Seldom Scene - Liz Smathers Shaw

 

Liz Smathers Shaw of Canton, NC, at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival,

Asheville, North Carolina 1974

The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival was started in 1928 in Asheville, North Carolina and claims the title as the earliest folk festival in the United States. It was founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford of Madison County and it continues to this day.

The nation experienced a revival in folk music that began in the 1960s and brought deserved attention to musicians, singers, and dancers in western North Carolina. It also sparked an interest in mountain music among young people, many of who moved to the area to learn music from the source. Others who were from the area were just beginning their lives in music. Musicians like David Holt, Sheila Kay Adams, and John McCutcheon and Liz Smathers were in the beginnings of their careers and the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival was an important venue for them.

Liz Smathers Shaw is a member of the musical Smathers Family of Canton, North Carolina, a heritage that includes her father, Quay Smathers, a shape-note singer and leader, and cousins, Luke and Harold Smathers, had their own very popular swing band. Liz lives in Athens, Ohio, with her husband Lynn Shaw and continues to perform and teach fiddle.

 

 

Hero - Gram

 

My Grandmother, Jennie Lozupone, ca. 1915

Today would have been my Grandmother’s 114th birthday.  She died in 1995. I was asked to give the eulogy at her funeral, which I’ve reprinted in this post. Rereading the eighteen-year-old text, I understand how much I’ve learned in the ensuing years from a series of great editors and teachers. I’m resisting the urge to correct grammar, syntax, and sentence structure within the text. There are also some factual errors that I’ve corrected at the end of the post. 

5/30/95

So, what’s in a name? The woman we are honoring and saying goodbye to today was known by many names. Jennie Lozupone. Mrs. Galeano. Aunt Jennie. Mama. Gram.

Her life spanned the length of the 2oth Century and encompassed many of the great events of this county’s history during the Century. But as we know, history is more than great events. History is also the past and the past is both personal and intimate.

Jennie Lozupone was born in 1899 in Bari, Italy. She arrived in the United States in 1907, part of the great Italian migration. She landed at Ellis Island and her family first settled in Albany, New York, before moving to Washington, DC, where she lived her entire life.

In 1916, she married Joseph Galeano, a fellow immigrant, he from Sicily. They bought a home on Morse Street in Northeast Washington. It was there they had their four children – Vincent, Louis, Catherine, and Charles.

When the Great Depression struck this country in 1929 Jennie joined the workforce to help support her family. She began a career as a seamstress with the late Jimmy Bello. While her clients included President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justices, she was most proud of the First Communion dresses, the dance recital outfits and the Easter clothes she made for her nieces and grandchildren. She was always there to hem a pair of pants or sew on a button.

Two of her sons served in the Armed Forces during World War II. She suffered the insecurity of not knowing her baby son’s whereabouts for two years during that conflict.

After the war, as the middle class in this country grew, her family became part of that movement. She and Joe bought a house in suburban Maryland on University Blvd. Gram always accepted what life had to offer her – sometimes with resignation, but more often with grace and a willingness to make the best of any situation. Her husband Joe died unexpectedly in 1948 and it was then the second half of Jennie’s life began.

Gram loved life. She loved food – not jus the cooking and eating of it, but she loved to feed others. Her lasagna and eggplant are famous across the country given the travels of her children and grandchildren. She loved to gamble – bingo, horse races, poker. She loved to win, but really she was a safe bettor. Mostly, she loved the Fellowship that the gambling provided.

Gram understood the value of money. I remember a story of her getting held up at knife-point by a young boy whose situation was even worse than hers. She said she looked him in the eye and said, “You’re not getting my hard earned money” and started swinging her oversized purse at him. She was a giving and generous woman who understood that by giving she would receive.

As she got older and her eyesight worsened, she switched from sewing to knitting afghans although she never could get the name right, calling them Africans until the end. Hundreds of Africans that now reside all over the country. She made them for weddings, births and graduations – or simply because she liked you. Every Christmas and birthday each of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren received a savings bond.

When she was 67 years old she made the first of seven trips back to Italy to visit her late husband’s relatives in Sicily, often taking one or more of her grandchildren with her. She loved those trips – talking the language again, the food, the attention.

