[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

PATTY DILLEY:

Start with your family. Were your family originally from Ashe County?

ROY HAM:

I was born in 1925 in Ashe County. My daddy had always been a resident of Ashe County. My mother was from Allegheny County. I was born in 1925 in Helton Township, and that's where I made my life until I left Ashe County.

PATTY DILLEY:

How old were you then?

ROY HAM:

I left in '47; I must have been twenty-two.

PATTY DILLEY:

You're a little bit older than my mother, then. She left about the same time, but she was only eighteen, I guess, when she left.

ROY HAM:

My Grandfather Ham always lived with us until the ripe old age of ninety-one.

PATTY DILLEY:

Boy, he lived a long time.

ROY HAM:

And he'd never been sick, and I never heard him say a cuss word of any kind.

PATTY DILLEY:

Had the Ham's always lived in Ashe County as far back as you can remember?

ROY HAM:

As far back as I could remember. I reckon my great-grandfather Ham lived over on Piney; part of it's in Ashe County, and part of it's in Alleghany County. I believe that's right. And my mother's people were more in Alleghany and Wilkes. She was a Church from Alleghany County. And I lived there until I left in 1947. And we moved one time that I remember, from the old house into a new house, and it was just across the road.

PATTY DILLEY:

Is this where your mother's living now?

ROY HAM:

That's where my mother's living right now.

PATTY DILLEY:

Is your second house?

ROY HAM:

Yes. That's the only time that we ever moved, is from the old house that was across the road into the new one. There were seven of us in the family. That included five children, Dad and Mother. I guess Grandpa made eight in the family.

PATTY DILLEY:

Were the other kids older than you?

ROY HAM:

I have one brother that's older than I am. Three brothers and one sister.

PATTY DILLEY:

Was your family real close?

ROY HAM:

Yes, very definitely. We didn't have no money, no nothing, but we were a real happy, and we were all close together, and we're still close together. We are all living except my father passed away nine years ago. And we all tried to watch out after each other instead of quarrelling like a good many families do?

PATTY DILLEY:

Yes.

ROY HAM:

We were real close.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you remember any fights or anything [laughter] like brother-to-brother fights or something?

ROY HAM:

We had very few of those. We had to play together, and we didn't have any fistfights. We'd get mad and fuss at each other a little bit. And when I was five years old I started to grade school down at Helton two miles from home. We had to walk every day. And sometimes when winter would set in along about October, we'd have snow the biggest part of the time until April the following summer.

PATTY DILLEY:

Gosh.

ROY HAM:

And most of the time we'd wade snow, a lot of times up to our knees,

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to get two miles to school.

PATTY DILLEY:

Bet it don't snow like that anymore.

ROY HAM:

No, it don't even snow up there. The winters have changed in that part of the country. And we always had to take a biscuit with something in it for lunch. And the wintertime, sometimes the children at that school would take milk and bread to school in a bucket and hang it out the window in the winter and keep it cool. Sometimes we'd wrap up an onion and stick it in our pocket to flavor the milk and bread. That was pretty good eating.

PATTY DILLEY:

You liked that?

ROY HAM:

Yes, ma'am. We didn't have any lunchrooms, period, when we went to school. And I went to that school until I finished the seventh grade, and then I had to graduate from there and go to Lansing to high school. That was a high school until they consolidated several schools there back in the thirties to make the high school in Lansing. Helton was a high school to start with. And I didn't like Lansing School too awfully well.

PATTY DILLEY:

That was further from home than Helton was, wasn't it?

ROY HAM:

Yes. Some of the things that we done down at Helton, I guess people would frown on it now. We had a well. We didn't have running water like we've got now. All the toilets were outside, and we had one well for all of us to drink from. It had a pump handle on it. And one day this boy who was in a grade younger than I was, but we had to walk two miles every day together, and one day he'd been playing pretty hard at lunch. And this new stuff that they'd started putting in wells, chlorine,

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neither one of us mountain people had ever seen any of that before, and somebody dumped [laughter] it seems like about a bushel in the well that day. Well, Robert Joins was young—we were all young, as far as that goes—but Robert went out to the well to get him a drink of water, and nobody had told him that they had that stuff in. And he pumped the handle pretty fast a few times and got the water running, and then he went around to get a drink of water while it was still running. And he drank [laughter] two or three swallows, and then he started tasting that bitter stuff, and he came in the house crying. [laughter] Said somebody was poisoning him and he was dying.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And we all cried a little bit; we thought it was poisoned. And one day he was out sailing ships out in Helton Creek, and this same young fellow stumbled and fell and got wet all over, and he had to stay at school wet all day, the rest of the evening, before he could walk the two miles home to get dry clothes, he had to stay at school in wet clothes.

PATTY DILLEY:

Poor kid. He just had it all on him, didn't he?

ROY HAM:

Yes, he did. It was nothing unusual to see a family, maybe two or three children, eating out of the same bucket of milk and bread. And you'd take a turn about with your spoon—each one had a different spoon—but if one person would get out of line and try to get a bite extra, the others would whack him with the spoon handle.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] That's one way to keep them out of your share.

ROY HAM:

When I got old enough to get a job, I quit school and went to the hospital to work.

PATTY DILLEY:

Is this when it was still new?

ROY HAM:

Still new. I worked for eighty-four hours a week for twenty dollars a month.

PATTY DILLEY:

That's a lot, for hardly anything.

ROY HAM:

That way I was making five cents an hour. One nickel an hour.

PATTY DILLEY:

What kind of stuff did they have you doing?

ROY HAM:

Cleaning up the hospital, and orderly. At that time that was just about everything except giving shots.

PATTY DILLEY:

Then you'd have to be a nurse or a doctor or something.

ROY HAM:

Well, I'd do most anything a nurse could except give shots.

PATTY DILLEY:

How old were you when you took that job?

ROY HAM:

I was eighteen.

PATTY DILLEY:

So did you finish high school? Not quite?

ROY HAM:

Not at that time. I finished high school, but I stayed there six months or something, and then I went to Norfolk, Virginia, to work in the shipyard. And I was awfully homesick. I was used to this pure mountain water, and then went to Norfolk in the swamps. You know, that's the Dismal Swamp? And the water tastes rotten. You'd take a bath, and the water would run down across your lip and you could taste it, and it was terrible after being used to the mountain water. And I was awfully homesick, but the War was going on. Another thing that made me sick, I thought people ought to work like us hillbillies to try to make a living, and they weren't. They'd come in the shipyard and just lay down; they didn't care whether they got any work done or not. That went on. And on several occasions I was called on not to try to work and get all the work done, so I'd have enough to do the rest of the day.

