Foxhunters

Hinkel Schillings and Shade Pate are uncle and nephew. For over sixty years, along the Texas-Louisiana border, they have gone fox hunting. Several times a week they sit around a fire from sunset to dawn listening to their hounds bark. That’s all there is to fox hunting — listening. There’s no kill. A pack of hounds simply chase a fox around and around in circles through the woods until the dogs get tired and return to their cages. The dogs bark all the while — the hunters call it “giving mouth.”

The men know the voice of each of their hounds and can tell from the bark how close each dog is to the fox. The hunters root for their favorite dog, reminisce of hounds of old, and tell stories. When a visitor is present, the men spend a great deal of time baying and yelping — imitating the barks of hounds past and present to illustrate the finer points of the sport. But mostly they just sit quietly and absorb “the music of the chase.”

Recorded in Logan, Texas. Premiered February 8, 1993, on All Things Considered.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Brewer Bell Museum

Virginia Belle Brewer, founder of the Brewer Bell Museum, has been collecting bells for almost sixty years. She now has nearly four thousand bells from fifty states and seventy-six countries.

Brewer opened her museum in 1973, but in 1996 an illness forced Virginia to close it down. Despite this, she vows to keep the bells together so as not to “split up the family.” In this documentary, Virginia Brewer discusses her love for her bells and the sacrifices she had to make to keep her not-so-booming business open. As she puts it, “I feel like the Lord intended me to share the beauty of bells with others. When the time comes, I feel He’ll work things out so the bells can be carried on long, long, long after I’m gone. That gives me the steam to keep on keeping on.”

Recorded in Canton, Texas. Premiered December 23, 1992, on All Things Considered.

Update on Brewer Bell Museum

Stephen Housewright, a friend of Virginia Brewer, sent the following letter to Sound Portraits on March 26, 2001.

I began visiting Virginia Brewer a year ago after overhearing a conversation about her at the library: “She’s not doing so well,” someone said. I remembered her from about ten years ago, when my late partner and I had gone by her shop to look for some bells for him to use in his music. Her love of bells and her determination to “hold on” had impressed us both, and so I thought I’d drop in and check on her.

Well, she captured my attention and my affection immediately. She was sick, lying helpless in bed and dependent upon caregivers that came and went, but she remained confident that things would somehow work out so that her bell collection could remain intact and available for people to appreciate after her death. I’d brought a loaf of homemade bread for her, which turned out to be a good idea since she always had her main meal at noon — a big bowl of soup. I’ve repeated the visit — and the bread delivery — every week since.

From time to time we’d talk about what would become of the bells, and the question became urgent as we watched the hastening deterioration of the museum building. There had been an extraordinary amount of rain here in Texas since the beginning of fall, and the old building was steadily coming down on top of the collection that Virginia had spent her life assembling. “The Lord will protect them,” Virginia would say, “but He can’t look after them forever.”

Her prayers were answered when the State of Texas appropriated funds to the city of Canton through a program known as “Main Street,” which gives grants to small towns to help them preserve their local heritage. Canton applied for and received a sum that will be used to spruce up the square and preserve our history, and a representative from the city visited Virginia to ask about the bell collection.

After a few weeks of deliberation and bargaining, the city agreed to accept the bell collection in exchange for maintaining Virginia’s house and yard and waiving her monthly water bill for the remainder of her life. It also agreed to keep the collection intact, and if for any reason the city is no longer able to maintain the collection, the bells will be given to the state.

I happened to stop by a couple of weeks ago while the collection was being moved. Volunteers were carefully packing the bells for transport to the old (and long idle) movie theater just off the square. Shelves and cabinets are being constructed to display the bells, which some say is worth close to $300,000. Virginia talks of attending the opening in a new dress and with a new hair-do.

When I went by last week, she was looking over a small collection of bells someone had sent her after reading about her in Holding On. She showed me one beautiful brass bell whose handle depicts a Medieval pilgrim on horseback, above the legend “Chaucer.” “He was an English poet,” I helpfully supplied.

“Yes, I know,” Virginia came back. “Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,” she added.
What a lady!

Stephen Housewright

March 26, 2001

They Shall Take Up Serpents

“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.”
Mark 16:17-18

For the past eighty years, believers living in the Appalachian hills of the southeastern US have incorporated handling serpents and drinking strychnine (a “salvation cocktail”) into their religious beliefs and practice. While serpent handling has been outlawed in all but two southern states, there remain several thousand practicing snake handlers today, most of whom live in poor coal mining communities. In accordance with their faith, handlers refuse medical treatment when bitten. Nevertheless, there have been fewer than 100 confirmed deaths in the history of snake handling.

In They Shall Take Up Serpents, we hear the voices of believers and nonbelievers alike, widows who have lost their husbands to snakebites and wives who fear the same fate. The documentary is an intimate portrait of unwavering faith and religious ecstasy virtually unknown in mainstream American traditions.

Recorded in West Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia. Premiered November 30, 1992, on All Things Considered.

