The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Waitkus was a queer duck. He was the biggest rival to John and Alan Lomax as far as collecting songs, but he didn’t go out of the country or out west and down to the Delta like the Lomaxes did. He just did the mountains — the Appalachians and the Ozarks, that whole Scotch-Irish-English tradition, looking for every variant he could find, and of course anything new that hadn’t popped up before.

He started way back in the twenties and thirties, and had his own little dynasty too — his son Carl was doing stuff around the same time as Alan Lomax, and then there’s… his grandson Peter. I met Pete when he was a little kid, and I always got along good with him. He had a bad case of hero worship for me, because, hell, there I was, little older than a kid myself, playing on stage with the father of bluegrass. I kind of took to Pete, he knew so damn much for a kid. We lost track of each other when I went country, though I got Christmas cards from him, and I’d always write him back.

It sort of meant something, getting cards from him, because to most folk he was real standoffish, like his old man and his grandpa had been. They did what they did, and published a book from some little college press every few years. I never knew a thing about Roger or Carl’s wives, though they must’ve had them. But Pete thought of me as a friend because we’d been friendly when we both were much younger.

When I went back to bluegrass, it was like I’d been born again to Pete. He came to a lot of my gigs and was plumb tickled when I got my own band. He’d give me songs he’d come across and thought might work for me, and I used a few, gave him a nod on the CD credits, or when we performed I’d say, “That song was give to me by a good old friend, Pete Waitkus,” and he’d like that. He was still digging in the mountains for songs the way his daddy and grandpa did — they were both dead now — and he spent a lot of time going over the old tapes and discs and wire recordings they made, seeing what might’ve been overlooked.

Anyway, he calls me last spring and says he wants to see me. He’s all excited, and he says, “Billy, I think I found a key to the Holy Grail.” Well, I’ve seen that Indiana Jones movie, and I don’t know if he’s joking or what, but I say okay, come on over. He lives in Nashville too, so he’s there pretty quick.

It’s quiet at my house since Linda’s gone. She left right after Christmas, but we’ve been keeping it mum. Bluegrass fans don’t like it if you got family troubles, and she’s still singing in the act with her mom and brothers, so we figure we’ll just play it cool before we get an actual separation or divorce.

Pete doesn’t want a beer or coffee or anything, he’s that excited. He can’t even sit down, and he’s up and walking around, and says he’s got the best clue ever about the rest of the “Mother Come Quickly” song. Hell, I figure if anybody would he would, since it’s his grandpa that found it, but I nod like this is great news. Then he starts rattling on.

“Do you know the story of how my grandpa got that song?” he asks, and I tell him I heard it was some old lady sang it for him. “That’s right,” he says, “it was Bertha Echols. She was old back then, and she told him there was more, but it wasn’t hers to sing. That’s all I knew, until.…”

And he takes this big old pause like he’s waiting for a drumbeat, and I say, “Until what?”

And then he says he found the original aluminum disc Roger Waitkus made back in nineteen-thirty-something. “I heard the tape transcriptions dozens of times,” Pete says, “but there was more on the disc.”

“More of the song?” I asked. I’m getting a little excited now myself.

“No,” he says, “just talk. I put it on a DAT. You got a machine?”

Of course I got a DAT, so he sticks it in there and I hear his grandpa’s voice, and it’s saying, close as I can recall, “Now, Mrs. Echols, it’s very important that you sing the entire song for me. This is an important historical document,” and he’s going on like that for a while, really pressing this woman, and then it gets to back and forth.

He says, “Well, why can’t you sing it for me?”

And she says, “It ain’t mine to sing.”

And he says, “Well, whose is it?”

And she says, “The family. Ask them.”

And he says, “What family?”

And she says, “You know.”

And he says, “No I don’t.”

And she says, “Yes you do, and that’s all I’m a-sayin’.”

And she says nothing and he says nothing and then Pete stops the tape. And I say, “That’s clear as mud.”

“No, she was right,” Pete says. “My grandpa knew it but he didn’t realize it. She’d sung it for him. The answer was right there in the lyrics.” And Pete tells me to listen, and he rewinds the tape and plays the beginning:

I come from a lovin’ family

That lives where the two creeks meet.

At least that’s what I hear. It’s tough, because the old lady is singing kind of screechy, and the recording is crap, all full of hiss and other junk.