She was devoted to St. Camillus Church and was an active member of the Leisure Club. She put her sewing skills to use for the Church and often made Baptismal bibs for the newborn and did laundry for the parish priests.

Gram represented a sense of security and safety for all of us. She has been with us all our lives. Not just the literal security of a home, a meal, clothing or help when we needed it, but also a symbolic security of a safer place, a safer time.

So, what’s in a name? I can’t help but wonder if this Jennie Lozupone, this Mrs. Galeano, this Aunt Jennie, this Mama, this Gram had any idea she would be so blessed in her life. That she would leave such a wonderful legacy – four children thirteen grandchildren, 37 great-grandchildren with two more on the way and seven great-great grandchildren.

The last few years she had forgotten most of our names although she still delighted in our company, especially the young children. She seemed to become more of a child herself. The last time I saw her was last November. She let me feed her her supper and carried on a long conversation with me – in Italian. As she finished her meal I struggled with my Latin and Spanish to ask her if she was done eating. “Fini?” I asked. She looked me in the eye, always the teacher, and answered, “Finito.”

Jennie Lozupone Galeano, 1992

 

Appendix

My grandmother and her family lived in Gioia dei Colle, Italy, which is a small village just west of Bari. Gioia dei Colle means Joy of the Hill – if there could be a more perfect name for a town I haven’t heard it.

I’ve listed Gram’s birth year as 1899, which would have made her 95 when she died. After her death, we discovered a document that indicated she was actually born in 1897.

The number of great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren has mushroomed since 1995 to a point where I can no longer keep up.

Seldom Scene - At the Rock Cafe, 1979

At the Rock Cafe, Marshall, Madison County, NC 1979

This photograph was made under the auspices of a Photographic Survey Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts awarded to me through Mars Hill College. Prints from the grant period are now housed at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. This was a period of time when our leaders and our citizens understood the role the Arts and Humanities play in our lives. They teach us about life itself - knowledge increasingly threatened by the present political and social climate in our country.  

 

Digging John Henderson's Grave

  

 

John Henderson at Home, Big Pine, 1978

I almost didn’t recognize him in the grocery store. After I moved from the community four years earlier, I lost touch with many of my neighbors on Big Pine – John Henderson among them. There were a couple of years before my divorce and move when I saw John most every day - helping him with tobacco, mostly, but also socializing together on many occasions. He was older, a local man, a tobacco farmer who was also a substitute driver at the post office. During World War Two he was in an engineer battalion at the Battle of the Bulge, in front of the front lines. He was tough, strong man with unlimited stamina. He enjoyed hanging out with the new people in the community, the hippies, and he loved to work.

But here in the grocery store was a spent man – his face and frame gaunt and hollow, while his stomach extended like a ripe melon. He would have been about 70 years old then, not young after a lifetime of work, but he moved with the gait of someone beat down. It had been some years since we had spoken and I asked what was going on with him. “It’s the cancer,” he said. “They say I likely got it from all that sprayin’ I did for the tobacco and other stuff. All them chemicals.” It wasn’t long after that conversation that I got word he had died.

 

Digging John Henderson's Grave, Big Pine, 1988

A group of men gathered at the graveyard one morning to dig his grave. It’s a very precise endeavor, grave digging, and there were men there who knew how to do it – the squaring and leveling, and the deliberate work of digging. Others stood around talking, waiting their turn at the shovel. The talk was of John and his commitment to the community. He wasn’t a churchgoing person, but he was always ready to pitch in or lead when something needed doing – kind of an individual neighbors-in-need program. The men talked about that. What they liked about him. His character. Funny stories. Sad stories.

At the Worley Cemetery, Big Pine, 1988

From the left, front, McKinley Massey, Jim Woodruff. Rear, George Marler, Cylde Anderson, Clyde Randall, Randy Fowler, Robert Buckner, Unknown, Alan Payne, Earl Roberts, Jerry Anderson

John would have enjoyed the mix of work and talk and the words being spoken by his neighbors - people he had lived with his entire life. I remember thinking how deeply intimate and spiritual this act was – the digging and handling of the earth John would be buried in. And also, how fortunate we were to live in a place where those rituals remain - men gathering, offering their backs and their memories to John one last time. Funerals remind us of our mortality; grave digging even more so. As everyone gathered for this photograph, we were aware that at some point in the future we, too, would no longer be in the picture, but would only exist in the memories of our friends. 

