Listen Here (42 page)

(March 17, 1917–July 14, 1985)

Lily May Ledford, author, musician, and storyteller, was a founding member of the Coon Creek Girls, the country's first all-woman string band. The seventh of fourteen children born to an eastern Kentucky farm family, Ledford's childhood was filled with traditional mountain activities—ginseng digging, berry picking, fodder pulling, and making music.

Ledford learned to play a groundhog hide banjo when she was seven. A couple of years later, she traded everything she owned (an old flashlight, a sweater, a sling-shot, and a box of crayons) for a broken fiddle. She whittled new parts for it, then fashioned a bow out of a willow stick and hair from the tail of the family's plow horse.

In 1935, Ledford auditioned for and won a regular job with a Chicago radio show, the WLS National Barn Dance, where she played fiddle, banjo, and guitar. In 1937, the Coon Creek Girls, composed of Lily May, her sister Rosie, and two other female musicians, was formed. Eleanor Roosevelt invited the group to the White House in 1939 to play for the King and Queen of England. The group performed together until 1957.

In 1968, Lily May was “rediscovered” at the Newport National Folk Festival, and from then on was in demand as a solo performer at folk festivals throughout the United States and Canada. Shortly before her death, she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor for traditional artists.

Ledford's brief autobiography,
Coon Creek Girl
, describes her childhood in Kentucky's Red River Gorge as well as her life as a musician during the early days of radio.

Autobiography:
Coon Creek Girl
( 1980).

Ellesa Clay High,
Past Titan Rock: Journeys into an Appalachian Valley
(1984), 67–106, 169–83. Ellesa Clay High, “A Tribute to Lily May Ledford,”
Appalachian Heritage
14:2 (spring 1986), 5–6.

from Chapter II

Off on my first train trip to my first job in radio at nineteen, I had with me my home-made fiddle case, shaped like a coffin, and my pasteboard suitcase packed with odds and ends of home-made clothing, hand-me-downs and borrowed clothes (everybody had tried to help me out). I had about $9 in my pocket.

Mr. Lair [talent manager at WLS] greeted me warmly, and as we started on our drive straight to WLS, he began to tell me of his plans for a barn dance of his own, to originate in Cincinnati, Ohio, and about his plans for an all-girl band of which I could be the leader. He told me of a couple of girls he had auditioned and was saving till the right time came to bring together this act. He thought it would all happen within a year and again warned me against signing any kind of contract with WLS. We reached the station on Washington Boulevard about a mile or two from the Loop and its rattle and clatter of elevated trains, buses, street cars and thousands of people of every race, creed and color, all talking and gesturing in all kinds of languages.

Oh how frightening, yet how exciting it all was. “Lord have Mercy,” I said, “Mr. Lair, I'll never learn how to get to and from work.” He then told me that he and Mrs. Lair had already planned to keep me in their home for a while. How grateful I was when I heard this. I felt among friends. Mr. Lair had briefed most everybody about me, and as we walked into the station a tall gentleman was introduced to me, a Kentuckian, Red Foley! I grew to depend upon this gentle-natured person, as a defender against the teasing I later was to receive from the others. I finally got to know the others and liked them very much too, for if they hadn't liked me they wouldn't have bothered to tease me about the way I talked and my old-fashioned music.

Most everyone was at the station each day and all day when not on the road with a show. The heads of WLS, said to be the greatest hillbilly station on the map, encouraged this. Many rehearsal rooms were provided, along with a billiard room, and a rec room for off-hours. All this resulted in a family atmosphere all over the 4 or 5 floors. The station was owned and sponsored by
Prairie Farmer
, a weekly magazine that was published on one of the lower stories.

After I had met everybody on our floor, including the many office workers with their smiling welcome, I was led on a tour of all the other floors, and oh Lord! so much of everything and so many nice people to take in, in an hour's time. Gradually my fears and apprehensions melted away and I began to feel proud and sure of myself. More than once Mr. Lair remarked that I had shown poise that no one would have thought a mountain girl could have possessed.

…

One night on the barn dance, a little boy was brought out on stage with an old fiddle. He was wearing shabby clothes and I watched, almost in tears (he looked so much like my brother Coyen) to see what they would do with him. They interviewed him briefly and put him on to play, calling for backup guitars. That little boy rared back and just made that fiddle talk with a couple of fast breakdowns. By then I was crying a little. The MC called me up, introduced me to the boy, and asked me what did I think of this little fiddler, hitch-hiking from way down in Southern Indiana. I was putting my arm around the boy's shoulder and starting to tell him how proud I was of him when I burst into uncontrollable crying, tears streaming and splashing on the stage. I had to turn and hurry off stage, embarrassed to death, and get to the dressing room and cry it out. When I went back on stage, now composed, Red, Lulu Belle and a few others were crying. I was neither scolded nor teased about this. Everyone at home who had been listening in wrote letters to cheer me up, realizing that I was homesick. Poor old Mama dressed a chicken and sent it, thinking that it being winter it would reach me without spoiling (it did spoil). She also sent a few jars of blackberry jam, molasses and pickles. Bless her heart. She had been touched deeply by my crying spell on the air and I'll never forget her for it, for she was a person that believed in no pampering. All my life she had scolded and lectured me saying, “Toughen up! If the rest can make it you can! You let people lead you around by the nose too much!”

