Dock Boggs in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia

Dock Boggs in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia

Dock Boggs in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia
by Greil Marcus
Representations, No. 58 (Spring, 1997), pp. 1-23

Dock Boggs in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia

DOCK BOGGS WAS A SINGER AND BANJO PLAYER who sounded as if his bones were coming through his skin every time he opened his mouth; that was the sound that drew people to him. If you can imagine him on his own ground, in the coal towns of western Virginia and eastern Kentucky, in the 1920s, you might picture him walking alone, staring straight ahead, stone-faced, like a man ashamed to admit he ended up in the wrong place because his money didn't run out before the whiskey did. Or you might find him playing on a corner, people around him, dollars in his hand, a glint in his eye that says-what? That, this day, the time is right to go all the way into the songs he's sung so many times, songs that, somehow, he's less sung than listened to, less loved than feared? Or that what the people who are giving him money are purchasing is a treasure, a memory he will be permitted to keep long after they have forgotten they paid for it? You know, a lot of these people now, used to be over there in Jenkins. Used to be the hottest place in town-if you go too far, if you needed a little money, you see ... [1]
 
It is December 1969 in Needmore, Virginia, just over from Norton, in the mountains in the southwest corner of the state, and Boggs has been drinking all night.

The folklorist and musician Mike Seeger, Boggs's friend and collaborator, has had the tape recorder on, taking down Boggs's stories as he has for years; now Seeger is trying to get Boggs to go to bed, but this night, though Boggs has for- gotten the tape recorder, he has many stories left to tell. He is seventy-one; he'll be dead in little more than a year.

I'm up to Jenkins once, me and a fellow in a A-model Ford, and we- that's before they got this road graded, down, this side of the mountain. You had to go up the old road to get to the top of the mountain, you get to the top of the mountain, you was all right, you see, come on to Norton, everything was paved up. We went down, stayed all night, with my brother-in-law, Lee Hunsucker, lived in Mayking, we went down to stay all night with Laura and Lee, visit with 'em a night. He didn't have no money and I didn't have none, and so we come back, we drove back-down below Jenkins, about eight or ten miles. He said, "Dock, my gas tank's runnin' kind of dry," and he said, "I gotta have oil in this 'fore it runs-how in the world are we gonna get back 'cross that mountain?" I said, "You just be right quiet." I said, "This thing hauls us toJenkins, that's all I want, just haul us to Jenkins." And that used to be one of the biggest, poorest places-what I'm talking about, they was the most freest givers I ever saw.

We got up to where we get into a parking lot. I walked out there.... that's when I had that Silvertone. He said, "What we gone do, Dock?" I said, "Just be quiet." I said, "Things'll turn around-don't be uneasy." We hadn't had dinner, either. He said, "My gas tank ain't got but a couple gallons in it." I said, "Just be right quiet." We walked out there, and they had some park benches, settin' out there by the side of the street. They's a whole group, 'bout ten or twelve there, I guess, settin' on the bench. "Waaaaaaallll," some of'em cursed- "Damned if there ain't old Dock!" Said, "Where that banjer at, Dock?" I said, "Banjer is out there in that little old A-model car." Said, "Well, God, don't you come out here with that, you go get it, and you bring it down here and play something for us." I said, "Banjer is plumb sick. And that there car, gas tank's about empty. My stomach's about empty." And I said, "If you fellas got some money, that you want to put out, for pick a few pieces, I'll set down on one of these benches here and play a piece or two for you."
 
They give me about three or four dollars 'fore I even started up on my banjo. That's a long time ago, when a dollar was worth a dollar. I went and got my banjo, come out there, get it out of the case, set it down on the bench. I never paid no attention to the traffic, people. Before I played a piece, I'd already took up a second collection. I had over ten dollars in hand. First thing I know here come a group of flash buttons, police caps and so on, bust through the crowd, and I looked out there and-I had that town blocked. I had the street blocked, they was all around, I bet they had two hundred and fifty, three hundred people around there. And he come up to me, he said, "Dock," saying, "you blockin' the street here, and you can't do that, you mustn't do that," said, "Go over there on that band- stand if you want to play, play all you feel like playin'." Say, "I love to hear you play myself." I said, "Oh, chief," I says, "I hadn't paid no attention to blockin' the street, I had never looked out there, all I'se doin' is takin' up a few quarters here." So I went over to the bandstand, followed me over there, and I don't know how much money they give us- hardly anybody give you less than a quarter, a half, or a dollar bill. I played about an hour, hour and a half, and I had plenty money to fill up the gas tank, plenty money to eat dinner on, plenty money to buy extra oil and get to the top of the mountain. I know that's about the best time that guy ever had in his life-his name was Sam. He's dead now. He used to brake on the L&S. You get to the top of the mountain, it's easy to get down.

Dock Boggs returned to stories like this one-stories about the chord his music struck in other people-again and again in the last years of his life. He talked around and through the deep and helpless manner in which his fellow Appala- chians had responded to his songs: the way they responded to his traditional songs and his refashioned, radio-borne blues as if they'd never in their lives heard any- thing like them, as if the land, the history, and the airwaves they shared with him had left them unprepared for what he had to offer.

As Boggs spoke into Mike Seeger's tape recorder, he was not embellishing these memories but fully retrieving them, spinning a tale until he could almost balance it on the palm of his hand and watch it spin of its own accord, like a top. In 1927, Boggs had traveled from Virginia to New York City to make his first 78s, then disappeared back into the history of the anonymous-but now, in 1969, Boggs had for six years known a second public life. In 1963, at the height of the folk revival, Mike Seeger located Boggs in Norton. Though Boggs had not performed in public since the early years of the 1930s, within weeks he appeared at the American Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. After that his voice could be heard throughout the nation, at folk festivals from Newport to Berkeley and on three new albums, if one knew where to look, or cared to.

Many responded from the heart-but not that many, even in the country of the folk revival. As the music historian Peter Guralnick wrote of Skip James-the great blues singer who, after making eighteen unique recordings in 1931, vanished like Boggs, only to reappear at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 immediately following his discovery by blues collectors in a Tunica, Mississippi, hospital- on bad nights Boggs could feel "that he had been snatched from obscurity only to be returned to an obscurity just as profound."[2] Weirdly, as he had sung in the 1920s in the Virginia and Kentucky mountains or as he sang before college au- diences in the 1960s, it was all in the music: at both borders of his career Boggs sang like a seer, standing outside of himself as the prophet of his own life, the angel of his own extinction. Young or old, he sang as if he could see his life as something that had already passed. The sensation, boiling in the music as he received it himself, was irresistible and unclear, like religion. Sometimes, as on that day in Jenkins, the performances were the ceremonies and the songs- "Country Blues," "Down South Blues," "Sugar Baby," "Danville Girl," "Pretty Polly"-the mysteries; sometimes it was the other way around.

