The OA’s next issue is a love letter to Southern art! ️✨

Pre-order your copy today or find it on select newsstands starting March 19!

SUBSCRIBE Shop Donate Login

Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

Issue 99, Winter 2017

Watershed

Southeastern Kentucky’s Phipps family legacy


Smokey Creek meanders beside a winding road, its music one of rocks and water, of the breeze in sandbar willows. A scattering of homes lines the road: trailers sit next to brick houses at the foot of the mountain where the state highway becomes a bobby pin of curves. I know these sharp turns well. I grew up in this area and have gone over this mountain many times on my way to friends’ houses or to the local bootlegger long before the recent vote to legalize alcohol sales. I know these woods and these people. Some I know by name, but all I know by my bones and blood because we share the same collective memory. We share a culture, a language, and a common history. There are few things more binding. 

When I was growing up here in the 1980s, the larger world told us we had nothing to be proud of. As Eastern Kentuckians, we knew better. We had our people, our work ethic, and our land. And we had our internationally known musicians: Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall, Jean Ritchie, Patty Loveless, Dwight Yoakam, many others. In our little corner of Southeastern Kentucky, we had the Phipps Family—lesser known but still a great source of pride for us. They had sung with the Carter Family, and they had performed at the Newport Folk Festival. Most importantly to us, they had popularized “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” one of the most beloved songs of the Appalachian people.

Today I live about an hour north of Smokey Creek, but the little college town of Berea might as well be a world away. It’s still officially within Appalachia, but it’s not the kudzu-decorated and Christ-haunted place of my youth. In Berea, the cadences of my people have been largely overtaken by professors who moved into the area from all over the nation. I moved there seeking a little dot of blue among a sea of red and a job at the liberal arts college that shares the town’s name, but I’ve been perpetually homesick ever since. So I went “down home” last summer to ease my constant ache, to breathe that air once again, to soak in that particular quality of leaf-light that lives only in Southeastern Kentucky, and to rediscover one of its lasting musical legacies.

On that humid day, when the smell of wild grapes filled the air with their mouth-watering tang, an older couple, dressed as if they were just home from one of the dozen nearby churches, worked in their garden, a miracle of growth with greasy beans climbing high on carefully stretched white string, big tomatoes throbbing with redness, cucumber vines snaking out into the grass beyond the rectangle of rich soil. Two little girls took turns failing to master a sparkling purple hula-hoop in their front yard. A group of men stood around a new pickup truck as one bent over the engine, half swallowed, until he emerged, arms streaked black with grease. The men raised their chins in greeting when I passed by.

Smokey Creek is near the center of Central Appalachia, in one of the prettiest and hardest places in America: Knox County, Kentucky, thirty miles from the legendary Cumberland Gap where Daniel Boone cut his Wilderness Road. Less than two hundred years ago, this was the Wild West. There are many Appalachias, but this one is much like most of the rural places in the region: a wound, a poem, a contradiction—none of them easily defined, all of them complex, taut with history and culture that most people never bother to study or understand before passing judgment. Like most places in America, it’s a place of poverty and wealth, of education and ignorance. Nowadays it’s mostly conservative; eighty-two percent of Knox County voted for Donald Trump. Once, however, this area was a hotbed of labor movements and yellow-dog Democrats.

In summer, Smokey Creek is a cathedral of lush glowing green. Springtime is a riot of white (dogwoods, sarvis), fuchsia (redbuds), yellow (forsythia, jonquils), and new leaves, small as squirrel ears. Wintertime is a gray affair—gray rocks atop the hills exposed by the bare, gray trees, against low, gray skies. The fall colors rival those of New England. Always there is the sound of the creek. And grumbling four-wheelers climbing the mountains. Cars and trucks zoom by as if on a NASCAR track. The breezes preceding summer thundershowers create a symphony of leaves. Not everyone here is loud, but in this part of Appalachia things are done in big, boisterous ways: loving, fighting, grieving, celebrating, worshipping. Music, everywhere.

