By Shirley Noe Swiesz
Originally published in Journey of a Mountain Woman
Good evening! I love the old mountain music especially the old religious songs that are dug out of the hearts of preachers and coal miners, or perhaps women humming with a couple of clothespins stuck in her mouth while she hangs baskets of wet clothes and hopes it doesn’t rain before they dry!
Some of my favorite memories are of me when I was nine or ten, singing with a mountain preacher, standing in the shadow of a coal-oil lamp, as we shared a tattered songbook at granny and pap’s house. Granny would be lying in a feather-bed, propped up with feather pillows, a smile on her sweet face. Granny was tall and thin, and she had ‘heart dropsy’ and hardly enough energy to get around. She was always cold and still dressed in clothes that surely were popular in the late 1800’s when she was born. Her dresses were down to her ankles and she wore cotton stockings and home made bloomers and slips made of feed sacks. These were the ones made that had pretty designs. They had writing on them and she had boiled them until at lease some of the writing was gone. They were used for everything…towels, sheets, pillow cases, curtains, and underclothes for granny and many other things. I had one of her old quilts that had been made from any material she could find. One quilt piece had a patch on it. It was from one of her dresses, faded and worn.
The old music takes me back to the people I loved, so many of them! They were all poor, hard workers and God fearing. It is amazing that my grandparents were born in the 1800’s and i spent time with all of them. My grandfather on my daddy’s side was killed in a feud and granny was pregnant with daddy. Her first child had died at birth, her only girl. She had four sons by her second husband and we all loved Pap like he was our true grandfather. She went through so many heartaches and pain but never lost her faith. Her smile still lingers in my mind as she listened to preaching and singing. To my knowledge she only came out of the holler twice in my lifetime…once to go to the dr to get her ears cleaned out in the hopes she could hear better and the next time was when she had a stroke and went to hospital and passed away after 13 days.
Fire flies, persimmons, walnuts, roses, popcorn and big fat sweet potatoes are some of the things that remind me of pap, granny, uncle Holly and uncle Clarence. The old songs take me back home to yesterday when time moved slowly and my grandparents could talk about the 1800’s in truth for they were there!
My grandma Halcomb could tell stories about her grandfather who was thought to be the oldest man in the US at the time. Old John Shell. You can look him up!
