Away Out on the Mountain
By Ken McFarland
I first saw daylight on Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, 1944, so called because FDR had proclaimed it “a day of national thanksgiving.” No turkey or dressing appeared, but facts show that I soon went from Shackelford Hospital in Martinsville, Virginia, to Seventh Street in the nearby mill village of Fieldale. It probably wasn’t long before my small self got the feeling that I lived in a haunted house. Of course, it took time for it to make a bit of sense, partly because the spirit went by two names, Kelly and Daddy, and he had died at a young 52 in July 1942, two years before I was born. Even so, Crockett Kelly Harrell remained larger than life in our house long after his passing, and he was my grandfather.
Of course, when I conjure up Granddaddy’s spirit it isn’t like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Never did an ectoplasmic being pop up, speaking with a Wythe County, Virginia, birthplace accent. Yet he was everywhere in that small house, which I shared with mother and daddy, and also with my grandmother, Mamma Lula Harrell, and my born-in-1867 great-grandmother Julia Russell, who everyone called Granny. It was always “Kelly did this,” or “Daddy said that.” My own daddy was the one who led the chorus—when he wasn’t knitting at the hosiery mill or hanging around Wacker Harlowe’s Esso station. He loved his father-in-law wholeheartedly.
Sometimes Kelly’s voice actually did ring out in that little house on Seventh Street, coming out of a large boxy thing nestled in a living room corner—a record player that spent much of its time as a plateau for my mother’s herd of ceramic elephants. Occasionally, the tiny pachyderms left, someone lifted the lid, a record appeared from the shelves below, and it was soon spinning.
“That’s your Granddaddy,” I’m sure my mother said, and I soon learned that the Victrola could hold any number of black discs of Granddaddy Harrell singing. Even before I could read “Kelly Harrell” on the label, I came to love the image in the center of those records of a dog with its head half inside the speaker.
A move to Durham after first grade parted me from the Victrola, but we visited Fieldale often. The Victrola was re-homed in my parents’ former bedroom, and as I got older, my record playing skills more than matched the demands of a crank phonograph. As soon as we got to Fieldale, I’d head straight for the Victrola to listen to my favorites, Granddaddy Harrell’s “New River Train” and the flip side, “Rovin’ Gambler.” Mother, who adored her father but found his music decidedly rustic, would then counter the old-time tunes by playing “Stardust” on the upright.
Kelly Harrell in His 30s, and the Author’s Favorite 78
Much of the kitchen table conversation about Granddaddy Harrell involved his recording trips to the Victor Records studios in New Jersey, travels that began early in 1925 from the family home in Fries, Virginia, where both of my grandparents worked the looms and where my mother was born in May 1913. (Granddaddy Kelly and Mamma Lula moved to Fieldale later in 1925, when they landed jobs at Fieldcrest Mills.)
Fries was a company town, the houses nestled on streets cut into the steep mountain overlooking the New River. The standing joke was that people living on a higher street could spit down the chimney of a house one level down. Fortunately, the Harrells lived on in the center of the village, so their flue was safe from all but the most proficient expectorators.
Today’s Fries has lost its mill—timbers salvaged for a mall in Texas, I’ve heard—a stab in the heart of preservationists and calamitous for people who had earned a decent wage there. Visitors will find a beautiful setting and several historic markers in the village center broadcasting Fries’ connection to early country music and naming three key figures: fellow millworkers Henry Whitter, Ernest Stoneman, and, of course, Kelly Harrell.
Whitter’s name popped up often in Fieldale kitchen chats. He was a true music pioneer and a self-starter, recording for OKeh Records several years before Granddaddy first sang for Victor. (Apparently, Whitter tried unsuccessfully to convince Kelly to join him in knocking on OKeh’s door.) Not that the locals thought much of Whitter’s talents, as Fries folks were often heard to remark, “If Henry Whitter can make money recording music anybody can!”
