent chasing ghosts and dreams. But you’re real to the touch, You don’t know how much that means.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
I’ve seen so many broken hearts getting washed away at night. Come and carry me above that tide.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
The front picture is of me as I looked when I wrote “Christmastime.” The performance is by me now, thirty-four years later.
As I recall . . .
It was in the spring of 1988, and I was writing songs for Ave Canora, a small publishing venture that was part of the music empire of Nashville/Broadway singing star Gary Morris. Word ran through the offices of Gary Morris Music that he would be recording a Christmas album in the near future. I’d never written a Christmas song before, but I really wanted to have a song on that album.
So, in April 1988, in the midst of that year’s Easter season, I sat down to write “Christmastime.” My main musical influences were only two: almost 30 years of hymns and carols in my little mountain church and community in Walnut, North Carolina, and Johnny Mathis’s album Merry Christmas, the Christmas album of all Christmas albums as far as I’m concerned, released in October 1958, less than two months before I was born. I was writing a lot of songs in the key of E at the time, and so, E it was for “Christmastime.”
Here’s an early recording of “Christmastime” from the home studio of my friend Mark Chesshir. It’s possible that this is the demo that I turned in to Ave Canora and the version that Gary heard.
Verse #1 is all about light, which is one of my true loves in the Christmas season. Leesa and I don’t decorate the exterior of our house, but I love the lights of Christmas. Light designs and displays–from simple to complex–are the only thing I enjoy about the extended Christmas season the Xian world developed due to the demands of capitalism.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
We have light appearing in “shine” and “sparkle,” and we have “light” in its different connotation of understanding–to see the world in a different light. Many of us give the world a little more grace at Christmastime. Or maybe we express a little bit of righteous anger at the commercialism that isn’t as much in our faces as at other times of the year. With “virgin,” the lyric includes just a taste, an essence, a foreshadowing, of the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. And the “snow” is classic in terms of memory and desire, for me, as I’m always “dreaming of a white Christmas.”
Verse #2 is about memory. The older I get, the more precious and haunting memory becomes, perhaps especially in the context of Christmas. So much of the celebration and so many of the people I’ve celebrated with are yearly lost and fade into memory.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
This verse is made up of images from memory. These memories, however, are only implied. They’re left vague and general so that the listener (reader) can plug in their specific memories and memory images. I doubt if I thought that at the time I was writing this lyric, but it’s the way I understand it now.
Verse #3 returns to the Christmas story a bit more directly than the intimation of “virgin” in the first verse. We have a star and a child, a call for peace and stillness, a sounds of celebrating bells and singing people and angels.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
I hope that I got chills, that I maybe even cried, when I completed this last verse. It’s all there, I think, all that Christmas has been to me–all that I struggle to have it still be to me. The star that guided the wise men guides me to the child that is still alive in me. The moon on virgin snow exists as part of a world lying peaceful and still. The parade, the laughter, kisses, and good wishes are echoed in the ringing bells and the singing people. And at the end, the lyric returns one last time to the original Christmas story of angels–the “heavenly host”–appearing to the shepherds.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
Many thanks to everybody who, over the years, has said that it’s not really Christmas until they’ve heard “Christmastime”!
“Merry Christmas to all!”
Here’s some more stuff:
I’ll go ahead and say it (with some regret and bitterness, and with apologies for the latter): I have a crass commercial desire that many singers had recorded “Christmas Time” so that I could have a nice little royalty bonus every year . . . and so could Leesa when I’m gone . . . and so could Lane and Raleigh when Leesa’s gone. . . .
When I first moved to Johnson City, people used to say, “Hey, I heard ‘Christmas Time’ in K-Mart today!” I even heard it there a time or two myself. But, you know, K-Mart’s not around anymore. (There’s the bitterness again, and again, I apologize.)
Jimmy Patterson was a fellow I met years ago when Leesa, Raleigh, and I attended Cherokee United Methodist Church. He loved “Christmastime.” I heard it told that the first time I played it at Cherokee, Jimmy was standing with our pastor David Woody, and in his excitement over what he was hearing, Jimmy took Pastor Woody’s hand and squeezed it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that “Christmastime” meant so much to Jimmy that his wife Bonnie asked me to play it at his funeral / celebration of life . . . in the summertime, as I recall.
One last thing: Gary Morris released two different versions of his album Every Christmas.
