Homeplace Read online

  Despite the whirlwind of tragedy and disappointment, or perhaps because of it, Jim kept busier than ever in 1963 and ’64. He had a regular Sunday afternoon gig at the Goose Creek Championship Rodeo in Leesburg, plus an Illinois-based manager brought Joltin’ Jim and the Melody Playboys out for a tour of county fairs throughout the Midwest, where they were billed as “The Official Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival band,” thanks to their appearances there. Jim did all this while still working at Montgomery Ward and DJ-ing for WHPL, one of WINC’s competing stations.

  In 1964, he caught the attention of a blue-eyed waitress on Loudoun Street in downtown Winchester. Her name was Linda-Ann McPherson. She knew Jim’s music and he appreciated that. He also appreciated her gorgeous face, and frankly, he was ready for a positive turn of events. They married, and had four kids in the next few years: twin girls, Penny and Angel, and two boys, James and Wesley. Jim even made another single with Tommy Hill, and partnered with the man who wrote the songs, Jean Alford, to create a label to release it, Alear Records. He sold the records in a bin in Montgomery Ward, and the store advertised autograph sessions with him. In one of his famous, oft-repeated stories, he once brought his younger kids to Nashville and took them to the Opry, where Loretta Lynn, mother of young twins herself, scooped up the baby girls and carried them onstage with her to sing. Despite a few years of setbacks and losses, Jim was moving forward with his career.

  And then Linda-Ann left. Disappeared as quickly as the first Tommy Hill tape. No grand good-byes, no note, no forwarding address. To this day, none of her children have seen her more than a few times in their adult lives.

  Jim was now in his mid-thirties with seven children and two ex-wives. He was still putting in the effort to get his songs in the right hands. But with Linda-Ann gone, the Nashville dream faded. To keep his gig schedule, he had to scatter the kids to the wind—some with his parents, some with Marjie, some with his sister. He’d ruined his first marriage and now his second had evaporated on him. Jim had grown up poor, but he’d always had a stable family home base, and he hated leaving his own children in such disarray. He simply couldn’t make the Nashville trips with such regularity anymore, and that more or less spelled the end of his flirtation with the mainstream country record industry. Because in 1965—in great part due to Patsy Cline’s success—the country record industry was Nashville. That was the only place to take the next step, and if you weren’t there, it wasn’t happening.

  The only thing Jim McCoy knew how to do was play and promote country music, but he could no longer entertain a delusion of the big time: a Nudie Suit, his name in Western font spelled out in the frets of his guitar, a large band, and structurally miraculous hair. George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Faron Young, Ray Price: that was the summit of country accomplishment, these were the saints of the realm. And now Jim McCoy knew he would have to settle for something far south of that, something much humbler. He’d spent all his adolescence and early adulthood in blind pursuit of this one occupation and finally, after a life of running, Jim McCoy reached the one thing he’d avoided so far: a limit.

  The industry was also beginning to leave him behind. In the 1960s, Nashville country matured astonishingly, absorbing and infiltrating other genres like a virus. Patsy and Ray Price introduced easy-listening strings, then Charlie Rich and Bobbie Gentry brought in R&B bass and rock guitar. By the dawn of the ’70s, the Byrds were playing honky-tonk standards and Miles Davis wrote and recorded a song called “Willie Nelson.”

  But as an artist and songwriter, Jim knew only the Tubb model: two minutes, narrated verses, big chorus, pedal steel solo, another chorus, and out. His biggest ’60s effort was “Which Away, What Away, Any Way,” the bouncy saga of one man’s comical search for a gal gone missin’. The rhymes are bargain-bin and his singing wobbles, but it’s fabulous: pure bouncy southern showbiz. In the right label’s hands, heard by the right DJ or A&R man, it might have sent Jim to another level. He might have been the next jukebox darling with decades of royalties from one big song. But by the time he released it on his own Winchester Records label in 1968, that dream had sailed on out of Jim McCoy’s life, gone. He sold it in the Montgomery Ward near the cash register, and sent it out to a few regional radio stations where it received respectable airplay. And that was it. That was the cost of keeping his family together amid chaos. He hadn’t had much as a young man on Highland Ridge, but he had stability. He knew where he was from and how to care for it. He had country music in his heart, but other responsibilities overruled even that. “I’m a family man,” was how he’d put it years later, when I asked how come he never made the move down to Nashville permanently. He wanted a home more than a grand career. He stayed.

