TEX AND ABE

They tell us that we carry all kinds of information in us, locked in our genes, passed down through the generations. So when I first heard the sound of the fiddle and banjo coming out of the radio as I tuned in one night, I'm convinced that my Irish genes woke from their slumber and started jangling. Nothing had prepared me for this. It was 1951. I was thirteen years old, living outside of Boston in Dedham, Massachusetts, far from the mountains of Appalachia, farther still from the Emerald Isle, definitely not a musical hotbed.

My parents had moved there to raise their family away from the Irish-Catholic enclaves in Boston. They were raising us to be open to all kinds of people. The focus was on education, and like my brother John before me, I was going to the Roxbury Latin School. After the Ames School in Dedham, where I had been quite the little genius, it was like walking into a stone wall. This was a "classical" education and I was taking Latin, Math, English, History, and Geography for starters. French, Greek and Physics would come later. I begged my parents to take me out, but they kept telling me that I could do it. Education was it. It was not negotiable.

At school I had become buddies with a live wire named Dick Curley. One day Dick told me to turn the radio on to WCOP at 7:45 that night. This band was playing "hillbilly" music. It was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. Songs like "Mother's Not Dead, She's Only Sleeping" It was a riot. I went home that night, took Dick's advice and tuned in. I heard this amazing sound—fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar coupled with a high wailing kind of singing. They called themselves The Confederate Mountaineers, and they were really from the South. Unlike Dick Curley, I wasn't laughing. Something about that sound was familiar; something about it was "right" Was it my Irish genes aroused by this music? Who knows? All I know is that I kept coming back again and again. I was hooked.

But there was more! Right after the Confederate Mountaineers a disc jockey named Nelson Bragg came on with a show called the Hayloft Jamboree. He was a great character—"The Merry Mayor of Milo, Maine." He definitely wasn't from the south, but he knew that there were lots of rural New Englanders and people from Quebec and The Maritimes who'd moved to the cities for work and who loved this simple, heartfelt music. Hank Williams sang "Honky Tonk Blues," Lefty Frizzell had "If You've Got the Money, Honey (I've Got the Time)," Hank Snow did "A Fool Such as I," Webb Pierce sang about a "Back Street Affair" This was a life I knew nothing about. If Dedham had any honky-tonks or back streets I certainly didn't know where they were, but these singers and these songs were reaching something deep inside of me, stirring emotions I didn't even know I had. They were taking me out of the life I knew. I was setting out on the journey of a lifetime.

Once a month the Hayloft Jamboree did a big show at Symphony Hall, so Dick Curley and I decided to go. The star was going to be Slim Whitman, who sang in a high, yodelly style and had had big hits with "Indian Love Call" and "Rose Marie" Symphony Hall was full and buzzing. I had been there once before on a school trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, something I would never forget, but Nelson Bragg lost no time in letting everyone know that there'd be no longhair music being played that night, and we were all invited to let our hair down and whoop it up. All the performers were dressed in western outfits except the Confederate Mountaineers who wore riding pants, high boots, and Confederate officers' hats. Slim Whitman was a star. When he came out in his black-and-white suit, his black-and-white guitar, and his Clark Gable looks, and hit his first high note the place went wild. I'd never experienced anything like it. It was worlds away from Dedham, from Roxbury Latin. I felt like I had taken a trip to an exotic land, but it was only a bus and trolley ride away.

One day Curley talked me into going into the radio station to see the Confederate Mountaineers play. WCOP took up a good part of the first floor of the New England Mutual Life Building in Copley Square. We entered a large lobby painted with a big mural of "hillbillys" having fun in the style of Al Capp's popular comic strip "Lil' Abner." There was a maze of studios and control rooms beyond the lobby, and as we rounded a corner there in one of the studios we could see the Confederate Mountaineers getting ready to go on the air!

Dick and I stood there in a classic pose, with our noses literally pressed against the glass, watching our heroes. Everett Lilly did all the talking in his high-pitched West Virginia accent. "Thank you just a whole lot there, Nelson Bragg. We'd like to say a great big howdy to all the friends and neighbors! We're going to kindly start off with a good Bill Monroe number, "'Footprints in the Snow.'" And off they went, gathered around the microphone—Tex Logan shouldering his way in with his fiddle, Don Stover driving with his banjo, Everett holding his mandolin up and singing high and clear, and his brother Bea, constantly smiling, steady on his guitar. After a couple of songs, they'd do an instrumental and let Tex and Don loose. Then they'd do a gospel number like "Sinner You Better Get Ready," something my Catholic ears had never heard before and sure wasn't in the hymnal at Roxbury Latin! This was passionate, heartfelt music.

All too soon the fifteen minutes was over. They packed up their instruments, came out, and said hello. They were leaving, so we left with them. Soon we were out in Copley Square, walking along with the four of them in their full Confederate regalia. I'm sure heads must have been turning, but we were oblivious, just happy to be allowed to walk along like we belonged! We crossed Boston Common to The Plaza Bar, and they invited us in to hear a set. It was early, and there was a thin...