I don’t remember exactly why this was the case, but here’s my story about it. He already had the original Every Christmas album recorded and turned in to Warner Brothers Records by the time I submitted “Christmastime.” That’s the cover on the left, released in 1988. The last song–track 10 on that one–was Gary’s version of “Carol of the Bells.” Then at some point soon afterwards, no later than Christmas 1990, they repackaged and rereleased the album–new cover (on the right) and “Christmastime” replaced “Carol of the Bells.” In practical terms, just as far as publishing goes, Gary’s company would receive what was called mechanical royalties for “Christmastime” that he wouldn’t receive for “Carol of the Bells.” I doubt that was the driving force behind the change, but it was a side effect. Now, on Gary’s website, the album on the left is for sale instead of the later “blue” version. Interestingly, the side effect here is that whoever gets the money for sales of that “poinsettia” version does not have to pay mechanical royalties to me because “Christmastime” isn’t on that version. Given this, I think it’s worth noticing that Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms sell only the “poinsettia” version, so . . . no Christmas royalties for me!
O the bells ring and people sing and angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime”!
I enjoyed my writing life this year. Although the majority of my productivity has taken place, in confidence, between the right side of my brain and an array of hard and virtual drives, I got somethings out into the world.
Leesa says when she sees the blue screen she knows what’s happening.
A number of blog posts. I set up a monthly schedule that’s I’ve more or less kept to. First Wednesdays are for writing/reading posts (like this one). Second Mondays are for whatever I feel like writing about. Third Saturdays are song stories. Fourth Tuesdays are supposed to be posts about politics, but I haven’t been very successful with these, as everything I think of seems to be darker and of meaner spirit than I want to be.
Short stories. I published one short story this year. “Jamboree” appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of my favorite online periodical Still: The Journal (#38). The good folks at Still included it among the journal’s Best of the Net nominations. The only other bit of news worth reporting about new stories is that I finally made some good progress toward finishing–but still not finishing–a story that I’ve been holding onto for years. It has been in progress and untitled for a good while, but I’m thinking now that it will be named something like “Payne Mountain.”
Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press 2017) is now five years old. Some folks have read it recently and really liked it, which makes me quite happy. I’ve done a number of podcast appearances to talk about A Twilight Reel, but Gabriel hasn’t gotten that kind of love. Until now. Back in September, Christy Alexander Hallberg interviewed me for her terrific podcast Rock Is Lit, which profiles “rock novels.” The episode “dropped” on December 8, and I’m really happy with it. The conversation about the novel was both good and fun, and I was really pleased with the follow-up discussion that Christy had with Frye Gaillard and Peter Cooper, the latter of whom walked on suddenly two days before, on December 6, from an accidental and traumatic head injury sustained a few days before.
At the beginning of 2022, I had a work-in-progress (WiP) about a Nashville songwriter named Ezra MacRae. I’m not sure how many words I had on it at that time. I’m thinking around 20K. I’m also not sure when I attached the working title, but I’m calling it Streets of Nashville until somebody with power tells me to call it something different.
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I had that title before I submitted some pages of it for workshopping at Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers Workshop in July 2021. Most of my classmates in the workshop fell in love with a character Benny Jack, who was in a dire situation at the end of the section they read, which ended at what is now page 41 of the novel. Somebody suggested #SaveBennyJack, and the workshop folk carried on with that. [An interesting tidbit: much of the meeting-Benny-Jack section was written for Gabriel’s Songbook but got cut for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, Benny Jack exists much more comfortably–and much more effectively–within Streets of Nashville.]
By May 2022, I had somewhere between 20K and 30K words. On the 25th of the month, I was in Durham for my granddaughter’s graduation from high school, and the night before the ceremony, I was sitting in our AirBnB watching Wiley Cash interview one of my heroes, James Lee Burke, about Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, his 40th novel. Cash asked how Burke is so productive. Burke said he wakes up every morning–that’s every morning of the year except maybe Christmas–with a scene or two in mind. Then he writes at least 750 words on the scene(s), and by the end of a year, roughly, he has a novel. I decided I’d try that method for the following few weeks, and it worked for me. By the time I left on July 4 for my writing residency at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains, I was approaching 70K words. Then, by the time I left Wildacres on July 10, I had completed a first draft of just over 90K words.