Dock Boggs made primitive-modernist music about death. Primitive because the music was put together out of junk you could find in anyone's yard, hand-me- down melodies, folk-lyric fragments, pieces of Child ballads, mail-order instruments, and the new women's blues records they were making in the northern cities in the early years of the twenties; modernist because the music was about the choices you made in a world a disinterested God had plainly left to its own devices, where you were thrown completely back on yourself, a world where only art or revolution, the symbolic remaking of the world, could take you out of yourself.[3] Modernist, really, because in 1923-one year before Andre Breton published the first surrealist manifesto in Paris, four years before Dock Boggs cut "Country Blues" and "Pretty Polly" in New York-D. H. Lawrence's pronouncement on the subject in his Studies in Classic American Literature could have applied as readily to the music Boggs was then contriving as to The Scarlet Letter. "The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism," Lawrence wrote, "have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I men- tion just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today.[4]
 
Boggs's music accepted death, sympathized with its mission, embraced its seductions, and traveled with its wiles. "Always the same," Lawrence said. "The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under- consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of desperation underneath."[5] With Boggs that hum is right on the surface-and still he sounds more than anything subterranean. In 1929 he had a band, Dock Boggs and His Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, with a fiddler and guitar players, featuring Boggs's own flamboyant buck-dancing, and one tune Boggs favored then was a kind of profane spiritual, a plea not for grace but for more time on earth, a song blacks and whites had known forever as "Oh Death." Whenever Boggs called for it his guitarist Scott Boatwright said the same thing: "Get out of the graveyard, Dock." "What is this that I can see, with icy hands taking hold on me?" Boggs would sing, the words jerking in his throat like the limbs of a marionette. "I am death and none can excel / I'll open the doors to heaven or hell."

In 1994 I was driving west out of Norton, in Wise County, the farthest reach of Virginia before it meets eastern Kentucky, as far from Thomas Jefferson's Virginia as the other side of the world. It is still the sort of mountain country caught in Thomas Hart Benton's House in Cubist Landscape, a small watercolor from the 1910s that is like a language the liquid, floridly gesturing heroes of Benton's fa- mous 1930s Americana murals forgot how to speak. The picture shows a hollow, but as an unnatural Appalachian pastoral with green trees, red earth, white granite, a blue river, all now a jumble of cubist blocks scattered by a cruel hand. On the left, a black mountain shoots almost straight up against a darkening blue sky; a tilted red house seems barely more a product of human intent than the rect- angles of verdure and stone. Behind this heaving tableau, a brown arch into the sky could be two tree trunks fallen together or a ladder to heaven. What you're looking at is some kind of church, a church that doesn't need you.

I was heading toward Whitesburg, just over the Kentucky line into Letcher County, like Wise shaped by the sudden hollows of the always looming landscape and marked by old coal mines, coke ovens, slag heaps, and the flimsy housing of company towns. The route was a back road through the woods, ordinary if some- how imposing, like almost any road in the area, until the road began to seem odd. It was completely quiet; nothing moved. No birds sang, no small mammals darted across the blacktop. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Vir- ginia farther east, the roads were a zoo, or anyway a natural history museum: dead raccoons, possums, squirrels, snakes, skunks, cats, dogs, armadillos. But here-plainly because a century of coal fires and coke smoke had driven off the wildlife-here, I would say later to a professor in Arkansas and to a friend in California, there was no roadkill. They both had exactly the same reply. "You know why there's nothing on those roads? Because as soon as those hillbillies hit something, they jump right out of their cars and eat it!"

This was only months after voters in Cincinnati, just over the border from Kentucky, repudiated a civil rights measure so sweeping, according to numerous commentators, as to reveal the whole idea of legal protection against discrimination for the joke it had become: not only had the city's human rights ordinance prohibited discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, or marital status, but it had also been deemed necessary to extend the same protection to persons of "Appalachian origin." That was the joke-a law for Li'l Abner!-and be it the joke told by the voters of Cincinnati or by my friends, the message was the same. Places such as Wise County and Letcher County were scorned ground, part of another country.

In the mountains the radio was all country, and the radio version of this terrain- the seedbed of the music that had made Nashville a new, glamorous kind of company town-was all bland. The music didn't fit. Glimpsed whole and on high, the mountains around Norton, through the Jefferson National Forest, into Daniel Boone country, could make you think no place on earth looked any different: they were that implacable. Merely hills on a map-the highest peak in Virginia doesn't reach six thousand feet-on some days they can seem bigger than anything in Colorado, rising up so suddenly an unwary traveler can find herself staring into the likes of a tornado. From one vantage point, you can see the leavings of strip mining and human devastation of the crudest kind; from another, with no sign of smoke or cut trees, you can see an entire landscape of hideouts, a world where people will never be found if they want it that way; the same view can let you imagine the land was never inhabited, not by Indians and not by Europeans. The huge upsurges of earth and the blue haze around them can seem to say that in some impenetrable way this country can never be claimed, can never be home; the cuckoo flies on for lack of a place to light. "Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image," Marx wrote. "Everything speaks to them of themselves."[6] Here you could look a lifetime and not see your reflection.
 
Not far to the east, where 23S turns onto 58E, into the Clinch River Valley, is the sylvan glade, a diorama of harmony and reassurance. Cattle graze on hillsides, everything is green, everything is defined, clear, marked off. The landscape is a backdrop to people, homes, enterprise, and leisure; everything has been made over. In the mountains where Dock Boggs worked, outside of the towns, every structure-coal shed, shack, or house-looks like an outpost, temporary, holding out or merely granted a reprieve against the day when it will join the ruins all around it. The radio offered a slew of performers milking the ruling formula of rural nostalgia, I'm-your-pal vocals, bright old-timey fiddles, and happy endings. The resentment and defensiveness-the embarrassment and shame-that is the other side of the roadkill joke or the Cincinnati law was there, but as a kind of winner's us-against-them sneer, the sneer around the edges of the smile of singers primed to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl if they hadn't already. The fiddles were the worst. After a bit they were semiotics, not music. Nothing was commu- nicated but the sign of traditionalism. It wasn't that one fiddle part sounded like another, doing the same job in every tune. It was as if there were no people actually playing, as if each part came from the vault in Nashville where they keep the all- purpose fiddle sample. Leaving Whitesburg, rounding north through Jenkins, I turned back toward Norton and stuck a Dock Boggs tape in the car's cassette machine.
 
Dock Boggs, c. 1927. Photo courtesy of Mike Seeger (photographer unknown).

Named Moran Lee Boggs, after the local doctor-thus the nickname he always preferred-Dock Boggs was born in West Norton in 1898, the youngest of ten children. The household went back a long way: the year the Civil War ended, Boggs's father turned sixteen. Beginning with 350 acres in Harlan County, Kentucky, he sold one farm after another, each smaller than the last, to coal buyers. "When he died," Boggs told Mike Seeger, "he never owned enough land to bury him on."

