Hobart Smith :: Uncloudy Day
There’s something about death that makes me want to listen to hillbilly music and I think it might be because of my paternal grandmother. When people jokingly say that they never saw anyone in The Carter Family smile, I believe it. Hillbilly music doesn’t allow you to smile when you sing it. To do it right, you have to form a holler and yelp from the diaphragm, push it through the nose a bit, and if you hold your mouth in a stern almost-frown while opening it wide to let it all out, then you’ve just about got the sound right. It’s the sound that Vachel Lindsay, at the end of his poem The Leaden-Eyed, describes in the eyes of the poor children of the world as:
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Anyway, as I was saying, I’m pretty sure I’ve acquired my love for old country / bluegrass / blues / scratchy 78s from my grandmother. She didn’t really listen to music, only the AM country station in the morning until her stories (that’s soap operas) were on. She could yodel like no one’s business, but she did it rarely. She was from the Ozarks, but lived the life of a sharecropper moving from town to town in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas with her husband and eight children (two others died at birth) before I was born. She was always nice to me because she liked me, but she could be a bitter, manipulative, and angry woman who raised some wonderful people and some that aren’t really all that wonderful.
She once pulled a gun on one of my grandfather’s associates because she thought he was trying to screw her family out of money (I probably would have as well). He was only saved by my grandfather knocking her arm up as she shot. She packed her youngest children in the car after that and left, but came back when she was about to run out of gas because she had no money and nowhere else to go. The associate didn’t bother them much after that, but they moved soon anyway. Her husband, my grandfather, died well before I was born, his body worn out from a life of manual labor and the onset of cancer. He was in his fifties.
I didn’t see my grandmother smile much until I graduated high school. That’s not because she was proud of me, although I’m sure she was, but because in the months that followed she had a massive stroke. She survived the stroke to live another 10 years or so, even though the doctors didn’t think she would. She didn’t smile because she lived though, she smiled because her brain was damaged, which completely changed her personality and gave her very strange hallucinations that she used to tell me about. She’d laugh about the things crawling on the walls. She’d laugh about the fact that she had just searched her roommate for cookies she was sure that she had smuggled into the room. She laughed when she made up stories about her children in far off countries while that child sat in the same room she was in. After suffering another stroke in 2002, her brain quickly withered. The doctor would come in every day saying she could die at any moment… and kept saying it for a week and a half, after a few days, looking increasingly guilty. In the week before she finally went, he said it almost as if he couldn’t believe it himself. My grandmother had a hard life, but if there was one thing you could say about her it’s that she didn’t let anyone tell her what she could do and if you tried, she was sure to do the opposite.
A few weeks ago as I was flying back from L.A. where I visited someone for the first time—someone that was close to me that I never knew, someone who fought for herself every minute of her life and who was tired of fighting, someone who loved art and beauty but had so very little of it in her later years, someone speeding toward death after a hard life —the song Uncloudy Day by Hobart Smith (recorded by Alan Lomax) came on my headphones. Hobart sings the lyrics written by Rev J. Alwood many years ago and unlike some treacly contemporary versions I’ve heard, Hobart sounds like he’s resigned himself to hoping there could be a better life after this one, despite what his experiences have taught him. ‘They’ keep telling him about a better land, but because he has no idea of what a land of no cares and uncloudy days is like, he hopes that he can make it on his journey. I listened to the song and turned to look down on the clouds and cried, hiding it from the couple who sat beside me reading magazines—she Glamour, he Sports Illustrated—the ones who laughed at the same jokes I hear from every airline steward during takeoff. It was strangely comforting trying to find a way to be alone on a plane because you can’t be alone on a plane. They weren’t thinking of dreamless starvation with no rewards and no god to serve. They were enjoying their flight.
I listen to hillbilly music when I’m confronted with death and I know that it’s because of my grandmother. I listen to it not in a search for authenticity, but in a search for home.
Uncloudy Day (5.2MB MP3)
Hobart Smith (wikipedia)
Kirk said on monday, june 30th, 2008
Melissa said on tuesday, july 01st, 2008
Thank you for this — and for all that you gave to me and to her when we needed you.
hiram, what a fantastic and touching story. I love Hobart Smith almost as much as that story. Thanks for sharing.