Eclectic Company: Volume Five Bring Me Home

Some days I’m nostalgic for when I used to be a homebody, when I fancied myself Mother Earth, with all my chosen family around, savoring one pot suppers with hand-kneaded bread, jugs of cheap wine, and homemade fun. For a long time now, much like the intrepid, widely admired (by the late Studs Terkel, and the late Hunter S. Thompson, and the UK band The Clash) Rosalie Sorrels sings about herself in “Traveling Lady”, I’ve been on the road, receiving my friends in coffee bars and chain restaurants late at night.

Last weekend, during the North Louisiana Main to Main celebration stretching for fifty miles of small town flea markets, craft fairs, antiques shows, art shows, mixed cultural events, and improbable festival foods (even a latte truck!), I was in the town of Minden, up near the Arkansas border, for one of the last weekends of my Louisiana Women tours. Friday morning at Webster Junior High and Friday night at Christophers event space were punctuated by sausage in barbecue sauce poboy, a sausage dog rolled in a pancake and dipped in syrup, jambalaya, some hard-to-describe chicken in a spicy cream sauce over rice with bread, and a First Methodist Church supper of chicken ala king, a half-dozen appetizers, side dishes and desserts, including a mixed side/dessert combo – jello mold featuring pineapple and grated carrot inside. One of my artist friends from Minden, Larry Milford, was showing his frame shop salvage art there, and the Church ladies were selling their cookbook, so I had to sample everything. Notably, throughout all this festivitying, there was no music.

When I say no music, I mean, no focus on music. A number of vendors and crafts people had radios going, Larry, who is the genius behind Minden’s lively and beautiful Dorcheat Museum, having designed and built every exhibit in the place, pressed a CD and lead sheet of a song he’d written about voodoo queen Marie Laveau on me (“just play it in the car on the way home,” but unfortunately, the home-formatted disc wouldn’t play in rental car’s stereo), and of course, every time I got in the car, I immediately turned up Red River Radio’s classical music format, and drifted from place to place to the accompaniment of Ravel, Debussy, and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” At least, that’s what I think they were playing. My memory of that weekend is fused with memories of a dozen other weekends on the road (and several weekdays too), and therefore other public radio stations, most notably WWNO (New Orleans), KRVS (Lafayette/Lake Charles) and WRKF (Baton Rouge), all of which offer some form of classical music during their day.

But in this version of last weekend, I’m daydreaming along at the speed limit on 171, driving south to Lake Charles, and trying to decide whether to eat sushi in Natchitoches on the riverfront at Hana, or to press on to my temporary home, when I notice the clock on my dashboard, and realize I’m within striking distance of the Lone Pine RV park in Ragley, and a 6:00 pm start time for a bluegrass visitation by Volume Five, a genial group from all over the south, organized by fiddle contest promoter Ron Yule.

Now I have been promising myself to make it to Ragley for one of Yule’s regular monthly bluegrass and old timey jam sessions for years; here at least was a chance to see the venue, and to focus on music as a driving break. Halleluyah. Only 4.4 miles east of the intersection of 171 and 190, the RV park’s lights loomed up on my left, and the nondescript community room was surrounded by trucks and cars. And as I am here to testify, Halleluyah it was. I safety-pinned on my raffle ticket so the band could see I’d paid (now this is OOOLLLLDDDD school), and ambled in about a half hour late, so the music was in full swing when I got to my folding chair. Judge Fred Godwin and his wife and two of my pals were the only folks I knew in the place, but I recognized several others from Lake Charles, and all were sitting in rapt attention as bandleader, fiddler and vocalist Glen Harrell led a merry quintet of band members and substitute musicians through more than two albums worth of songs, some of which they’d written and recorded, and some of which were old gospel, old bluegrass, old timey, and just plain old songs. (www.volumefivebg.com). Too bad you can’t hear their stand-in vocalist/guitar player, who sang high lonesome like he was Bill Monroe himself, but he’s not on their Mountain Fever Records release Down In A Cell, and I didn’t catch more than his first name – Dennis – before I had to hightail it out of there, having started to feel poorly from all my road work.

I’d picked up the band’s record, so as I drove home I listened to them all over again. There was a bad wreck at Perkins Ferry Road that flashed red lights visible miles away, and as I slowed down to drive safely past the firetrucks and burned cars and gawkers lining the intersection and spilling out from the shoulder onto one-and-a-half lanes of Highway 171, I realized that Volume Five were singing “Home,” the old Joe Diffie song in which home is “a swimming hole and a fishing pole” and other rural sights and memories. You know how sometimes your thoughts are movies unfurling through free association from one ribbon of images to others, to end up miles from their starting point? Well all that I’d been feeling – pleasantly and sometimes wearily displaced, warmed by meaningful work performed well, and by fleeting cheering conversations with old and new friends, and enveloped in the good fellowship of a heartfelt song, sung mightily and with grace, sharing the experience with strangers around me, and sorrowful that some unknown others weren’t going to be doing any of these again – I stopped feeling melancholy. The road is my home I realized, at least for these last and next few months, and its a fine place for the traveling lady I’ve become.