High-School Moms

About a year after Beverly Donofrio’s memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys, was published, she received a call from Joanne Savio from the Educational Program for Pregnant and Parenting Adolescents — EPPPA for short. Donofrio’s memoir was about growing up as a teen mother on welfare and putting herself through college. Savio had read it and implored Donofrio to visit the unique high school. “We got nothing but pregnant and parenting girls here,” she said. “They’re real pissers. I’ve read to them from your book. They’re going love you. You’re a success story. You got to say yes.”

EPPPA was a very different school than the one Donofrio had attended. At EPPPA, a student could walk into the school pregnant, take all the academic classes required for graduation plus a coarse in parenting, have pre- and postnatal exams, deliver her baby, and return to classes two weeks later (six if she’s had a cesarean). In 1992, Donofrio visited the school and met with the students, bringing her tape recorder along.

Recorded in Oakdale, Long Island. Premiered April 12, 1992, on All Things Considered.

Jefferson County Gospel Quartets

Jefferson County, Alabama, a true crossroads of steel and song, is recognized as the birthplace and capital of a cappella gospel singing. This style of music emerged in the early 20th Century when a boom in the coal and steel industries led to a massive migration of African-American workers to Jefferson County. The workers were housed in segregated company towns and worked for meager wages. With little available recreation, they soon formed singing groups, and Jefferson County established its preeminence in the gospel world.

Although Jefferson County’s reign as a gospel center came to an end long ago, two of the oldest gospel quartets still remain in Bessemer, Alabama: The Sterling Jubilees (started in 1929 at the Bessemer Pipe Plant) and The Four Eagle Gospel Singers (started in 1938 at the U.S. Steel Plant in Fairfield, Alabama). Narrator Joe Watson has been the lead singer of The Four Eagle Gospel Singers since 1946.

Recorded in Jefferson County, Alabama. Premiered February 22, 1992, on All Things Considered.

“BIRMINGHAM SOUND” HAD PROFOUND INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC

by Henry Willett
June, 1994

In Jefferson County, Alabama, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century, there developed a tradition of African-American a cappella quartet singing that was to have such widespread influence on the recorded gospel music industry that numerous record companies applied “Birmingham” to recording artists who were not even from Alabama, hoping to take advantage of that city’s reputation as the heartland of gospel quartet music.

With a rich, fluid and mellow intertwining of voices, the Birmingham Sound” is a direct-line ancestor to the most popular versions of African-American harmony singing, from the Ink Spots and the Platters to the Temptations, Take Six and Boyz 2 Men.

In 1926, the Birmingham Jubilee Singers traveled from Jefferson County to record in Atlanta, after being discovered by a Columbia Records talent scout. They achieved popularity nation wide and back home through their live radio broadcasts over stations WAPI, WVRC and WJLD.

In the following two decades, a number of other Jefferson County Quartets–the Famous Blue Jay Singers, the Dunham Jubilee Singers, and the Four Great Wonders–followed in the footsteps of the Birmingham Jubilees as immensely popular recording artists. The “Birmingham Sound” was nurtured by the historical migration of African-Americans from the farm to the industrial mill and mine settlements of Jefferson County in the early twentieth century.

Quartet “trainers,” such as Charles Bridges, R. C. Foster, Son Dunham, and Gilbert Porterfield, products of music teachers from Tuskegee and Fisk, in turn taught legions of quartet singers, combining those traditional harmony lesson stressing timing and articulation with many of the more modern influences of jazz. The result was a dynamic new sound which emerged from Jefferson County’s mining camps and mills towns and became immensely popular in urban areas across the country, from New York to Los Angeles.

The “Birmingham Sound,” characterized by close harmony, a stressing of vocal attack and release, exchanging lead vocals from singer to singers, and a “pumping” rhythmic bass vocal, set the standard for gospel quartet music.

While a handful of Jefferson County quartets vigorously pursued recording and touring careers, dozens of other quartets were content to remain at home performing only on weekends. According to gospel music historian Doug Seroff, “During the 1930s and 1940s practically every block in the black neighborhoods from Dolomite to Leeds boasted at least one quartet.”

Those quartets who chose not to remain at home carried the “Birmingham Sound” far and wide. The Kings of Harmony, originally from Winona, are credited with introducing the New York area to gospel quartet. The Famous Blue Jay Singers of Birmingham, led by Silas Steele, moved to Dallas in the 1930s and Chicago in the 1940s. The Heavenly Gospel Singers of Birmingham relocated first to Cleveland and finally to Los Angeles. Legendary quartet trainer Gilbert Porterfield, who had, in the 1920s, performed with the Red Rose Quartet of Bessemer, took the “Birmingham Sound” to New Orleans where he was a gifted lead singer and arranger with the Four Great Wonders of New Orleans and the New Orleans Chosen Five.

With the emergence of popular music and rhythm-and-blues in the 1950s, and its influence on contemporary gospel, the more traditional quartet music suffered several decades of decline. However, beginning in the early 1980s, there developed a new interest in and enthusiasm for the “Birmingham Sound.”

Sparked by a 1980 Jefferson County Quartet Reunion concert organized by Doug Seroff and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, older active quartets, including the Sterling Jubilees and the Four Eagles (who, in 1994 will be celebrating their 65th and 55th anniversaries respectively) have found new audiences while inspiring younger groups, like the Birmingham Sunlights, who are bringing fresh innovations to the music.