PATTY DILLEY:

Was this by your fellow workers or your boss?

ROY HAM:

It was the supervisor. And one of the biggest experiences that I had there was, they brought a ship in that had been sunk in Pearl Harbor, the ship "The Honolulu." It was a cruiser. I believe your daddy told me he saw that ship sunk.

PATTY DILLEY:

Yes, he was over there.

ROY HAM:

He was in Pearl Harbor when it was sunk. The first day that they turned it over to the workers to go aboard, I went aboard to help fix that ship, to put it back in the water. Well, we had done all the work that we were permitted to do on this particular day, and the gentleman that I was working with was a pipe fitter, or plumber as you'd call it in real life, and I was his helper. I was close to nineteen. And we'd crawl back in the ballast tanks and went to sleep.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And all at once Sladen commenced to kicking and hollering and screaming. He said, "Roy, did you punch me?" I told him no. And he said, "Well, get out of here," so he run across the top of me. Now in the ballast tank there's only room for one person to lay; two people can't lay side by side on the deck of one of those. So he'd went in first, and he'd crawled back in the corner and went to sleep, and I had to go to sleep right in under this hole where you get in the ballast tank. Now I'm ashamed at having to sleep with the War going on, but we had nothing else to do, and tired and weary, so we had went to sleep when he woke up screaming. And I thought he'd had a bad dream. And when we got back out on the deck where there was lights—see, there was no light at all in there—it was probably five or ten minutes before he could talk, he was scared that bad. And when he got so he could talk, he

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says, "Roy, are you right sure you didn't punch me?" And I said, "I know I didn't. You woke me up, a-hollering and kicking." And he said, "Well, there was a sailor in there with us." And I said, "No, there couldn't have been, because if there had been a sailor in there with us he'd have had to walk across the top of me to get in too." The sailor had punched him with his nightstick and told him it was time for him to get up and go to work. And he told me the sailor's name, and he said the sailor had number such-and-such on his shirt, and he described the tattoo the sailor had on his arm, and the armband with the Shore Patrol on one arm. And the man had had a nightstick and had punched him with a nightstick and told him it was time to go to work, and then turned and walked out through the steel bulkhead, and it four inches thick. There was no door there. And he said there was just a glow around this sailor. And that's what scared him, when the sailor turned and walked out through the steel bulkhead.

PATTY DILLEY:

And walked out through the wall.

ROY HAM:

And I laughed at him, because I had seen plenty of people scared wake up from a nightmare. But three to four, maybe five months later, he hunted me up one day. He and I had parted company and were working on different shifts, so he hunted me up one day and dropped me a letter from the Defense Department. It came from Washington. And on that letter from the Defense Department, that sailor, that number, the Defense Department described the tattoo on that sailor just exactly the way that this man described it to me on the day that he was scared so bad, was killed in Pearl Harbor aboard "The Honolulu."

PATTY DILLEY:

That was scary. What did that do to him?

ROY HAM:

He believed it, and there's no way in this world that you could

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get him to go back in those holes to work, let alone go to sleep. I had to do his work from that day on back in the ballast tanks. When he and I had to go to the ballast tank to work, he wouldn't go. He told me he'd quit before he'd go back in and do the work.

PATTY DILLEY:

Gosh. Why wouldn't they let you work as much as you wanted to?

ROY HAM:

Get too much work done.

PATTY DILLEY:

And they didn't want that to …

ROY HAM:

Apparently. I still can't understand it.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] I don't understand that either.

ROY HAM:

It's not reasonable, but yet it happened. And they'd keep me there sometimes fourteen hours a day, and do two hours' work. Everything that I could have done could have been done in two to three hours, the way I was used to working in the mountains. By the time the War was over, I was pretty well sick of that type of work, so two or three days after the Japanese had surrendered I quit and came home. School had been going on a few weeks in Lansing, and I told you I'd quit school. So I had a younger brother that was going to high school at that time, and he was bragging about what a good teacher they had at Lansing named Ron Davis. He believed in making a child mind, and if he told you to move he meant for you to move. Just a great, great teacher. He wasn't unreasonable; he was just a good teacher. And I shook hands with him when my brother introduced him and told him if he had been the principal when I went to school that I would probably have finished before I left. And he said, "Well, you can finish anyway. Come on back next week."

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And I met a real good friend, the English teacher, and just out of the blue sky she said, "Roy, you coming back to school?" "Yes, ma'am." She said, "Well, you'll be in my room. I'll have your books in a minute." I had no intention of going back to school.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And I just joked with her. I was visiting the school. I was going out to hunt me a job and was visiting the school. Well, it wasn't ten minutes till she come with my books, and I would be in her homeroom. And that incident caused me to finish high school. I went that year, passed my grades, and then went the next year and finished. And that was in '47. I graduated from Lansing High School in 1947. The reason that I left Ashe County, there was no jobs, no nothing. By the time you'd get your tobacco raised or whatever, the government would come and cut it down and you couldn't sell it; you couldn't get enough money out of it to last you.

PATTY DILLEY:

So the government came in and stopped you from growing so much?

ROY HAM:

Oh, yes, they allowed my dad and mama one-tenth of one acre of tobacco.

PATTY DILLEY:

That's just terrible.

ROY HAM:

That's not much tobacco. So that year, '47, I put out five acres of beans, and I worked hard on them. That was the only thing I had to do. I wasn't married. And hoeing, fertilized, following the team of horses over five acres of ground, planting the beans, getting the beans in the ground, getting them up, hoeing them, and then it come the great day when I'd make some money off them. They had growed good; they had a good season that year. And when it come the

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day to pick them, I went out and hired a bunch of people to come in and pick beans at fifty cents a bushel.

PATTY DILLEY:

My mother was telling me she did that. [laughter] She picked beans for fifty cents a bushel.

ROY HAM:

I borrowed the money to pay that. I paid them as they come out of the field. I had to hire a truck and take them to market at West Jefferson, and that cost me on average ten cents a bushel, maybe. And while I was sitting in there, the government man who controlled the price of beans come up and said that was the prettiest … [Interruption: In come some people of Mr. Ham's. Mr. Ham begins to talk to friends for several minutes and talks again of the story about the "Honolulu."

PATTY DILLEY:

And they did a television story about that?

ROY HAM:

Yes.

PATTY DILLEY:

On "One Step Beyond"?

ROY HAM:

"One Step Beyond," it was that story. Since I've been working here at Bassett the past five years, this young friend of mine… Let me go back to the beans.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] Okay.

