Homeplace Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Old Days

  The Blue Ridge Country King

  A Closer Walk with Thee

  Resistance

  New Ways

  A Museum and a Mountaintop

  How to Build a City

  Photos

  Toxically Pure

  Homeplace

  They’ll Have to Carry Me Out

  Better Neighbors

  Blessed to Be Gray

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by John Lingan

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-93253-1

  Portions of this book originally appeared in the Morning News, The Baffler, and BuzzFeed.

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © Matthew Lincoln Yake

  Author photograph © Pat Jarrett

  eISBN 978-0-544-93083-4

  v1.0618

  For Justyna

  Music seeks to change life;

  life goes on;

  the music is left behind;

  that is what is left to talk about.

  —Greil Marcus

  Preface

  In August 1716, lieutenant governor Alexander Spotswood led sixty-three men and seventy-four horses on an exploratory mission across the Rappahannock River valley and into Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. So far as any of them could tell, they were walking into unpassable darkness: the dense ocean of trees was daily shrouded in mist and clouds. The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, as Spotswood’s band of German, Scots-Irish, and Native American muscle was later known, hacked through the forest until finally they found the Swift Run Gap, a narrow pass in present-day Stanardsville. From the peak of the Blue Ridge, they had view of a North American Avalon, an endless horizon of wide skies and pastoral splendor that looked, more than anything, like the lush, mountainous English Lake District that was soon to inspire the Romantic poets. The unblemished Shenandoah Valley was a setting that might leave a man “Alive to all things and forgetting all,” as Wordsworth felt about the Lakeland. Spotswood had gone looking for a trade route and ended up in paradise.

  From that point on, according to one Indian testimony of the time, the white men “came like flocks of birds.” Some crossed the mountains and went north on the Valley’s Great Wagon Road, where they encountered Pennsylvania Dutch explorers who had come down through the Cumberland Valley. Within years, the Europeans built houses, barns, roads, a route back to the coastal colonies, and infrastructure for grain and livestock farming. In 1738, a little hamlet called Frederick Town was incorporated on a wide, flat expanse up toward the Potomac River, perfectly positioning it as a trading post. The new settlement attracted craftsmen and Quakers, gentry and rabble. By the time its name was changed to Winchester in 1752, the town was a hub—the de facto capitol of what was then still the Wild West.

  The border kept moving, of course, but Winchester maintained its odd duality of economic prominence and cultural seclusion. George Washington commanded troops there during the French and Indian War. In the nineteenth century, it was the biggest commercial market in the Shenandoah and the site of multiple pivotal Civil War battles. And starting between the world wars, it became best known as the home base of Harry Flood Byrd, the most influential southern senator for nearly four decades and the leading grower in the world-famous Valley apple industry. Through all this, for more than two centuries, the social order stayed ironclad. The same wealthy families owned everything—jobs, government, and media—and everyone else just hoped to be employed by them.

  By the time I first came to Winchester in early 2013, the apple acreage had been largely replaced by corporate land holdings and housing sprawl. The Washington and Civil War stories had been subsumed into local lore and historical tourism draws. In many ways, twenty-first-century Winchester was just an archetypal early-American town: a cozy historic district circumscribed by highways and big-box shopping, increasingly diverse but still politically conservative and a little dull. The kind of place where people knew their neighbors’ genealogy and filled prescriptions at a pharmacy whose perfume shelves were misted over with ancient dust. The sole local paper, the Winchester Star, remained independently owned by descendants of Harry Flood Byrd.

  I had come to learn about Patsy Cline, who was born in Winchester in 1932 and spent most of her life there, suffering the indignities of wealthy men and women who considered her common. I still don’t understand what people think they’ll find in an artist’s home—some experience beyond the art, I suppose, a glimpse of the wide, hidden world that great songs always seem like advertisements for—but when I learned that a legend had grown up less than two hours from my house in the D.C. suburbs, I followed the well-worn path. Thousands of aficionados have gone to Winchester ever since the singer died tragically in 1963, and when you arrive and start asking questions, the Patsy people all tell you: You have to go see Jim McCoy. He was an old man who had known Patsy in his youth, and for years he had owned and operated the Troubadour Bar & Lounge, the only twang-and-sawdust roadhouse left in the Virginias. If you want to understand how this place works, everyone said, you need to head up to Jim’s compound in the Blue Ridge of West Virginia and see what he’s made.

  How right they were. First and foremost, this book is about Jim McCoy, a humble Valley lifer who contributed to a momentous, underappreciated era in American music, and a perfect emblem for all the unheralded working people who made that music what it was. From a drafty mountaintop house without electricity, he managed to create a life and a legacy in entertainment, writing and recording dozens of his own songs and many more of other people’s. He made it to Nashville’s inner sanctum and eventually to the Opry stage. His story is not a rags-to-riches saga, but something more complex and bittersweet. In a time of extraordinary change and upheaval, as interstates sprang up and the orchards turned to housing tracts, he embodied an older tradition, and empowered many of his neighbors whose livelihoods had become threatened by all this so-called progress. Ultimately, as I saw up close, he suffered in the manner of those neighbors as well.