Dad

 

My father, Robert Warren Amberg, High School Graduation Picture, Chicago, 1935

 

Dad,

I’m a day late with this thank you. I’m sorry. But I born a few days late so I sense you learned early on to wait on me. Thank you for your patience that lasted throughout your lifetime.

Yesterday, on Fathers Day, my oldest, Benjamin, called from work, unable to talk for very long and we made plans to speak later in the week. Kate has been home for a couple of months and she, Shu, and Kelsey fixed a great supper for all of us, our friend Cedric included who is visiting from South Dakota. A great meal and greater evening. I am a fortunate son.

I thought to call you in the middle of the evening, but that, of course, is impossible. It’s been over eleven years now. It’s been an eventful stretch of time, marked most clearly by the evidence of time’s passage on each of our faces, and in our lives. Know that I think of that, and of you, daily.

I mainly just want to thank you for bringing us to the world so that we may make our own imprints on time’s journey. And I want to add that this is a killer tie you are wearing. I trust you are resting well. 

Carrboro Arts Center

Nicholson Gallery Exhibit

Madison County - Past and Present

Photographs by Rob Amberg

                  At Ramsey's Store, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1977

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             At Cricket's Birthday Party, Big Pine, Madison County, NC 2011

As a documentary photographer living and working several decades in Madison County, North Carolina, Rob Amberg has chronicled the lives and stories of people in isolated mountain areas such as Sodom. The photographs exhibited in Madison County - Past and Present include some of Amberg's oldest as well as most recent work demonstrating thechanging culture of Appalachian North Carolina.www.robamberg.com

Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 6-8pm in the Nicholson Gallery

The exhibition runs from June 3-30.

http://www.artscenterlive.org/exhibition/exhibit

The opening reception on June 14 will feature a performance by noted Madison County ballad singer and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams. Adams was just awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is widely considered the highest honor for the Arts in the nation.

sheila_kay_web.jpg

Sheila Kay Adams, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1975

Madison County - A Bloody Jewel

 

Historical Marker, NC Highway 212, Madison County, NC, 2010

Madison County, North Carolina, earned the moniker Bloody Madison in the Civil War, specifically in January 1863, at the well documented, and well remembered, Shelton Laurel Massacre. That terrible and fearful time in our county’s personal past is thankfully long gone. The nickname, however, has stayed with us and some people would say for good reason.

I don’t know if we have more violence and mayhem in Madison than other places of comparable size and demographics, but we certainly have our fair share. Here are a few notable instances from years past. The year before I moved here, 1972, Nancy Morgan, a young VISTA worker, was murdered and left hogtied in her car on Hot Springs Mountain – a case that remains officially unsolved. Five years later, Philip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews murdered two Yancey County men passing through the county on their way to Greenville, Tennessee. The bodies were found some weeks later in an abandoned stone quarry on Highway 208 after the murderers were overheard bragging in a Cripple Creek, Colorado bar about “getting away with murder in North Carolina.” Then there were the elderly Gahagan siblings who were killed in their home near the Belva community and the man who murdered his daughter by feeding her food laced with pesticides. And one only has to look at the weekly arrest report in the newspaper to realize there are people living here, as there are everywhere, who believe violence is the answer to their problems. Wildness and isolation tend to be defining elements for much of Madison County and I think people, non-residents especially, associate those characteristics with the idea of Bloody Madison - a place where people tend to deal with their own problems.

              Convicted Murderers, Phillip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews, being led from the

Madison County Courthouse to the jail, Marshall, 1978.