ROY HAM:

And then I'll finish this later. The government man that we were talking about assessed the price of the beans. He said, law, that's the prettiest beans he'd seen that year. The price would be sixty cents a bushel. That's the exact price that I had in the beans that day. And I was a-hoping that when the buyer would see them that he'd give me seventy cents a bushel. When the buyer came around he said, "I'll give you forty cents a bushel." So that left me paying people twenty cents a bushel just to take my beans. I lost twenty cents a bushel on the beans that year. The rest of the beans I had to leave

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in the field. It was a shame.

PATTY DILLEY:

That was just terrible.

ROY HAM:

What I've never been able to understand is why we paid the government man the money to control the price of it, and all he was doing was just drawing the money and writing and wasting pencil. Because that was twenty cents a bushel. The buyer wouldn't give but forty cents, and he had put sixty cents a bushel.

PATTY DILLEY:

Do you think there was ever something between these government men and the buyers? You think they ever had anything up their sleeves?

ROY HAM:

No, I never thought that. I thought it was just an idiotic thing, taking our freedoms one by one, when we could pay a government man to something like that, and then he didn't have any more control over anything than that. A waste of money, a waste of time. Maybe he couldn't use his brain for nothing else; I don't know. But it seems like our government has wasted so much that could have been put to good use, just worthless things like that. It has hurt me. It's taught me to distrust my government. I can't help it. Some of the hardest times I ever saw was when our government… One year we didn't have a bite of meat in the house. We weren't asking nobody for nothing. But on this year—it must have been in '36 or '37—our government come and got our next-door neighbor's pigs, twelve of them, and killed them and buried them. And two or three families there with not a bite of meat in the house. Not a bite.

PATTY DILLEY:

Now why did they do this?

ROY HAM:

Oh, to run the price of other pigs up.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did they do this with this man's permission, or did they just come in and kill them?

ROY HAM:

He kind of begged them to let him give them to some family that needed them. No, that wasn't our government's wishes at that time. That is what has brought us up to what we're in today. Right now it's pretty hard for me to say anything good about our government.

PATTY DILLEY:

It's kind of ironic that all the people were …

ROY HAM:

All the people throughout the world that were starving, and that next year our government took millions of bushels of wheat out in the ocean and dumped it. Now we have never paid for those pigs. We have paid interest on the money year after year after year until today. That's still down in this big debt that's hanging over our head. Done nobody no good. The millions of bushels of wheat that was dumped in the ocean in '37 and '38 may have kept us out of the War; if we had just given and helped the hungry people instead of making them fight, maybe things would have been better. I don't know where the Lord was at when all this was going on.

PATTY DILLEY:

He was still there, I guess.

ROY HAM:

He was bound to have been there, and some of these days He's going to frown on what we've been doing, maybe.

PATTY DILLEY:

This time you were talking about when you-all didn't have hardly anything to eat, was that during the Depression, or was that way after?

ROY HAM:

I don't even remember the Depression.

PATTY DILLEY:

You were born right after that, I guess.

ROY HAM:

I was born before… Well, I don't even know what the

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Depression was.

PATTY DILLEY:

I know it. My mother had a problem remembering about it, too.

ROY HAM:

I've heard so much talk about it. Some people refer to the good old days when you was making a nickel an hour. [Interruption: James Ham, one of Roy's brothers, and Robert, a friend of Roy's from Chilhowie, come in and stay. Both of them live in Newton today.]

ROY HAM:

The good old days that the people talk so much about was when they were paying a nickel for a Coca-Cola, but they don't realize that they were making about a nickel an hour and it was taking one hour's work to buy one Coca-Cola, compared to if you're making three dollars an hour now, you'll get fifteen Coca-Cola's for one hour's work.

PATTY DILLEY:

Is that what that lady was making, working in Bassett?

ROY HAM:

Yes.

PATTY DILLEY:

Three dollars an hour, and she's complaining.

ROY HAM:

This lady was complaining about Coca-Cola's being so high-priced now, twenty cents apiece. Said she could remember the time back when she was making ten cents an hour, that she had money left. A Coca-Cola was just a nickel. And I said, "Lady, if a Coca-Cola was a nickel and you were making ten cents an hour, that took thirty minutes to buy one Coca-Cola, compared to buying fifteen Coca-Cola's now for an hour's work." And she said she had never thought about the good times and bad times that way. She was talking about it nickel for nickel. So I really don't know what the Depression was. I don't want to go back to the times right after the Depression.

PATTY DILLEY:

Your father was in farming? Is that what he did?

ROY HAM:

Yes, he was a farmer.

PATTY DILLEY:

About how many acres did he own?

ROY HAM:

About ninety acres, I guess. And the government would let us raise one-tenth of one acre of tobacco to raise a family of eight on. At one time we were cut down to one-tenth of an acre. And that just wasn't enough for eight in a family to live on. So when we got old enough we had to scatter out. And there was no jobs. The job that I had taken at the hospital before the War paid me twenty dollars a month for eighty-four hours a week work.

PATTY DILLEY:

There wasn't any industry back in the county?

ROY HAM:

No industry whatsoever. No way to make a living. Well, it was so far back, we didn't pipe the sunshine in, but we carried a lot of moonshine with us …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… on Saturday nights. Carried it in gallon jugs.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did your father ever make any of that?

ROY HAM:

[laughter] No. Not to my knowledge. I never saw any.

PATTY DILLEY:

You would be ashamed. [laughter]

ROY HAM:

I had never seen my father drunk, drinking liquor, never. What he done before we got up that old, I don't know.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you-all ever drink any, you and all your brothers? [laughter] I know James, and I bet he did.

ROY HAM:

Not while we were at home. We wasn't allowed to. We often went to church. One night we'd go to one church, maybe up in Virginia. The next night we'd go up Horse Creek to another church. Sometimes it'd be eight or ten miles walking. No automobile. We didn't even have

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electric lights back in those days. And on one occasion that I remember pretty well, three of us went up to Helton Valley up in Virginia to the church. There was a crowd outside cutting up. And the sheriff was sitting in the front row because he was right up next to the preacher in the Amen corner. One of the boys hollered outside, and we saw the deputy sheriff heading out. I stepped up on the steps and met him coming out, and the boys that were with me [laughter] , one of them headed back to North Carolina and one of them headed for the woods. One of them got tangled up in a barbed-wire fence—like to scratched himself to death—and the other one went down Helton Creek …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B] [text missing]

ROY HAM:

[When I got] back to North Carolina, he said, "What happened to you?" I said, "I went in to listen to the preacher." [laughter]

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] Were you outside when all this hooting and hollering was going on?

ROY HAM:

Yes, but I met the sheriff coming out.