I’d proven to myself that I could write a book of fiction in less than twenty-five years! This was the amount of time that passed between first words and publication for both Gabriel’s Songbook and A Twilight Reel.
Between mid-July and now (approaching mid-December) I’ve made four more passes through the novel, the current draft of which is at 102K words.
All along, I’d been focused on trying to tell a good story. I’d thought it might be a mystery, but then I realized I didn’t know how to write a mystery. So, I just stuck with the good story idea. After the first draft was finished, I learned from Google that I had been writing a suspense novel:
suspense: the main character may become aware of danger only gradually. In a mystery, the reader is exposed to the same information as the detective, but in a suspense story, the reader is aware of things unknown to the protagonist. The reader sees the bad guy plant the bomb, and then suffers the suspense of wondering when or if it will explode.
Just for fun, here’s what my writing screen looks like when I’m working. This is the opening paragraph of section VII.
I started writing fiction in the early 1990s, using the old WordPerfect/DOS. I got used to the look replicated above. By the time my university offices began switching me to Word, I found I didn’t like writing in black letters on a white background. So, I figured out how to get my blue screen with my white or gray letters, and I was on my way.
I’ve sent Streets of Nashville to a couple of agents and a couple of publishers, but I think I’m going to put off going further with that process until after the first of the year. But a couple of folks have it in hand right now who could just blow me away if they said yes to representation and/or publication.
Avalon Moon
In the meantime, I have no time to sit on my nonexistent laurels, so, while I begin sending Streets of Nashville out into the world, I’m over 25K words into the next novel, which I’m calling Avalon Moon. I like where it’s going, and those who’ve read some of what I have seem to like where it’s going, too. I’m trying something different this time out, with a handful of different points of view, one of which is my old friend Gabriel Tanner. Like A Twilight Reel, this one hangs pretty close to Runion. The story will include wolves, a river island, preproduction work for an adaptation of a Ron Rash novel, a mysterious document over two hundred years old, and many of the Runion folks I’ve worked with before.
I’ve always been an inspiration writer—not an inspirational writer, of course, as that’s a different thing. No, whether I was writing songs or academic essays or fiction or this blog, I awaited inspiration to begin or continue or finish a piece. I’m still like that to a large extent, I guess, but I started a new practice near the end of May 2022 when I listened to author Wiley Cash interview my favorite contemporary novelist James Lee Burke.
At the time of the interview, which took place on the 25th of May, when my older granddaughter graduated from high school and I turned 63.5 years old, Burke was promoting the publication of his 40th novel. Cash asked him how he managed to be so consistently productive.
“750 words a day”
I immediately said to myself, “I should try that.” So, I did, starting as soon as Leesa and I returned from the graduation celebration in Durham.
At that time, I was maybe thirty-five thousand words into the first draft of a novel that I’m calling Streets of Nashville. I’d begun serious work on the story in July 2021, and my goal was to try and finish an initial draft of sixty to seventy thousand words by the time the fall semester of 2022 began in the third week of August.
I got started with Burke’s 750-words-a-day plan by Friday, May 27th, and I stuck with it, writing at least that many words daily and often a few more. By the time I hit mid-June, I was feeling good enough about my progress that I thought I could finish the first draft during my writing residency at Wildacres in NC, which was scheduled for July 4-10. I still thought this even when I blew past sixty thousand words and knew that the story was going to demand more than my earlier guesstimated word count.
The draft stood at something over seventy thousand words when I arrived at Wildacres Retreat on the afternoon of July 4th. During my writing time there, from Monday afternoon through Saturday evening the 9th, I finished the first draft—right around ninety thousand words.
Laurel Cabin at Wildacres Retreat. This is how it looked while I was in there writing.
Now that the semester is underway, writing time is limited, so I’m unable to write 750 words a day, but I’ve devised a schedule (of sorts) that is allowing me to write around three thousand words a week (750 X 4), and I’m okay with that. I’m into a fourth draft of Streets and beginning to send it out in search of a publisher, and I’m over sixteen thousand words into the first draft of another novel with the working title Avalon Moon.
Cover and spine of A Twilight Reel: Stories: design by Jamie Reeves, photo by Joey Plemmons, photo concept by Raleigh Cody
My new book, A Twilight Reel: Stories, is set for publication on May 25 by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. The collection is made up of twelve stories, each set in a different month of 1999. The physical setting for all is my imagined town of Runion, North Carolina, which is on the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County.