There has been a concerted effort over the last fifteen years to temper the county’s image and it has since been reborn as The Jewel of the Blue Ridge. This extreme makeover corresponds with the construction and opening of I-26 and efforts to make the county more appealing to developers, small businesses, and new residents; a program that was largely successful until the economic collapse of 2008 altered the dynamic. Since then, most new, gated communities have gone belly up and the initial flood of new people has slowed. One has to wonder if those developers, as they ponder their red-inked balance sheets, or the county itself, as we mourn our bloodied landscape and lost tax revenues, still think of Madison as a jewel.

It’s not that I dislike the name, The Jewel of the Blue Ridge, or what it represents. I know I live in a jewel of a place - safe and comfortable, with generous, welcoming people. But I also know this can be a hard place to live and that it’s not for everyone. A jewel connotes a certain ease, a station in life, that doesn’t quite mesh with our sometimes hardscrabble reality in Madison County.

 Welcome Sign, Highway 25-70 West, near the Ivy River, Madison County, NC, 2013

But Bloody Madison continues to ring true for me - not the mayhem and violence associated with it, but the name itself. It’s a name with guts and character. For me, it speaks of wildness, and isolation, and a certain unknown, or unmapped, quality. We live in an environment where the natural world plays an influential role in our daily lives. Those influences – the air, water, and soil, the quiet, the mountains and forests, and the culture itself – are the Jewel we speak of. They are our reasons for being here. But without care, attention, and an openness to change, or simply because the world can be brutally unforgiving, as it was in 1863, that jewel can be tarnished and dulled, and oftentimes is Bloody.

 

Victims, Phillip Paludan. An excellent book on the Shelton Laurel Massacre.

The Kingdom of Madison, Manley Wade Wellman. Popular history of Madison County.

Mystical Madison - The History of a Mountain Region, Milton Ready. A new non-academic history by Professor Emeritus at UNCA.

Sodom Laurel Album - Rob Amberg

The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia - Rob Amberg

Kate - Twenty-two

 

 

 

Born in the year of the cicadas

Your colicky wails mimicked the shrill cries of the bug

To create a voice unique to our ears, and to the world.

It has been that way ever since.

 

Under the sign of Gemini, on Dylan’s 50th,

We thought -

This is going to be a wild ride.

Ain’t that been the truth.

Too many moments to prove otherwise.

It’s hard to pick a favorite.

 

Perhaps when you were two years old and

You walked away from your mother at the mall.

Only to be found fifteen minutes later,

After the mall had been placed in lockdown,

Talking to two elderly women ten stores away from

Where you’d last been seen.

You never did know a stranger.

 

Or sending Steve Garrison’s mother to the clinic with a nasty bite

When she mistakenly backed you into a corner at daycare.

Or putting poor Leroy the cat in the freezer and

Claiming your brother did it.

Rebar on the soccer field. The last line of defense.

The endless parade of friends and critters brought to the house,

Most of whom, to our joy, are still in our lives.

 

You’re the perfect mix,

Your mother’s calm and nurturing ways.

And your father’s hypersensitivity.

Like mixing yoga and football.

Pensive, moody, fierce, unyielding.

Joyful, expansive, embracing, giving.

At work, it’s always, “May I help you?”

At 22, still figuring when to be which.

And I suppose, which to be when.

It’s a rich journey.

 

Happy Birthday

 

Half Staff

At the Madison County, North Carolina, Courthouse, 2013.

Our flags have been flying at half-staff for many months now and I, like many people, am sickened and saddened by the unrelenting violence in our world. Benghazi, Sandy Hook, and Boston have provided us with a never-ending stream of heroes and innocent victims to be honored and remembered. And honor them we should.

But I find myself equally saddened and distressed by the deaths of people we have chosen not to honor with this same public tribute. I’m thinking here of the thousands of victims of abuse and gun violence, the low-wage factory workers in Bangladesh laboring in unregulated industries so that we may have inexpensive clothing, or the scores of children and families killed in our drone strikes. I wonder if someone, some country, flies a flag at half-staff for these unsung heroes and innocents. 

We Americans believe we are an exceptional people and that we are the force for good in the world. We believe our laws and culture are above reproach and our motives and tactics are always pure and should never be questioned. Why would anyone, or any society, wish us harm?