PATTY DILLEY:

So you went in. [laughter]

ROY HAM:

I was going in.

PATTY DILLEY:

(To James) Roy got out of it that way. He was smart. [laughter] Did the deputy ever take his gun out?

ROY HAM:

No, but he searched me one time for a gallon of liquor. Me on the motorcycle. Now I never had a gallon of liquor in my life. That highway police scared me the worst I was ever scared in my life.

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James or (To Robert) Was you with me that night? There was somebody on the back of the motorcycle.

PATTY DILLEY:

(To the others) You-all straighten me out if he starts telling [laughter] a lot of stories.

ROY HAM:

(To James or Robert) It may have been before you and I met.

PATTY DILLEY:

How young were you then, when they stopped you on the motorcycle?

ROY HAM:

Twenty-two, I guess. I didn't give them no race, because I was already stopped and right at dark. And in sections of the country, just like you have gangs now, the ones of us from North Carolina, the ones up in Virginia were waiting on us to whip us in gang fights.

PATTY DILLEY:

Were they just gangs of friends or boys or something? What?

ROY HAM:

This was the sheriff's, but I thought it was a gang that was after me.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did these gangs ever get into fights or anything?

ROY HAM:

Not with me, because it was too easy to run.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] Did you ever hear any stories about them getting in fights?

ROY HAM:

Yes, a lot of times they'd fight. It wasn't the gang fights like we have now.

PATTY DILLEY:

There wasn't anybody killed or nothing like that.

ROY HAM:

No, but sometimes mighty wrung.

PATTY DILLEY:

These big gangs, did they have motorcycles, or what kind of gang was it? Did they have automobiles?

ROY HAM:

That was on foot. There wasn't too many automobiles and cars back in those days. I have walked… I'd hitch a ride of

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the evening to get to West Jefferson to go to a picture show, and then have to walk the fifteen miles home that night. There wouldn't be enough cars going that way to hitch a ride with to get in home that night. And I have slept in the road. (To James) Would you remember the night that we woke up there at Lansing, the car pulling around us? Me and you and Billy Joe, wasn't it? We'd got tired. That was eleven miles from West Jefferson. And we'd got tired, lazy, and we was going to sit down there in the road and wait till a car come along and ride the five miles home. Instead of waiting, we lay down stretched out across the road, and we went to sleep, all three of us. And as I woke up, there was a car over in the ditch pulling around us, to keep from running over us. And that feller went away telling about seeing three drunks out there in the road.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And neither one of us was drinking.

JAMES HAM:

Tell her about running up the telephone pole.

ROY HAM:

Yeah, I had a run-in with women.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

That's true, what he's telling you, but he'll lie to you about the way it happened.

PATTY DILLEY:

Okay, let's hear about that… [laughter] He don't want to tell.

ROY HAM:

It's something I can't tell, Patty. No, it's not that bad. I was scared of women, especially this one, and she didn't look like this one [like Patty].

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And she wasn't as nice a girl as this one. And she made a grab at me, said, "You're the one I want."

PATTY DILLEY:

Where was this? Where did this happen at?

ROY HAM:

That was over on Horse Creek at Tuckerdale.

PATTY DILLEY:

How old were you then, just a young one?

ROY HAM:

I was twenty or more. And instead of climbing the telephone pole, I clumb the guy wire by my hands like a monkey, faster than she could run.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And I stayed up on the telephone pole till she left.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

JAMES HAM:

It's true.

ROY HAM:

Patty, you're a grown girl. She said she'd been with every man there except me, and she made a grab at me. And until today, if she's still alive, she never caught the one that went up the telephone wire.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

Now, James, that sounds kind of bad on you.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] (to James) You were there.

ROY HAM:

Yes, he was there.

JAMES HAM:

Yes, but I wasn't in the '34 Chevrolet.

ROY HAM:

I don't remember nothing about a '34 Chevrolet.

JAMES HAM:

Well, they'd take those women for a ride.

ROY HAM:

Well, you're talking.

JAMES HAM:

I know it.

PATTY DILLEY:

Well, we don't have to talk about that one any more. Changing

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the subject, did you-all go to church a lot back then?

ROY HAM:

Yes.

PATTY DILLEY:

How many nights a week did you go?

ROY HAM:

Well, through the summer …

JAMES HAM:

About every night.

ROY HAM:

You had to walk. There were no automobiles to ride. And they'd have bigger crowds at church then than you have now, because the people enjoyed walking back home. And crowds of us would go five or six miles to church, and then we would all walk home of a night.

PATTY DILLEY:

What kind of things did you do at the service? Did you-all have a preacher, or was it mainly singing, or what?

ROY HAM:

It would be for revival services that we'd go every night. I didn't go much to Sunday school. I reckon it was in lieu of the trip home. Enjoyed walking with the crowd. I was afraid to walk by myself; there was too many boogers out.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

I've walked backwards many a time to keep a booger from coming up behind me. One time, we didn't have running water in the house, and we heard that there was a store in Lansing that had two sinks. This was back during the War, and we decided if we got up at three o'clock, we could walk the five miles to Lansing and buy the sink and then go on to school, to keep someone else from getting it. So we'd walked a little over a mile. It was around four o'clock, and you know that's the part of the day that it's the darkest. Me and my brother got out to where John Sheets lives, and there was a gap where

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Page 20

he'd lay the fence down for moving stock from one field to the other. And it was just a wide place in the road, and it was foggy that morning. And we walked by, and there stood John Sheets. I said, "Well, good morning, John." He didn't speak. Freeman said, "Good morning, John," and he didn't speak to him. We both saw what we thought was a man standing there, and we turned and walked backwards for maybe twenty or thirty foot. And the man was walking on gravel about knee-deep and not making any racket. And that was a little too much for us to take …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… so my brother broke first, and if that man or whatever it was behind us, when we got to the top of the hill he was running pretty fast. We got way into Lansing before dark. Yes, I was scared. Now, had I been the only one that see that, then I would think that I was imagining something. But there was two of us saw the same one. We both spoke. And we thought it was John Sheets, and we asked John about it that afternoon. He said no, he wasn't out that early. And what scared us, it bothered us; it was right behind us within five or six foot of us and not making a bit of racket walking in the gravel.

PATTY DILLEY:

Were you-all walking then, or were you-all running? [laughter]

ROY HAM:

After about twenty foot, we were running.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

We would hit the ground about every twenty foot. That was moving on, wasn't it, Robert?

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] You would make Lansing before dark. Gosh. What were you-all doing out that early in the morning anyway?

ROY HAM:

We were going to Lansing to buy a kitchen sink.

PATTY DILLEY:

Oh, yes, you had said that.

