Johnny Cash looked me dead-on straight in the eye and said, “Thank You!” It was a look of respect. It was bone chilling. And completely unexpected. But that’s not the story I’m telling here.
I mention it because I had just finished trying to impress a table full of distant kinfolk in South Charleston, West Virginia with my Johnny Cash Said Thank You To Me story, when Aunt Ina, at 93 my oldest living relative, stood up and silently walked into the kitchen.
Aunt Ina wasn’t very big and she moved slowly, but she still had that look of determination that I’d seen many of the women on my father’s side of the family show. Eyes fixed on something in the distance. Jaw stuck out just daring you to cross them. Her sister, Grandma Georgia, often looked exactly like that. So I knew something was up, and I figured at the very least maybe she didn’t care all that much for Johnny Cash.
I’d been living in Northern California for at least 10 years by then, and I didn’t often make it back to West Virginia. Rarer still was a trip down to Lincoln or Kanawa counties. In my limited time to visit I usually preferred to visit Parkersburg in Wood County, where most of my close relatives lived. The aunts, uncles, and cousins I remember being with regularly as a child.
Curiosity called me down by the Kanawa River this time. Years of self-inquiry had lead me to investigate the roots of my raising. I figured spending time with my father Harold Wayne Sr.’s most rural of relations might somehow help me understand myself better.
Pulling up in Aunt Ina’s driveway in early afternoon I had looked out the window of the rental car and seen in the front yard a huge vegetable garden. In the front yard! Now that’s country living, I thought.
Truth be told I was holding some anxiety about the visit. It had been fifteen years, maybe more, since I’d last seen Aunt Ina or any of her family. My hair was now long down the back and sides and had been permed into a stylish wave in front and on top. A few years later a hairdo like that would be a target for universal derision, but at the time I thought I looked cooler than any Nashville guitar slinger with my new Mullet. But what would Aunt Ina and family think? Weren’t they a conservative clan?
Soon I was next to Aunt Ina under the hot August sun in that garden picking the tomatoes, squash, and sweet corn she directed me to. I liked feeling the soft brown dust of West Virginia soil on each vegetable I handed to her. On the way back to the house, Aunt Ina carried a huge pile of produce in her upturned apron. She moved with some effort, but wouldn’t let me help.
She wouldn’t let me help in the kitchen either as she prepared a big country meal of chicken, dumplings, potatoes, and corn chow-chow. A fresh apple pie made from scratch cooled on the counter. Later when Aunt Ina’s daughter Enolia showed up she commented about her mother while happily shaking her head in amazement, “She can still work us all down.”
Irrepressible Enolia was 77 years old and one of Harold Sr.’s cousins. She was tall and had a commanding presence, which probably served her well in her career as a teacher and middle school principal in the Saint Albans area for over 40 years. She said she enjoyed serving the children, and even the grandchildren, of the people she grew up with.
Adventurous, quick minded, and full of good humor, Enolia, while we were eating the pie for desert, smiled over at me and explained why she had come. “I just wanted to see the boy who went to college,” she said, “and then moved to California to play music.” She said it jokingly, but I understood her meaning. People in her world didn’t get a good education to end up playing guitar in honky tonks.
Clinton, another of my father’s cousins, had joined us right in time to eat. He wore overalls and a sly smile, and he told me he was 71 years of age. The back of his neck was a delta of deep creases, like an old piece of leather that had been folded over and back many times, a sure sign of his long hours working in the sun.
Clinton said he would like to come visit me in California some time. When I asked him if there was something particular he wanted to do when he came out, thinking he was sure to say “see The Golden Gate Bridge,” or maybe “ride the Cable Cars.” He replied without hesitation one word:
“Stockton.”
Stockton? Was this guy putting me on. Stockton was 100 miles away from the Bay Area and stuck in the unappealing Central Valley. Nothing there but heat, dust, and cow dung.
“They got the big farms there I hear,” Clinton said.
I agreed to take Clinton to Stockton if he ever made it out my way, and then Aunt Ina was back in the dining room with us from the kitchen. She held an old Bible in her hands. It was on. An old-fashioned Bible beating was underway, and I knew I was the one about to get hit.
Growing up across the Ohio River in Southeast Ohio gave me plenty of experience dealing with small town Jesus believers in the Bible Belt. During my high school years it wasn’t unusual for a classmate to try and “save” me during study hall or at the burger joint after classes were over for the day.
Jesus! The only man who could keep you from an eternity of burning in fire, brimstone, and damnation! I understood that the people who bore witness to me on behalf of the lord thought they were giving me the greatest gift in creation. I knew they really meant me no harm, even though it invariably annoyed me to be approached. Probably because I wasn’t about to explore my own suspicion that I was most likely going to end up as part of the charcoal down below.