  Now, sitting next to me, he was old, watching as Carol Glass-Cooper skipped out of WINC and her husband changed costumes to impersonate the next meaningful man in Patsy Cline’s musical evolution. The role of Jim McCoy was complete. He was the first small step in a grand saga, a bit part in a friend’s bigger life.

  I went back up to the bar, where Codi, one of Jim and Bertha’s devoted employees, was busy pouring beers and keeping track of a dozen-odd handwritten tabs. Codi was in her mid-thirties, a single mother with a young teenager, and she split the bartending duties with another woman in the same position. Saturday nights were toughest; she maneuvered between the beer taps and the lineup of rail liquor hanging in a metal basket off the coolers, with occasional stops at the yellowing cash register to ring everybody up. The most popular drink was a bright-orange concoction called Rocket Fuel: one pour of everything in a pitcher, topped off with enough Sunny Delight to make it palatable. As Carol Glass-Cooper started into “I Fall to Pieces,” Codi paused from calculating another small bill in her head. To no one in particular, she said out loud, “I’m so sick of Patsy Cline.”

  One of the out-of-towners, a guy in an ironed polo shirt, approached the bar.

  “Can I get a bourbon, neat?” he asked Codi.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “No ice.”

  “Oh,” she said, grabbing the handle of Jim Beam and setting a plastic cup on the scuffed bar top. “We call that a shot.”

  On Sunday, the novelty gun was smoking and the foil-covered casseroles were gleaming in the sun around its base. The medical-bill donation bucket was positioned by the fence door. There were only a few slow-moving, marshmallow-white clouds in the sky but everyone was still talking about rain. Jim was in his formal wear, the collared black shirt with the electric guitar pattern, and sitting near him was Charlie Dick himself, looking much younger than his seventy-nine years in dark blue pants and a light-blue button-down. The two old-timers sat in their lawn chairs, leisurely holding court as well-wishers came up for photos. They handed their babies over to Jim like he was the pope, but stayed within arms’ reach.

  The right ingredients were all there for the kind of legendary hoedown that all the knowing Patsy fan clubbers had prepared me for, but the whole afternoon felt somehow flat, not quite there. Maybe it was just that I’d been to one of these cookouts before, or the fact that the crowd wasn’t nearly the size that I’d been told to expect for the biggest day of the Troubadour year. Boots, Beer, and BBQ was an event, whereas the McCoys’ Patsy party was merely a lovely time in the open air. The pickup band was playing on the bandstand, down the hill by the tree line. They felt a mile away.

  Closer to the picnic tables, the familiar sounds of hissing meat and roaring grill fire were more prominent. Codi, Little Eddie, and the rest of Jim and Bertha’s young army were busy turning chicken thighs, cracking Coors Light cans, making change for $5 bills, and running plates out from the restaurant. Outside, in the light of day without loud music to distract from it, it was incredible to see how much work went into this “picnic.” There is no easy way to create leisure for dozens of people. Bertha came by the grills, looking in to check on everything while Jim enjoyed his fans and his old friend.

  As another ringing pedal steel intro kicked off th
e band’s next song, I spotted Matt Hahn, Jim’s doctor, up by the edge of the hill, standing alone. He was a hard figure to miss in these surroundings, a tall and upright man with a striking, pale bald head. I clinked beers with him and we watched Jim stand up and move slowly through the crowd, accepting toasts and tributes. I asked Dr. Matt how his patient was doing.

  “Jim takes the normal health equation and turns it on its head,” Hahn said. “I vowed to stop him from smoking and limit the alcohol. Instead, he turned me onto whiskey. My wife and I were vegetarians when we came here, and they broke us in months.”