ROY HAM:

You couldn't find one. That was during the War. And we wanted one to put in the house so we wouldn't have to get up of a morning and go carry a bucket of water. And the way we bought our clothes, we'd gather peppermint, spearmint, elderflowers, dig all kinds of herbs, pick black-berries, anything we could pick and take to the store and sell, we'd do that to help buy our clothes. And my mother made soap out of lye. A little rough; it didn't smell as good as the soap you go to the store and buy today, and a little harder to make than it was to go buy it. And these people that has it so rough now and starving to death and longing for the old days, I wish they had a little bit of that.

PATTY DILLEY:

Lye soap. That's rough on your skin, too.

ROY HAM:

In 1949 I had the motorcycle wreck. Had both legs broke. And there was a city fellow from Newton went up to Horse Creek to go groundhog hunting. And he was pretty well drunk, and he left his wife there at my mother's where I was at until him and these other gentlemen could go groundhog hunting. And they'd been gone a good little bit, walking across the hill, and he saw a groundhog and he shot it. And my uncle hollered at him and said, "Good Lord, get on that groundhog. It's getting away." And he jumped on, and it was a polecat; it wasn't a groundhog. [laughter]

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

By the time he got back to the car, his wife was in the car and ready to go. And I didn't know that had happened. I saw her jump out of the car and run. And she blessed him out, and she wouldn't get

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Page 22

in the car.

PATTY DILLEY:

I don't blame her.

ROY HAM:

So they put him on the back of a truck and took him back to Horse Creek, because the polecat didn't do any good for the perfume. And they got to Horse Creek, and they got a gallon of soap belonging to my Aunt Hattie and took him down to Horse Creek and tried to wash that off of him, knowing all the time that that lye soap wouldn't do no good. And they rubbed all the hide off of him [laughter] …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… and still had to bury his clothes. And I hadn't saw him until, say, five or six years ago. That would have been up in twenty years that I hadn't seen the feller since. I met him out where I work one day, and I said, "Hey, you killed any polecats lately?"

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

He stopped and said, "You're one of them Horse Creekers. You are a Ham or a Brooks, one. Which one are you?"

PATTY DILLEY:

Did she make that soap to sell?

ROY HAM:

No, just made it to wash clothes with.

PATTY DILLEY:

To save some money.

ROY HAM:

Yes.

PATTY DILLEY:

So you-all sold tobacco, and then you-all sold your wild plants and stuff. Who bought the wild herbs and stuff that you-all gathered?

ROY HAM:

At the stores.

PATTY DILLEY:

And then they bought them for somebody else or something, or what? Do you know what they did with them?

ROY HAM:

They would take and make chewing gum out of the peppermint and

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Page 23

spearmint, candy out of the horehound. And some of the other stuff that we gathered was catnip, lowbeally, and we had a bamgilly [balm of Gilead?] tree that we'd pick the buds off of. That was about the easiest money you could get. Did you ever hear of bamgilly bud?

PATTY DILLEY:

No, I never heard of that.

ROY HAM:

Oh, there's plenty of them here. You've saw them plenty of times, up on Buffalo Creek.

PATTY DILLEY:

I probably didn't call it; I probably just saw it.

ROY HAM:

Next time you go down the river, you look at those trees that's on both sides of the river. The biggest part of them is bamgillies. They look about like these sycamore trees; they favor them a good bit, except they're slimmer.

PATTY DILLEY:

Were their leaves good to chew?

ROY HAM:

No. The buds really smell good when you get them. They're so heavy and sticky. They make some kind of salve out of them, I believe. They have a good healing quality about them.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you-all do any other things to make money?

ROY HAM:

We'd go help the neighbors hoe corn or whatever we could do at small jobs. Even the neighbors didn't have the money in a lot of cases to pay for the work. Now that's not in the Depression; that was many years after the Depression. That's what's got me mixed up about what is good times and what is bad times. I don't know the difference.

PATTY DILLEY:

It was all kind of the same. That's the way my mother was. She was trying to tell me about it. Did your father have any cattle or anything like that?

ROY HAM:

You had to have some cattle and some sheep, from time to time

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Page 24

a few chickens. I had a pet rooster one time and taught him to fight. He made a mistake. He nailed my mother one day, and she was about to kill him with a board.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

Do you remember that, James?

JAMES HAM:

You had a pet sheep up there, too, didn't you?

ROY HAM:

You was the one that got on the fence.

JAMES HAM:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And James couldn't get across the fence because the fence was loose, and he'd got about halfway across it and the sheep would butt him, go "Ba-a-a-a", and James would swing out pretty near the wall and come back back at the sheep. And that would make the sheep mad, and [sheep noise], butt him again. [laughter]

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

If you got in a field with a grown buck sheep, you could be in trouble. Myself and Carl Spencer were walking up the meadow one day to keep from getting muddy. You see, a car couldn't get up that road in the wintertime. From October until April or May, an automobile couldn't get up this highway leaving about a mile. On this particular day it had been raining. The creek was up; the branch was up. And the road was so muddy we didn't want to walk it, so we walked up the meadows. Had to go through the meadow where the fighting sheep was at. This other gentleman had a stick to keep the sheep off of us, and he was swinging the stick back and forward and making the old fighting sheep to stand back. So we'd walk backward going up the branch, and I gave him a shove. He dropped his stick. The sheeps was about to get him.

---

Page 25

So the sheep took out after him and run him across the branch, and every time he'd jump the branch the sheep would jump. And it tickled me so good, and finally Carl got up enough speed to run and jump across the fence. And I was too busy laughing about the race. They run a good five minutes, jumping the branch and running [laughter] up the hill. And I didn't have time to think that it would be my turn later, so here the sheep saw me and here he come.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And I was running toward an old beech tree that was standing out above the fence, and I made the tree before the sheep got me. As I went under the tree, I grabbed a limb and swung up and went and clumb the tree. Well, I didn't get up in the tree till about a dozen hornets had stung me. I had stuck my head in a hornets' nest. I turned loose of the tree and fell to the ground right by the side of the sheep. And there was a hornet that popped the sheep right on the nose [laughter] , and me and the sheep, from right then on for the next two or three minutes, we run out through a swamp.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And hitting big weeds, and we both laid down right by the side of each other to get away from the hornets. Every time a hornet would sting that poor sheep, he'd go, "Ba-a-a, ba-a-a." [laughter] But I thought it was so funny, Carl running to get across the fence [laughter] , he couldn't climb the fence, that I was about to get hurt for laughing.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you-all ever have cockfights or anything like that?