The senior Boggs ended up in Norton as a blacksmith and a gunsmith. The spot was first explored by a white man in 1750, and in 1785 named Prince's Flat, after William Prince, the first man to raise a house there; just four years before Boggs was born the town was renamed for Eckstein Norton, president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. It was a signal transition. From this point on, the life that people like Boggs's father carried into Norton lived on mostly in music, in styles and songs that in the 1920s were already called old-time. Real life was defined by coal and the rail cars that hauled it away.
 
Educated in a one-room school open three months a year-the town lacked the money to pay a teacher for more-Boggs went into the mines at twelve, in 1910, earning seven cents an hour on a ten-hour day; after that he taught himself with a dictionary, the Bible, and a speller. For most of the rest of his life he followed mine work back and forth between Wise and Letcher counties. In 1954 mechanization left him permanently unemployed and destitute, dependent on his wife's vegetable garden and their church, until Social Security and a United Mine Workers pension began when he turned sixty. Boggs had pawned his banjo in the 1930s; some time before Mike Seeger found him he retrieved it and began practicing.
 
It was in the 1920s, when Boggs was in his own twenties, that he first lived a life outside of common expectation and market determinism-that he discovered a kind of freedom, or mastery, that he would soon lose.

In 1918, with $600 saved, Boggs married; Sara Boggs soon took ill and Boggs found himself $1200 in debt. These were large sums in their place and time: enough to buy a house, enough to place a lien on the future. Self-willed and ambitious, Boggs had thought he was set. He'd rented a farm, subcontracted part of a mine: "I was making as much as any foreman. Had a whole section of the mine under me, and me just twenty years old. I was drawing more money than five or six, eight men." His wife's illness forced them back to her family's home in Letcher, and Boggs lost his job; it was given to two men, both of whom quickly cleared enough to buy their own farms.

At the same time, Boggs's music, first found as part of family life, was edging toward public life. As a small boy he followed a guitar player called Go Lightening, who lived in the black settlement of Dorchester, above Norton; Boggs would beg him to play "John Henry." From a black string band he watched as part of a Dorchester crowd, and from Jim White, a black banjo player with blue eyes, he got the idea of playing the banjo like a blues guitar, picking the notes separately; the white musicians he'd seen all clawhammered the strings up and down, producing in comparison an undifferentiated flurry of sound. Letting the notes stand out from one another, you could speak more clearly; you could speak to others as others had spoken to you. You could pass it on: the "thrill," as Boggs remembered it, that shot "from the top of my head to the soles of my feet."

Boggs's sisters taught him ballads; his brother-in-law Lee Hunsucker taught him sacred songs and played him blues records. From one Homer Crawford, a traveling photographer, he learned "Country Blues." It was just an old song called "Hustling Gamblers" with a more salable title, Boggs always said- in the twenties, the word blues was slapped onto every sort of tune-really just a variant of "Darling Cory" or "Little Maggie." It was as commonplace as any piece in the mountains. Boggs performed it as if it were the story of his own life, as if it were coming out of his mouth for the first time anywhere.

He listened to the radio. He found himself especially in tune with women's voices. He loved Sara Martin, famous for her work with Fats Waller and the W. C. Handy Band; from her he took "Sugar Blues" and "Mistreated Mama Blues," probably never catching "Death Sting Me Blues," a record she made in 1928, just before quitting the blues for gospel. He heard Rosa Henderson's light, swaying, charming "Down South Blues," which went through him and came out unrecognizably harsh and sardonic, funny and cruel; Fletcher Henderson's piano accompaniment disappeared into Boggs's cantering banjo. In his family, Boggs said, "four, five, six maybe ten, twelve pieces is all they could play." Boggs was becoming a musician, a person who, if only in his own mind, still far away from any notion of professionalism, might pursue a secret calling. He played for family and friends, for neighborhood socials and dances; for a little money he took his banjo into pool rooms and barber shops.

For real money he went into moonshining. Sara Boggs could not have children and must have feared losing her husband; as a devout woman she hated Boggs's music as a road to a fast life, to hell, and bootlegging only made the road wider, but there was nothing for it. Boggs was determined to free himself from debt. Soon he was always armed, even in his own house. Conflict with his wife led to mistrust and suspicion between Boggs and her family. His own business was dangerous-on Guest River below Norton, where Boggs was living, whiskey men regularly went down in shoot-outs over bribes and turf.

Boggs's corner of Virginia was a place of violence, economically unstable, socially chaotic. "It was dangerous," Boggs said,just "to get on the highway. People a-shootin' in the road, shooting everyway, carrying guns, everybody carrying revolvers, and they'd shoot to hear 'em pop like you'd shoot firecrackers. I was standing in my own doorway, and a fella down the road, about a hundred and fifty yards, pulled out his pistol and shot, shot right inside of the door. One foot from where I was standing. I emptied my pistol right down toward where the shot came from."

One of Boggs's schoolteachers was killed, over nothing, he remembered; one of his brothers and two of his brothers-in-law were murdered. "I've had I don't know how many first cousins killed," he said, "and I've had some first cousins kill some, too." In 1928, when a lawman named Doc Cox broke into Boggs's house and grabbed Sara Boggs as a shield-"Aiming to, I reckon, to push her between me and him so he could maybe kill me and me couldn't get a shot at him"-Boggs pulled his gun on the man, drove him and his deputy out of his house, and was over the border and into Kentucky by nightfall, not returning to Virginia for more than three years, when Cox was killed: "One of my friends killed him." With the events of his own childhood shading back into the stories he had heard his father tell, Boggs grew up in the shadow of notorious local feudists Clayton Jones and Devil John Wright; the famous killer Tad Hall, who shot the Norton sheriff dead in the streets of his own town; and Doc Taylor, a physician and quadruple- murderer who escaped from Wise County into West Virginia by train-in a casket. He was hanged in Wise when Boggs was a boy; so were at least five others. Emry Arthur, who wrote "Man of Constant Sorrow" and in 1929 backed Boggs on guitar, "couldn't reach the chords," Boggs said. "He'd been shot through the hands. Bullets went through his hands."

A deep well of violence within Boggs himself opened; he began a war with himself that despite long interludes of peace would last the rest of his life. He was arrested for fights and beatings. He beat one of his wife's brothers nearly to death over fifty-two dollars: "The blood was just squirtin'- I guess sometimes squirtin' three feet high." When it was over an onlooker pronounced judgment in words Boggs never forgot. "Looks like Dock had a little mercy on Dave," he said. "He's part human."

Feeling overmatched by his wife's family-"They had a tendency to be over- bearing and kind of run over me.... I didn't know what they might start some- thing with me"-he determined to kill them all. "I had it all planned," he said. "How I was going to do it."

