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A Slice of Time: Between worlds with the everybodyfields By Chuck Hicks I should have seen this coming. Back in March of 2005 a friend introduces me to the everybodyfields and their first album, Half-way there: electricity and the South. At long last, I exclaim, somebody is making modern Appalachian music. Not standards from the public domain, not murder ballads and train wrecks. Rather, songs from a contemporary mountain milieu that introduce themselves with simple profundity: “a time machine can only bring things back…” But then comes the summer and an opportunity to catch the trio in a live gig. My wife and I crouch on the edge of our folding chairs as Jill Andrews leans into the microphone, her eyes tightly shut and her face drawn: |
| I think God is a moonshiner His skin is gold from the whiskey in his blood I think in heaven there is a barroom A place where the men go to forget about their wives… |
| Then David Richey’s resophonic guitar bawls like a bluetick hound beaten with a hickory limb, and I realize the magic is really there; this is a taste of what the Bible calls “things new and old.” With their latest release, Plague of Dreams (Captain Mexico, 2005), these hipsters from the hills of upper East Tennessee continue their precarious trek between worlds resurrecting, perhaps unwittingly, a narrow slice of country music between the atomic bomb and Korea that once seemed lost forever. |
| “Late at night I swear that I hear angels…” |
| Jill Andrews was born in Normal, IL, the middle of Middle America, in 1980. Her dad, a professor at Illinois State University, took a transfer to East Tennessee State in Johnson City when she was seven, so her formative years were spent in a home that blended intellectual interests with an appreciation for traditional music. Jill enrolled at ETSU and majored in psychology, with a particular fascination in the criminal mind. “I'm a people watcher,” she says, “and like trying to figure them out. Maybe a little bit of what I write is autobiographical, but mostly I draw on people I’ve known or observed.” This explains, perhaps, the striking world-weariness that comes across from a band whose members are in their twenties. Not anger, mind you, but the kind of resignation that lines the face of an aged laborer. “Sam [Quinn] and I love the slower, melancholy songs…those are what we listen to.” She also cites Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch and Patty Griffin as favorites. |
| Andrews and Quinn have been singing and swapping guitar and bass with each other for several years. Neither have formal musical training; yet their harmonies are skin tight. On stage they are a study of complimentary opposites: she fair and blond with a radiant face, he tall and dark with neo-Elvis pork chops turning into an Abe Lincoln beard. Vocally they are Gwyn ap Nudd and Creiddylad arising from the underworld. When they sing about loss of place and connectivity, Andrews’ plaintive voice is melded over Quinn’s like the Morrigan on the shoulder of a dying Cuchulain. It harkens back to the late 1940’s, when Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks were running a similar circuit with an eerily similar configuration (guitar, Dobro, fiddle and bass). O’Day and husband Lynn Davis sang one heartbreaker after another to the delight of fans on WNOX’s Midday Merry Go ‘Round. Molly was authentic – singing what she felt and experienced as a girl in Depression-era southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. With horror she watched a bus rumble down Gay |  |
Street in downtown Knoxville one brisk Saturday morning, her image plastered on the side showing her skirt hiked above the knee. Her sensibilities shocked, Molly took an early retirement and retreated to Huntington, WV. Country music lost the woman who most inspired Loretta Lynn and lost a band that had struck a careful balance between the extremes of bluegrass and honky tonk. Most critics place the everybodyfields in the ambiguous swath called Americana. “I’d rather let the listener define our music,” says Jill. “We’ve been to a couple of bluegrass events where a few people didn’t quite understand what we were doing.” The everybodyfields have enjoyed an excellent reception in the northeast, and are especially fond of playing the Stone Church in Newmarket, NH. “There seems to be a deeper appreciation and respect for this music up there. And the pay is better, too,” she laughs. In the 1950’s Nashville pasteurized country music and beamed its slick, over-polished sounds into homes all over the countryside. Overnight it wasn’t cool to be like Hank Williams anymore. By the 1990’s Music City’s version of “country” was largely indistinguishable from mainstream pop, and traditional bluegrass had become the lunatic fringe for a few sanctified purists. |
| “When I was a boy back in Tennessee…” |