Here’s a list of the stories included:
The Wine of Astonishment
The Loves of Misty Sprinkle
Overwinter
The Flutist
Decoration Day
Conversion
The Invisible World around Them
Grist for the Mill
A Poster of Marilyn Monroe
A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel
Two Floors above the Dead
Witness Tree
I thought I’d share some writing I did a few years ago about the setting, the use of place, in these stories.
When “place” is mentioned in relation to fiction, the first thing that comes to mind is physical setting. This is the world of the story. It may be anything from a solitary room to an overcrowded neighborhood, from Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, to “dear dirty Dublin.” If the fiction is fully realized, we as readers will be able to enter this world, to see its colors and shapes, to hear its noises and silences, to smell its aromas and stenches, to feel its textures.
However, a sense of place in fiction is not achieved by the depiction of a physical setting only–its topography and wildlife and climate, its antebellum homes and filthy streets and glittering skyscrapers. There is a spiritual element to setting that is not inherent in the place itself but rather exists according to human experience of the place: an experience built up over time with thick layers of cultural, communal, familial, and individual histories.
I have chosen to place the following four stories in the environs of the fictional Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” Appalachia is, I believe, a fertile subject for fiction that remains far from being exhausted. Jim Wayne Miller, a poet native to mountains not far from my Runion, says, “the Appalachian region of America, being neither north nor south exactly, neither east nor west, but a geographical, historical, cultural, and spiritual borderland, has an interesting and complicated past (and present)” (86). This quote implies that even though North Carolina may be considered part of the same “South” as Faulkner’s Mississippi, there is a sense that life in its western mountains is something other than life in what is traditionally known as “the South.” In fact, the spirit of the place, especially that of the more sparsely populated areas like Madison County (where I grew up and where I locate Runion), seems to make it as much the southern region of what some have imaginatively tried to create as “the state of Appalachia” as it is the western region of North Carolina. [Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, NC, although he spent much of his creative life in Kentucky. Also, at the time I wrote this, I think I was unaware of the early American proposal for an actual State of Franklin that would have included at least some of western North Carolina.]
The idea that Runion is a part of some borderland has colored my intentions in writing all of these stories. In addition, I have sensed in Runion the “interesting and complicated past (and present)” to which Miller above refers. All of the stories are set in contemporary Runion (the late 1980s, the early 1990s). This time of stressful change–when the portions of mountain culture not capable of being made “quaint” for tourists are being absorbed into the world at large–highlights the lines of difference between generations and individuals as well as within generations and individuals. The conflicts that necessarily arise in such a situation are what the stories included here attempt to portray. [By the time I completed the collection, its twelve stories had settled into a single year: 1999.]
It was once upon a time in the Appalachian mountains that accents could change from hollow to hollow and hill to hill. Once, the answer to the question “‘Whose boy are you?’ coupled with the name of the branch on which one lived was sufficient to give one a sense of person” (Sprague 23). And again, a person born in this county or that remained a native of that place no matter how much of his or her life was spent elsewhere.
All that is changing. Life in Appalachia is slowly moving from its traditional isolated state to a backwoods version of the global community. For example, satellite dishes pimple the hillsides behind weatherbeaten mobile homes. They stand among the mossy gravestones of hilltop family cemeteries, eyeing the heavens. They perch on the ridgepoles of dusty barns. They function as a sign that the isolation of the past is being stripped away, and along with it the traditions which it nurtured and preserved.
My purpose in writing these stories is to attempt to capture in fiction some portion of this far-reaching transition. As the older generations try to hold on to what their world used to be, the younger generations are trying to transform that world or escape from it altogether. Those generations in the middle simply seem lost. Connected to the old and attracted by the new, they either freeze and wait for what is coming or run to meet they know not what. The conflicts that exist among all these generations are the stuff of which stories are made, and it is my hope that I am able to write some of the “true” stories taking place among the hills and hollows and communities that surround my fictional Runion.
Such fertile fictional ground is incredibly attractive for a writer who feels strongly toward the real ground upon which it is based. In the early part of this century, the actual town of Runion hung on a hillside above the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County. A sawmill town of over sixty houses, it died when the mill shut down with the rest of the country in the early 1930s. Today some scattered concrete foundations, the ruins of a one-room wooden schoolhouse, and a single line of jonquils blooming in what once was somebody’s yard are all that remain of Runion. This collection attempts to recreate Runion as if it had never faded out of reality, piecing it together with certain characteristics of the real Madison County towns that surround it–the river town personalities of Hot Springs and Marshall, the small college town atmosphere of Mars Hill–as well as other places that are better labeled villages or hamlets. I realize that four stories cannot create a complete town–Anderson gave twenty-two to Winesburg, Joyce fifteen to Dublin–but I feel I have made a good start.
