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  The recording booths in the studio were made of plywood and soundproofed with decaying eggshell foam. The drums, set apart in one corner room, had tiny divots in the heads, and the bell of the ride cymbal was cracked. As if to apologize and make up for the accommodations, a centerfold featuring a teased blonde with pendulous naked breasts had been pinned to the sagging fabric walls. The hallways and other rooms were crammed floor to ceiling with yellowed newspaper clips, pushpin-damaged photos, and junk-shop grails such as a poster-size “Map to Heaven.” Down the narrow hallway, every room was a makeshift museum: binders full of old ads and record deals in four massive file cabinets, old tape reels stacked in crushed boxes in every nook and corridor, including the space on either side of the toilet. If the Troubadour grounds felt endless, as wide as the sky, the studio was its inverse. There was a whole world in there, but it was subterranean, a tunnel made of old mail.

  “There’s a fella coming by from the Library of Congress,” Jim told me as he puttered around the maze. “Wants to gather some of this stuff up and decide what to keep. I told him good luck. John set that up,” meaning local newspaper editor John Douglas, who published a slim, tabloid-size biography, Joltin’ Jim: Jim McCoy’s Life in Country Music, in 2007, right after the old man was inducted into the National Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame. Soon after that honor, Jim was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, where he shares space with Kathy Mattea and Bill Withers. In a framed photo at the top of an overloaded bookshelf, Jim was standing under bright blue stage lights, wearing a tuxedo that seemed as ill-suited as a bullfighter’s costume. It was a rare undamaged artifact amid the clutter. Most everything else seemed to hearken back to Jim’s childhood, the era of typewriters, homemade shelving, and hand-lettered signage, when hoarding was the only way to protect personal effects from oblivion.

  We ambled back up the hill. Jim walked me into the Troubadour Bar & Lounge, which at midafternoon was completely empty but still seemed to breathe. An unbroken collage of fading celebratory Polaroids covered every wall—hundreds of bleary, joyful faces mugging and hugging, a walk-in scrapbook. The only light came from strings of mini holiday bulbs running along the ceiling. They soaked everything in warm red and blue and green, like an LED womb. As if reading my mind, Jim said, “That’s how you can tell a redneck: we never take the Christmas lights down.” He growled and jabbed my ribs.

  A handful of Formica tables were arranged between two sets of maroon vinyl booths, with a small stage up front. On the wall behind the stage hung a life-size Patsy cutout, a massive framed headshot, and one of her gold records, a gift from her widower, Charlie Dick. At the opposite end of the room were the bar and kitchen. Right by the entrance, next to a couple older wooden shelves that held Patsy shirts, Troubadour Studios CDs, and some spare peppers and tomatoes from Jim’s garden, was a yellowed Coca-Cola bar sign with a grave warning:

  ATTENTION

  ALL TROUBLE MAKERS WILL

  BE TRAMPLED BEATEN AND

  STABBED ALL SURVIVORS

  WILL BE PROSECUTED

  NO PROFANITY

  “Got you a booth,” Jim said, leading me up to a table. He wasn’t one for sitting down, so I took a seat and watched as the folks arrived. It started slow, a couple regulars who went right up to the bar to give Bertha, Jim’s wife of nearly forty years, a hug before the door even had a chance to squeak shut behind them. Bertha had small eyes and a flat mouth that curled into a subtle smile. She hugged with her whole body, eyes closed, her chin resting on her friends’ shoulders and her hands firm against their backs, like she was trying to absorb them. When they separated she kept hold of their arms, looking her friends over one more time, then her smile finally opened up all the way. The visitors turned and came over to their booth, easing down like the cushions were their own living-room sofa after a double shift.

  Two more couples came in and repeated the same scene before a young waitress walked over to my table and announced it was steak night. Three minutes later I had a frosted mug of beer. Five minutes after that, a plastic plate with a medium-rare slab of beef, fat still dancing from the grill fire. Jim was everywhere, greeting everybody and catching them up on his health problems. Right as he walked past the door, a young blond guy in farm boots and a black T-shirt bounded in, seized Jim’s right shoulder, and cried out lovingly, “How ya doin’, badass?” then strode right over to a bar stool, all in one unbroken motion. Bertha put a Bud Light in front of him and he drained half of it in one go.

