"in the arms of the lovesongs"

  learning the ballads from Sheila Kay Adams

Coming down through Sheepstamp, the road narrows for dear life.  The blacktop snakes around the seemingly impassable, desparately hugging the mountainside as it has for years, for fear of tumbling into the pine pocked valley to either side.  Each home passed seems to bear a scar, a timeless expression telling the many years and lives that took place behind its doorstep.  Just outside the car window is a spellbinding landscape, stands of ghostly sycamores haunting hillsides that roll along like shoulders, as if they were gently smoothed by an eternity of heavenly footsteps, one by one.  “Well, honey, you’re in God’s country now,” the woman in the front seat says wistfully, moving aside a long plaited pigtail to tend the ash of her cigar through the car window.  She’s right.  You don’t have to see the rest of the world to know that there’s nowhere else quite like Sodom Laurel.  Not even close. 

When we step outside the car, the wind bites harder than it whistles.  “They ain’t nowhere cold like the Burton Cove, honey,” she says, drawing me in for a hug.  As she takes the scant step up onto the porch of the abandoned house, she says, “Right here is where uncle Byard used to live, right in there,” motioning through the clouded window.  “I have spent many a night in there, too!” she says with a creaking smile, stepping toward the outhouse.  The creak of the porch melds with the lonesome wind, filled with voices that do not whisper, but sing out, full and loud.   I think of the endless, weaving drone of Byard Ray’s fiddle, turning out a farewell tune against the hills.  I think of sitting Indian-style on my bed, thirteen years old, listening to records of the Sodom singers, holding my breath as Dillard Chandler’s voice soared through the tin roof on “Awake, Awake.”  Breaking the near silence, I say longingly, “I just wish I could sit up one night and sing with all them . . .”   A beat.  “I do too, baby,” she replies and puts a hand on the small of my back, “One more night.” 

Sheila Kay Adams comes from a long line of mountain singers, keeper of a tradition that stretches across the ocean to an ancestral home in the British Isles.  Adams estimates that her family has been singing the songs she knows for over seven generations in the remote wellspring of Sodom Laurel, nestled in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina.  When Cecil Sharp visited “the laurel country” in search of ballads during the turn of the century, he was astonished to find, “a nest of singing birds who sang as easily as they talked.”   Like a nest of birds, the young singers in Sodom were well cared for and brought up to make their voices soar in the fields and on the porches, at the cookstove and at the frolic, making use of the songs their people had carried for generations.  One such song was “My Dearest Dear,” Adams’ favorite ballad, a song that seems to have come to Adams by destiny.  “While Sharp was setting up with Mary Sands, collecting ‘My Dearest Dear,’ over ‘cross the ridge, my mama was being born,” Adams says, nodding her head, “that very day.”  Little did Sharp know that his pen was capturing something that would filter through hearts and voices regardless of the notes he put down, eventually making its way down to a teenager named Sheila Kay Adams. 

Adams was born March 18, 1953 to Ervine Adams and Neple Norton Adams, the second and last girl of the family.  Her parents were both raised up in Sodom Laurel, but by their time, were searching for some distance from the harsh poverty and all its extensions that pervaded their birthplace, which meant forgetting the songs and stories of their upbringing.  Adams explains, “Mama always said later on that they threw away their culture with both hands, and what a shame that was.”  But, family gatherings and visits called them back, this time with little Sheila clinging to their legs closeby.  These visits back would introduce young Adams to the voices of her relatives Dellie Chandler Norton, Berzilla and Lee Wallin, Dillard Chandler, Cas and Virgie Wallin and Evelyn Ramsay who clung to the old ways and amongst themselves knew hundreds of ballads sung in the characteristic ornamented style of the region.  Moreso, these relatives were all relentless storytellers, who couldn’t so much as tell someone about their day’s goings-on without resorting to poetic rhythms and speech that hearkened back to the old country.  As she grew older, Adams began to realize the strength of the singers in her family and had to go back for herself, not so much to collect songs and stories as to spend time amongst their singers, each one a rich portrait of a bygone time in the present day.  At first, Adams sung only because she could and because it granted more time among her relatives, learning the music unaware of its soon coming commercial value and not fearing for the future of the songs.   