Sam Quinn comes from a place called Delano (“as in Franklin Delano…”), TN, roughly halfway between Chattanooga and Murphy, NC, where serial bomber Eric Rudolph successfully eluded the FBI for over five years. It’s a stone’s throw from the ruins of ancient Cherokee “Overhill” towns, several of which were inundated by man-made reservoirs. Sam grew up in a house trailer surrounded by a hay pasture which would eventually inspire the name “everybodyfields” – a place where all fictional characters came to life. He takes umbrage to the notion that shortening the band’s name to “the fields” for the sake of economy - or affection. After high school Sam traveled up the Great Valley to Johnson City to play in a band and enroll at ETSU. Along the way he worked at construction and wrist-watch repair, and did a stint as a receptionist at a mental health clinic. “I had people coming in trying to tell to me how crazy they were,” explains Sam. But unlike Jill the astute observer, Sam writes from a more personal, internal perspective. “We mess with each other’s songs,” adds Jill, “but the ones Sam sings are mostly his, and vice versa.” It is Sam’s voice, in addition to the harmonies and the skillful resophonic accompaniment that immediately captures the first-time listener. Noted for its “reedy-ness,” Sam’s vocal work has been compared by a few to Bob Dylan’s, but that misses the mark. His other-worldly delivery is more comparable to Roscoe Holcomb; the man who Dylan said possessed an “untamed sense of control” and whose voice inspired folklorist John Cohen to coin the phrase “high lonesome sound.” Like Quinn, Holcomb grew up in a rapidly changing Appalachia where summer gardens and winter game gave way to mines and factories spurred by the military-industrial complex. Being from East Tennessee placed Quinn smack-dab in the middle of one of the great economic paradoxes of the United States. Beyond the rolling fields of Holsteins, corn and bull thistles loomed the smokestacks and electric grids of ALCOA, the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratories, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The album Halfway There included Sam’s “T.V.A.,” the song that won the 2005 Chris Austin Songwriting contest at Merlefest. A post-diluvium tale of a family losing its land to construction of a hydroelectric dam, the lyrics capture one of the many nuances of southern Appalachian culture – silent internalization: |
We never talked about the week daddy had nothing to say Songs like this reflect an innate quality of the Appalachian South - the ability to express the inexpressible in a culture that, outside of music and worship, tends to hold its emotions in check. |
| “Magnetic opulence…” |
| David Richey is the everybodyfields’ southpaw resophonic guitarist who adds harmonies and occasionally sings a solo during live gigs. He came to Johnson City and ETSU from Oklahoma. Although Quinn and Andrews had known each other longer, Richey and Andrews were singing and plying in a band together before Quinn introduced songs that |
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provided an impetus for a new group. Of the three regular members Richey is clearly the studied musician. Jill comments on his facilities: “David can listen to Sam and me sing and tell us about the eighths and fifths. He hears things in music so well. He’ll listen to us play through a song once, and then knows the right kind of accompaniment it needs…where to embellish and when not to.” She adds, “David is a tasty player.” That’s an understatement. With every stroke of his slide, Richey paints himself into the pantheon of great Dobro players. He may not have the flash of Brother Oswald or the technical precision of Jerry Douglas, but those differences are only measurable in nanometers. Richey brings feeling and soul to his instrument. The Dobro lends itself to overplaying and often becomes an annoying, distracting element in many songs. Not so with Richey; he maintains a “brown” sound (versus metallic, too often the case with some players) and without ostentation chooses the appropriate licks to compliment the mood and lyrics of each piece. A terrific example from the first album is “Nubbins.” An intro and interlude feature Andrews and Quinn singing a monotonic, staccato “na-na-na…” through the melody, Richey swinging above and below them with wailing slides that allude to the inner emotions of the story. It’s a clever, subtle |
| piece of composition: literally, “nubbins” refers underdeveloped ears of corn left in a field where a girl and boy follow - and watch - one another. But “nubbins” also implies stunted growth or imperfection – a relationship that never fully materializes. It is upon these ideas that Richey applies a coat of inexpressible longing. Whereas Jill and Sam are the resourceful mom and pop team instinctively brewing up recipes, David is the gourmet who garnishes their work. His instrument is the intrinsic "third voice" of the everybodyfields. |
| “Down the road, and take a right down State of Franklin…” |