I pulled into the freshly blacktopped parking lot of the Pleasant View Baptist Church, outfitted in faded brick and topped with a squat white steeple rising above the mouth of a holler. Parked here, I could watch Smokey Creek for a time. Across the road an old man finger-picked “The Great Speckled Bird” on his beat-up guitar as he sat on a folding chair out in front of his trailer, tucked in the shade of an enormous and fully blooming purple crepe myrtle. A freshly washed Mustang went by, thumping the heavy bass of a rap song. A young woman wearing earbuds and a Lady Gaga shirt—LITTLE MONSTER, screamed the jagged script from the black cotton—walked with determination across a wide pasture, bobbing her head to the silent beat as a feisty spotted terrier hopped behind her like a rabbit. Later on I knew the church would be filled with singing and tambourining, the speaking of tongues. Down the road I pumped gas while a young boy whistled and picked up cigarette butts from the pavement. Inside the station the cashier’s gravelly voice produced not only her words—Hi there sugar, how are ye?—but also the smoke of her recently inhaled Virginia Slim. I could barely hear her over the blaring speakers issuing mainstream hits from Nashville.

For hard country like this, music has always been the balm. 

99 Feat House SmokeyCreek1
Photos of Smokey Creek, Kentucky, by Meg Wilson

In the early 1900s, a tremendous number of songs were written, performed, and preserved in Southeastern Kentucky. This great flourishing of music centered around the railroad town of Corbin, about twenty miles west of Smokey Creek, where a melding of Appalachian, African, British, Irish, and Eastern European influences not only cemented a lively and mournful brand of music but formed a thriving music scene where songs were created and passed on. Scholars say the music was largely shared in “the shops,” a local name for the cluster of locomotive service centers in Corbin that were used to maintain, inspect, and service locomotives, rail cars, and coal trains for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. There was also a more violent side to the town’s cultural mixing. In a 1919 riot, a mob of white men chased all two hundred African-American railroad workers out of town; many of the remaining people of color soon left. (Some white people reportedly allowed black men to take shelter from the riot in their homes.) The legacy of that night lives on: Corbin is still considered by some as “a sundown town,” where nonwhites are not welcome. I grew up in a tiny community near Corbin. Today, when I tell people where I’m from, they sometimes hesitate and say, Wait, now, isn’t that that real racist town? The answer, I believe, is more complex than a simple yes or no. Many of Corbin’s residents still fight against this notion and strive to make it a welcoming place. A few others don’t seem to mind the identity. Some even embrace it. But once upon a time, different kinds of people made music there together.

The 1920s were the beginning of rural music’s commercialization throughout Appalachia and, indeed, around the United States as record companies looked for as many avenues as possible to sell records—and they reasoned that capturing the voices of the rural working class might be one way to make more money. At the same time, musicologists were seeing radio as a possible threat to authentic voices, so they began to go into the region to preserve the music and “catch” songs.

Pockets as rich as Southeastern Kentucky were rare. In one 1937 trip to two counties abutting Knox County—Bell and Clay—Alan Lomax captured three early recordings of “The Rising Sun Blues,” which would decades later be recorded by Bob Dylan and become a worldwide hit for the Animals as “The House of the Rising Sun.” Victor Records’ talent scout, Ralph Peer, advertised heavily throughout the region and Corbin musicians took the bait. They traveled through Cumberland Gap and over Clinch Mountain to Bristol, the town that straddles the state line between Virginia and Tennessee. The 1927 Bristol Sessions were the birthplace of commercial country music. They were arguably the most important series of recordings ever made in American music, especially because of the Carter Family’s tremendous popularity and influence on country music that still continues.

In 1916, Arthur Leeroy Phipps was born in this unlikely nest of creativity. A.L. was twelve years old when his cousin, Ernest Phipps, recorded a thrilling set of gospel songs at the Bristol Sessions in the same building with artists such as B. F. Shelton, Alfred Karnes, Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Stoneman, and—most famously—the Carter Family. “There are no other commercially released recordings from the prewar era that capture the ecstatic fire of a white Pentecostal church service the way that those of Ernest Phipps and his singers did in 1927 and 1928,” said Nathan Salsburg, the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity. I’d reached out to Salsburg because few people understand old-time music better than he does—and because he doesn’t just study it. He feels it, he lives the music. “They’re thrilling, irresistible, no matter how thoroughly divorced from any semblance of Christian belief you might be.”