She began fooling with the banjo around age eight and took up two finger style banjo in the Madison County style under her uncle Byard Ray and looked up to the great Obray Ramsay, whose clear ringing pluck she heard plenty as a girl.  Her cousin Jerry Adams played a beautiful unique two finger style also alongside his storytelling prowess.  West Virginia banjoist Dwight Diller offered up the watershed, shifting Adams’ gears from the two finger style to the frailing clawhammer she has become known for, which she interprets with a distinctive rhythmic “thwock” on the offbeat that makes her banjo playing all her own.  The rowdy fiddle and banjo tune verses were just as much a part of the Sodom singing tradition as the ballads, and they make up a considerable part of Adams’ repertoire.  Sacred song also made up a great deal of Adams formative music, mostly the shape-note hymnody of her relative Cas Wallin who taught singing schools in the community.  At the singing schools, Adams excelled, often being moved by Wallin from one section to another to strengthen the sound.  “I could sing any part, bass, lead, tenor, alto,” Adams says, “Cas would just throw up a hand and say, ‘Go over yander!’”  All the Sodom singers Adams learned from had a foothold in gospel music, including Dellie Norton who always claimed “Camp A Little While in the Wilderness” as her favorite meeting-house song.  Adams performs “Camp A Little While” to this day, remembering how Dellie always said, “the woods was her church.” 

Adams began singing publicly in the 1960s, and renowned American folklorists, the Lomaxes visited Sodom to record its singers throughout Adams’ lifetime.  This led to a performance at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, in which Adams brought a passel of her older singing relatives on a tumultuous pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., an experience she still laughs about to this day.  Encouraged by North Carolina songster Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Adams began performing at the Asheville Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, where she has continually claimed “Special Awards,” for her banjo playing and singing ever since.  In 1995 she published Come Go Home With Me, a collection of stories drawn from her childhood that were already well worn with stage use.  Come Go Home With Me received the North Carolina Historical Society’s award for historical fiction in 1997.  From then on she became a perennial favorite at the nation’s foremost folk festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival.  In 2000 Adams was selected to train the cast of the award winning film Songcatcher in mountain ballad singing, sharing her ballad heritage intimately in sessions with actors from across the nation.  She has appeared in several other films, including Mutsmag and The Last of the Mohicans.  She has performed internationally and was selected among the nation’s finest traditional women singers to participate in the Sisters of the South tour.  In 2004 she published her first novel, My Old True Love, a retelling of a Civil War love story handed down to Adams from her father, accompanied by songs from the novel on her companion recording All The Other Fine Things. This led to her receiving many prestigious literary awards, including one in honor of her dear friend Lee Smith, who first encouraged her to write down her tales. Her storytelling gifts have made her a continual presence at the International Storytelling Festival of Jonesborough, Tennessee since she first appeared there in 1997.  She has taught religiously at music camps across the nation such as Warren Wilson College’s Swannanoa Gathering and the Augusta Heritage Center, and has taken numerous young students into her home, teaching them just the way she learned.  She is mostly responsible for the careers of several young’uns who have taken a spot under her wing to new heights, such as her world class multi-instrumentalist, Grammy winning cousin Josh Goforth and Virginia ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle, who tours nationally.  In April 1998, Adams was honored with the Brown-Hudson Folklore award, a prestigious gift of the North Carolina Folklore Society given to tradition bearers who have furthered the preservation of North Carolina traditional arts. 

Her life aside from the music, if such a life exists, has certainly not been a charmed one, as she was pregnant and married at eighteen, continuing to pursue her college education and support her young’uns.  She graduated from Mars Hill College in 1975.  Since then, she has emerged stronger from two abusive marriages and managed to raise her three children, Hart, Melanie and Andrew with the love she knew as a child.  In her days before making a living as a professional musician, Adams taught public school for seventeen years out of necessity, teaching eighth grade North Carolina history until she began performing full time in 1991.  In 2009, her most recent husband and musical partner and manager Jim Taylor committed suicide as a result of mental side effects brought on by Lyme’s disease, leaving life as Adams knew it in a pile of ashes.  The passing had not come peacefully; Adams and her son Andrew were in the house when Taylor ran them out at gunpoint, nearly burning the kerosene-soaked house down before he took his own life.  As anyone would, Adams retreated to a dark place, grasping for the roots to ground herself with while still handling her full performance schedule.  Friends in and out of the traditional music community surrounded her with love from all directions, but Adams returned to Sodom to heal over, losing her ability to play the banjo and singing rarely for a year or more.  The light to draw Adams out would come from her memory, the songs and their strong singers who had shaped her as a child and would remake her again.  “I fell back into the arms of these old love songs,” she says.

“I used to adapt the songs for the stage,” Adams says, “cut a verse here or there, fill in a word so it’d all make sense and the audience would follow.  I thought they didn’t have the patience.  But I’m about as far from that now as I can be.”  To make a living as a performer, Adams used her gifts from all sides without compromising her roots, combining storytelling, ballad singing, banjo playing, teaching, writing, emceeing and her countless other talents with good country humor.  Combine this with her various mediums of stage performing, radio, recording, etc, it has been a winning recipe, sustaining her continued career as a music personality to this day. 