  He’d come from Washington almost fifteen years earlier, right as the new century began. Hahn’s medical school scholarship mandated that he work in a needy community after graduation, so he left D.C. and headed over the hills to become a small-town family doctor, expecting to stay the minimum required time with his wife and baby daughter. Then they found that they loved it, and found a community of fellow transplants who had made a permanent home around Berkeley Springs. His practice was just over the Potomac in Hancock, Maryland, about ten minutes away. When I asked why a lifelong east coaster would raise a family in the sticks, he responded like he’d heard the question before. “It’s quiet and it’s safe,” he explained. “And since there’s not a lot of services or activities around, the families really come together and support each other. It’s an actual community.”

  Jim McCoy was one of Hahn’s earliest patients, and he knew the old man strictly on those terms until John Douglas, still years from writing the Joltin’ Jim book, played him some of Jim’s music from the 1960s.

  “I was looking at these old photos that John had,” he told me in the sun-dappled shade as a nine-year-old girl took the bandstand stage to sing “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” “and I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s my patient.’” Hahn started coming to the Troubadour and, like most of us who stumble on to it from the outside, became a proselytizer. Soon their whole transplant family scene became regulars.

  But Hahn became more regular than most. He had no background in country music, but he was an ex-musician. In the 1980s, during D.C.’s famously tight-knit punk scene, he fronted an antic, keyboard-heavy band called the Young Caucasians that gigged relentlessly and recorded a few albums. The more time Hahn spent with Jim, the more he learned about the man’s long and occasionally merciless career in the hinterlands of the country industry, the more connected he felt to the ecosystem that Jim had created at the homeplace.

  “We were one of those bands where, after every show, someone would come up and tell us, ‘We’re in business, it’s gonna happen,’ and then it never did,” he told me. “And Jim was that guy in country music in the ’60s.”

  When Jim got wind of his young doctor’s musical past, his show business instincts kicked in. He smelled a hook. In 2005, he asked Hahn if he’d like to record an album: Matt Hahn Sings the Songs of Jim McCoy. Hahn couldn’t refuse the second chance at musical glory. On weeknights after work he came up the mountain and spent hours in Troubadour Studios, working with a series of bands that Jim assembled for the sessions. Jim was not quite eighty at the time but his work ethic and energy dwarfed Hahn’s own. They recorded until 2 a.m. most nights, working with local musicians who were capable but, in classic country style, only sporadically dependable. One guitar player, according to Hahn, played perfectly after eight beers but couldn’t play at all after nine.

  The record took two long years to make, more time than Hahn ever thought it would, and by the end of it he was practically absorbed into the Troubadour’s scenery and mythology. Jim gave him his old embroidered red suit to wear for gigs, and stood a life-size cardboard cutout of the good doctor in those radiant duds in the backroom of the bar, by the pool tables. Along with John Douglas, Hahn was now Jim’s musical executor, and when Jim was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, Hahn accompanied him to the ceremony in Charleston. He became the unofficial mascot of the bar, proof of its gravitational force and community-building capacity, not to mention the man who was doing the most to keep Jim alive. Now, in 2013, Hahn had given a dozen-odd years—a quarter of his life—to treating and honoring Jim McCoy. No one was more surprised by this than Hahn himself.

  “He brought the magic of country music to us, in such a beautiful and personal way. To rub shoulders with these people . . . When we went down to see Jim get that West Virginia award, we were sitting next to Bill Withers. I’m meeting Patsy Cline’s husband. And I think, ‘Where am I?’”

  But now Jim—his patient, after all—was faltering. He’d had stomach surgery in the spring, and was due for lung cancer tests in the early fall. What could a family doctor do for him now?

  “I tell him, keep living. Have a blast,” Hahn said, watching Jim walk slowly by. “At a certain point people get to dictate these things for themselves and you just try and help them out as much as possible. Out here, if someone isn’t feeling well enough to come to my office, I go to them. So I’m out here a lot. And he loves music, he loves crowds. He never stops. He’s got a digital studio, all sorts of gear to transfer his old tapes to CD. He had this tower built so he could start his own Internet radio station. He’s got plans all the time to keep the studio active. To see someone his age working hard, making plans, using technology . . . He’s an inspiration.”