The Carter Family changed American music forever with their recordings of songs like “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and countless others. Almost single-handedly they proved that Americans wanted to hear working-class rural voices, thereby giving birth to the incredibly profitable country music industry. Perhaps their most important contribution, however, is that the Carter Family collected songs of the region from people throughout the hills and hollers. While some argued that magic was lost in the transfer of songs to the moneymaking schemes of radio, it is inarguable that the Carter Family, with the help of African-American guitarist Lesley Riddle, rescued many songs not only from obscurity but also from disappearance. The Carters and Riddle took songs that had until that point been sung only on porches and in fields, often distilling them down to the two or three minutes that would fit comfortably onto a record, and made them ready for radio.

A. L. Phipps was enthralled by the Carter Family’s music, and as a young man he often shared their songs at the singing parties he attended up and down the creeks and hollers of Knox County. At that time, singing parties were the main form of entertainment for young people who lived in the coal camps and on the farms of Eastern Kentucky. Usually planned around a busy season of physical labor—harvest or planting time—the parties were a reward after working through the week.

It was likely at one of those parties that A.L. first knew he loved Kathleen Helton, a girl almost eight years his junior who attended the same one-room school. They were both beautiful. He was lanky and tall, with luxuriant, wavy hair and piercing ice-blue eyes. Kathleen’s skin was luminous and accentuated by dark eyes and perfectly arched brows. But her actions shone, too. There was an elegance in her walk, in her way of standing, in the gentle way she held her guitar. People who knew Kathleen unanimously say that they didn’t know anyone who didn’t love her. She had a kindness about her that immediately put people at ease. Yet she was no pushover. She was forthright and hardworking, strong and keenly intelligent. A.L. could be brusque, but people liked that you always knew where you stood with him. He did not suffer fools and could be blunt enough to annul those he didn’t want in his company. Like Kathleen, he was known for being smart.

And they both could sing. Everyone in their valley knew that. Kathleen would entrance a crowd when she leaned over her guitar and unleashed her rich alto on tunes like “Home on the Range” or “Old Faithful.” One memorable time at a funeral on Stone Coal Branch, Kathleen invited A.L. to visit her at home—so long as he brought along his guitar. “We tuned up our instruments, and played some,” he reflected fifty years later in an oral history taken by Harry Rice, a longtime sound archivist at Berea College. “There were several others there, fiddles and guitars, people singing. But it seemed like somehow we were outstanding.” Even then, A.L. thought that he and Kathleen had a unique talent for playing the Carter Family’s tunes.

A.L. and Kathleen married on a lovely fall day in 1937. She was thirteen and he was twenty-one. While they were courting, Kathleen had told him that she wanted to learn to play an Autoharp the way Sara Carter did, so he promptly ordered one from the Montgomery Ward catalog and gave it to her as a wedding present. She took to it so quickly that she seemed to have been born with the knowledge. The young couple settled a few miles away from their families near the banks of Smokey Creek. Together, they started playing gospel concerts throughout the valley and were popular guests at Baptist churches in the area. Folks wanted them at their homes, on their porches, at their church homecomings, at Dinner on the Ground gatherings at graveyards on Decoration Day.

I imagine them at a baptism on the banks of the wide Cumberland River, its summer water as green as the skin of an acorn. They are not two people, but one entity, their voices rising together into the willow leaves, their arms moving in unison much like that old couple in the garden I saw on my drive back home. They are singing: 

There’s a little black train a-comin’ 
Set your business right 
And it may be here tonight

Kathleen’s eyes are closed, clutching the Autoharp against her chest, her right ear resting on the rich maple. A.L. is watching her, joining in only on the chorus, his fingers lithe and slender on the guitar strings. A woman in a white dress is dipped into the silky water and her mother collapses into tears, happy that salvation has come at last to her once-prodigal daughter. The congregants sing along, raise their hands in praise. The river flows on around the people, carrying the voices of the Phipps Family downstream.

At the height of the Great Depression, A.L. talked himself into a good job working for the L&N railroad, though music remained his greatest passion—not just the hearing of it, but the playing of it, the act of being a musician. A.L. was drafted and served in the waning days of World War II, although the war ended before he was sent overseas. He came rushing back to the green valley of Smokey Creek to devote even more of himself to music. A.L. and Kathleen had thirteen children, one of whom died in infancy, and several became sometimes-members of the band. The Phipps Family got their own radio show on the hugely popular WCTT in Corbin, and they were guests on most of the other ones in the area, always receiving a slew of fan mail and calls to the station requesting more.