I done made up my mind that if I did it I was gonna kill all's in the house. The old man, the old lady, the boys, everyone's there, I swear, I gonna kill everyone of 'em. And tell my own tale about it. Go to court, give myself up. "Well, why'd you kill the old lady?" "Well, she got in the way of a bullet." Ha ha ha ha. That's the way people get killed, get in the way of a bullet, you know.
That's the way I had it figured out. It's a bad thing, a man to have it figured out in his mind-I'm talking about being set on it, I was set on it. And there wasn't no nervous stuff, I'm not braggin' about it or nothing like that-that's the kind of person I was, and if a person do enough to me today, they'd cause me to kill them. They'd have to do an awful lot to me because I'm more settled, I've got more understanding, and I know more about life, and I know more about what it's about than I did then. I was just a young fellow, hadn't read much, hadn't traveled much, only I just didn't want to be run over and walked on. I'd as much as kill someone as to be walked on. Today I'd let a fellow walk on me a little bit before I'd kill 'im.

So Boggs said as an old man, when he was sober. When he was drunk the old story came out. On that long night in December 1969, troubled by a legal dispute over a cesspool, he suddenly broke out: "I'm going over to the hardware and have them order me a snubnose .38 Special, Smith. The Smith grip. Don't want to kill nobody but if anybody fool with me, they encountering danger." Mike Seeger tried to turn the conversation in a different direction, but Boggs simply turned a corner, and began ruminating over a traffic dispute: "If they hoodoo me too bad, I'm liable to end it pretty quick. If they try to take my driver's license away from me, and my rights, and my insurance, I may walk in that insurance office and clean it up, clean it out." "Don't do it, Dock," Mike Seeger said, sounding scared. "Don't do it." "If I do it I'm a dead man, I know," Boggs said, his words dropping like stones in a lake. "I know my life will be over."

All of this-it was not really about him, Boggs explained again and again. It was about the United States. Patrick Henry no less than John Henry was in his testimony if you knew how to listen. He told the story in the language of a civics book, but with the pride and remorse he brought to his accounts of mayhem and jeopardy, because it was the same story.

I never did want to look at myself, or figure myself to be, to have a chip on my shoulder, or feel that I was better than anybody else, or anything like that, but I always felt this way about it: I felt that I'm just as good as the other person. We's all borned equal. Came into this world with nothin' we go out with nothin'. We all supposed to have the same chance, under our Constitution, in this world. And God give us that, too. Because some person has got a big bank account, fine home, and a lot of the world's goods, it don't make him no better than me, nary a bit better 'n me.

In its way, then, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia was not that far from Dock Boggs's; Jefferson's idealism made a true country, Dock Boggs's country or any- one's. To trace the line is simple enough, but the reality is all switchbacks. As Boggs invoked the Constitution-or, really, the Declaration of Independence-he locked into a strain of American individualism that on his ground in the 1920s had few outlets beyond outlawry, music, or unionism. To be a citizen, Boggs had to stand for himself; if he did so, he might directly risk his life or his reputation, but he might also achieve dignity, democracy's blessing on the ordinary man or woman. Thus, as a teenager, when he saw The Standard Book of Etiquette advertised in a catalog, he saved the $1.50 it cost, ordered it, and read it over and over: "It helped me more than all the books in school."

People would ask me, "Why in the world are you studying stuff like that for, you just a coal miner? Why do you wants to know good English, or how to act at parties?" I said, "I think a coal miner ought to have a little sense, and know how to meet the public, and speak very good English if he's to meet the king, or the president of the United States, he ought to know how to conduct himself, and how to act, if he's figuring on going into the White House."

Thus, as a young man, he stood facing his enemies at the line that once crossed could not be erased.

I don't know why I ain't killed nobody. I just ain't got that in me. Mike, I've had a chance, people talkin' over my shoulder, telling me, "Pour it on, Dock," and me with a .38 Special in my hand, dead cocked. 'Bout the only person that-and they really needed killing. I mean if you count anyone needed killing. "Pour it on, Dock, we'll swear you on, pour it on, pour it on." I say no, no, I won't do it without he goes too far and they never went too far and I never poured it on. And I ain't got no blood on my hands.

Not yet thirty, brooding over his life as his desires came into focus and were blocked, as face-offs over life and death took place and were repeated, as his music began to take shape and win the hint of a response, Boggs found the curse of the sort of individualism, the sort of citizenship, by which he defined himself. His descriptions of studying for the White House and of drawing his gun make it plain: if Boggs truly did not feel himself to be better than anyone else, he felt different.

That was in the Constitution and the Declaration too-between the lines. On the fourth day of July you get to holler: like a cuckoo, you get to make a sound no one wants to hear, or so you might flatter yourself. That fantasy, the thrill within it, might be the very thing that leads you to open your mouth. But part of the charge of that thrill is a kind of terror, because the American fantasy of public mastery contains a fantasy of public suicide. "The land of the free!" D. H. Law- rence wrote, opening his little book on what he called "the old American art- speech"-"speech that contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and nowhere else," an alien quality, a strangeness, that even at home made it strangers' speech-speech that, just because it belonged to the American continent, was not necessarily speech most inhabitants of the American continent wanted on it. "This is the land of the free!" Lawrence crowed: "Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of them."[7] Like the murders he stepped back from, that event too is in Dock Boggs's sound.

Boggs was twenty-nine when agents of the Brunswick company-a major New York label with separate lines for "hillbilly" and "race" records-arrived in Norton to audition mountain talent. Boggs showed up at the Norton Hotel on Kentucky Avenue with a borrowed, second-rate banjo. Even with a half-pint of Guest River whiskey in his stomach he was intimidated by the crowd of pickers and fiddlers: "I stood around and pitched them high as a dollar, dollar and a half at a time-I mean nickels, dimes, and quarters-to hear them play. They wasn't doing nothing but playing and I was working on a coal machine." A. P. Carter of the Carter Family failed the audition; Boggs passed.

He cut eight sides, four 78s, in New York City; the company wanted more but he demurred. Before traveling out of the Virginia mountains for the first time, Boggs went to the Norton haberdashery for a new suit, shoes to hat, socks to underwear; determined to walk the city streets with pride, he insisted on clothes that would draw no northern smiles. Unlike his father, he would not play the country fool. He'd see how those eight sides did. He'd see, it is clear-as one listens to him tell the story to Mike Seeger-if he could make the Yankee peddler un- derstand he couldn't take him. Perhaps it didn't occur to Boggs that the people at Brunswick realized they might never hear his like again, just as he would never again get half as good a chance.

"I thought that I might get started," he said. "That I might make, happen to put out a record that would make a hit, that I might-to where I have an oppor- tunity, I maybe never have to work in the mines no more." It all floods back as he speaks forty years later, his words breaking out of their sentences, the story caught in his throat, along with all the stories untold and lives unlived. In 1927 Dock Boggs and Bascom Lamar Lunsford were two mountain singers recording traditional songs for the same New York record company, and a quarter-century later, in 1952, Boggs's "Sugar Baby" and Lunsford's "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" would appear side by side on the Anthology of American Folk Music, the great collection of forgotten 1920s and '30s recordings that became the founda- tion stone of the folk revival of the 1960s; in between, in 1939, Lunsford sang in the White House for President and Mrs. Roosevelt and King George VI.
 