But I’m reminded of that quote from Galatians 7, Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, which leads me to question our own complicity in this rampant violence being perpetrated on us. Americans are the most heavily armed people in the world. When you couple that fact with our country’s poor mental health care and lax gun laws, you have a potent recipe for havoc. America has been the leading exporter of arms and munitions in the world for many years, and since our beginnings as a nation, violence and warfare have been among our most defining characteristics. Our invasions, interventions, and liberations bring the same indiscriminate death and destruction to innocents. That we do these things in the name of peace, freedom, and democracy matters little to the countries we invade or the families affected by our violence.

Perhaps a more honest response would be for all nations of the world to fly their flags at half staff in perpetuity so that all innocent victims receive the honor and respect they deserve. 

In Weaverville, North Carolina, 2013.

Seldom Scene - EY Ponder

Madison County Sheriff, E Y Ponder (center with tie) and deputies with confiscated marijuana crop, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 1979

In 1979 Madison County was one of the leading producers of marijuana in North Carolina, and the illegal crop was widely reported as the number one cash crop in the state. Madison was also the leading producer of burley tobacco in North Carolina.

Jesus on the Hill

 

Mark and Marisa's new home in Frederick, Maryland.

I recently took a trip up to Maryland to help my younger brother move into his new home. The move was a success. Their new residence is in historic downtown Frederick, Maryland, and was built in 1850 by John Joseph Moran who gained notoriety as the attending physician at Edgar Allen Poe’s death in 1849. I got to spend some time with my two nieces, Lily and Samantha who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and meet Sam’s boyfriend Jake from West Virginia. 

 

 

Left, Lily. Right, Jake and Samantha

While in Maryland I drove over to my old stomping grounds around Langley Park and our Oakview neighborhood in Silver Spring to have a look around. That area of suburban Washington, DC has been changing dramatically and steadily since World War II. When I grew up there, pre-Beltway, there was still a lot of open space and the roads were small and slow. That pastoral landscape is now rolling hills of concrete and development and has been for some time so I wasn’t seeing anything new. What got my attention were things that had stayed the same – specific places and specific memories. 

 

My Grandmother's House on University Boulevard in Silver Spring, Maryland.

While driving over to my old neighborhood just off of New Hampshire Avenue, north of Langley Park, I passed my grandmother’s old house on University Boulevard and decided to stop. When I knocked on the door an elderly Asian woman answered. I was able to communicate to her my relationship with the house that had been in her family for thirty years. She graciously invited me inside, which I refused, but I did walk around the outside, mostly wanting to see the backyard, a scene of many 4th of July parties with my family. My Uncle Charlie’s brick grill was gone, but the yard was as I remembered it; big enough for badminton and croquet, lawn chairs and blankets, the grill, and tables for food. The house itself, almost new when I lived there in the late forties, was now run down and in need of structural repair and paint. And University Boulevard, a slow two-lane road through the 1950s, and still that way in my memory, was now six lanes of unrelenting traffic and sound, made immediate and real by its close proximity to the house.

At the intersection of Piney Branch Road and New Hampshire Avenue, stopped for the traffic light, I looked up on the hill facing me and saw a familiar statue of Jesus, his arms outstretched in a gesture of embrace and protection. Years ago, in maybe 1955, my cousin George and I had been dropped off at the movie theatre in Langley Park for a late afternoon matinee. It was dark when the movie ended and we had been told to wait at the entrance where someone would pick us up. After thirty or forty-five minutes of waiting, and repeated phone calls to a busy single or no answer, we decided to just walk home. It was two miles or less and we knew the way. New Hampshire Avenue in those days was dark and lightly trafficked with no sidewalks or streetlights. By the time we reached Piney Branch road, I was pretty scared and said so to George who was a year older, and in my mind wiser. He suggested I look at the Jesus statue and ask him for strength and comfort. I do recall feeling calmer, at least for a short time, which was about when our parents drove by, saw us, and doubled back to pick us up. George and I could tell pretty quickly the adults were not happy or impressed by our resourcefulness and I do remember Jesus didn’t offer much protection from their wrath when we got back home. Later that year, the statue suffered the wrath of a hurricane and was blown over. It was subsequently moved back on the hill where it has stayed, eternally vigilant, and protected from the wind.