ROY HAM:

No. I don't think I could have watched anything like that. You see, I killed a groundhog one time. And I looked down at the

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Page 26

groundhog after I'd killed it, and I never could figure out why did I kill the groundhog? So I hung up my gun, and I don't think I've ever killed anything since.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you-all go hunting a lot?

ROY HAM:

No. James did, but I could never kill anything. I was forced to get rid of a cat two or three years ago, and I had to get a neighbor to kill my cat. I didn't have the heart. It had been run over with a car. And I guess that's the reason that's kept me in this shop all these years, making musical instruments. I can't go hunting; I don't like to go fishing; my wife won't let me run around with women.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] So you've got to have some pastime.

ROY HAM:

I had to have something to do.

PATTY DILLEY:

What kinds of things did you do when you were a kid, to have fun?

ROY HAM:

We made what they call now Appalachian toys. Some of the first toys I remember would be these blocks; some people call them clackers. They're making them out of plastic now, but we made them out of wood. And we had slingshots that we'd shoot and kill snakes. We made motorcycles.

PATTY DILLEY:

How did you make those?

ROY HAM:

Well, we called them motorcycles. They was just something to coast off the hill. We had to work to push them up the hill, and in some instances we'd saw the wheels off of a log of black gum. We had brakes on them. We had springs on the seats, but the way they were constructed, if you hit a rock with the front wheel it would throw you,

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Page 27

because the front wheel would fold up with you. And a lot of times we'd wreck the motorcycle, and it'd take us another week to get them repaired to ride the next Sunday. And we'd hoe corn all day, thinking. We'd watch a black cloud. We'd go out the row of corn, digging up the corn and watching that black cloud to see if it was going to rain so we could go work on our motorcycle.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And we'd push those up the hill. It'd take us a whole lot longer to push them up the hill than it would to come down. That was in the summer that we'd do that. In the winter we always had bobsleds that we'd make out of wood, and put cradle fingers on the runners to make them run faster. Anything we could do to get up a little more speed. One winter we were going to put a set of wings on the bobsled and fly it across the branch. I like to froze to death that day, because it didn't work.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

JAMES HAM:

Just got to the branch.

ROY HAM:

It just got to the branch, right in the branch.

PATTY DILLEY:

You were telling a story earlier about going swimming and everything. [laughter] Go ahead and tell us that. Don't be ashamed for that. I won't put you on the spot.

ROY HAM:

[laughter] That is on the spot. There was four of us boys. I'd say we were thirteen or fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and we were going swimming. We didn't have bathing suits like you've got now. When you come to a place deep enough, you just went swimming.

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Page 28

That was it. And on this day it was hot outside, and we walked up Helton Creek till we come to a place that was deep enough to go swimming. And we pulled our clothes off and went swimming. Meanwhile, two ladies maybe twenty or twenty-five years old must have saw us go swimming, so they came down through the woods. And they had a foot log right above our swimming hole, and those girls come and crawled on the foot log, kind of watching us swim. We saw them coming and we went to the deepest water we could get, which was right up at our chin. And the water from mountain streams in the summertime, in July it was still cold as ice. They like to froze us to death …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… keeping an eye on us, keeping us in the water. My toenail was about to come off over there; it froze.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did your daddy make you work a whole bunch, or did you-all think it was just…

ROY HAM:

We thought we had to work hard… Mountain life, I guess, is the best life there is. But for a kid that wants to do something, play, work is hard. Hoeing corn, beans, potatoes.

PATTY DILLEY:

But then you got to go out and have your fun afterwards, then.

ROY HAM:

One of the things that I can't understand, I don't know where it came from or what has happened to it, but we had a game the first day of May every year. A group of people would get together, and they'd go and hang a May basket. Picked the first flowers they could find, and if they go up to a neighbor's porch and throw that basket on the porch and holler, "May basket!" people in the house were obligated to catch every person in the crowd. And sometimes it would take till twelve or

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Page 29

one o'clock for the old farmers to do that. The people that brought the May basket up there would throw the May basket and then start running down through the fields or woods or whatever. And the people in the home thought they were obligated to catch everybody that was in the crowd that hung the May basket.

PATTY DILLEY:

I remember doing something like that when I was a little kid. We'd take bundles of flowers and go and leave them up on people's porch and ring the doorbell and run. But we never had them chase us. [laughter]

ROY HAM:

In that section of the country they felt obligated to catch every person in the crowd. And the first one that the old farmer could catch, if she was a young, pretty girl, he got to kiss her.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

She would run to get away from him.

PATTY DILLEY:

I see why they'd run now.

ROY HAM:

But sometimes ladies would dress up like men to keep the men from kissing them. Well, after a hard day's work of plowing, I don't see how the old farmers had the energy for that.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

But they all, at that time in life, everybody looked forward to the first day of May. And sometimes we'd do that the entire month of May. Every night somewhere, somebody would be doing that.

PATTY DILLEY:

And you'd get in big crowds to go around and do this?

ROY HAM:

Oh, yes. The bigger the crowd, the more you could laugh and holler and have a good time. You didn't laugh out loud until after you'd hung your May basket. That was supposed to be a surprise. Catch

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Page 30

the farmers at the supper table. And the faster that farmer gets out and catches them, the quicker that he'd go back and go to bed. And we'd a lot of times gather at molasses boiling. After you'd gather the cane and get it ground and boil it sometimes till two and three o'clock in the morning. That's what we used for sugar. We couldn't buy sugar; we had to make it. And a lot of times people would bring their musical instrument in and play hillbilly music. I think that's the way a lot of the songs were handed down from family to family, for years, from generation to generation.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you have a lot of music around you all the time? Like in your family, did people play?

ROY HAM:

Not in my family. There was no music. We had one old Victrola that my daddy had won at a sale. They had wrote everybody's name down and drawed a name out, and my daddy won it. And he couldn't stand music. He liked music, but the people that played it, he thought they were all lazy and wouldn't work. If they played music through the day when you could do a little farming …

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

PATTY DILLEY:

I wanted to ask you about your first dulcimer. How did you get to making musical instruments? How did you ever get interested in that?

