William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

WG Yeah, Truman Capote could do it. People were intimidated by the tape recorder. He would test himself. Early on he would tape things then he would write it and then listen to the tape and see how close he came.

JMW You can come pretty damn close.

WG It’s hard to go back and go over stuff. That’s why I’ve never rewritten or tried to go back over that Natchez piece. (He is referring to a book he was working on several years before, a novel about the early days on the Natchez Trace. He had one scene where the characters come up to a swollen river that he thought was the best thing he had ever written. However the manuscript was stolen and has never been recovered.) It just seems like ground I have already covered. I’ll probably do it sooner or later, especially since I don’t have another idea for a novel. I’ve finished Lost Country and now will have to start on another.

JMW I’m trying to remember was Bloodworth’s band in Provinces of Night the Skillet Lickers?

WG No, it was the Fruit Jar Drinkers. I had that woman asking him, “You don’t have a drink on you, do you Mr. Bloodworth”. And it said, “Of course he did.” What would a Fruit Jar Drinker be without a drink?

JMW Weren’t the Skillet Lickers in there somewhere. Were they a real band?

WG They were a great band. They were like the Beatles of their day, like the rural Beatles They sold a lot of records; they were from Georgia. They had a sound that nobody else has been able to duplicate. My brother and I talked about this once. He was a big Skillet Lickers fan and had all these records. They figured out how to have more than one fiddle player and most of the other bands only had one. They didn’t even have a banjo player just guitar and fiddle with an extra fiddle that made it sound different. I want to see if Oxford would like me to write about the Skillet Lickers before people forget about all that stuff.

JMW Are the Skillet Lickers on the Harry Smith album? (Harry Smith compiled and edited the three album Anthology of American Folk Music , commonly known as the Harry Smith Anthology, which came out in 1952.)

WG No.

JMW I don’t think I have ever heard them.

WG They have the best version of Casey Jones I have ever heard and I have heard a bunch of versions of Casey Jones. They were sort of humorous and did country comedy and sometimes they would just do straight songs. There were a lot of people who imitated them, I found that out when I was living in that trailer and I was writing a piece on the Delmore Brothers. I researched a bunch of that stuff about that time and found out about some of the other groups. I’ve got anthologies with songs that sound like the Skillet Lickers.

JMW Did you hear that kind of music when you were a kid, either on the radio or being played anywhere around Lewis County?

WG Nobody wanted to be backward, or consciously backward. The music I heard as a kid came from a stack of records my Daddy had, a bunch of old 78’s: Jimmy Rogers, the Skillet Lickers and the Carter Family. We had an old crank up phonograph. I listened to the radio all the time but I didn’t like country music; I was listening to pop music. When Elvis Presley came along it kind of reordered my world. Not the later Elvis but the stuff he did for Sun Records, that was great stuff. I went from there to folk music. It was what I thought was real folk music but it was like the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters and Peter, Paul and Mary. When I first got into Dylan I went backwards. I read this thing that said a lot of his influences came from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music so I got into that and I ended up going into it backwards.

JMW Harry sure opened that door for a lot of people.

WG Oh yeah.

JMW So now it seems like the Kingston Trio and all that were just doing popularized versions of songs from Harry’s Anthology. Is that right or not?

WG They did some; how they got famous was nobody was buying Dylan records because people thought that he couldn’t sing with his raspy voice. Well Albert Grossman was Bob Dylan’s manager and he thought how can I get this stuff out over the radio so he formed a group. He knew these folk singers around the Village so he put three of them together, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow. So Grossman put them together to do Dylan type songs.

JMW Wow that worked great huh?

WG Yeah with “Blowing in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”. Grossman was a very smart man; apparently he was not a very likeable man but he was certainly smart at what he did. He managed Dylan perfectly; he kept him appropriate for the times and didn’t try to make him too accessible. He never tried to make him be more congenial to the press or anything like that, he just let him be who he was. Of course Dylan would be who he was anyway.

I know a record I would like to play for you, my daughter drove me up to Columbia to go to the Doctor for a check up. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said to take me over to the sound shop and I was looking for this record called “I’m Not There” and they had it on sale. It is the soundtrack to the movie and boy is it good. I figured it would be a bunch of really crappy covers of Dylan songs but not so, it was good versions of the songs with a bunch of relatively famous people and then it had more obscure people that you don’t hear all that often. It must have twenty-five songs, plus it has Bob Dylan’s version of “I’m Not There” which has heretofore been available only on bootlegs on the Basement Tapes .

I don’t think I get it. I read a book by Greil Marcus one time, you probably read it, called Invisible Republic where he talks about that song and goes on and on about it. So I listened closely to that song to try to hear what Greil Marcus heard and I like the song, it is an ok song but I don’t hear all the significance, which is not to say that it’s not there.

When we go by Barnes and Nobles I want to pick up a copy of Best Mystery Stories of 2009. It might have a Joyce Carol Oates story in it. It seems like forever since I bought any magazines, I subscribe to some magazines but I am hardly ever where they sell magazines, I want a copy of No Depression and see what kinds of CD’s are with the magazines. My subscription to Fortean Times is out but I won’t buy one of those, they cost over $11 on the newsstand and they aren’t that big anyway.

Mark Smirnoff of Oxford American is making noises about me writing something. We had a little falling out over my Dylan piece. (Smirnoff wanted him to cut the piece significantly and he refused and instead sold it to Paste who made it the cover article and printed it in full.) He has been calling every now and then. Sonny Brewer told him I was sick and his girlfriend called and then he called from Little Rock. He wants me to do something and I want to do it. I like being in there, they still have me as a continuing writer. Anyhow Sonny is coming up for a reading next month. He will stay over and then carry me up to the reading and then stay over again that night. He is on a never-ending tour.

He told me a story about his dog. I’ve been down there a lot and had seen the dog so he has written a memoir of the dog and he calls it Cormac, which of course is the dog’s name. He really thought the world of that dog and the dog comes up missing and he goes to all kinds of efforts to find it; he even hired a private eye, and the private eye discovered that the dog had been kidnapped and to make a long story short the dog eventually turned up in Connecticut and he tracked him down and he had a lawyer to get the dog back and prove that it was his dog. The dog had been neutered but it was still his dog.

He told me this long story and I said “Damn Sonny, you ought to write about your dog.” So he wrote a whole book about it. I’ve seen it in bookstores. There’s one called A Sound Like Thunder and I tried it. He has been everything and no telling what he may do; he may be a movie producer or director or anything.