Boggs quit the mines after his records were released, drew crowds to schools and houses, formed the Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, and signed a booking agent, but the records sold mostly where he carried them. Boggs recorded only four more songs in the 1920s-generic blues and sentimental parlor lyrics written by a Richlands, Virginia, variety store owner named W. E. Myers. Myers would send his "ballets," or poems, to musicians he liked, hoping they would put his words to music. He'd release the results on his own Lonesome Ace label, which featured both a picture of The Spirit of St. Louis and the slogan "WITHOUT A YODEL," because Myers loved Charles Lindbergh and he hated yodeling. Boggs cut "Will Sweethearts Know Each Other There," "Old Rub Alcohol Blues," and two other Myers efforts in Chicago in 1929; then the Depression destroyed the southern economy and Myers went bankrupt. Boggs pressed on, writing to record companies, traveling to Atlanta for a session with Okeh, which shut down just before he arrived, finally surrendering when a recording date with Victor in Louisville fell through because Boggs, knocking on the doors of his now penniless friends and relatives, could not raise the train fare. He drank hard, leaving home, even leaving the state for a week at a time, running to where no one would recognize him on the last day of a ten-day drunk, always returning home, where his wife looked right through him. Days like the one inJenkins became less frequent, more precious in memory and less valuable as life. Again and again his wife gave him the same ultimatum: she refused to sleep with him unless he gave up his music, and finally, not long into the 1930s, he did.

Already, though, he had set down a handful of performances so strangely demanding as to lead a listener to measure what he or she knew of the American voice- any emblematic American voice, Huckleberry Finn's, Robert Johnson's, Franklin Roosevelt's, Barbara Jordan's- against Boggs's, to see if what one knew could pass his test. Already, he had created a small body of work so dissonant that like black gravity it can seem to suck into itself whatever music might be brought to bear upon it. Already, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of a Shaker elder nearly a hundred years before, he "had joined in the sacred dance, every step of which is believed to alienate the enthusiast from earth."[8]
 
In "Country Blues" a wastrel antes up to pay the piper one last time. As he looks back across the ruins of his life he is guilty but distant even from his sins, let alone their punishment, and there is more foreboding in the distance than in the guilt. Perhaps that is what makes the singer's testimony even more convincing than it has to be.

      ... a-drinking and a-shooting and a-gambling
      At home I cannot stay

In the singer's detachment, there's an anticipation of Willie Dixon's satisfied monologue in Howlin' Wolf's otherwise desolate 1961 version of "Going Down Slow" ("Now, I did not say I was a millionaire," Dixon deadpanned, gold tooth gleaming. "But I have spent more money/Than a millionaire"). There is also the cold terror of a man who knows that though he lives he has already drunk himself to death. "All around this old jailhouse is ha'nted," he says, but the claim is nothing to the image he finds to seal it. "Corn whiskey has surrounded my body," he says, wiping out the happy blues fantasy of a river of whiskey and the singer a diving duck; the jail cell fills with whiskey, and as the singer reaches for the last layer of air at the ceiling, he treads his own water.

Judgment Day is coming-but the singer will judge nothing, not the world and not himself. In some part of his soul he knows that if the citizens of his town even notice his death, as decent people they will have to conceal as much envy as delight.

    Go dig a hole in the meadow, good people
    Go dig a hole in the ground
    Come around all you good people
    And see this poor rounder go down

The great Irish tenor John McCormack once defined the element that separated the important singer from the good one: "You have to have the yarrrrragh in your voice." What Boggs has is similar, but less physical, more moral, more secretive: a yowl. It is a smaller, fluttering presence, a creature darting out of a mouth and into the words of a song like a tiny, magical bird; it draws attention not to the singer, as a real person, but away from him, so that he too becomes a presence, a specter, his own haunt. The sound seems loosed from any singer's intentions, any lesson in the song. It is an imp that disorganizes all that is held together by rhythm and melody; it confuses performance with visitation, spinning words away from their lines, mere vowels into huge syllables their words do not recognize and can barely hold. "The whirligig," the English musicologist Wilfrid Mellers captioned a photo Boggs posed for in New York in 1927, and the word brings up lines Alexander Pope wrote in 1728, in The Dunciad: "whirligigs, twirl'd round by skilful swain /Suck the thread in, then yield it out again."[9] That's the sound Boggs makes in "Country Blues." Time and again, a word-"people," "money," "buried," "empty," "troubles"-is cast out, reeled in, the word rolling and then violently bucking like a patient in a mental ward convulsing in restraints. The words break as their unwieldy new phonemes drag the listener out of what- ever life she might have flattered herself to have inhabited and into the air-
   bu rrerrrrrree ee ed -
while some words, seemingly harmless, dive right out of the song.
 
One could speak of Boggs accompanying himself on his banjo, but that's not how it feels. The banjo creates a tremendous internal drive in "Country Blues," carrying the storyteller not forward, to his certain appointment, but elsewhere. Small notes, blues notes weighted down with a kind of nihilistic autonomy, a re- fusal to recognize any maker, any master in the music, barely rise to meet descend- ing vocal phrases, and they don't make it all the way up-rising, at first, as if to support what's being said, then dropping away as if the music, so much older than the words, has heard it all before. Here the banjo can seem to take over the song, racing across the heroic peaks and valleys its quickening pace has revealed, until a ragged word appears to meet it and turn its course. But always, the sound the banjo makes pulls away from the singer, discrediting him as a fact, his performance as an event: the sound is spectral, and for seconds at a time a specter is what it turns the singer into. When this happens, to the degree that he has made himself felt before you, it's as if you can see right through him, as a physical fact, to a nowhere beyond.

The banjo leaps the hollows of the singer's voice, as if to bear him away, pressing a queer sort of fatalism: death is looking him in the face and it is in a hurry. But the singer is telling his own tale and he has dug his own grave. The face of death in his song is his own face, and so, for a last moment, the singer stands his ground against himself. Here the masks he has worn- the banjo's implacable solipsism in the face of the singer's wish to tell his tale to others, the singer's heedless solipsism in the face of the world that will not listen-fall away. The mask ceases to function, it can no longer offer protection, and everything is revealed, even if this must be an incident without narrative, a breach in time that cannot be denied any more than sound and words can describe it.

At the close of the song ("When I am dead and buried / My pale face turned to the sun"- Boggs worms you into the old, common lines, traveling from tune to tune from decade to decade, until you sense the racial transformation they hint at, the distant promise of a man shedding his skin, like a snake, like a lizard in the spring), everything moves faster, as if to say, Get it over with. "Can't you spare me over till another year?" Boggs would ask in "Oh Death," and you can imagine Death's reply: Sure thing, man, what the hell. It's no skin off my back. Anyway you sound like you checked into this hotel a long time ago.