  The music was on, classic stuff: George Jones, Kitty Wells, Buck Owens, Ray Price, Tammy Wynette. Fridays are karaoke night, so a loud and twangy-sounding man named Donny, Jim’s partner in Troubadour Radio, was busy setting up his DJ rig. The place was beginning to buzz. A crowd of seven middle-aged women from Westminster, Maryland, not far from where I grew up, came in giggling.

  “We’re having a girls’ retreat in Berkeley Springs,” one of them told me. “Hotel told us about this place.”

  “We’re here to drink!” shouted one of her friends, and the whole table erupted. The waitress delivered them two pitchers and a tray of frosted mugs.

  Donny’s wife, a silver-haired woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt with a huge wolf’s head across the front, kicked off karaoke. She had an unmade-up moon face and worn, white sneakers, but she absolutely owned Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” wagging a finger and throwing a hand on her hip whenever she landed the chorus. For her final note she threw her head back, eyes closed, and took it all home with a flip of her hair. Then she came off the stage and smiled bashfully while the room went nuts.

  No one could match her, though there was no shortage of musical passion in the Troubadour that night. One older man, sitting in the front row all night with only his wife, wobbled up onstage and draped his massive body over a chair by the monitor. Then he started into a version of “Ring of Fire” so tuneless and heaving that I wondered if he’d even heard the original song. He sat motionless on the chair, staring deadpan into the monitor, delivering his lines like a police chief naming casualties at a press conference. In the middle of the song, Jim came over and sat down at my table.

  “Got a big boy up there, don’t we?” he asked over the din. I said he was certainly putting in the effort.

  “Some people just need to get it out,” Jim said.

  “Ring of Fire” ended, and our colossal singer’s wife applauded loudest of all as he exited the stage stone-faced and returned to their table like he’d just completed an honorable, ugly job that only he could do. Another huge man, this one just tall, got up from an otherwise empty booth near the back of the room and sang a more contemporary song I didn’t recognize. It was a ballad, and he gave it everything. Eyes closed, two hands on the mic, he lent his unpracticed but orotund baritone to an overwrought tune about Jesus. He died on the cross, I’m worthless without him—the works. It was genuinely touching, but the people had come for beer and a party. We clapped, but we wanted something to scream about.

  Donny obliged. Up next, he sang a song about farts, to which he’d added a few appropriate sound effects and choreographed a whole routine where he’d point the microphone at his own ass and let it finish every other line. He had the faces—pained, surprised, relieved, overjoyed—to match the panoply of squeals, wet blasts, and foghorns that he’d programmed in. Later in the night he sang a solemn, reverent version of “That Ragged Old Flag.”

  At one point, I scanned the room and couldn’t see Jim. He wasn’t at the bar, near the door, or being toasted at one of the booths. Feeling a little beer-weary, I stepped outside to see if he’d gone out to have his customary evening bourbon. But it was too dark for that. The parking lot was pitch black except for the floodlight above the Troubadour entrance and the red neon coming out of the game room out back. The air had picked up a slight mountain chill. I wondered if he’d actually gone home, to bed; his front door was barely a hundred feet away. But there were only two burly guys out there smoking c
igarettes and talking about their motorcycles. Beyond them, there was nothing but black sky and a thin ribbon of Christmas lights on the roadside fence.

  But the lights—they moved. Something unseen, on the other side of the gravel lot, shook them loose and a strand fell suddenly to the ground. I walked past the cars, out of reach of the floodlight and the neon, until he finally came into focus. I saw the blue baseball hat in the dim holiday glow.

  “Jim?”

  “I’m all right,” he croaked. “Fixing these lights.”

  I walked over and saw he was standing in a shallow notch in the grass by the roadside, on the parking-lot side of the fence near the welcome sign. His knees were locked and he was checking on a bulb that had gone out.

  “You have to get back in there,” I said, the only thing I was sure of.

  “I ain’t been gone long. One of these bulbs here. See it?” He slipped a little—his Velcro shoe slid down the grass, and he grabbed the fence before anything else happened. Out of nowhere, a pickup truck came over the ridge and roared past us. The air shook as it flew by. Jim didn’t look at me. A muffled burst of laughter drifted over from the bar.

