The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Pete turns it off and asks me what she sang. I tell him what I heard and he shakes his head no. “She didn’t say ‘a lovin’,’ ” he says. “You heard her dialect, she’d have pronounced it ‘luhvin,’ but instead she sings almost a long ‘o’ like ‘loavin.’ And listen to the word before too.”

So he plays it again, and damned if it doesn’t sound like “loavin,” and in front of what I thought was “a” I can just barely hear, over all the noise, a t-h sound.

“What did you hear?” Pete asks.

“The loavin’ family?” I say, feeling stupid. “What the hell’s that, folks that make loaves of bread?”

“The L-O-V–I-N family,” he spells out. “Spelled like lovin’, but pronounced ‘loavin.’ It’s a name. Not a common one in the Appalachians, but a real one. Louvin is another version of it, like the Louvin Brothers?”

I nod my head. I’ve met Charlie Louvin — mighty nice man, though I hear his brother Ira was mean as a gutshot snake.

Then Pete tells me he’s gone online and checked the records for the county where Bertha Echols lived, and there was a Lovin family who lived there around 1935, when Roger Waitkus made that recording, but Pete couldn’t find anything about them after that.

So I asked him, “What are you sayin’? That this family’s got the last verse to the song?”

“Why not?” he says. “That stuff gets handed down, and after all, it’s their song. If anybody’d have it, one of the Lovins would.”

So I ask if he can’t find any modern records about them, what makes him think there’s still any Lovins left. And he says there’s still places up in the mountains where the census takers don’t even go, still folks who don’t pay taxes or social security, still people the government don’t even know exist, and if they do, they couldn’t care less, since they don’t have any money to pay taxes anyway.

Well, it all sounds kind of dubious to me, and he can see it in my face, but then he starts pitching me. “Think about it, Billy,” he says. “Think about the singer who introduces that last verse to the public. Think about TV appearances, think about record sales. Boy, this is the closest anybody’s ever come to finding this verse — and maybe the real story of the Lovins beside. I always liked you, always liked your singing, always liked your company… so why don’t you come with me?”

I thought maybe there was more to it than that. Pete’s sort of a pip-squeak, and I figured he didn’t like the thought of going up into those mountains alone. Me, I’m a pretty big guy, and I got a nice collection of pistols, which is two good reasons for wanting me to come along. It was probably a wild-goose chase, but hell, I didn’t have to start touring for another two weeks, and if we did find that verse, well, he was right about the publicity, and I could use it. If you ain’t been in O Brother, Where Art Thou? bluegrass is still the poor cousin in the music business.

So I say sure and Pete says great, but don’t tell a soul. He doesn’t want anybody else knowing about this, which is fine with me.

Next day, six o’clock in the morning, God help me, I drive my car over to his place, park it in his garage, and we go off in his RV. It’s a nice one, with a toilet and big bunks, just in case we got to spend a night or two someplace where there are no motels. Pete lives alone too, so nobody knows what we’re doing except us.

We drive east about four hours into North Carolina, just stopping once to take a leak and get some Krispy Kremes, then up into the Smokies, and we go to this town where Bertha Echols lived. I stay in the RV, behind the tinted windows, and let Pete talk to the people, because they might recognize me and we’re keeping a low profile. He checks first at the post office, this little building not much bigger than an outhouse, but they tell him there’s no such family living around there.

So he comes back and tells me this, and says he’s gonna poke around town and I say fine, so I read some magazines while he’s poking. Around one o’clock he comes back and says he’s talked to dang near every old fart in the village, and nobody knows a thing. Never heard of no Lovins around here, they say. Closest Pete gets to anything is one old black man who says there used to be Lovins living years ago way up in the hills. The old place might be there, but nobody’d be alive now.

That’s good enough for Pete. I tell him that if there’s nobody alive up there then there’s nobody to sing any damn songs, but he’s like a kid in a candy store. He pulls out these, whaddyacallem, topographical maps with all the mountains and streams on them, and starts looking, and I ask what he’s looking for, and he says, “Like in the song—‘I come from the Lovin family that lives where the two creeks meet.’”