ROY HAM:

Everywhere that there was a gathering, some of the mountain people had some of their instruments along and played. And I always loved fiddling, banjo picking, or anything. And the nearest I ever come

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Page 31

to an instrument would be to get a groundhog hide and stretch it across a box, put a handle on it, and make a banjo. My daddy didn't want us to have a guitar or nothing, but I had worked and saved up twelve dollars and ordered me a guitar from Sears, Roebuck. And I was as happy as a person could be, even knowing that I couldn't pick it, because a guitar that cheap, you couldn't… To me, the twelve dollars was a fortune. And one time in 1946, there was a gentleman put on a show in Lansing, where I went to school. And if there was hillbilly music around, I'd always be sitting in the front row. And on this particular night, the best part of this man's show was to get somebody from the audience out of the crowd up on the stage with him, and would pop jokes at him. I thought that the gentleman was going to let me pick his new Gibson banjo, and I wanted to pick it. Everybody out in the audience knew me; they were all my friends and family. I got up on the stage with him, and instead of letting me pick his store-bought banjo, he'd pop jokes and had the people laughing because I was so backward. I had been on stage before; I had been in crowds; and I could talk, and it never bothered me. But on that night, with him popping the jokes and everybody happy and laughing, I started to say something. My mouth worked; my tongue worked; but I didn't have any voice. And the people hollered. I could take a run and jump up in the air and turn a flip and keep going. And everybody knew that, and they hollered so much, wanting me to turn a flipflop, that I walked out to the end of the stage, unable to talk, and turned a flip over, off of the stage, right by the side of my chair and just set down.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

And it was an hour before I got so I could talk. Now being able to do that eased it a little bit, but I had never been on stage again until just recently. It was thirty years before I was able to get back on stage in front of people again, because of that one incident. But last summer, which was twenty-nine years from the year that that happened then, this old lady here in Newton asked me to take her to the mountains with me on Saturday morning. I agreed to take her, and about six or eight miles from where this incident took place is where she was going. And I'd never been over there in all these years, twenty-nine years that I had never been to this road since, where this lady was going. And when we got to where she was going, instead of sitting her out by the side of the road, after driving a hundred miles I took her on up to the house and knocked on the door to see if there was anybody at home. I didn't want to leave her there by herself. I knocked on the door, and a real old, grey-headed man came to the door. The only thing that he could say was, "My God, Roy Ham. The last time I saw you, you turned a flipflop off of the stage at Lansing. You just made a durn fool out of the feller that was a-picking the banjo." And in the past six months, that has helped me a million times, what that one gentleman said, knowing that the people didn't remember me as being the person that had lost his voice and got stage fright and scared to death; they remembered me as the one who turned a flip off of the stage in the crowd. The reason the people had known me, I had put up rope swings there in the gym a few weeks before that, and I had turned flips off of the ropes, and they broke with me and left me

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Page 33

hanging about fifteen feet in the air by my heels. And when the bar broke with me, everybody in the gymnasium jumped up and screamed. And all I done is just flipped over and landed on my feet and went up through the crowd, turning flips.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

I was the only person in that whole… Was you there that night? (To James, his brother) Well, I guess you jumped up, too, because there wasn't a soul there setting.

PATTY DILLEY:

Were they afraid you were going to get hurt?

ROY HAM:

They knew I was going to be killed.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

Because, see, I had jumped from the ropes and hung my heels over this bar and was swinging on the bar by my heels, after I had turned loose from the swings. But what I done, I had swung it up this way and got it over the crowd and had turned the flip up here over the crowd. And that had already unnerved them, and when I turned that flip they thought I was going to land in them. I went back the other way and turned loose and hung by my heels on this other bar, and that's when it broke.

PATTY DILLEY:

How did you learn to do all that?

ROY HAM:

Swinging on grapevine.

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] Out behind the old barn.

ROBERT:

That was the monkey in him.

ROY HAM:

Like Robert said, the monkey that was in me. We used to see how far we could go, swinging from limbs up there in the mountains. We

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Page 34

never could go far like Tarzan …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… but we enjoyed what we could do. And a lot of times in the winter… People talking back then about they could take five dollars and buy all their groceries. They didn't buy all their groceries; they just bought the seasoning to go in the groceries. The groceries, in a lot of cases, dug in a hole and put out here in under the snow. And you could rabbit hunt in the winter, and you knew where a certain pile in the snow was at. And you'd go out there and dig in under that, and some of the hillbillies had their apples laying on the ground with straw cover and snow, and that snow would keep the apples all winter. And that was good eating …

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

… if you went rabbit hunting.

PATTY DILLEY:

When did you first start making dulcimers?

ROY HAM:

I don't remember the year. I had been making violins.

PATTY DILLEY:

How did you first learn how to make your violins?

ROY HAM:

I made my first fiddle out of a cornstalk. We had always made our Christmas toys out of wood. The little men that can dance on a board, slingshots. Everything like that was handmade. And we enjoyed playing with them at the time, but we learned to hate them, all of them, because we wanted store-bought toys. And now that's what the children want, is these handmade toys now. No way that I can furnish what the people want, even right around here, just wooden toys. But the first dulcimer that I ever saw… Now you've

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Page 35

heard the song about Tom Dooley. Well, Tom Dooley killed Laurie Foster, was supposed to have. That's what the song was wrote about; there's a big debate going on about it. Laurie Foster's sister was a neighbor of ours, and in her home at one time, she had… Us children, walking two miles to school every day, Aunt Bertie Baugus lived half the distance between our home and the school. And every evening of the world, by the time we got up there we'd need a drink of mountain water. And she always had a dipper hanging on the back porch that we'd get us a drink. And we were welcome to go. And I guess I was five years old when I saw my first dulcimer. I knew that Bertie's sister had been killed by somebody, but I didn't know it was Tom Dooley. At the time didn't know there'd be a famous song wrote about it. And the first dulcimer book that I ever remember seeing was years later, and the first tune that I opened up on the first page was the song of Tom Dooley. That may be one reason that I made so many dulcimers; it was just something next to my heart. The first dulcimer that I made, I went up Horse Creek. There was an old mountain preacher up there that had one, and it had been in the family for well over a hundred years. His grandfather had made it. The old preacher is dead now, but his grandfather had made it, and he said the best that he could figure it would be a hundred and twenty-five years old. Now that was maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago.

PATTY DILLEY:

What was that preacher's name?

ROY HAM:

Walter Gray, and his grandfather had built the dulcimer. He wouldn't play nothing but church songs on it; he wouldn't even pick

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Page 36

"Wildwood Flower" for me. But he did let me get the pattern for where the frets would go. And it was years later before I could build my own fret board without measuring off. He had thirteen frets on his, and now I can put any number of frets on it, depending on the length that you want your neckband. And since that time I've made hundred of them. I've got them in about every state in the United States. When I was growing up, when we heard our first radio, they had a Dr. George D. Heaton on the radio, and my mother enjoyed listening to him. And I had the privilege a few years ago of making him a dulcimer for his birthday. And then last year I made a dulcimer for the Governor of North Carolina (Jim Holshouser) and gave it to him up at Hickory. He wrote me a real nice letter December the sixteenth; it was my birthday. I've got his letter put up in a frame, that I'll probably keep as long as I live, knowing that I got a letter from the Governor of North Carolina. Now I've made guitars, mandolins.