  “What are you out here for? Why does this need to be done?” I thought of his brother, who’d already seemed annoyed by my showing up in the afternoon. How would he react if Jim dropped dead in my presence by the side of the road, tending to a single expired bulb in the darkness?

  “I’m just piddlin’. That’s all I do now. Can’t do any real work. Fell down in my garden last week and had to wait an hour till the boy came by. He was in Afghanistan, now he helps me with things around here a few days a week. But I can’t sit still. I got to keep doing my little chores, my little fixes. You know: piddlin’.”

  “Well I can’t leave you out here. Can’t do that to Bertha.” After a few seconds he silently draped the rope of lights back over the fencepost and reached out for my arm.

  When we got back inside, Donny was at the mic, announcing the winner of a raffle. He pulled a ticket from a hat, read the numbers slowly, and when he finished, the young man at the bar, Mr. How-Ya-Doin’-Badass, slapped the counter and held his latest beer up high.

  “Ten pounds of bacon!” Donny said. “Breakfast at your place tomorrow.” As our winner walked up through the main room to claim his prize from a cooler onstage, Donny called up another singer. The night wore on. Song after song about pride, loss, God’s might, revenge, survival, and love. Each one was a celebration, even the sad ones. Especially the sad ones. In my booth between performances, I read a few of the newspaper clippings that lined the wall, most of which were paeans to the Troubadour by small-town newspaper reporters who’d driven in from three states away and marveled at the throwback charm of it all. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, they all marveled at the “last of the breed.” The Troubadour, they all exclaimed, was the kind of place your grandparents would have loved. But this seemed off to me now. Even though past relics and memories filled every visible corner of the place, there was nothing backward-looking about the scene that night. This wasn’t a reenactment or the last of anything. People there had come because it was a good time, not because it was a connection to their older relatives. The Troubadour still lived, still performed its role in the present tense. Being there felt like a gift.

  For her next song, Donny’s wife gave her husband a nod and he cued up that familiar twinkling piano line: “Crazy.” People leapt to their feet. One of the Westminster women literally howled. We all mouthed the words but let Donny’s wife—I would learn later, while drunkenly thanking her for this performance, that her name was Gay—do her thing. This was deep, mountain-bred soul singing, honed by years of joyful practice. Gay must have been in her early fifties; assuming she’d been singing “Crazy” for about as a long as she could talk, that meant she’d been feeling this song and growing with it for quite a bit longer than Patsy walked the earth. She sang like “Crazy” was in her DNA. For three minutes she was the greatest performer alive. I watched with gratitude, certain that the Troubadour was the center of the world.

  Eighty years earlier, no one would have thought that Highland Ridge was the center of anything. It was just a sparsely populated hill with a few families, plenty of sunlight, and spectacularly fertile dirt. The flatter land around Winchester was the biggest apple territory in the United States, possibly the world, and every mountaintop family had a few fruiting trees on their property for cider. But the real ridge crop was tomatoes, which sprang from the soil in a rainbow of colors, growing heavy and firm enough to bend vines and overtake gardens. Jim was the oldest of six children born to Peter Wesley McCoy and his wife, Carrie Virginia Henry McCoy, and he helped his parents deliver the summer crop to the canning facilities that dotted the mountains. As a young man he washed cans for Highland Tomatoes, his grandfather’s business. Then the blight arrived. The McCoys and their neighbors moved on to a steadier crop: timber.

  The trees came down to fill out the railway lines, the nearest of which went south into downtown Winchester. Working for Guy Spriggs, a former Morgan County sheriff, Jim helped saw, sand, and transport the logs, then held the spikes as his father hammered the tracks into the countryside. It was a small life, demanding and scarcely profitable, but it had its luxuries: fresh vegetables, endless cider, and friends to share them with. The McCoy home was a broad two-story wood box with a long porch and plenty of windows. It was filled at all times with the screech and rumble of six children and frequent visitors, and with the tinny, otherworldly warble of a windup Victrola and a battery-powered radio in the parlor—the electric towers hadn’t yet reached Highland Ridge.