Across the street from the Norton Hotel, boarded up and scheduled for demolition (a move blocked by a citizens' effort to preserve it as a working landmark), I bought a copy of the Coalfield Progress: "A PROGRESSIVE NEWSPAPER, SERVING OUR MOUNTAIN AREA SINCE 1911." The paper announced a lecture by Virginia writer Sharyn McCrumb called "Keepers of the Legends," which was fitting, since keeping legends is what McCrumb does for a living. Born in North Carolina, she started out writing comic mysteries set in England and moved on to "The Ballad Books"-serious, complex mysteries set in the Appalachian highlands, each tak- ing its title from one of the murder ballads that cling to the mountains like smoke. These are painful, historically ambiguous books, where legendary characters take on flesh and modern-day men and women lose layers of their personalities to mythic avatars-as with the third of the series, She Walks These Hills. Named for a line in "Long Black Veil," a 1959 country hit for Lefty Frizzell that The Band revived for their first album, Music from Big Pink, in 1968-"an instant folk song," said co-composer Danny Dill, and the tune did feel too old to date-the book was about mountain women who killed their children, in 1993 and in 1779."'' Pub- lished in the fall of 1994, when the story of Susan Smith's drowning of her sons was breaking, as House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich announced that it was only the welfare state and the ruling Democratic Party that had brought the coun- try to such a pass that a crime so unthinkable was possible, famously declaring that in the face of such a violation, "the only way to get change is to vote Repub- lican," McCrumb's tale threw the national orgy of pious incredulity over Smith's crime into ordinary light. In McCrumb's pages, both "Long Black Veil" and her characters make it plain that what most distinguished Smith from the countless Americans who each year kill their children was her wish to dramatize herself- claiming, before confessing, in a plea that reached every corner of the republic, that her children had been ripped from her arms by a mysterious black stranger- her wish to become, if only for a moment, precisely the sort of mythic figure the old ballads were made for.

In If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, the first of McCrumb's mountain mysteries, a folk singer is talking to a sheriff about one of the old ballads, "Knoxville Girl," which turns out to be a clue to a present-day murder. "It's a local variant of 'The Wexford Girl,' an English broadside," she says.

"It dates from around 1700, but people have always changed the words to fit whatever local crime is current. 'The Oxford Girl."The Cruel Miller.' There's always a new dead girl to sing about. Always a dead girl ... Isn't it funny how in the American versions, they never say why he kills her," she mused. "She's pregnant, of course.... So many songs about that. 'Omie Wise.' 'Poor Ellen Smith.'. . . So many murdered girls. All pregnant, all trusting." [11]
 
"Pretty Polly" was another: the story of young rambler Willie, who one night leads Pretty Polly to her already-dug grave. Perhaps the oldest of the songs in its family, it might be McCrumb's basic text; in English versions Polly's pregnancy is part of the tale. Yet whatever was stripped from the tune in America, something more, perhaps the "fact, a traditional fact," as Bob Dylan once described the pres- ence of mystery in old music, came into play.[12] Take away the fact on which a story turns, and other stories, carrying new wishes and fears, take its place; as they become new facts, the story's characters may begin a great migration, to all the corners of the heart.

As "Pretty Polly" sailed off from its origins as "The Gosport Tragedy" or "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter," Polly could still appear after her murder as a ghost, carrying her baby in her arms; when the ship of the song reached the new world Willie began to move back and forth between Polly's tune and the cuckoo's. Passed along in many different forms for centuries throughout the South, in the late 1 950s and '60s "Pretty Polly" was being sung in all the folk enclaves of the northern cities. Bob Dylan sang it in Minneapolis in 1961; two years later in New York he took the melody for his "Ballad of Hollis Brown," where following a newspaper report of mass murder in South Dakota, Willie changes his name, marries Polly, becomes a farmer, sires five children, and when his farm fails shoots his family and fires his gun into himself. In 1991, in "Polly" on Nirvana's Nevermind, the murdered girl and murdered wife return as one, clinging to life as she is raped and tortured. "Polly want a cracker," Kurt Cobain sneers as one of the rapists. As the rapist sneers, in some collective unconscious of the tradition itself-in that spot where all the victims in all the ballads plot their revenge-he seals his guilt.[13] Singing so idly, he has opened the window for the talking bird that so long before witnessed the murder of a faithless knight by his lover in "Henry Lee," the very old English ballad that in 1993 on World Gone Wrong, an album of blues and folk songs, Bob Dylan recorded as "Love Henry." "Hush up, hush up, my parrot, she cried," Dylan sang of the bird that in many variants of the ballad takes the name "Pretty Poll," "Don't tell no news on me-"

Fly down, fly down, pretty parrot, she cried
And light on my right knee
The doors to your cage shall be flecked with gold
And hung on a willow tree
 
I won't fly down, I can't fly down
And light on your right knee
A girl who would murder her own true love
Would kill a little bird like me. [14]
 
And always a new dead girl, the song always finding room for her. In 1995, the Chicago country singer Cindy Norton, who performs as Ninnie, saw the brother of a childhood friend on the evening news, with the report that he had killed his wife and was found holding their baby, chanting "I didn't mean to do it" over and over. Thus in Ninnie's "Pretty Polly," a dirge so slow each word seems to scrape the ground, Willie has become Gary, who now carries in his arms not a baby, as Polly did in the beginning, but Polly herself: "'I didn't mean to do it, Polly'/ Was all that he could moan / Was all that he could moan / Was all that he could moan."[15]
 
For all of that, there is no sense of pass-it-on in the peculiar aura of Dock Boggs's 1927 recording of "Pretty Polly," and none in the version he recorded in 1963. What one hears is a mythic occurrence, but an occurrence nonetheless: two people appear before you, one kills the other, and no myth bears the crime away. There is a supernatural tinge to the song as it emerges from Boggs's performance, even though nothing unearthly is named or even hinted at; the sulfurous odor comes up because, as Boggs tells it, there seems to be no will in the story, only fate, or ritual.

As Tom Benton recognized from the first, pressing Boggs's Brunswick 78 on anyone who would listen to it-the one with the black and gold lightning-bolt label, "Pretty Polly" on the A side, "Danville Girl" on the B-the record seemed untouched by anything else abroad in the land. You've never heard anything like it, he would say, and it didn't matter if you were Charles Seeger or whoever Benton was chatting up at the New Gallery in New York City-it didn't matter how much you had or hadn't heard. This was an event. It would begin as you listened, and then as you listened it would end.

Bang, bang, bang, the song starts, each note standing out on its own, the banjo tolling its bell, everything slow; as the song moves on Boggs drags out his vowels, this time every one on a flat plane. The man who is telling this story is in no hurry to finish it; he knows what is waiting at the end of every line. There are no surprises, there is no possibility of surprise. That's what is so murderous about the performance.

Boggs's "Pretty Polly" is a killer's confession, queered away from its narrator. "I used to be a rambler, I stayed around in town, I used to be a rambler, I stayed around in town," the singer begins in the first person; he disappears from the story, then reappears in the fourth verse in the third person, where he remains, further and further from his own crime with each spadeful of dirt on Polly's grave. Within that remove is a hint of the catacombed archives of utopia and morbidity beneath American highways of practical enterprise and manifest destiny. The small, circular pattern the banjo traces around each breath of the rambler's tale reaches deep into the nineteenth century for the single ancestor of its cadence. It is an echo of the great chant of the Shakers, "Come, Life, Shaker Life."