PATTY DILLEY:

How did you learn to make your other instruments?

ROY HAM:

Trial and error, I guess, a whole lot. People like Albert Hash were great, mountain people showing me the different things to do.

PATTY DILLEY:

He taught you how to make fiddles.

ROY HAM:

Yes.

PATTY DILLEY:

Did you make any of those before you first made your dulcimer?

ROY HAM:

Yes, ma'am. I'd made several violins before I made any dulcimers. The first dulcimer that I made, me and this halfbreed Indian sawed the wood out with a crosscut saw. And it took us a half

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Page 37

a day to saw enough for two dulcimers.

PATTY DILLEY:

Now you can do it in five minutes, almost.

ROY HAM:

Yes, I saw one out in five minutes now. And these American people talking about their light bill being high? I would not, under no circumstances, regret paying my light bill because it would be worth the entire light bill to saw out one dulcimer, for the price of my month's light bill. I'd rather pay my whole month's light bill than to saw out the one dulcimer with a crosscut saw. Now after I got out of crosscut saw I made me a frame saw, looked like a window, and used that to saw dulcimers out for years. Dulcimers, fiddles, guitars.

PATTY DILLEY:

I heard one man up in Avery County saws his wood out with a chain saw. [laughter] I bet that tears up wood. It wastes a lot of wood.

ROY HAM:

It wastes a lot of wood.

PATTY DILLEY:

Because I guess with this real fine saw, you save as much wood as possible. Not as much of it's turned into sawdust.

ROY HAM:

I worked hard to get bowls of wood for years out of old furniture. We went to a sale in the mountains several years ago, and on one of the old beds that they had up there they had a bed slat that I wanted, a real pretty piece of wood. And I didn't want the bed—it was no good—I just wanted that bed slat. And somebody bid fifty cents on the bed. And that started it off. I would give a dollar for it. I run it to twelve dollars and a half to get that one little five-and-a-half-inch-wide board, and as long as a bed is wide. I bid twelve dollars and a half; that was a fortune back then. That must have been in the late forties, I guess, early fifties. Well,

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after twelve dollars and a half, I quit bidding and let the other fellow have it. There was just two of us bidding. And after the sale was over, I walked over and asked him if he'd sell me that board. And he looked at me right stupid. He said, "Is that what you was bidding on?" I said, "Yes, sir. That board was what I was bidding on." He said, "You take the darn board. You can have it."

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter]

ROY HAM:

So I got the board for nothing. [laughter]

PATTY DILLEY:

I bet he was mad. He could have got it for fifty …

ROY HAM:

No, he thought it was funny that a person would be crazy enough. But if he'd have saw the fiddle that I made out of the old bed slat, he'd have probably wanted the bed slat back. That, I think, was the best violin I ever made.

PATTY DILLEY:

So all your instruments and stuff, it kind of gives you some satisfaction besides your work? I don't know what I'm asking. [laughter]

ROY HAM:

The satisfaction I get making people happy is my pay for it. I've never charged for the instruments. In fact, tonight I sent one all the way to South America. (To a woman who was starting to teach down there)

PATTY DILLEY:

That's a real sweet girl.

ROY HAM:

She was. As far as I'm concerned, I'd never seen that girl before. The one that was in here a while ago? She came in last Sunday night, I believe. Came through the door, and the gentleman that was with her introduced her to me, told me where she was from. She was living down in South America. And I told her who I was, and

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she said, "Well, Mr. Ham, I've been in here before when I was about twelve years old." So I guess that I'll probably be getting some of their instruments from down there, and they'll probably be getting some of mine from here, exchange. She has friends in South America that build instruments, and she's introducing them to our instruments, and she's going to see if they would be happy with their introducing me to their instruments.

PATTY DILLEY:

I know for a while there you were thinking about doing dulcimers and making things for a living. Have you changed your idea about that, or how do you feel about doing that, about selling your instruments?

ROY HAM:

Well, I've got to live. If things gets bad enough till I have to quit the plant, I'll have to charge for the dulcimers, fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos. My wife throwed a pressure cooker lid at me last year, and I tore it up and made a five-string banjo out of it. Did you see that thing?

PATTY DILLEY:

Yes, I saw that. That was pretty.

ROY HAM:

And more people wanting that than any other banjo in the county. You didn't see that one, did you, Robert? I'll show you a picture of it.

PATTY DILLEY:

That was pretty.

ROY HAM:

I'm going to keep making these instruments as long as I can get around. [Music]

PATTY DILLEY:

That's "Arkansas Traveller."

ROY HAM:

"Arkansas Traveller." Several years ago, before any radio or television, you'd get a bunch of fishermen together, and they'd always

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talk about the fish that got away. And if it was people that liked to hunt, if a bear come through, every bear hunter in the country would get together and they'd leave their families and go hunt for the bear. Well, there was a white stallion down in Arkansas, Alabama, down through there in three or four states, that the people had tried for years to catch. And every time that stallion would come through, they'd all take out after it and run. And they called it "The Arkansas Traveller." And when they captured it they wrote the tune of "Arkansas Traveller." Most of the mountain tunes are wrote about some incident like that that had happened. [Music] One of the tunes that I remember from years ago was "It Ain't A-Going to Rain No More." You ever heard of that one?

PATTY DILLEY:

Yes.

ROY HAM:

You like it.

PATTY DILLEY:

Yes.

ROY HAM:

Well, you get throwed in jail if you play that in the state of Texas. It's against the law to pick that tune in the state of Texas.

PATTY DILLEY:

Why is that?

ROY HAM:

In 1930—I believe this is right—that was one of the most popular tunes in the country. And they had a drought in Texas, and it sure didn't look like it would ever rain again in the state of Texas. The man that wrote the tune, they grabbed him up and put him in jail, and he was in jail for thirty days. And they passed a law that they couldn't play the tune "It Ain't A-Going to Rain No More" in the state of Texas. And that man, being that they had had him in jail before the law was wrote, he had to sign an affidavit that as long as he lived in

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the state of Texas, he couldn't play"It Ani't A-Going to Rain No More" in the state of Texas. Now us people in North Carolina, we're smarter than that, aren't we?

PATTY DILLEY:

[laughter] I know what you're going to say, so I'll say yes.

ROY HAM:

Now we have one of the prettiest mountain tunes that's ever been wrote, is against the law to pick it in the state of North Carolina. Did you know that? [Music] ("Poor Ellen Smith")

PATTY DILLEY: