The Great Shark Hunt, page 49
Rolling Stone #171, October 10, 1974
III
Traveler Hears Mountain Music Where It’s Sung
Renfro Valley, Ky.—The Bluegrass country is cold and brown in the winter. Night comes early and the horses are taken inside to sleep in heated barns. The farmers sit around pot bellied stoves and pass the time with a banjo and a jug and sometimes a bit of talk. Not many visitors in the winter. Not much to do, either.
Here in Rock Castle county the biggest event of the week is the Saturday night show in a little spot on the map called Renfro Valley, a big barn and a recording studio on U. S. highway 25, about 50 miles south of Lexington.
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Ten years ago they flocked to this place like pilgrims to the shrine—not just from the nearby Bluegrass towns, but from all over the nation. They came for the country music and the All-Day Sings and to get a look at the Old Kentucky Barn Dance they’d heard so often on their radios at home. It got so big that 15,000 people showed up one summer Saturday night, and a national magazine sent down a team of cameras to record the scene for posterity.
Now perhaps 150 will show up. They come down from Berea and Crab Orchard, and Preachersville, and from places like Egypt and Shoulder-blade across the mountains. Not many from out of state. Not even enough to justify using the barn, which is closed until spring, when the crowds will pick up again.
* * *
Only the locals show up in the winter. They come with guitars and bass fiddles and old songbooks, and they gather in the studio to do a radio show that you can still hear in some cities, but not in so many as you could a few years back. The show starts around 7 and winds up at 9:30—just about the time the hillbilly singers and the Bluegrass banjo champs are warming up at Gerde’s in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Folks around here don’t have much time for strangers. You ask what goes on at Renfro Valley and they shrug and say, “Not much.” You want to find a restaurant after 8 p.m. and—if you can find anybody to ask—they’ll direct you to Lexington, an hour’s drive.
You have a thirst and they tell you, “This here’s a dry county.” Pause. “Yep, dry county.” Another pause. “Maybe if you go up the road a piece to where you find a sort of restaurant, maybe somebody there can fix you up.”
So if you want entertainment in these parts, you go to Renfro Valley and you go early. The studio is warm and the music is every bit as real as the people who sing it.
“Well, now, for all you folks out there in radioland, I want to say that we got a little gal visitin’ with us this evenin’. Little Brenda Wallen, from up in Winchester, I believe.…”
And little Brenda sings: “Beeyooteeful lies, beeyooteeful lies… each one a heartbreak… in perfect disguise.…”
Then the Hibbard Brothers quartet, lean mountain faces and huge hands poking out of gabardine sleeves—“O, what a time we will have up in heaven.…”
A murmur of approval from the audience. A flashbulb pops near the back of the room. Things are picking up. The Farmer Sisters take their turn at the mike, with a rippling version of “You’re the Reason.”
* * *
A few cheers from the crowd, a quick burst of fiddle music from a man beside the piano, then somebody holds up a hand for silence. Time for the commercial.
“This here’s a long one,” says the announcer, glancing at a yellow script in his hand, “so let’s do it all at once and get it over with.” Snickers from the audience. Everybody grins as the commercial is read very earnestly into the mike that will carry it out to the Good Lord only knows where.
* * *
The announcer finishes and heaves a sigh of relief, also into the mike. Everybody laughs and the show goes on. Meanwhile, the Greenbriar Boys are tuning their instruments at Gerde’s; in a few hours there will be a long, button down line outside the hungry i in San Francisco, waiting to hear the latest hillbilly sensation.
It’s 9:30 in Rock Castle county and the Old Kentucky Barn dance is over until next week. Only a few people remain in the studio. One of them is John Lair, a local boy and a onetime Chicago disk jockey who came back home to put Renfro Valley on the map. Red Foley got his start here. So did the Coon Creek Sisters, from a place back in the hills called Pinch ’Em Tight Holler.
* * *
Lair seems genuinely puzzled by the term, “Bluegrass music.” He thinks it’s a misnomer.
“It’s plain old mountain music,” he insists. “Same stuff they’ve been singing for more than a hundred years.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “You go up to Lexington and call it Bluegrass music and you’ll have a fight on your hands.”
Lair says goodnight and leaves to go home. Outside, the parking lot is almost empty. A visitor has two choices—drive up to Lexington for something to eat and maybe a good fight, or hurry to the nearest motel.
* * *
A few miles up the road is a town called Nicholasville, where motel owners won’t even answer the door after what they consider a decent hour. When I stopped a man on the street and asked him why this was, he said he was the chief of police and offered to rent me a bed in his house.