So I didn’t want to be saved back then, and I didn’t want to be saved right now. Even as Aunt Ina started paging through her Bible I was thinking of ways to duck out of the room.
Suddenly a small scrap of paper fell from her Bible, spun in the air, landed briefly on the kitchen table, and slipped to the floor. Like a cat with a cornered mouse I pounced, picking it up with my right hand, all the while thinking it might be my ticket to distracting my Christian relatives from working me over with the word of God.
Carefully printed on the paper in straight block letters were the names of relatives who had passed on many years ago. Beside each name there was a date. Next to the name Washington Griffith there was a date and the words “The Crying Kind.”
Whoa!
“What are these names and dates about?” I asked.
Aunt Ina took the paper from my hand with her rough working fingers and looked at what was written on it. “They’re some of your people and the date that they got the holy-spirit in them.”
“Let me see that,” said Clinton as he reached for the paper. Enolia rustled in her seat showing interest in the conversation. Maybe I should have left it at that and let a 93-year-old relation do her thing uninterrupted, but I couldn’t sit still either.
“What does it mean?” I said, “The Crying Kind.”
Immediately everyone fell silent. No rustling. No talking. No nothing. They all looked down at the table. You’d think I was the first person who walked into Kanawa County who didn’t know what The Crying Kind was. I looked at the faces all around me and every last one of them had a tiny whisper of embarrassment on it.
My distant kinfolk were embarrassed for me.
Finally Enolia looked over at me with tenderness in her eyes and said, as if talking to a child, “Wayne, it means that your Great Grandaddy Wash, when he got saved, he started to cry. He got The Crying Kind.”
Now that sounded cool. Best of all the paper falling from the Bible and the explanation of The Crying Kind worked, just as I’d hoped. The saving of my soul lost intensity and was heading off track.
Before our meal Aunt Ina had scrambled up on a chair in the kitchen, much to the dismay of her children, and teetered up there for ten seconds to fetch an old black Realistic cassette player from a top shelf. Then she sat back down and snapped my latest demo tape into the portable deck. Everyone sat quiet and listened to the two songs I’d written, played, and sung.
Aunt Ina kept her eyes closed. Concentrating.
These were people who were raised working all day, every day in the fields, but still had enough energy before turning in at night to sit on a hillside and play and sing country music back before anybody thought to call it country music. Every last one of them a true mountain singer.
“He sounds like Haskel and them,” said Clinton.
Enolia nodded agreement. I’d never heard Haskel and his group, but figured it was a good sign that they thought I sounded like him.
Aunt Ina opened her eyes when the tape was done and looked at me.
“That’s good pickin’,” she said. I still think that may just be, out of all the compliments I’ve gotten on my music over the years, still my favorite.
After the witnessng was broken up by The Crying Kind, instead of coming at me head on, Aunt Ina veered off and tried a different approach.
“If you switched to gospel music,” she said, “you would be doing the lord’s work and you’d sell tapes galore.”
What could I say? I told her that she just might be right. This seemed to please her, she looked at me and smiled. The Bible remained on the kitchen table, unopened for the remainder of my visit.
Around 10 years later my mother, Dorcas Virginia, passed away. As I stood on a snowy February hillside in Parkersburg, West Virginia, while she was slowly lowered into the earth, I looked around me and saw red faces and tears everywhere. I wondered why, me being her only son and all, I was the only person on that cold day who seemingly didn’t get The Crying Kind.
Sleep didn’t come easy that night. I laid motionless on a fold-out bed while staring at the ceiling in my Aunt Betsy’s basement. My mind felt as frozen as the Ohio River. Finally, around two in the morning, I got up and softly sang to myself. Sad songs. “Dark as a Dungeon.” “The Long Black Veil.” I wished I had a guitar with me, and remembered the first one I ever owned.
It was a small bodied Sears Silvertone acoustic that cost $13.95. Dorcas bought it for my Sister Annie’s 14th birthday. I’m sure Dorcas imagined Annie playing “Lemon Tree” and other safe-sounding Peter, Paul, and Mary folk songs on it. But to us kids it meant something else. Rock ‘n’ Roll!
Handed down to me after Annie bought a better guitar, soon I was beating three percussive chords on that little box and singing the songs of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan as loud as I could. Songs of sex, death, and mystery.
One afternoon Dorcas stood in the doorway to my teenage bedroom unnoticed. I was singing a Cash song called “The Wall,” about trying to escape from prison naturally, and when I brought it to a close after dying painfully “in a jailbreak plan,” she said, “If I knew what it would lead to when I brought that guitar into this house I never would have done it!” She looked at me sadly, like the devil already had hold of my ankles and was pulling me straight into the fire.