  Jim came over and whispered to Dr. Matt that it was time to go inside. Hahn excused himself and walked off through the crowd discretely. Jim followed, as did Charlie, Julie, Bertha, and a couple more of the innermost sanctum. Inside, amid only the Christmas lights and the lazily revolving ceiling fans, the old friends gathered by the bar and Bertha poured everyone a finger of Jim Beam. This was a yearly ceremonial toast, in a sense the real occasion for the Labor Day party altogether. Jim spoke to the memory of their beloved friend, mother, and widow. It was Patsy who compelled them to find this time each year, Patsy who gave shape and a soundtrack to their whole vision of the world. They’d done this toast for fifty years now, in Winchester and then up here, at the gate of the sky. Fifty years: nearly twice as long as Patsy even lived. The memory of her grew more precious with every year, because it kept everyone in touch with a sense of possibility. It was like having a friend who stayed young for life. Their empty plastic cups smacked gently on the bar.

  When they reentered the daylight and the quiet potluck crowd, Jim and Charlie made their way to the stage as tradition required. Earlier in the day, Charlie had told Jim that he wasn’t in the mood to do it this year but Jim responded with the guilt trump card: “I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing next year.” So they did their duty, up the wood-slat steps and onto the bandstand. The sun was just beginning to set behind the stage; it was a punishment for the audience to stare toward it. Nevertheless, the band picked up the familiar lilting melody and “Waltz Across Texas” began. Neither of them could carry a tune anymore, but we all watched silently as these two men labored to honor each other and the woman who defined their lives.

  Down on earth, at the foot of these mountains, the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley was open to visitors, charging admission to show locals and tourists just how central Patsy Cline really was to the development and history of the region. Finally the town had caught up with her, finally the local money needed her enough to pay respect. But that money wasn’t anywhere near the Troubadour, and it hadn’t touched Jim McCoy. He was up in the hills as he’d been for the last three decades, putting on a shoestring party and soliciting donations for his and Bertha’s medical bills. Jim hadn’t been granted the chance to be a mere icon; he had to go on with the messy work of the living. He had to carry the symptoms of a reckless youth into old age, and suffer the indignity of outlasting his own body. He lorded over a messy but vivid hall of memories in a world that increasingly preferred tidy museum exhibits and tourist attractions.

  The sun faded behind the bandstand and the magic blue dusk settled over the party, bringing a slight cool to the breeze that fluttered the tree branches and the
last of Jim’s tomato plants behind the trailer. Summer was over.

  5

  How to Build a City

  A few minutes before lunchtime on Wednesday, February 18—midday, midweek, midmonth, midwinter—Jeanne Mozier took her usual drive up Washington Street in Berkeley Springs, watching her life flash before her eyes. Entering town from the south, she passed the local historical museum, which she opened in 1984 and still operated with only a small volunteer staff. She crossed Fairfax Street, site of the local chamber of commerce and tourism bureau, both of which she founded in the late 1970s. A hundred yards beyond that she looked up at the vintage marquee of the single-screen Star Theatre, which she refurbished with her husband in 1977 and had owned and operated ever since. And finally she arrived at the Ice House, headquarters for the Morgan Arts Council, which she opened right after reviving the Star, and where she still served as treasurer.

  Jeanne, whose name has two syllables, went inside to grab a half-dozen white display cubes from the art gallery and brought them out to her Camry. Then she got back on Washington Street and headed south again to the Country Inn. Walking the inn’s parking lot, Jeanne could see the town’s namesake springs, which have flowed at a constant 74.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 1,000 gallons a minute, since the beginning of recorded time. The air outside was well below freezing. A thick steam haze danced over the four stone pools. During summer weekends the whole state-owned town square is filled with families swimming and shopping, but around Valentine’s Day it was dead quiet except for the water’s soft sigh.