In 1784 North Carolina ceded some of it mountain counties to settlers led by John Sevier (b. Jean Xavier), the famed Indian fighter. During the Revolutionary War, “Nolichucky Jack,” as he was called, assembled a group of Wataugan mountaineers who were disgruntled by threats from the British crown. They mustered in a village called Elizabethton which today is one of quaintest and most history-conscience communities in upper East Tennessee. They marched over the mountains into the Carolina Piedmont and destroyed a Loyalists regiment at the battle of Kings Mountain. Later, these same fighters would meet at the settlement of Jonesborough to form the independent state of Franklin - in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin didn’t last but four years, but it left an indelible spirit of fierce independence upon the people – and artists – of East Tennessee. Today, Jonesborough has a charming downtown filled with antique shops and soda fountains; the courthouse lawn sports headstocks, a reminder of the good old days when times were bad. Between the hamlets of Jonesborough and Elizabethton sits Johnson City, a relatively large town for rural Appalachia. Johnson City is part of the “Tri-Cities” which includes Bristol, the birthplace of country music where Ralph Peer first recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in the 1930’s. On one side of the highway is East Tennessee State University, which dumped its Division I-AA football program but is one of the few (if not only) places in the country where one can study old-time and bluegrass music at the collegiate level (banjoist Abe Spear of the popular traditionalist group King Wilkie studied here). On the opposite side of town is a strip of “glass and brass” restaurants, bars, and shopping centers. Sandwiched in between is gray, downtown Johnson City, whose storefronts are dark and quiet on weekend afternoons. Unlike nearby Asheville, NC, the burgeoning beatnik capital of the southern mountains, Johnson’s City’s eclectic crowd stay off the streets until past dark, when some of them descend on Down Home, a music room that has served as the everybodyfields’ occasional home base. Also in town is EKS studio, where the band recorded both of its studio albums. Like the first album, Plague of Dreams gets an assist on fiddle, this time from Angela Oudean, on loan to the group from Anchorage-based Bearfoot Bluegrass. She has several solos, and her performance on "Out of Town" is particularly affecting. In addition to a more prominent role for the fiddle the new record features a rawer, more urgent atmosphere. “We weren’t trying to create a sonic masterpiece like Dark Side of the Moon,” says Sam, “but wanted rather to grab a slice of time.” Right out of the gate, despite the up-tempo tones of “Magazines,” there’s a theme of doubt expressed as “white knuckles on a baseball bat…round the bases and home I’m out.” Jill follows with “The Only King,” a requiem to Elvis Presley that pictures him as “eyes wide like no-doze and hair black as coal / he’s walking the streets of Memphis.” This glance back at a wandering Tennessee icon sets up “Leaving,” the first of a three-song cycle including “Arletta” and “Out of Town” that establishes the recurrent motifs of going and coming. Here all the aforementioned elements are in perfect sync, with Quinn and Andrews’ voices mingling on the choruses with devastating pathos. The shiftless, ambiguous desire for adventure, peace and permanence are major themes. Sam closes “Out of Town” with the most consoling lyric on the album: New town While Sam strings together these intuitive fragments, Jill tells vivid stories. “By Your Side” expresses that persistent longing among mountain folk for the pleasures of the ocean side; while in the country boogie “Baby Please” she speaks of scooting across the dance floor “with a buzz on.” Though having studied only a limited amount of song craft (“they told us never to use the word ‘soul’ in a song”), she paints an unrelenting Southern gothic portrait of a daughter’s entrapment between an irresponsible sibling, a depressed mother and a detached father: |
Daddy, daddy the dog chewed up my toys Daddy, daddy my momma is so tired |
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The most poignant track on Plague of Dreams is “Fade Jeans Blue,” an autumnal duet that ebbs and flows over the transience of life and love: Fade jeans blue Though these lyrics are more ethereal than the ones Molly O’Day sang back in the ‘40s, there is still that fundamental earthiness that connects these songs to a post-traumatic South that is still reeling from upheaval. The everybodyfields’ music reconstructs that slice of time between the terrors of modernity and the false “age of innocence,” where folks hold fast to memory as the world shifts deeper into fast-forward. Dislocation in time and place incites the best art, and somehow these young people have tapped into that with a grace beyond their years. “Our music will continue to evolve,” says Jill. “We’ve been in the country and now we’re going to town, so to speak. The music will definitely change with us.” As if these songs haven’t already broken our hearts… |