I went back to one of the motels, went into the office, turned on the light, picked a key off the desk and located a cabin by myself. The next morning it took me 20 minutes to find somebody to pay—and then I was told I wouldn’t be welcome there in the future because my car had a license plate from Louisville. They don’t care much for city boys, specially when they’re roamin’ around late at night.
If you drive thru Kentucky and plan to spend the night, get your room early. And if you like a toddy before bedding down, remember that 86 of the 120 counties are bone dry until you make friends. Grog shops are few and far between, and a man without foresight will usually go to bed thirsty.
Winter mornings are bleak. Almost always you wake up to a gray sky and a good country breakfast: fried sausage or ham, fried eggs, fried potatoes, and a plate of biscuits with butter and apple jelly. Then, after a pot of coffee, you move on.
No matter which way you go you’ll drive thru a lot of cold, barren country to get there. North, thru the heart of the Bluegrass, west toward Louisville, east into the mountains, or south to Tennessee.
Not much speed on those narrow highways, plenty of time to look off across the white fences and wonder how the cows find anything to eat in the frozen fields. Time to listen to the sermons on the radio or the lonely thump of a shotgun somewhere back from the road.
Not much to hurry about in the Bluegrass, specially in the winter when the trees are bare and the barns are white with frost and most folks are inside by the stove.
The Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1962
A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den
In Puerto Estrella, Colombia, there is little to do but talk. It is difficult to say just what the villagers are talking about, however, because they speak their own language—a tongue called Guajiro, a bit like Arabic, which doesn’t ring well in a white man’s ear.
Usually they are talking about smuggling, because this tiny village with thatched roof huts and a total population of about 100 South American Indians is a very important port of entry. Not for humans, but for items like whisky and tobacco and jewelry. It is not possible for a man to get there by licensed carrier, because there are no immigration officials and no customs. There is no law at all, in fact, which is precisely why Puerto Estrella is such an important port.
It is far out at the northern tip of a dry and rocky peninsula called La Guajira, on which there are no roads and a great deal of overland truck traffic. The trucks carry contraband, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it, bound for the interiors of Colombia and Venezuela. Most of it comes from Aruba, brought over at night on fast trawlers and put ashore at Puerto Estrella for distribution down the peninsula on the trucks.
* * *
I arrived at dusk on a fishing sloop from Aruba. And since there is no harbor I was put ashore in a tiny rowboat. Above us, on a sharp cliff, stood the entire population of the village, staring grimly and without much obvious hospitality at Puerto Estrella’s first tourist in history.
In Aruba, the Guajiro Indians are described as “fierce and crazy and drunk all day on coconut whisky.” Also in Aruba you will hear that the men wear “nothing but neckties, knotted just below the navel.” That sort of information can make a man uneasy, and as I climbed the steep path, staggering under the weight of my luggage. I decided that at the first sign of unpleasantness I would begin handing out neckties like Santa Claus—three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.
As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag began screeching, and the men just stared. Here was a white man with 12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $500 worth of camera gear slung over his shoulders, hauling a typewriter, grinning, sweating, no hope of speaking the language, no place to stay—and somehow they were going to have to deal with me.
There was a conference, and then a small man stepped forward and made motions indicating that I should put my gear on an ancient truck which started with a crank. I was taken to an abandoned hospital, where I was given a sort of cell with a filthy mattress and broken windows to let in the air.
There is not much for the tourist in Puerto Estrella, no hotels, restaurants, or souvenirs. Nor is the food palatable. Three times a day I faced it—leaves, maize, and severely salted goat meat, served up with muddy water.
The drinking was a problem too, but in a different way. At the crack of dawn on the day after my arrival I was awakened and taken before a jury of village bigwigs. Its purpose was to determine the meaning of my presence. These gentlemen had gathered in the only concrete-block house in town, and before them on the table was a cellophane-wrapped bottle of Scotch whisky.
After an hour or so of gestures, a few words of Spanish, and nervous demonstrations of my camera equipment, they seemed to feel a drinking bout was in order. The Scotch was opened, five jiggers were filled, and the ceremony began.
* * *
It continued all that day and all the next. They tossed it off straight in jiggers, solemnly at first and then with mounting abandon. Now and then one of them would fall asleep in a hammock, only to return a few hours later with new thirst and vigor. At the end of one bottle they would proudly produce another, each one beautifully wrapped in cellophane.
As it turned out, three things made my visit a success. One was my size and drinking capacity (it was fear—a man traveling alone among reportedly savage Indians dares not get drunk); another was the fact that I never turned down a request for a family portrait (fear, again); and the third was my “lifelong acquaintance” with Jacqueline Kennedy, whom they regard as some sort of goddess.