  Over the course of countless nights at the Troubadour and with the people who live near it, I came to see that the Winchester region, for all its sleepiness, was actually in the final throes of a full-scale transformation that began more than a half-century earlier. Starting in the 1950s, a new “business progressive” mindset replaced the previous southern focus on agriculture, and Virginia, the upland Shenandoah in particular, went all in. Shenandoah University, a small Methodist school originally located in Dayton, about an hour south, relocated to the east side of town in 1960. In 1965, a length of Interstate 81, which runs from Tennessee to Canada, opened on the city’s eastern border. The Apple Blossom Mall arrived in the mid-1980s and chain stores spread around it like a rash. Virginia’s sole inland port was built just 12 miles south of Winchester in 1989, so shipping traffic, of all things, now accounts for part of the region’s economic pull as well. The current Winchester-Frederick County Manufacturing Directory includes more than a hundred companies, most of which have come to the area since the late twentieth century.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, the Winchester region’s expansion rivaled th
at of any other region in the United States. Inside the Winchester limits alone, the population increased 7.4 percent from 1990 to 2000, and 11 percent from 2000 to 2010. U.S. manufacturing employment decreased throughout the same time, but Winchester-Frederick County’s spiked. The first industrial parks were built in the 1980s, and they expanded to cover a shudderingly vast swath of land above the city limits along the interstate. There is new money here, more than ever before, but the inequality is arguably no better than it was in Harry Flood Byrd’s time. The region still has manufacturing jobs, but that work is less stable and sufficient than it once was. There is heroin, delivered through all those nearby highways, and widespread health struggles, a result of rising health-care costs. There are immigrants, too, mostly from Mexico and points south, trying and often struggling to find that elusive better life. Turns out that this little town of 25,000 is in fact a brutal microcosm for the entire country, a place where the deepest history and most pressing contemporary concerns are in constant collision.

  And so secondly, this book is about the never-ending American fight between commerce and culture, fought, in this case, on a battlefield that is both universal and unique. No region in the United States is safe from corporatization or the loss of local identity, but not every region has experienced such a thorough, rapid dismantling of a centuries-old order, with all the excitement and pain that entails. And not everywhere has a figure like Jim McCoy to reflect and ennoble the struggle of a whole class of people as this transition occurs. When Jim opened the Troubadour in 1986, Winchester’s transition to tourist-trap respectability was already inexorable. Jim provided a sanctuary for those people who still remembered the era of cigarettes and cowboy hats, and for those of us who only romanticize it. It was always a place for people who prefer low lights and drunken karaoke to strip malls and antique shopping—anyone who still believed that you can have the best time of your life in a backwoods bar in rural America.

  That kind of good time is harder to find each year, but I found it, and saw its significance to a region that is in perpetual risk of losing its strange native character. There is no name for the meeting place of Virginia’s western hump and West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. Whatever you think it is, it’s the edge of that: the northernmost point in the South, the westernmost point in the East, not at all urban but nothing like Appalachia. Some of the oldest money in America lives here, and some of the country’s oldest historical ghosts, but it is also home to some of the freshest immigrants and the most dirt-poor red-state white folks. This spot doesn’t have a name, but it has an energy, and Jim McCoy is the truest expression of it.

  So this is his story, but it’s also his neighbors’ story and the story of his land. Because my years among all three taught me, more than anything, that none of those stories are possible without the others.

  Part One

  Old Days

  1

  The Blue Ridge Country King

  Sure, there’s a quick way to the Troubadour Bar & Lounge: starting from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, population 624, you simply turn onto Route 38/3, Johnson’s Mill Road, and head up into the Blue Ridge. Swing along pendulous mountain curves that ease past wide grass fields, up through dense tunnels of pin oak and pine. Take it slow at the one-lane wooden bridge and again at the hairpin turn by the vaunting power-line interchange. Past the cemetery, with its green-tinted graves so old that the names and dates are just half-disappeared scars. Then on through the final hypnotic stretch of forest, still on a roller-coaster incline that demands another inch down on the gas just as you might be compelled to slow up and address your lord.

  Again, that’s the quick way, only twenty or so minutes of alert mountain driving. But if you aren’t coming from Berkeley Springs—if you’re coming from Capon Bridge, Gerrardstown, Hedgesville, Paw Paw, or any of the dozens of other panhandle towns too small for maps—then it’s even longer. Then it’s all woods, up and down hills with no visible end, past spray-painted houses made of plywood and exposed Tyvek. Look out for smeared snakes and exploded deer, and prepare for shaky trips across metal bridges high above the Potomac’s minor branches. Down below, to the boys swimming in T-shirts and waterproof shoes, your car’s faraway rumble might as well be distant thunder.