By Christmas of 1936, I had gained a good solid popularity with my listeners, and also the friendship of my co-workers. Patsy Montana was one of my best friends, always wearing her leather western costume and big white hat, taking me home with her. Dolly and Millie did the same, and Lulu Belle to her nice apartment, for a good home cooked meal. I also remember the hospitality of Red and Eva.

I shopped and shopped for Christmas, for the family and for the “Skiddies,” as I loved them and owed them so much for their great help in the past. I ran my legs off riding street cars and “L's” to the post office, mailing huge packages. Then the fans started mailing stuff, home made cookies, candies, roses, clothes, cosmetics, and finally one that tore the mail room all to pieces. A live crated possum had arrived for me, a baby one. Rev. Sharpe was greatly alarmed but consented to let me keep it. It wouldn't allow itself to be petted, nor would it eat anything I brought to it. It just huddled up and grinned. How I longed for persimmons, favorite food of possums. He finally got out of the crate and crawled into the coal bin and got all black and filthy. Mr. Lair appeared, to take it and donate it to the zoo, so his whole family and I went to the zoo, enjoyed it and donated the possum. I was given a check for $5 for the “donation of one o'possum.” I kept this check for a long time before cashing it. I wish I'd kept it. To this day I believe that the sender of the possum was only trying to relieve my homesickness.

(March 3, 1891–March 23, 1980)

Grace Lumpkin usually gave 1900 or 1901 as the year of her birth, though her younger sister, born in 1897, says that Lumpkin was 88 when she died in 1980. Born in Milledgeville, Georgia, to Annette Caroline Morris Lumpkin and William Wallace Lumpkin, a Civil War veteran, she was the ninth of eleven children. Around the turn of the century, the family lived in Columbia, South Carolina. Moving to a farm in Richland County, South Carolina, around 1910, gave Lumpkin firsthand experiences with sharecroppers.

In 1911, after graduating from a teacher's training program at Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, Lumpkin spent time in France, taught in a rural school, worked as a home demonstration agent, and spent summers in the North Carolina mountains. She also worked as a secretary for the YWCA and lived in New York City, where she studied writing at Columbia University and became involved in left-wing politics.

Her first novel,
To Make My Bread
, won the Maxim Gorky Award for best labor novel of the year. Chronicling events she had witnessed—mountain people leaving farms for textile mills—it begins in the North Carolina mountains in 1900 and ends with union activities in the 1929 Gastonia strike.

Her second novel also concerns proletarian issues of race, social justice, and union activity. Though a complex web of personal and public events eventually turned Lumpkin away from Marxism and toward more conservative political and religious ideas in her subsequent work, her first novel remains a significant literary contribution to American literature. The principal archive of her papers is in Columbia, South Carolina, at the University of South Carolina.

This excerpt from the first chapter of
To Make My Bread
introduces John McClure, whose difficult birth in a one-room cabin is traumatic for the whole family.

Novels:
Full Circle
(1962),
The Wedding
(1939),
A Sign for Cain
(1935),
To Make My Bread
(1932).
Short stories:
“The Treasure,”
O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories
(1940). “White Man—A Story,”
New Masses
(September 1927), 7–8.

C. Michael Smith, “Grace Lumpkin,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 287–88. Suzanne Sowinska, “Introduction,”
To Make My Bread
(1995), vii–xliii.

from Chapter 1

Granpap Kirkland and Emma McClure's two sons had ventured out to find the steer and cow. When they did not return Emma stood outside the door and screamed to them. She could not stand long against the strong wind. It blew her against the wall of the cabin with the force of a strong mans fist. Leaning over she held to the woodblock that served as a step and kept up intermittent screams until the others returned. They came crawling on hands and knees, and she did not see them until they were right on her, and Granpap called into her ear that they were safe.

She did not learn until later that the steer and cow were lost, for as soon as her anxiety for Granpap and the boys was over, Emma felt a first sharp pain and knew that her time had come. Inside the cabin with the door shut she crouched over the fire trying to get some of the warmth of it into her body. The icy wind had reached the very marrow of her bones.

The hickory log fire shone on her twisted face, and on the form that protruded from her belly in an oval shape. It seemed as if the child in her womb had already been born and was lying wrapped up in her lap asleep.

On the floor at Emma's right eight-year-old Kirk lay and stared into the fire, and between them in a poplar log cradle Bonnie, the youngest, whimpered in her sleep. On the other side of the fire, Basil, who was a year older than Kirk, sat against the chimney, his legs spread out before him on the floor.

The wind sniffed at the doors and blew gusts of icy breath through the cracks of the log cabin. Clothes hanging to pegs on the walls flapped out into the room, making strange balancing movements. If the wind died down for a moment they suddenly collapsed against the wall as a man does who gives up the struggle to keep on his drunken legs.