With the exception of a few sophisticates and local bigwigs, most of the men wore the necktie—a Guajiro version of the time-honored loin-cloth. The women, again with a few exceptions, wore dull and shapeless long black gowns.
A good many of the men also wore two and three hundred dollar wrist watches, a phenomenon explained by the strategic location of Puerto Estrella and the peculiar nature of its economy. It would not be fair to say that the Indians arbitrarily take a healthy cut of all the contraband that passes through their village, but neither would it be wise to arrive and start asking pointed questions, especially since anyone arriving on his own is wholly dependent on the good will of the Indians to get him out again.
Trying to leave can turn a man’s hair white. You are simply stuck until one of the Indians has to run some contraband down the peninsula to Maicao.
There is nothing to do but drink, and after 50 hours of it I began to lose hope. The end seemed to be nowhere in sight; and it is bad enough to drink Scotch all day in any climate, but to come to the tropics and start belting it down for three hours each morning before breakfast can bring on a general failure of health. In the mornings we had Scotch and arm-wrestling; in the afternoons, Scotch and dominoes.
The break came at dusk on the third day, when the owner of a truck called the Power Wagon rose abruptly from the drinking table and said we would leave immediately. We had a last round, shook hands all around, and shoved off. The truck was fully loaded, and I rode in back with my gear and a young Indian girl.
The drive from Puerto Estrella to Maicao is 10 to 12 hours, depending on which rut you take, but it seems like 40 days on the rack. On top of the heinous discomfort, there is the distinct possibility of being attacked and shot up by either bandits or the law. As far as the Contrabandista is concerned, one is as bad as the other.
The smugglers travel armed but they put their faith in speed, punishing both truck and passengers unmercifully as they roar through dry river beds and across long veldt-like plains on a dirt track which no conventional car could ever navigate.
We rumbled into Maicao at three in the afternoon. They dropped me at the airport, where my luggage was thoroughly searched by a savage-looking gendarme before I was allowed on the plane for Barranquilla. An hour later, there was another search at the Barranquilla airport. When I asked why, they replied I was coming from an area called Guajira, known to be populated by killers and thieves and men given over to lives of crime and violence.
I had a feeling that nobody really believed I had been there. When I tried to talk about Guajira, people would smile sympathetically and change the subject. And then we would have another beer, because Scotch is so expensive in Barranquilla that only the rich can afford it.
National Observer, August 6, 1962
Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border
One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club—a five-iron, if memory serves—driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call “a stylish pot” instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.
He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was in a residential section on the edge of the Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the roofs—golf balls, “old practice duds,” so the Britisher told me, that were “hardly worth driving away.”
In the weeks that followed, when I became more aware of the attitude a good many Colombians have towards that nation’s Anglo-Saxon population, I was glad nobody had traced the source of those well-hit mashies. Colombians, along with their Venezuelan neighbors, may well be the most violent people on the continent, and a mixture of insult and injury does not rank high as a national dish.
* * *
It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But it is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.
The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rooftop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the nation of “arrogant gringo imperialists.”
Whether the candidate in question is a fool, a thief, a Communist, or even all three does not matter much when emotions run high—and few elections south of the Rio Grande are won on the basis of anything but blatant appeals to popular emotion.
* * *
The North American presence in South America is one of the most emotional political questions on the continent. In most countries, especially Argentina and Chile, there is a considerable European presence as well. But with recent history as it is, when the winds of anti-gringo opinion begin to blow, they blow due north, toward the United States, which to the Latin American is more easily identifiable with capitalism and imperialism than any other country in the world.
With this in mind, a traveler in South America gets one shock after another at the stance generally taken by his fellow gringos—and sometimes a worse shock at the stance he takes himself. One young American put it this way: “I came down here a real gung-ho liberal, I wanted to get close to these people and help them—but in six months I turned into a hardnose conservative. These people don’t know what I’m talking about, they won’t help themselves, and all they want is my money. All I want to do now is get out.”
It is a sad fact that living for any length of time in a Latin American country has a tendency to do this to many Americans. To avoid it takes tremendous adaptability, idealism, and faith in the common future.
Take the example of a young man named John, a representative in a Latin American country for an international relief organization. His work consists mainly in distributing surplus food to the poor. He works hard, often going out on field trips, for three or four days of rough driving, bad food, primitive living, and dysentery.
But the people he has to work with bother him. He can’t understand why the principal of a back-country school will steal food earmarked for the pupils and sell it to speculators. He can’t understand why his warehouse—lying in the middle of a district where food is distributed regularly—is constantly being looted by the very people who were standing in line the week before to get their regular share.