  No matter if you take the back roads or the back-of-back roads, eventually the tree line splits and the road delivers you to Highland Ridge, a stretch of sloping, sunny prairie in Morgan County. When I first arrived, it was relatively populous, after more than a decade of steady development to make room for Baltimore and D.C. retirees. To the east, the state long ago shaved a wide and hideous strip down the mountainside to make way for the electrical towers. But to the west, the Blue Ridge peaks still rolled on for ages, unblemished. Above them stretched miles of epic Shenandoah Valley meteorological scenery, whole weather systems forming and dying above the mountains’ dark folds. In his mid-eighties, when his family would rest easier if he had a hospital or even a doctor nearby, Jim McCoy still lived on Highland Ridge. This was by choice, by ornery insistence. He still watched the sky like a farmer: constantly, with a mixture of awe and submission. He still grew tomatoes like prior generations of upland West Virginians who lived too remotely for grocery stores. Jim ran the Troubadour and managed its grounds, but this wasn’t only his place of business. Back before those power lines were even a dream in some developer’s mind, Jim McCoy was born here, and his intention was to end his life where it started. This, as he called it, was his homeplace.

  When I pulled into the parking lot and turned off my car, the daytime quiet was overwhelming. It was a Friday in early June, the opening weekend of the outdoor season. A cracking noise echoed softly in the distance—maybe a gunshot, maybe a splitting log. I could hear every minor breath of wind, every gravel pebble crunching under my feet. I heard soft voices as I pushed open the white picket gate, and saw Jim sitting at one of the white plastic picnic tables out back, smoking a Marlboro Red. His much younger brother and niece were sitting on either side of him, elbows on their knees. They were clearly frustrated by a sudden visitor. Jim was approaching eighty-four at the time, and looked a few hard years beyond that. His attenuated, faintly tattooed forearms stretched out from his faded collared work shirt. He flicked his cigarette and the ashes fell past his blue pants and gray Velcroed shoes, lost in the thick grass. He raised his head and I caught my first up-close glimpse of his strained face underneath a dark trucker’s hat. From his eyes alone I could tell that his body had betrayed him. He longed to move and couldn’t, at least not easily, not painlessly. So instead he smiled, and instantly came to life.

  “They want me to quit working,” Jim said, rising from his chair and gesturing to his visitors. Knowing they were beaten, brother and niece helped him up. They were only thinking of his health: Jim was due for gall bladder surgery within a fortnight. Standing wobbly, he straightened his hat brim, and scuttled over to greet me while his relatives traded exasperated glances.

  “We’ll get going,” his brother said, and shook my hand without introducing himself. Jim had entertained his share of curious hangers-on up here, and someone with his best interests at heart might think that another out-of-town Patsy completist would only rile the old man. The wooden gate slapped gently behind his relatives, and Jim put a hand around my upper arm as their car passed over the gravel onto Highland Ridge Road and down into the woods.

  We walked out from under the trees, past the picnic tables, playground, and covered bar. Jim stopped at the edge of the hill, taking in the wide sky.

  “How you like that?” he asked, pointing at the view. I was taken aback, and said so.

  “In the morning I come out here and have my coffee while the sun comes up. In the evening I have my Jim Beam and watch it go down.” He laughed hard: a deep, decayed growl. Later on, when I read some of the innumerable articles that have been written about the Troubadour in every small-town paper within a five-hour drive, I saw Jim had repeated this same line to every writer who’d ever
stood on the property.

  At the bottom of the hill, right at the tree line, sat Troubadour Studios, a musty double-wide where regional bands still came to record, as they had since he opened the facility almost thirty years earlier. (He operated various home studios before that, going back to the 1950s.) The trailer sat next to a covered bandstand that hosted weekend festivals between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. And right where we were standing, looming above us like a naval cannon, was Jim’s most photographed piece of property: a 10-foot-long six-shooter, the cylinder of which contained a smoker big enough for a whole hog. During outdoor season, hickory-scented smoke poured out of the gun barrel all weekend long and Troubadour Park filled with neighbors, old friends, and outsiders who wanted to see the last honky-tonk standing.

  Jim held on to me for balance as we shuffled down the hill. When we reached the trailer he led me into his windowless shrine. CDs and press photos lined the walls, images going back a half-century to the era when he led Joltin’ Jim and the Melody Playboys. Jim’s stage outfit was a custom-made red suit embroidered with white musical notes, topped with a white Stetson; the Playboys, his five-piece band, backed him in matching black Stetsons and bow-tie suits. In the old photos he was forever grinning crookedly underneath a little pomade twist. He looked muscular, farm-raised. His neck was thick, though his eyes looked tired even then. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jim and his men prowled the state highways of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the Virginias, playing every dank beer hall and Moose Lodge that would hold them. Poetically, unbelievably, they traveled in a disused hearse. Jim earned the honorific “Joltin’” from putting on so many miles, rushing from recording sessions to radio gigs to late-night shows and back to the farm. But he also knew alliteration would help him build his name, as it had for the Kountry Krackers, his friends and recording clients who served as one of Patsy’s earliest local bands.