A view from an elevated vantage point of the lumber and pulp mill nestled along the river with a hill in the background; ramps in the foreground leading to buildings.
The ruins of a Runion house, probably that of a mill owner, on the ridge overlooking the French Broad River, December 2019
Place is the basic point of reference upon which the stories in this collection are built. Every layered aspect of each story is affected by it; the fictional modes of “conflict, symbol, tone, style, etc., are all intimately related to Place and mutually interpenetrated” in a “unity” that “can only be intuitively grasped” (Foster 76). The experience of these characters and their stories would not be the same–in fact might not exist at all–without Runion. However, as Leonard Lutwack says in The Role of Place in Literature, “the qualities of [Place] are determined by the subjective responses of people according to their cultural heritage, sex, occupation, and personal predicament” (35). Thus, Runion would not exist without the characters and their stories; they are its living elements, defining its qualities and making it visible.
In his poem “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” Wallace Stevens writes,
There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans. (51-52)
Stevens concludes with these lines:
The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible. (52)
It is the people of a place that make this invisible spiritual element visible: their language, the interconnected colors and themes of their lives that are the visible manifestations of that place. Consequently, it seems to me that fiction attempting to take these invisible elements and make them visible for us as readers must necessarily be fiction of the place as opposed to fiction about the place. It is the fiction of Runion and of an Appalachia-in-transition that I have attempted to create in these stories.
The author at the graffiti ruins of the paymaster’s vault, December 2019
Works Cited
Foster, Ruel E. “Sense of Place in James Still’s River of Earth.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 68-80.
Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1984.
Miller, Jim Wayne. “I Have a Place.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 81-99.
Sprague, Stuart S. “Inside Appalachia: Familiar Land and Ordinary People.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 20-26.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990. 51-52.
It really is a noisy world. It’s noisy with talk shows and screaming matches, with tears and laughter, with machinery, with so-called reality TV and podcasts and the oral diarrhea of all politicians and too many of the politically engaged and the meaningless niceties on the insincere and the feckless reasoning of the pseudo-intellectual or the real intellectual and the bootless rage of the arrogant ignorant or the simply ignorant ignorant. The list could go on.
But as some elements in the list above suggest, the world is not only aurally noisy but also emotionally noisy and spiritually noisy. Our greed is noisy. Our joy is noisy, which can be beautiful, but our culture pushes the idea that to be truly celebratory, our celebrations must be over-the-top with senseless, pointless screaming and jumping up and down — witness any game show, any clot of people upon whom turn the cameras of The Today Show or Good Morning, America. The world grows nosier and noisier with silent people staring into their screens with headphone stuffed in their ears. (My telephone just lit up without making a sound or vibrating, but it pushed this at me: “Trump’s 2020 campaign team is in hot water after inviting people to ‘send a brick’ to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s offices.” Behind my eyes as I read that, some voice like my own growls, “WTF?” Silent noise!)
The ringing in my ears is most probably from my days of making loud music in clubs and studios, but still I blame the noisy world for it. They’re with me all the time — the noisy world and the ringing ears. My quiet times are marred either by ringing or by the hum of a fan meant to mask the ringing. Maybe some deep meaning is somewhere in that.
My own noisy mind complains that I’m wasting time here and that I should get to work, even though it’s Saturday morning:
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.”
So, I’ll get to work, but I’ll leave the blog with this that I read this morning, sitting in my CRV (with over 355,000 miles on it) at Buc Deli Drive-Thru and waiting for my tenderloin biscuit with added tomato, mustard, and jalapeños, sided with cheddar rounds and an unsweet tea:
To be alone by being part of the universe–fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. Unity with all living things–without effort or contention. My silence is part of the whole world’s silence and builds the temple of God without the noise of hammers.