Learning from Sheila has been an incredible journey for me, one that shaped the course of my life almost entirely.  When I met Sheila, I had only been playing music for a year or two, singing in my home county to my clumsy guitar accompaniment anywhere they would have me.  My love was bound up in the bittersweet songs, the old love songs that make the head lean back with longing, and I was singing them already, keeping a few ballads under my belt for each gig.  When Sheila came to perform at a festival in my Wytheville home, I was awestruck to find that I would be opening for her throughout the festival, effectively following her around for two days.  I’ll never forget our first meeting, when Sheila piled out of her Subaru like a mad woman, sighing under her breath as she gave me a hug, “Honey, you just don’t know what I’ve been through.”  From then on, I carried her banjo for her and we talked like we had known each other for longer than my lifetime as we sought out a corner in the green room where she sung “Dinah” for me, at the request of her favorite love song.  I was shocked that I was not allowed to leave that day without another big hug, in which she whispered in my ear, “You’ve got it, honey.”  We kept in touch through email for the next few years until I finally learned to drive and got the chance to visit her at home in Marshall, North Carolina.  Since then, us two skinny, stringy-headed singers have been close as can be.  Sheila has been like a sister, a friend and a grandmother to me all at once as we’ve made biscuits together, sat up late in the night on her bed quilts sipping coffee and gossiping, laughed for days on end, and rode around the state performing together.  Without cracking a smile, she often introduces me as her protégé, an honor and responsibility that I accept with some facial redness.  Most importantly, I’ve learned the ballads from her working in the garden, hands in the dishwater, sitting on the porch, the booths of seedy late night diners and backstage of everywhere we’ve been.  Recently, while playing with her young grandson Ezra, she took me by the hand and said, “You realize, if anything was to happen to me, you will be the one to teach him,” smiling. 

The interviewing process over the summer became a seamless part of our everyday life, as I would stay with Sheila for weeks at a time, balancing our time on tape with private time to visit and learn the songs.  I followed her with a camera many hours a day, assisting her in her teaching at the Swannanoa Gathering and performing with her on stage while trying to record the events responsibly.  In our off time, I asked Sheila about the songs she rarely sung on stage, who she’d learned them from, and the stories attached to them and they came back one by one, little by little, in what was to become a torrential flood of her memories from early childhood on.  Throughout the process, she would close her eyes reverently and transport herself to another time, almost as if channeling, and sometimes sing up to twenty verses that she had perhaps heard only once before fifty or more years prior.  Often, she would prompt herself with a verse from her family’s contribution to the Sharp collection or ask me to sing out a snatch of the tune from the page, but our most productive visits came when we traveled to Burnsville to see her dear friend, master ballad singer Bobby McMillon.  Sheila calls herself, “the performer,” and Bobby, “the national treasure,” the true keeper of the endless canon of mountain ballads from the obscure to the standards.  The two compared memories of the Sodom singers and in doing so brought back songs that perhaps had lain silent since the older generation’s death, all the while encouraging my singing and documenting of the songs.  At the Swannanoa Gathering, I was Sheila and Bobby’s constant companion, each day teaching two classes, eating three meals, enjoying a late night beverage or two, singing countless songs right beside them.  I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such gracious singers and people who have loved me as I loved them and given me the gift of so many songs which I claim now as my own, lowering my feet into a stream of ballads that runs back across time and space. 

Now you have spent time with Sheila Kay Adams as I have known her, as the singer, the best friend, the rambling woman, the performer, the teacher, the enigma.  She is so much more than the songs she sings, yet they make her up completely, binding together the knock kneed girl learning “Lord Bateman” on Granny Dell’s porch with the modern woman, cruising into the parking lot of her venue ten minutes late.  I would call her a dear friend who just so happened to have the voice that helped me find my own, the touchstone that any of my singing will always spring from.  I think the story of our time together is a testament to how a song can live on, how a song takes hold in the heart often woven together with the love of a friend, how a song can carry its singer just as much as its singer carries it.  What was put on tape this summer pales in comparison to what was planted in my heart and mind, the legacy of singing, the unshakable friendship and the desire to someday pass on what was learned.  Just like Sheila before me, I am steady falling into the arms of the love songs and I expect to stay wrapped up in them just as long as they can pass my lips, in the cool of the morning when I close my eyes and sigh and remember. 

I will always remember.  

-Sam Gleaves

February '12