“I hope you can enjoy yourself up in heaven knowing I’m suffering down in hell,” I said angrily before exhaling a cold ribbon of laughter.
“I wish you would just believe in the lord,” my mother pleaded, eyes soft with heartbreak and pain.
Then she was gone, and my laughter stopped.
Leaving home at eighteen I swore to both mom and dad that I would never set foot in a church again, and over the decades I had kept that promise. Now, with Dorcas in a Wood County grave, I suddenly felt the need to better understand Jesus and God as well as Heaven and Hell. Probably not in the same way she understood them, and not for my own spiritual enlightenment, but to get a clearer understanding of where I came from.
But how to start?
That’s how I found myself easing my van on to Highway 580 in Oakland listening to Merle Haggard’s album “The Land of Many Churches.” I figured my way into greater understanding just might be through gospel, preferably sung by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, or some other country singer I admired. Merle definitely qualified.
Modesto was my destination on a warm spring Saturday afternoon. That evening I would take the stage at some hole-in-the-wall bar and sit in with my friend Papa Ed and his Central Valley hillbilly band The Mostan Wheelers. I could hardly wait to get up and sing old rockabilly and honky-tonk songs with Ed while his big hands slapped time on an old upright bass.
“Precious memories, unseen angels, sent from somewhere to my soul.” Merle, three songs in, started a honey-throated version of “Precious Memories,” a song I remembered singing in church when I was a little kid. My right foot eased off the accelerator a touch even though the 4-cylander van was chugging up the long incline of the Altamont Pass. Electricity-producing windmills spun in rows in the hills all around me. Somehow I needed to slow down. Suddenly the air in the van felt thick, dusty, almost unbreatheable.
Then I started crying. I mean red-faced, gut-shaking, deep-sobbing, water down the face, salt in the mouth, gulping for air tears. I wondered what was happening. I wanted it to stop.
But the release started feeling . . . well, like a release. Like a warm place to be. Like a gift. Like suddenly I was part of something unexplainable. Like the tears were draining away a dark part of me I’d been holding on to for a long time.
I decided to let it be.
For the next, I don’t know - 50 miles, 40 miles, 60 miles (I wasn’t exactly keeping track) – while Merle Haggard and The Strangers serenaded me with old country gospel songs I cried and drove. My stomach and ribs shook uncontrollably as I howled out a surprising river of tears. Then I’d get a period of more or less rest when all I could do was soundlessly gasp from the deep down-depths of me, dry faced, with no water at all.
Part of me still wanted to pull over to the shoulder to get a grip, stop all the damn foolishness, but it felt so good. And I thought that if I got off the road the crying might end. So I drove on.
Fifty miles per hour on California highways is not the socially accepted speed on a Saturday afternoon. Even the most timid, jelly-guts, fearful drivers breezed by me that day. Weeping while driving, letting go into something I still didn’t quite understand, I still had the presence of mind to drive reasonably safely.
How many people passing me in cars looked over in the van and saw a red-faced, blubbering wreck at the wheel? Every last one is how it seemed to me, but not one person honked their horn. Nobody registered their disapproval with any kind of angry gesture.
Twenty miles outside of Modesto “The Land of Many Churches” came to an end, Merle was silent, and my crying melted away. Sporadic whimpering and occasional soft spasms in my stomach rose and fell, came and went, but the deep release was over.
Adjusting the rearview mirror with my right hand while pressing down on the brake with my foot, I finally had a chance to get a look at me. Dang! Eyes red and half closed. Tear streaks all down my face. Cheeks puffed out like crimson balloons. Not looking good, but not all that concerned about it either.
Half an hour later I pulled into the parking lot of the club and cut the engine. Sound check was due to start soon, but I didn’t move from the drivers seat. I sat there feeling more peaceful than I had in a long, long time. That’s when it hit me.
I’d just got The Crying Kind.
That night, when I got up to do my 30 minute “sittin’ in” set with Papa Ed, I tore up the house with a casual fire that was unusual to us all. It was like the notes dripped deliciously from my fingers and into the guitar neck, which felt softer with each song. It was like my voice sprayed the audience with a magic mist that magnified the emotional charge of every word I sang. Sure enough the crowd went wild, but I never breathed a word to the other musicians how I’d cried like a baby all the way down the road to the gig.
Sunday I drove back to Oakland, trying to make sense of what had happened to me. The more I thought about it, the less I understood. Yet I couldn’t deny that getting The Crying Kind felt good.
Adding it all up I wondered. Since I had such a moving experience driving in my car listening to Merle Haggard sing on the stereo, what would it be like if I went to a real church and heard actual flesh and blood people sing and play live?
One week later I was at one of San Francisco’s largest churches for Sunday morning service, sitting alone in the back row. But that’s a story for another time.
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