Thomas Merton, from “January 18: An Ecology of Silence,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journal (this excerpt written in January 1953)
I thought I’d wander back through diaries that I kept on and off for several years and see what I could find with today’s date, 6 December. I found a couple: one from 1977 and one from 1981. Both are back in my Trekkie days, which were, admittedly, not fanatically so. I liked the show but didn’t let it take over my life. I called my diary Captain’s Log and used a few different dating systems, both of which are translated with the transcriptions below. I’m going to try not to edit the writing, so that my mistakes in spelling and grammar stand.
Captain’s Log: 120.677 [December 6, 1977]
It’s 8:00 AM and snowing. It really looks good. I told Phil on Saturday that it was gonna snow today. I hope to pass all of my tests and go to ballgame tonight. At the ballgame I hope to see Madison beat Reynolds and Leesa. . . . Lord, be my guide this day
Captain’s Log: Supplimental
Today has ended rather boring, but well. I made 84 on my Math 110 test so I’m out of there with an 87.
It continued snowing and freezing the rest of the day so the games were called (I didn’t get to see Leesa). We all sat around tonight listening to music then watching “Houston, We’ve Got a Problem” . . . . God be praised!!!
My Mars Hill College ID Card
Okay, so I was a first-semester freshman music major (flute) at Mars Hill College when I wrote this. I was living on campus in Spilman Hall. My roommate was Johnny Sawyer, with whom I’d grown up in Walnut. He was hardly ever there, so it was like having a private room. The Phil mentioned is Phil Shuford, who lived across the hall with his roommate Yogi Something. I don’t know where Yogi is, but Phil lives in Ozark, Missouri. We’re friends on Facebook. The math course I reference was an early computer course, in which we learned to create those punched cards that were the apps of 1977. And in those MHC days, Leesa was in my heart and mind but not with me. She’d begun her career at Creative Hair Design in Asheville and was working hard to build a clientele and support herself and Lane, who was seventeen months old at the time.
Captain’s Log Stardate 8112.06 [December 6, 1981]
As seems almost usual for me on Sunday morning, I woke up ill at the world. The Lord knows how hard it is for me to get up before 11 AM. I almost decided not to go to church, like every Sunday, thinking that I got nothing from the small, country service. Then I realised, as always, that they are my people and, even though I may get nothing from the service but seeing them and feeling their friendship, that is enough. Then I also come face-to-face with the fact that the singing I dread with such passion is for them and not for me, and that, being graciously given the gift from God, it is my duty to sing for them. It should also be my desire to do so. Well, Allen met me at the door asking if what he heard about me signing with Capitol was true and he was followed closely by Butch asking the same. I quickly gave them my practiced explanation about Townhouse but they were still pleased. When time for me to sing came around, as I was getting my guitar, Raymond spoke up about my struggles with my music and my witness for the church and my hopefully impending record deal. Then totally unexpectedly he suggested a standing ovation for me and I was overwhelmed. If it is not the Lord’s will for me that this all go through all right, He sure is planning to teach me a great lesson in disappointment. Even at that, though, this morning was a great blessing, and I am very thankful for all those people there.
As far as my music and my career go, I am constantly trying to ask with a sincere heart that the Father’s Will be done and not my own. I could live with losing this deal but not with going against His plans for me.
Oh, in church I sang “A SONG FOR CAROLINA” and “DEAR MOTHER”.
The rest of the day was the usual big chicken dinner and lazy Sunday afternoon. I did, however, add music to and edit some lyrics I wrote last night called “DO YOU EVER MISS ME”
We practiced for the Christmas program this evening then I returned home to watch “YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN” on the tube.
As always it is quite late as I write this so I’ll sign off for now…MC…”Dear Mother, I know He’ll come again”
I’d left Mars Hill College two years before, December 1979, in the middle of my junior year, and transferred to Belmont College in Nashville for the spring semester of 1980, to study music business. But it was too much business and not enough music, so I stayed only one semester before transferring to UNC-Asheville–as an English major–for half the fall semester of that year before quitting altogether. I lived at home in Walnut, writing songs and playing solo at different events and venues around the area. I had a manager named Ron Weathers, who worked out of Asheville, and we’d spent some time in Nashville, where Earl Richards recorded my songs for his publishing and production companies. Earl had cut a deal with Townhouse Records, which was distributed by Capitol Records, and my first album was in the works.