The Shakers were like one of the old British ballads come to life and seeking death-seeking deliverance. With dim origins in the Brethren of the Free Spirit of medieval Europe and the Ranters of mid-seventeenth-century England, they emerged in about 1769 as a tiny dissident sect in Manchester. Led by a young charismatic called Mother Ann Lee, they traveled to America in 1774, and despite constant, virulent persecution by both officials and the public at large-"More than once," the historian Stephen J. Stein writes, "Ann Lee was dragged from her bed, abused by mobs, and examined physically to see if she was a man, a woman, or a witch"-began to flourish in the years after the Revolution.[16] Of all American perfectionists they were the most severe. The heart, a follower remem- bered Ann Lee saying, in words Emily Dickinson could have used, was "like a cage of unclean birds"; to the Shakers, the world was evil, and God in heaven was waiting for true revelators to end it.[17] Judgment was no day but history seeking its final curtain, and judgment was underway. To do God's work, the human race, corrupted beyond grace, would have to end itself. Thus the Shakers came together to wait out their time on earth in forbearance of all desire. The sect would bring more and more of God's creatures into its fold, and humankind would begin to dwindle, until that time "when," as Hawthorne had a Shaker elder say, "the mission of Mother Ann shall have wrought its full effect,-when children shall no more be born and die, and the last survivor of mortal race, some old and weary man like me, shall see the sun go down, nevermore to rise on a world of sin and sorrow! "[18]
 
A death that pure is in "Pretty Polly," with Boggs's hard count-"Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly, come take a walk with me / Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly, come take a walk with me"-matching the count of the Shaker plea, taken fast, the high voices of Shaker sisters reaching, reaching, shaking, whirling:

Come life, Shaker life
Come life eternal
Shake, shake out of me
All that is carnal[19]
 
But while there is a wholeness in the Shaker chant that makes it shine, a wholeness that folds the attainment of the last trump into the wish for it, in "Pretty Polly" the singsong cadence pits each phrase of words or melody, voice or rhythm, against whatever phrase precedes or follows it. An irrational, insoluble opposition is established, and it becomes the premise of the entire performance.

As clearly as the narrator sees, the listener, like Polly, is given only haze. You can imagine that Polly's pregnancy is missing from the American song not because of Puritan prudery, but because of the secret Puritan recognition of those places in the heart that cannot be reached, wishes that can't be explained, not even ex- plained away-you can imagine that the motive has been removed from the song because that way the song is scarier. Or is it that the tension between the singer's foreknowledge and his victim's trust, his second sight and her blindness-a gap that only death can close-makes a mystery that is the song's true subject? The evil in Boggs's singing, its psychotic momentum, far outstrips any need to do this to achieve that; its only purpose, you can believe, is the announcement of its own existence, a revelation that is its own reward. "Love and produce! Love and produce!" "Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!" Given the chance to destroy, Boggs's performance asks, who wouldn't take it?
Boggs's drama is sadistic in its pauses-the pauses of a man who, with his lover waiting at the end of Kentucky Avenue, admires his reflection as he passes the store windows of his town, the narrator stepping back from his story to gaze upon his own loveliness. It is preordained; that is the beauty of it. He will lead her over hills and valleys so deep. Taking her by the hand, he will walk her through the woods, until they are near the banks of the river, and show her her grave. But before that he will pause, and watch the story begin. "Oh, where is Pretty Polly?" he asks, as if he doesn't know, as if already there isn't blood on his hands, the hands he already rubs together, not to rub away a stain, but in anticipation: "Oh, yonder she stands."

The singer's mask emerges from the dynamic of the new world. In a new nation all are presumed free to invent themselves, to make themselves up out of nothing, just as, with each unspoken wish or finished act, all are making up their country. That is the credo, and no matter how many are at any time forbidden to utter it, American women, American blacks, and on, and on, sooner or later it will shape them all, and all will say it out loud, as blessing or curse: the presump- tion of self-invention is the presumption of beginning with nothing, which is the presumption of equality. As a credo it is an argument you have with yourself far more than with others, to convince yourself, since no one would publicly profess disbelief: "We's all borned equal. We all supposed to have the same chance, under our Constitution." "Negroes were not less American than anybody else," the omni- American critic Albert Murray said to interviewer Tony Scherman in 1995. "They expected the same thing." "But there was-is-a huge contradiction between the ideology of equality and the reality," Scherman said. "That's not as important as you might think," Murray said. "We got all those Negroes segregated? That's un- important, compared to the fact that they shouldn't be. It's not the fact that they're segregated but the fact that if they were segregated in another society, it wouldn't even matter. Can't you see that?"[20]
 
The old America of the founders, of the Puritan, the pioneer, and the lawgiver, was always present, Murray said-it was all about "free enterprise. Don't reduce it to economics; I'm talking about free endeavor: an experimental attitude, an openness to improvisation. The disposition to approach life as a frontiersman, you see, so piety does not hold you back. You can't be overrespectful of established forms; you're trying to get through the wilderness to Kentucky"-and the point was not "that if something doesn't work for everybody, it doesn't work. The im- portant thing is that the official promise existed. 'All men are created equal.' Now you had something to appeal to."[21]
 
This was the America shared by a Harlem jazz theorist and an Appalachian banjo stylist; its ideal was the birthright ofboth. The trap set by this ideal, though, was made especially for people like these, for the person who had something to say, for the artist, for whoever used the common tongue to speak what in any given place or time might sound like a foreign language. Lived out, among one's fellow citizens, the presumption of equality can freeze into the presumption that all are the same, that all see the good in the same way, that all want the same things for the same reasons. Because this can never be true, the presumption that all are the same becomes the need of each uniquely perverse individual-the black intellectual preaching Jeffersonianism in Cracktown, the white Virginia miner hoarding the claims of death against life's blandishments-to appear as if he or she were just like everybody else. Thus the mask of equality covers subjectivity, and the masked voice that issues from it, speaking quietly, reasonably, without affect, turns all other voices into those of cranks, and so when the reasonable person one day becomes a crank and begins to rant, when he kills his family and himself, when he walks into the place of work where those who have troubled his life stand and kills them all, he says no real thing. He has simply removed himself from the community; giving speeches that make no sense and performing acts that have no meaning, he is at best part human.

The mask that turns others into cranks is the mask Dock Boggs removed to sing "Pretty Polly," or that the song as he felt it dissolved as he sang. "Nothing will protect you" in "the old America," Steve Erickson writes, no "secret identity or reconstructed tissues or unmarked grave or faked death."[22] All of those things are present in Boggs's deepest performances; "Country Blues," "Danville Girl," "Sugar Baby," and "Pretty Polly" are nothing if not faked deaths. But they were not made for protection-they are the faked deaths of the defiant sinner, the unwilling killer, the determined flagellant, the rounder too smart for his own good, all placed together on the confessor's block by a voice that in its gothic tangle says what they remain afraid to say.