Jefferson County’s sturdy a cappella gospel quartet heritage will be showcased at Birmingham’s City Stages Festival on June 17-19, with performances by the Sterling Jubilees, the Birmingham Sunlights, the Shelby County Big Four, the Delta-Aires and the Four Eagles.

Alabama Folkways welcomes readers’ comments and contributions. Write: Folkways, Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, 410 North Hull Street, Montgomery, AL 36104.

Mississippi Jews

Almost every Friday at about 7:45 p.m., auxiliary police officer Joe Erber calls in “Ten-Six” (or “busy”) to his dispatcher. He cruises over to West Market Street on the outskirts of downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, and strides into Ahavath Rayim, the last Orthodox synagogue in the state. Erber grabs a prayer shawl off the rack, kisses it, and drapes it over his police uniform. Then he makes his way to the pulpit and begins the services: Hebrew with a drawl. For years, Erber has served as the de facto rabbi of Ahavath Rayim, spiritual leader to a once-thriving congregation that has dwindled down to almost nothing.

It’s a story that can be found in small communities throughout the South. At the turn of the century, Jewish immigrants poured into towns like Greenwood, seeking relief from the stifling tenement life up North. They arrived as peddlers, saved money, opened up stores. By the 1930s, Jews formed the backbone of the merchant class in hundreds of these towns. Soon after, though, young Jewish people began leaving, opting for the larger cities. By the early 1950s, this small-town Jewish exodus was in full swing. Today, the exodus nearly complete.

Note: For the first time in well over 100 years, it appears there will be no minyan in Greenwood, Mississippi, to celebrate the high holy days in 2001; there are now less than ten Jewish men over the age of thirteen in the area. If you or someone you know can help Congregation Ahavath Rayim make minyan this year, please e-mail Joe Erber at [email protected].

Recorded in Greenwood, Mississippi. Premiered December 20, 1991, on All Things Considered.

Joe Franklin

Joe Franklin, the man credited with creating the television talk show, has hosted over 28,000 episodes of The Joe Franklin Show and has interviewed over 150,000 guests, some famous and some . . . not. From his Times Square office filled with chaos and clutter, he fields about 1,000 calls a day from hopefuls hoping to land a spot on his show. “Of course, most of them can’t be on, but I hate to hurt their feelings so I never say ‘good-bye.’ I just hang up. So that way they feel the conversation hangs in limbo until we chat again.”

Over the years, Sound Portraits producers have met some pretty impressive characters. Unbelievable characters. But the greatest of them all is Joe Franklin. Just give a call to his office (the number’s listed) and you’ll see: “Hello? Who’s this?” he’ll ask. “[Fill in your name], my friend!” he’ll exclaim, as if he’s known you all his life. “Listen to me closely now. Whatever you want, it’s automatic. Listen, [Fill in your name] — I’m very busy. Very busy. Call me back at three o’clock exactly. You swear? Don’t forget now — very important. Critical! God bless you.” SLAM.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered September 8, 1991, on All Things Considered.

Ward 2-West

Ward 2-West presents an honest and direct profile of twenty-six men, all found “not guilty by reason of insanity,” all incarcerated at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, a hospital for the criminally insane located on Ward’s Island near Manhattan.

Ward 2-West houses a group of men who have committed some of the most notorious and gruesome crimes in New York City’s history. Are people capable of committing monstrous acts of cruelty monsters themselves? In 1990, Producer David Isay spent one week, day and night, with the men of Ward 2-West to better understand the circumstances behind such extreme criminal behavior. Isay found that nearly every patient at Kirby had lived a life of almost unspeakable physical and mental abuse before committing his own crime.

The sensitive portraits that emerge from the documentary present disturbed men whose personal suffering cannot be denied — they speak with hauntingly human voices that we would all rather forget.

Recorded in Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Hospital, New York City. Premiered August 25, 1991, on SoundPrint.

Last Day at the Automat

A chapter of American history quietly drew to a close in New York City on April 9, 1991, when the country’s last Horn & Hardart Automat shut down. During the Depression, there were hundreds of these Automats, mostly in New York City, dispensing macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and coconut cream pies from their famous windowed, coin-operated compartments. David Isay visited the last of them, on 200 East 42nd Street, on the day it closed.

Recorded in New York City.

Cynical Santa

It’s early in the morning at Santa central, an auditorium in the headquarters of the Volunteers of America, New York’s largest supplier of Santas. For 80 years now, the Volunteers of America has been placing down-on-their-luck Santas on the streets of midtown Manhattan to raise money for charity.

In one corner of the auditorium sits a thin, moustached, half-dressed Santa hunched intently over the day’s racing form. His graying hair is cut short, he’s missing a front tooth, and his face furrows deeply each time he frowns — which he does a lot — as he suits up for the day’s work. This is Eddie Surwinski. Not your typical Kris Kringle, he prefers to be known as Cynical Santa. And at 8:15 precisely, he’s out the door.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 23, 1990, on All Things Considered.