The Townhouse/Capitol thing eventually fell through. Although I probably still have the lyric somewhere, I don’t remember anything about “Do You Ever Miss Me”; most likely it was a Leesa lyric. I remember singing “A Song for Carolina” at a couple of big events, one of which was the ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina, celebrating Liston B. Ramsey’s ascension to Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, but again, I remember little about it. “Dear Mother” I still perform now and then.
On Friday, June 15, I spent the morning driving from Johnson City and East Tennessee State University to Harrogate, Tennessee, and Lincoln Memorial University. The 13th Mountain Heritage Literary Festival took place over that weekend. It was my first time to attend such an event, my first time to lead a fiction workshop.
I had five good folks in the workshop–Sue, Rebecca, Sam, Luke, and Mike. I decided to call it “Song Scenes.” I’d selected a handful of narrative verses from songs I like. We began with the first verses of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” McDill’s “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” and Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.” We discussed the narrative elements — how (and what) the writers of these songs achieved in such a short space. Their overnight assignment was to take a verse I handed them and 1) figure out how it works, just like we’d done in class, and 2) write something of their own in which they attempted to evoke the same narrative ambience using some or all of the same elements. All five of them came up with terrific stuff, and I was so pleased with their work and their discussions. Thankfully, they seemed to enjoy the workshop as well, so maybe I’ll get to do this again someday.
The whole weekend was great! During the day, we had the workshops, special events (presentations, performances, and so on), and when everything was finished in the evening, many of us gathered on the dormitory’s patio with guitars and other instruments and beverages in red or blue Solo cups, enjoying the company until late.
One view from Pinnacle Overlook near Cumberland Gap
It’s a very old tale—boy meets girl; boy trades girl for a shot at fame; boy comes to regret that last part. Gabriel’s Songbook, a debut novel by Johnson City author Michael Amos Cody, is a love song to music—creating it, performing it, and generally being passionate about it. What it is not is a love song to the music business.
Twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Tanner leaves his new wife, Eliza, and his little hometown near Asheville for the chance to prove himself in Nashville. He’s hoping for a big break, but reality sets in as soon as he arrives: “Young men with guitars awaited country music stardom on every corner, warbling songs about trucks and alcohol and mamas and cheating hearts, guitar cases opened at their feet. Grungy kids Gabriel’s age or younger, looking both frightened and defiant, one moment weaved and bobbed through the starry-eyed sidewalk crowd like the children they were, the next disappeared into some black hole of a bar.”
Gabriel’s Songbook chronicles the talented-but-naïve young musician’s ups and downs with a vast array of music-business figures: managers, producers, label executives, promoters, engineers, disc jockeys, contract lawyers, marketing consultants, bandmates, writing partners, hair stylists, and wardrobe consultants. They all have big plans for him, but eventually he comes to understand that they’re all working their own angles, which are not necessarily to his benefit. Through it all, Gabriel works hard to remember why he’s doing all this, and what he’s given up along the way. He goes back to the night he saw the new girl at their high school in the crowd at one of his shows:
In the purity of that moment—filled with music and Eliza—I discovered a light. A guiding star, as I’ve always imagined it. Over the years, even in times when I felt most earth-bound, I kept sight of that star in the heavens. When I sat in some darkened room with my guitar in my arms, trying to fit words to music, it hovered above me like a muse invoked. And when I finally got a real stage and an audience made up of more than friends and family, it became a spotlight, or the spot-lit reflection of myself in some pretty woman’s smiling eyes. I followed that star … without question, through a great wilderness and some of my wildest dreams.
Such dreams don’t always survive the trip, though Gabriel’s love for music endures: “This part, the writing of lyrics, I loved most of all about songwriting, even on this edge of exhaustion,” he remembers. “The soul churning. The stirring up of memories and feelings and dreams. The strange sensation that I was a bystander watching as the page filled with these things put into words.”
Through flashbacks, dream sequences, song lyrics, and even ghostly visitations, readers can watch Gabriel learning lessons the hard way, as he is transformed from a romantic idealist into a hard-drinking, hard-living “almost was,” often at odds with family and friends. Cody brings to life Gabriel’s passion for his art and his ambition to succeed in music, deftly portraying the anguish of unrealized dreams made even more bitter by regret.
A graduate of Auburn University, Tina Chambers has worked as a technical editor at an engineering firm and as an editorial assistant at Peachtree Publishers, where she worked on books by Erskine Caldwell, Will Campbell, and Ferrol Sams, to name a few. She lives in Chattanooga.
A graduate of Auburn University,