Driving around Norton, you can see the marks of a cultural war, the war between the likes of "Country Blues" and the churches and signs that dot the landscape: JESUS IS THE ANSWER, JESUS IS WAITING, or, in a hollow, a modest, somehow implacable white frame house, with three stark crosses underneath the words HOUSE OF PRAYER. Against the obvious and occult desires you can hear in Boggs's music-the wish for a private exile, the lust for an endless drunk, the secret fantasy of a public unmasking of the face no one wants to see-the church promised a world where all would stand unmasked in fellowship before God, in a gathering of scorned saints recognizable only by God and by themselves: the nihilist singer's final temptation, beckoning him to surrender his refusal. With his music far behind him, Boggs finally did. In 1942 he experienced conversion and joined his wife's church, the Old Regular Baptists, the fifteen thousand or so self- named "peculiar people" who range from the southwestern part of West Virginia to the Boggs's patch of Kentucky and Virginia.[23] Boggs became a community man. In the worst weather, in the worst times, he and others collected food and clothes for those who had none and carried them over bad roads in the dead of night; speaking of it, Boggs broke down weeping at the memory of the misery he served. In later years, when Boggs returned to his music, members of the Free Pentecostal Holiness Church of God on Guest River, his church then, would send him un- signed letters condemning him for his apostasy.

 "He's going to sober up now, he said," Sara Boggs said in December 1969, the morning after Boggs's long night of drinking, when he could not stop talking. "I'm going to get him started back to going to church again," she told Mike Seeger. "He'll be a different man when you see him again." "I couldn't be much of a different man," Boggs said. "Whenever you're upright, honest, fair and square, what else can you be?" He began to rail against false prophets, preachers who took money from people whose faces they never looked into. "It's a lot worse, that preachin' is, than musicians," he said. "They do earn the money. They have to play for it." "I want to get at peace with myself and the Lord, you see," Boggs said. "That there is the main thing that I want to do. I'm not wantin' to make no big showin' as I'm such a big Christian, or anything like that. But I want to live a life that the people can see the sunshine shinin' through me. I mean, understand me. Not live in a shell, or live a hypocritic life." To make a living, he was still singing "Sugar Baby" and "Pretty Polly" in 1969, and though there was no shell on those songs or hypocrisy inside them, no sunshine could shine through them, either. Around Norton twenty-five years later, there wasn't a song on the radio that would have dreamed of writing a check Jesus couldn't cash.

Notes
Adapted from the author's Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, and London: Picador, 1997). With thanks to Barry O'Connell for his generous and gracious assistance.

1. All quotations by Dock Boggs are transcribed from interviews with Boggs conducted by Mike Seeger between 1963 and 1969 and used by special permission of Mike Seeger and Smithsonian Folkways, Center for Folklife Programs, 955 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, D.C. 20560. For Boggs's songs cited, see the discography following these notes.

2. Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll (1971; reprint, New York, 1994), 123.

3. The phrase "primitive-modernist" is that of Memphis bandleader Jim Dickinson, though in his notes to Howlin' Wolf's Memphis Days-The Definitive Edition, Vol. 2 (Sun/ Bear Family, Germany), he gives the words a different meaning than I do: "Wolf brings out of his band an ensemble counterpoint unlike anything else in the blues. His voice seems to hang in the air, and make the room rumble with echo. His singing is so powerful that between the vocal lines the compressor-limiter through which the mono recordings were made sucks the sound of the drum and the French harp up into the hole in the audio mix. Notes blend together and merge into melody lines that are not being 'played' by any one instrument. Wolf is not bound by the three-chord blues pattern, and often seems to erase the bar lines of western music. He is a Primitive- Modernist, using chants and modal harmonies of the dark ritualist past brought up from Mother Africa and slavery through electric amplifiers."

4. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York, 1964), viii.

5. Ibid., 83-84.
 
6. Karl Marx quoted in Guy Debord, "Theory of the Derive" (1956/58), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, 1981), 50.

7. Lawrence, Studies, 3.

8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Shaker Bridal" (1837), in The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, 1937), 1010.
 
9. Alexander Pope quoted in The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "whirligig."

10. Danny Dill quoted in Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy (New York, 1975), 351.

11. Sharyn McCrumb, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (New York, 1991), 160.
 
12. Bob Dylan quoted in Nat Hentoff, "The Playboy Interview," Playboy, March 1966, collected in Bob Dylan: The Early Years: A Retrospective, ed. Craig McGregor (1972; re- print, New York, 1990), 130.

13. Nirvana, "Polly," on Nevermind (DGC, 1991).

14. Bob Dylan, "Love Henry," on World Gone Wrong (Columbia, 1993).

15. Ninnie, "Pretty Polly," on Cotton Candy Country (Ninnie, 1995).

16. Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 24.

17. Mother Ann Lee recalled in ibid., 27.

18. Hawthorne, "The Shaker Bridal," 1013.

19. "Come Life, Shaker Life," on Early Shaker Spirituals (Rounder, recorded 1963).

20. Albert Murray quoted in Tony Scherman, "The Omni-American," American Heritage, September 1996, 74.

21. Ibid., 73, 74.

22. Steve Erickson, Amnesiascope (New York, 1996), 127.

23. "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew for the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light"; 1 Pet. 2.9. "Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works"; Titus 2.14.

D i s c o g r a p h y (Only available recordings are noted.)

Of Dock Bogg's original 1920s recordings, "Sugar Baby" and "Country Blues" were included on the Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways Records, 1952, compiled by Harry Smith, a six-LP set), which is scheduled for reissue on six CDs by Smithsonian Folkways Records in 1997. "Country Blues" is also anthologized on Country: Nashville-Dallas-Hollywood, 1927-1942 (Fremeaux & Associes, France), while Boggs's "Pretty Polly" is anthologized on Folksongs: Old Time Country Music!USA!1926-1944 (Fremeaux & Associes, France). Of Boggs's later record- ings, Dock Boggs-Legendary Banjo Player and Singer (Folkways, 1963), which in- cludes Boggs's first recording of "Oh Death," Excerpts from Interviews with Dock Boggs (Folkways, 1964), Dock Boggs, Vol. 2 (Folkways, 1965), and Dock Boggs, Vol. 3 (Folkways, 1970) are out of print, but can be ordered as CDs or specially boxed cassettes, with photocopies of original cover art and liner notes, from Smithsonian Folkways, Center for Folklife Programs, 955 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, D.C. 20560, tel. 202/287-3262. New Lost City Ramblers and Friends (Vanguard), includes a live Boggs performance of "Oh Death" (with Mike Seeger); Georgia Sea Island Singers (New World) features a powerful a cappella gospel version of the song by Bessie Jones, recorded in 1960 by Alan Lomax. The video anthology Shady Grove: Old Time Music from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky (Vestapol/Rounder) in- cludes 1966 footage of Boggs performing "Pretty Polly," "Country Blues," and the parlor tune "I Hope I Live a Few More Days."