I think they were her best years, aside from the experience of WLS, which
I don't think could have been topped in her life. She got a lot of, I
guess, affirmation from people who were important, you know, and who
were important in a sense that she discovered later was happening: that
sense of oral history about traditional music. That was not something
that she knew about in her early life. You know, that kind of scholarly
approach to preserving what went on in the mountains of Appalachia. That
was not something she was even aware of, I don't think. Now, she started
reading, once she moved to Lexington she started reading Wendell Barry's
books, and James Steele's books, and people who were writing about the
Appalachian area of Kentucky. She had never done that before.
The life she lived with my father had changed from being a Renfro Valley
kind of experience into a more Nashville experience. They had these
things in Berea called Berea Homecoming that they got involved in
helping with, and they were having people come to perform in Berea once
a year. And it would be like the beauty contest, the, you know, the, all
the different kind of things that a community does once a year would be
involved in this, but they would also have a major performer come. And
they did it out at the Indian Fort Theater, the amphitheater, which
could hold a large audience outside. And, like Marty Robbins came one
year, Flatt and Scruggs, people like that. And they would all, and my
father would always help coordinate that, and they would always come and
eat with us, and we would have a big party at the house, and they would
always, and Billy Ed Wheeler was a big part of that too, from the time,
I guess I remember Billy Ed starting to come to the house when I was
about in the sixth grade. He was a student at Berea College at that time
and was already writing lots of songs. Actually, he was a student who'd
come back to do some work, and he was involved in that. And so, kind of
the music experiences that she had during that time were those kinds of
things. A lot of parties at the house where Billy Ed would come, and we
would do Billy Ed songs, and she would sing gospel songs. There was a
fellow named Shorty Van Winkle who still has a gospel group in Kentucky
who would come and, those were kind of the, what kept her going. You
know, those parties. And she didn't sing "Pretty Polly" and
Page 21 songs like that. She did "John Henry," and she'd do the
driving songs with her banjo, but she did not do any of the old ballad
kinds of stuff at those parties. Nobody was interested in hearing that
at all. And so, that was what she did until, and those parties went on
at our house until, pretty much until the time they divorced.
Occasionally. You know, Billy Ed would come back, even when he went to
Nashville, he would come back and they would have parties, or they would
go down to see Billy Ed, and they would have parties. So, she had more
of an influence like that. But her, what she did was shoved further and
further in the background in lieu of the gospel, just singing harmony
and having fun with it and, you know, and getting with these other
people and hearing them play and really just, what we called music
parties.