To listen to the Phipps Family sing and play is to hear the mossy rocks and wide pastures along Smokey Creek. In their voices sits the sound of Paint Hill in the gloaming, of a mountain holler in the blue hour. In some ways, even though they are a generation younger than the Carter Family, they sound even more rural. “I hope someday we’ll all get thar,” they repeatedly sing in “Away Over in the Promised Land.” As they sing, we are bearing witness to a time that is long gone from us now, when the dialect and accent of the Appalachian people struggled to hold on against a world that heard only poverty in their cadences, a world inundated by the standard newscaster voices, vocal fry, and up-talk that now make the region sound like everywhere else.

For many people listening during the group’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, the Phippses offered a sense of nostalgia. The country was already changing with great speed thanks to the consolidation of schools, growing generation gaps, the social upheaval of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the Appalachian diaspora. The nation was desperate for those ancient tones once again, resulting in a resurgence in popularity of country blues and Dixieland jazz as well as the folk revival. Nostalgia had always been a way to go forward by comforting oneself with memories of the old days. Much like today, some folks simply wanted music that reminded them of their youth, while others were longing for a time when lines demarcating race and gender roles were clearly defined, when people “knew their place.” The Phippses delivered the sound of the past, as their goal was not one of innovation, but remembrance.

99 Feat House SmokeyCreek2

 

A.P. Carter, a founding member of the Carter Family, was living in relative obscurity when he became a fan of the Phippses in the 1950s. By then, some people had begun to describe the family as “Carter Clones.” The Phippses tuned their instruments well below standard pitch, just as the Carters had done, resulting in a rich bass quality and a striking similarity to the original Carter Family sound, especially since they employed the same harmony structures and instruments; A.L. even played the same brand of guitar as Maybelle Carter. But they were much more than a cover band. “To anyone who gave a second listen, it became clear that the Phipps Family had gone far beyond mere imitation for its own sake,” wrote musicologist Bill Vernon. “They have absorbed the elements of The Carter Family style so thoroughly into their own style of singing and playing that what has emerged is a thoroughly personal perpetuation of a fine old mountain style of singing and playing.”

A.P. seemed to have a deep respect for the way the Phippses were not only carrying forth the musical tradition but also putting their own marks on it. In the late 1950s, the Phipps Family started to attend and perform at the annual Carter Family Homecoming at Maces Spring, Virginia, near Bristol. And A.P., whose dark depressions are well documented, often visited the Phipps Family on Smokey Creek.

“A. P. Carter came and lived with us for two or three months at a time,” remembers Truleen Phipps Morgan, Kathleen and A.L.’s sixth child and the oldest still living today. A former middle school teacher, she still gives off the air of someone ready to dole out either love or discipline, depending on the situation at hand. When I met her, she would have been right at home at a tony beach resort, with her golden tan, her white capris, and her fresh pedicure of coral nail polish, but we were in her condo in Lexington; she was about to turn seventy but looked at least ten years younger. She sat in a large comfortable chair in the middle of her carefully decorated living room. “He was like a member of our family after Sara left him,” she said. (A.P. and Sara Carter divorced in 1936.) “He was very lonely and he loved to come to our house. And we’d go to their home in Virginia. Once we went and Johnny Cash was there, officiating the funeral of [A.P.’s daughter] Gladys. We’d go to Nashville and visit backstage at the Opry with Maybelle, June, and the girls. Helen Carter sang on an album with us.”

A.P. most likely influenced the way A.L. and Kathleen would take old songs, slightly rearrange them, add a few new words, and then slap their own copyright on them, always in A.L.’s name. This was not an attempt at dishonesty. On the contrary, at this time such rearrangement and copyrighting were acceptable and widely done. Almost all of the Carter Family’s most famous songs were the result of such restructuring, although it is hard to understand this element of folk music in today’s heavily policed, multi-billion-dollar music industry.

The Phippses composed songs of their own, too. “Their music told the stories of the tragedies that fell in the mountains,” said their grandson, Wayne Phipps, who is now a pastor in Georgia. Some of these songs of tragedy include “The Yellow Tomb,” about the 1958 school bus wreck that resulted in the deaths of twenty-six children and their bus driver in Floyd County, Kentucky; “The Red Jacket Mine Explosion,” about the deaths of forty-five miners in Southwest Virginia in 1938; and “Hurricane Creek Mine Explosion,” recounting a 1970 mining disaster in Leslie County, Kentucky, that left thirty-eight miners dead. (Tom T. Hall’s “Trip to Hyden” is also based on this event.) The songs acted as broadside ballads once had, carrying news of the happenings to people throughout the land.

The Phippses’ big break came in 1959. “The Little Poplar Log House,” written by Kathleen and recorded by the family, became widely heard throughout the region. In the 1960s, Kathleen recounted that the song was No. 1 “for four full months on the most powerful radio stations.” The 45 was backed with an original composition of A.L.’s, “Wish You’d Meet Me on the River,” which received plenty of airplay as well. The songs were big enough radio hits to attract the attention of the Nashville-based Starday Records, which signed the family. They would go on to record for Vanguard, The World of Folk Music, the American Record Company, and Folkways. But most of their music was controlled by A.L. himself, who set up his own enterprise, first called Pine Mountain Records and later Mountain Eagle Record Company, where he also released albums by other artists, including the Carter Family.

A.L. became so well known throughout the region for his business savvy that people began to seek him out at his home to help them with their music careers. Truleen remembers a visit from a young Dolly Parton, who was raised a couple hours south, just over the Tennessee border. She was brought there by a man who was trying to help her break into the business. “She didn’t even have a coat,” Truleen recalled. “My mother was looking all over the house for one of my old coats to give her.”

The mountains were on fire with fall color when Ralph Rinzler, director of the Newport Folk Festival, drove the winding roads of Knox County to pay a personal visit to the Phippses on Smokey Creek in 1963. Rinzler was determined to have the family from Southeastern Kentucky make the thousand-mile trek to Rhode Island to appear the following July at his young but influential music festival and sing alongside acts such as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Perhaps Kathleen was sweeping the porch when Rinzler’s car came down the dirt road. Maybe A.L. was in the back room, packing LPs to ship to record stores. I imagine Kathleen leaning on her broom there at the top of the steps, putting a hand up to her brow to block the midday autumn sun so she could see the tall stranger unfold himself from the car. “Hidy there,” she might have said. Rinzler might have put his hand out when he was halfway up the steps, already introducing himself in his Yankee accent. Kathleen would have taken his hand with hesitation since men and women only shook hands in church. Yet I picture her welcoming him inside so he could meet A.L., have coffee by the grate where a small fire crackled, and try to convince the Phippses to be a part of the festival. The family would have been tentative. There was the farm to see to, after all, and Truleen would have to miss a couple days of school. They had grown used to going to Nashville on occasion to record, but even that much-shorter trip involved weeks of planning. But eventually, they agreed.

“I had never seen so many people in my life. They were just as far as you could see, and they loved us,” Truleen recalled of the festival, her face lighting up with the memories. By then she was showing up on nearly all of the family’s recordings and her clear, careful voice had become an integral part of the act. “We weren’t used to people really appreciating our music in that way. It was quite an experience for a sixteen-year-old girl from Smokey, Kentucky.”

Besides the crowds, there were the stars. Truleen was awed by the folks they were sharing the stage with, including Cash and Baez. Backstage, Elizabeth Cotten taught Truleen how to play “Freight Train,” her most enduring song, on the guitar. Occasionally, Truleen said, she still gets out her memorabilia—programs, articles, photographs—from the Newport Folk Festival to properly remember the summer of 1964. “It was something else.”

On the way home from Newport, the Phipps Family recorded an album for Folkways that would be their crowning achievement as a group. Faith, Love, and Tragedy was released in 1965 and perfectly captures their clear harmonies, songwriting ability, musicianship, and knack for covering moving songs. They included standards like “The Unclouded Day,” “I Never Will Marry,” “My Home Among the Hills,” and “The Great Titanic,” as well as some less likely candidates such as “Merry Golden Tree,” a variant of Child Ballad No. 286; “Charles Guiteau,” a song that had been handed down through the Phipps family for generations about the man who assassinated President James Garfield; and “Forsaken Lover,” set to the tune of “Wildwood Flower,” with words by Kathleen.

99 Feat House PhippsAlbum
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

The Phippses were among the last mountaineers to be singing and recording true mountain sounds that were more influenced by the valleys and hollers of Appalachia than the increasingly commercialized sound of country radio. This shows that, as Salsburg told me, “Contrary to what a number of folklorists of the era wrung their hands over, access to phonograph records and the radio could expand and diversify local performance styles and repertoires instead of compromising or crushing them.” The Phipps Family came to be known at the exact same time that many within musicology circles began to better implement the industry’s ability as an outlet for documentary. The Phipps Family recorded songs that might have been lost otherwise. Yet while music scholars and crowds in the North seemed to recognize their allure, the country music scene in Nashville was not paying much attention to mountain music. “They wanted honky-tonk stuff back then,” Truleen said. A.L. and Kathleen were eager for their music to be heard, but they really had no interest in becoming stars or being swallowed by the music industry. (“They liked being home,” Truleen added.)

By the 1970s, they wanted to spend the majority of their time singing in church and in their own valley. They had the farm, and A.L. had small interests in coal and timber. Perhaps their greatest legacy occurred after the Newport Folk Festival, when they had settled back into domestic life on Smokey Creek. They became largely responsible for the popularity of one of the region’s most beloved and best-known songs, “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem.” A.L. was still using his self-taught business sense to sell record albums. He was also working with radio stations and pitching the Phippses’ songs—both originals and new arrangements—to publishing houses in Nashville. A.L. thought the Christmas song might have particular potential, so he pushed it with special vigor and managers took the tune to their artists.

In 1966, A.L.’s copyrighted arrangement of “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” appeared on their album Christmas with the Phipps Family, although by that time they had been singing it together for yearsA note on the back declares, “No group has ever recorded these songs in the true old fashioned way.” Over the next two decades, their version of the song would be recorded by Emmylou Harris, the Oak Ridge Boys, Patty Loveless, Rhonda Vincent, Bill and Gloria Gaither, Ralph Stanley, and dozens of others.

The song particularly resonated with country stars from the region such as Naomi Judd, who recorded it with her daughter Wynonna for their platinum 1987 album Christmas Time with the Judds. Naomi told me that when she lived on the mountaintop near Berea, Kentucky—without a TV or telephone—a family who lived nearby taught Wynonna to play a few chords on guitar. “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” was the second song she learned. “It became our song that Christmas up on the mountain and we have loved it ever since,” Naomi said. “We still sing it at family Christmas gatherings at our farm. The song had a powerful influence on how Wynonna’s voice developed and obviously on all our lives.” The Judds’ interpretation of the song became one of their most popular holiday tracks.

Although “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” has the feel of an old English ballad that has been handed down over generations, it was written by a dairy farmer named R. Fisher Boyce, who composed it in a Middle Tennessee milking barn, claiming he had been given the words “by the Lord.” The Vaughan Company of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, the premier seller of Southern gospel songbooks during the period, published the song in 1940, about twenty-six years before the Phipps Family recorded it. But Boyce never copyrighted the song in his name and reportedly never received any royalties from the company. People in Eastern Kentucky started singing it. A.L. and Kathleen heard it and put their own spin on it.

“It was an old song back many years ago and had never been published,” A.L. said on a recording recently discovered by his grandson Wayne. “So, when I did a Christmas album I picked it up and re-wrote it . . . what you call ‘arranged copyright.’ Never thought it would amount to anything much but you had to do everything legal. Boy, I tell you what, everything in the world picked it up: Columbia, RCA, Capitol, Warner Brothers. It’s done quite well.”

When I was growing up, we sang “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” at Lily Holiness Church, which I attended as a child, always managing to incorporate it into the annual Christmas play. (The entire cast wore their bathrobes to emulate the people of Nativity days.) We sang it in the living room of my Aunt Sis’s small trailer, where the whole family crowded in every Christmas Eve, arms around necks, eyes closed, heads thrown back. We sang it on the night the neighborhood kids bundled up in sweaters and scarves to go caroling, along with more universal songs like “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World.” There is something inexplicable in its lyrics, its delivery, and its music that speaks to the mountain experience like no other holiday song. The structure is straightforward and deeply effective in that simplicity. The lyrics’ imagery of pilgrims traveling “over the mountains till the break of dawn” conjured for us the dark December hills of Eastern Kentucky. The plaintive call to “give us a lamp to light the way” made us visualize the impenetrable winter nights. It is a song that begs for the pluck of banjos and the sawing of fiddles and a rousing chorus of many voices. That easily sung chorus spoke to us the loudest, bringing out some natural instinct to make our voices tangle up together. Not everyone I knew could sing well, but they all knew the words to that chorus, and they were compelled to sing. Loneliness and longing are both captured in the song’s melody, two conditions that country people know intimately. With “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” we had a song of darkness and light, sadness and hope, and we sang it with all our might. In those moments of rising voices there was community, family, togetherness. We were a people to whom not much belonged, but “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” felt like ours. We would never have known it if not for the Phipps Family.

In 1991, shortly after Kathleen had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, A.L. carried a tape recorder into her room and asked his wife of fifty-three years to sing with him. She struggled through a couple of gospel tunes that A.L. had suggested. But when they launched into a song from their early years together, her spirit—and voice—strengthened. The song was “We Didn’t Come Here to Stay Always,” which was often sung at the funerals in their valley when they were young. Perhaps A.L. remembered that funeral on Stone Coal Branch in 1937 when Kathleen first invited him to come over to her house. Perhaps he pictured her as a teenager, leaning toward him with a little smile as she whispered, “And bring ye guitar.” A year after that last recording session, Kathleen passed away.

“He couldn’t perform without her,” Truleen said. “We tried to sing together after she died. But his voice—he couldn’t do it.”

Today, the family remembers Kathleen as the more gifted songcatcher and arranger. (Truleen believes her mother did much of the arranging on “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem.”) Yet most often the group was credited on album sleeves, marquees, and programs as “The A. L. Phipps Family” instead of simply as “The Phipps Family.” All of the copyrights were in his name.

“My wife was . . . a real good songwriter. I’d say she’s much better than myself,” A.L. told Harry Rice during an interview less than a year after Kathleen’s death. “She could write them songs, no question about that. And she knowed how to put them together to have a good sense to them, the meaning.”

Three years after Kathleen died, when he was seventy-nine years old, A.L. was murdered by one of his tenants, a young man named John Mills, who beat him and stabbed him some two dozen times with a pocketknife. Less than a year later, a jury sentenced Mills to death. The case is still on appeal, more than twenty years later.

A.L. and Kathleen Phipps are buried side by side in the Phipps Cemetery, near the mouth of Emanuel Holler, not far from those bobby-pin curves of the road going over the mountain from Smokey Creek. His stone bears the etching of a guitar and hers an Autoharp. Both are embossed with gold records, music staffs, and Bible verses. Their graveyard is full of mountain music: birdsong, leafsong, cricketsong.

99 Feat House SmokeyCreek3

 

On the small porch of a small house in the small community of Gray, just over Paint Hill from Smokey Creek, a man in his early seventies played a beat-up off-brand guitar, his nimble fingers moving up and down the fretboard. He was Bob Carter, a distant relative of A. P. Carter. His right hand was busy keeping rhythm on Kathleen’s “The Little Poplar Log House.” I had gone to meet him because I knew that he remembered A. L. Phipps and the old times.

“They had a hit with that one,” he said.

When Bob was growing up, everyone knew about A.L. and Kathleen Phipps and their children. Bob worked for a while in the coal mines with some of their sons and often heard the family sing at church homecomings. And A.L. was looked up to as someone who knew the music business.

The Carters have a propensity for telling stories. Bob told one about his encounter with a bear that had climbed up from the creek and stood sentry on the path that was Bob’s only way home from work; he was too tired to turn around so he just slid right on by it.

“We walked everywhere back then,” said his wife, Louise, who possesses a rare elegance, apparent even when she is doing nothing more than sitting on their porch swing, her toes occasionally giving the floor a gentle nudge to keep her swaying. “We walked over the mountain without thinking a thing about it.”