  The voices and melodies that floated out from those primeval machines were the first proof that Jim McCoy ever had of life beyond hilltop manual labor. He heard mostly hillbilly music, the string-band harmony songs that sounded immemorial: “Wildwood Flower,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “You Are My Sunshine.” Somehow, he knew he was going to play them himself.

  There was only one person in the McCoy family orbit who actually knew what to do with a guitar: a neighbor named Pete Kelly who made his living cutting stone and building walls. If you entered Winchester from the north on Route 522, as all Berkeley Springs residents did, you passed by a long, waist-high barrier wall that Pete constructed around a commercial apple facility. It still stands. But Pete also liked the McCoys’ cider, and during one of his regular visits he taught Jim how to tune a guitar and pluck out a few chords. He gave the boy a week to master “You Are My Sunshine,” and came back to find that Jim had done just that. Peter McCoy soon bought his son a guitar from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, an uncommon expense for mountain families, and Jim now had a vision of life beyond a crosscut saw.

  He played his first gig at the Berkeley Springs Castle, a private mansion downtown, a few years after World War II. He was paid all of $2, which he gave back to his family in full. But despite the humble debut, the mid-1940s was an auspicious time to enter country music. The war had forced hundreds of thousands of young men from all corners of the United States to live together in close quarters. Naturally, they shared music, and many of them were exposed to real country for the first time in barracks throughout Europe. They returned home with broadened musical tastes, then the GI Bill and urban employment beckoned rural men into cities. This sudden growth and shuffling of the country fan base affected the very sound of the music as well. Before the Depression, there was hillbilly music and there was Western, for the mountain man and the cowboy respectively; Hill & Range, the publisher for Elvis’s early repertoire, was named for this dichotomy. After the war it all began blending together, traveling along America’s growing network of radio stations and highways, colliding in cities that were filling with victorious soldiers whose roots were in the hills, plains, and deserts. This new strain required a new name.

  The term “honky-tonk” stretches back to the late nineteenth century, though it became most commonly associated with highway-set beer joints in post-Prohibition Texas. O
n the outskirts of oil towns, often near a county line to accommodate changing liquor laws, all manner of little venues sprung up around the state: dance halls, working-class bars, nightclubs, social dens. They proliferated even faster as the military men came home. Their unifying elements were neon lights and music, whether by jukebox or live band. This was a louder setting than country music was used to (Glen Campbell would later refer to these venues as “fighting and dancin’ clubs”), and the musicians needed to be heard above breaking bottles, bawdy talk, and brawls. They plugged in and hired drummers, but the move indoors also meant that the tried and true lyrical themes—the family Bible, outdoor work—were replaced by the tribulations of the nightlife: romance, heartbreak, alcoholism, and financial woes. Honky-tonk was the first de-regionalized country music. It was born on the nation’s nascent highways, and animated by the struggles of displaced rural people. Hank Williams was the patron saint of this era, and he naturally wrote a song called “Honky Tonkin’,” a celebration of aimless club-hopping and drinking that had no wildwood flowers or sweet hills of Virginia in sight: “We’re goin’ to the city, to the city fair / If you go to the city, you will find me there.”

  Besides Hank, nobody embodied this relative cosmopolitanism better than Ernest Tubb, “the Texas Troubadour.” Tubb started out in the 1930s as a disciple of the great hillbilly yodeler Jimmie Rodgers, but emerged as the quintessential road-warrior bandleader through years on the Lone Star circuit and beyond. His string of hits began with “Walking the Floor Over You” in 1941, and his touring band had drums, electric guitars, and a rollicking sense of swing. They dressed in sharp matching suits and big cowboy hats and boots, the perfect mix of regional affectation and citified flair. Tubb himself never sang beautifully, but over the years he employed some of the most virtuoso musicians to ever play country, including guitarist Leon Rhodes and pedal steel visionary Buddy Emmons, who literally built new gears and components into his instrument in order to make it more amenable to harmonically complex genres, including jazz. Tubb found unprecedented commercial success: radio dominance, a sponsorship by Gold Chain flour, even a headlining spot on a country show at Carnegie Hall in 1947.