In the half darkness of the small space between the circle of firelight and the end wall of the cabin, John Kirkland walked the floor. His boots stamped on the split-log flooring regularly, hesitating when he turned at the wall and again when he turned just behind Emma's chair.

Granpap Kirkland's life had been full of varied experiences. A fight with a she bear had left three long scars across his right cheek, and there was a scar on his side from a wound received in battle. He was not a fearful man by nature. But he had known fear and dread in the last few moments since he knew that some time in the night he must deliver Emma of her child.

Emma instructed Granpap. She took his thumb for a measure. The cord must be cut so far from the child. Neither of them had much fear for Emma. She was a strong woman. A few months before, just after Jim McClure died of fever and before Granpap had come to stay with her, Emma, then five months gone with child, had carried the best part of a thirty-pound shoat the twelve miles over steep mountain trails to Swain's Crossing. Nevertheless her children always came hard, and Emma knew there would be plenty of pain even before the child made its final struggle.

Bonnie cried out loud. Emma walked to the wall where the clothes hung and took down a pair of old jeans. She tucked them into the cradle around the child. Back in the chair with her foot against the cradle she set it rocking slowly, and the child quieted for a moment.

The old man came and stood behind Emma. His shoulders were bowed a little, but he was very tall, and stood high above her.

“Do you think it'll be soon, Emma?” he asked. His voice was anxious and querulous.

Emma did not answer. She knew he wanted it over and done with. But so did she. There was no way to hurry the child.

“Are you going to bed?” he asked. She straightened up.

“When hits time, Pap. Hit's s' cold there.”

The wind slapped against the cabin and snarled down the chimney. Snow blew in under the north door and spread over the floor in a hurry and flurry like an unwelcome quest who is trying to make himself at home.

During one of the quiet times between the pains Emma took the coffee pot from the fire and poured out a drink for each one in the tin cups. Above the kerosene lamp on the table strings of dried apples hanging from the rafters stirred and as the lamp flame gutted and flared up the apple strings made long crooked shadows across the bed in the corner.

“Hit'll warm up our backs,” Emma said and handed the cups. She walked over and picked up the water bucket that was in a dark corner behind Kirk.

“Here, Kirk,” she said. “Hold the pan.”

The water was frozen. Emma broke through the ice with her fist. When she poured it out of the bucket it clinked against the bottom of the tin basin. She set the basin down in the ashes against the live embers.

“You'll need the hot water,” she said to Granpap. As she gulped down the warm coffee she wished in herself there was a woman who would know what to do without telling. And she wished the men were where they belonged when a woman was in travail—somewhere out on the mountains or at a neighbor's. There was a shame in having her sons near, and Granpap must see her as he had not seen her since she was a naked baby in her mother's
arms. Soon, maybe, it would be over. The pains had begun to get worse, as if it was the end.

In the bed away from the others, Emma let go. She was shaking with cold yet the quilts and her cotton flannel skirt were too much and she pushed them off. Sitting up in bed she pressed down slowly with her hands over the great lump stirring inside. Others had done this for her before to help the child come. She found that she could not do it for herself. The hot pulling cramp forced her to lie back and scream again. A bear was gnawing at her belly, pulling at the muscles with its strong teeth. She felt its fur on her face and beat at the fur with her arms.

It was Granpap's beard. He was trying to tell her to keep covered as long as she could. She pushed him off. It was not possible to bear the agony of one hair touching her. There was no Granpap and no children now. Nothing mattered but herself and the pain.

Bonnie kept up a fretful wail, and Granpap walked up and down the room. Outside the storm brushed against the cabin as if all the trees on the mountains had been uprooted and their dry branches were scraping over the roof and against the outside walls.

Kirk was quiet. Now he stood with his back to the chimney, watching the corner with frightened eyes. Suddenly Emma cried out sharply to Granpap. He stooped over the bed and peered down.

“Bring the lamp, Kirk,” he ordered. “And you, Basil, put that pan of water and bucket on the table.”

He rolled up his sleeves and walking quickly to the fire leaned far over to rub his cold hands in the flames.

Kirk held the lamp over the bed and kept his eyes on his Granpap. On the bed was a woman he did not recognize as his mother. She was a stranger, a sort of beast. Granpap stood between him and the new thing, and he kept his eyes on the wide back where Granpap's old shirt and patched jeans were familiar and safe. Kirk saw the old man bending over working with his hands at Emma's body and he smelled blood. It made a familiar shudder run over him. Granpap bending over the bed was like a man bending over at a slaughtering and Emma's last cries were the same as those of a pig with a knife at its throat.

For a while Kirk had not heard the storm because Emma's cries were closer than the sounds outside. But when they stopped there was the storm again, wheezing around the cabin and pushing at the door. When Granpap at last stood up he held in his hands something that looked to be a mass of blood and matter. But it was really a living thing. For as Granpap shook it the mass made a wailing sound—a sort of echo of the storm outside.

There was washing to be done, and Kirk stood and held the lamp until the old man finished. At last Granpap covered Emma where she lay exhausted on the dry side of the cold bed. Then he put the washed baby in the cradle with Bonnie to keep it warm until Emma would come to and let it suck.