Bob told one about his siblings pouring powdered milk into the spring so that there was milk to be had for days. He reminisced about a time when this area was booming, when the roads were packed with men coming home from working in the mines owned by the Jellico Mining Company. Louise interjected her own stories of growing up in nearby Harlan County, of music parties where she and her friends would sing and court, when she fashioned her singing after Loretta Lynn’s. She told of an era when everyday living was much harder than it is nowadays. Listening to Bob and Louise, I was gutted in remembering my own grandparents. They once sat on a porch like this and told tales, sang songs, took me back in time. They once carried the old knowledge with them. But they’re gone now, and like all people who have lost someone close to them, I still have momentary pangs of being undone in sorrow. Bob and Louise are like that: they could be the grandparents of most contemporary Appalachians. There is a wonderful vitality about both of them yet the old ways live in them, too. a porch like this and told tales, sang songs, took me back in time. They once carried the old knowledge with them. But they’re gone now, and like all people who have lost someone close to them, I still have momentary pangs of being undone in sorrow. Bob and Louise are like that: they could be the grandparents of most contemporary Appalachians. There is a wonderful vitality about both of them yet the old ways live in them, too.

In the middle of a story about how her mother used to always sing around the house while she was doing housework, Louise let loose a verse from “Making Believe,” which was first a hit for Kitty Wells but has since been covered by everyone from Merle Haggard to Ray Charles to Bob Dylan. Louise’s voice was clear, exact, as natural as birdsong. The sound carried out onto the unseasonably cool air of a summer’s evening, shivering through the low-hanging leaves of the sandbar willows lining the banks of the East Branch of Lynn Camp Creek, which flowed nearby. This branch meanders through hills and hollers until it eventually slides through Corbin, the old railroad town where the L&N railroad shops shut down two years ago, putting two hundred twenty-five people out of work. This part of Kentucky has always been a place of booms and busts. But lately it’s gotten worse. Today, the poverty rate in Knox County is almost thirty-three percent, and the number of people who have a high school degree is sixty-three percent, about twenty-five percent lower than the national average.hundred twenty-five people out of work. This part of Kentucky has always been a place of booms and busts. But lately it’s gotten worse. Today, the poverty rate in Knox County is almost thirty-three percent, and the number of people who have a high school degree is sixty-three percent, about twenty-five percent lower than the national average.

Great music is born of hard places. So the music still lives on porches and in living room gatherings on Saturday nights. It survives in places like the Carcassonne Community Center a couple counties away, where the oldest continuous square dance in Kentucky has been happening since 1924. The music lives on at the Renfro Valley Barn Dance just up the interstate, where musical gatherings have been held for nearly eighty years. It happens every Wednesday night at the Masonic Lodge just down the road from Bob and Louise Carter’s house. Sometimes Bob goes down and picks with “the old fellers,” as he called them. The music thrums in the many homes of wealth and poverty and in-between throughout the region. In the hundreds of fundamentalist churches that pock the valleys and mountainsides like tombstones. The creeks and branches roll on.

There are many rivers in Kentucky. In fact, the Commonwealth possesses more navigable waterways than anywhere else in the contiguous United States. Corbin sits on the confluence of the Lynn Camp and the Laurel. Smokey is nestled at the foot of Paint Hill in the crosshairs of Smokey Creek, the Cumberland River, and Big Richland Creek, made famous in “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” written by Darrell Scott, also a native of Knox County. The Cumberland River begins in the mountains of Harlan County. It swoops down into Tennessee, where it was responsible for the rise of Nashville, then meanders back up to nurture the coalfields and marshlands of Western Kentucky. There are many rivers in Kentucky. In fact, the Commonwealth possesses more navi-gable waterways than anywhere else in the contiguous United States. Corbin sits on the confluence of the Lynn Camp and the Laurel. Smokey is nestled at the foot of Paint Hill in the crosshairs of Smokey Creek, the Cumberland River, and Big Richland Creek, made famous in “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” written by Darrell Scott, also a native of Knox County. The Cumberland River begins in the mountains of Harlan County. It swoops down into Tennessee, where it was responsible for the rise of Nashville, then meanders back up to nurture the coalfields and marshlands of Western Kentucky.

I have spent my life being comforted by mu-sic and water, by creeks and lakes and rivers, by being a Kentuckian, even when it was hard to be, even when I didn’t quite understand what that meant. Sometimes, especially around elec-tion time, I don’t understand my own place in the world. But when I hear the music of my people, I have a home again. I know what it’s like to be trusted instantly by a man like Bob Carter because I know the words to a song he’s singing on his front porch.


“Forsaken Lover” by the Phipps Family is included on the Kentucky Music Issue CD.


 





Silas House

Silas House is the nationally best-selling author of five novels. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and he currently serves as the NEH Chair at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Writing program. His latest novel, Southernmost, will be published in June 2018.