A guitar and harmonica player, Henry Whitter did link up with Kelly Harrell in Asheville, North Carolina, in August 1925, recording several sides for OKeh, including the iconic “Wreck of the Southern Old 97.” Whitter may also have encouraged my grandpop to make that early 1925 trip to New Jersey. British musicologist Tony Russell has noted that three of the four songs Kelly recorded there for Victor Records had previously been put on OKeh discs by Whitter.
Granddaddy’s recording stories could cover many pages, so I’ll focus on the basics I learned about during my Fieldale period, 1940s to 1960s. Most of Granddaddy’s work in the music business happened at Victor Music’s Camden, New Jersey, studios, except for the Asheville OKeh trip with his pal Whitter in 1925, plus an August 1927 Victor session in Charlotte. The key story-within-a-story, however, was who was backing him, as Granddaddy Harrell played no instrument save maybe harmonica.
Initially, the records used studio musicians, skilled but clearly not old-time fiddlers. New York City types for sure. Matters looked up for Granddaddy during his second Victor session in 1926, when he was backed on harmonica by the should-be-legendary Carson J. Robison. The best came in 1927, though, when Granddaddy appeared in New Jersey with his own group, The Virginia String Band: Fieldale boys R.D. Hundley on banjo and Alfred Steagall playing guitar—all known to me as a child and young adult. Joining them was Virginia-born fiddler Posey Rorer, best recognized for partnering with the highly influential Tarheel banjo player Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers, who you may not have heard of, but you should have, and with YouTube and the internet, you still can.
The family was especially proud that two Kelly Harrell songs from the Virginia String Band sessions later appeared in Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a three-volume set that was highly influential in the folk music movement. Bob Dylan even used or at least referenced another of my grandfather’s songs, “My Name is John Johanna,” in several of his folk compositions.
***
The year 1929 witnessed several major events for the Harrell family. In particular, the Great Depression hit, and Granddaddy Harrell quit making records, two related developments. February 1929 saw the final four sides he ever recorded, with Alfred Steagall again strumming guitar, but with a fiddler and a harmonica player hired by Victor. Sadly, though, as the economy slid so did record sales, and Victor Records told Kelly Harrell that in the future he would have to personally reimburse musicians. It was “no deal” for Granddaddy, and having now put 43 songs on 78 RPM wax, the time had come for him to be a full-time loom fixer again.
The guiding hand behind much of Granddaddy’s recording action had been Victor artists-and-repertoire producer Ralph Sylvester Peer, who initially worked for OKeh but joined Victor Records in 1925—the year granddaddy Harrell made his first 78s. Peer’s name was another I grew up hearing in that house on Seventh Street. Among country music historians he’s probably best known for setting up the two-day summer 1927 Bristol Sessions, which kicked off the careers of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, about as big of names as can be found in the early country pantheon.
A true man of business, Ralph Peer was unmatched in his tea-leaf reading skills, and he was right on the mark about the people who quickly embraced what he termed mountaineer or “Hill-Billy” music. (Granddaddy Harrell and many others hated the latter term.) It must have been at one leaf-reading session that Peer saw the wisdom in having artists compose their own songs. Wise too because he could then copyright them and make even more money off their recordings.
And thus, another oft-told Fieldale story, this from 1927: Kelly Harrell writing his own classic “Away Out on the Mountain.” My uncle Gene told it best, having been on the scene at the time. It seems that Peer contacted Kelly Harrell one day and asked him to write a “mountain song.” Granddaddy arranged for my mother and Mamma Lula to go to the movies while he sat down at the multipurpose kitchen table and quickly wrote “Away Out on the Mountain,” about as mountainy as you can get. Peer also wanted someone who could yodel, a vocal embellishment being popularized at the time by Jimmie Rodgers. Granddaddy failed miserably at yodeling, his attempts still bringing tears to Mamma Lula’s eyes decades after the fact.
Peer thus convinced Kelly to let Jimmie Rodgers have “Away,” which became the back side of “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas),” released in 1928. “T for Texas” was a million-seller and a milestone event for Rodgers. Meantime, “Away Out on the Mountain,” being under copyright, generated royalties that added nicely to the Fieldale income, and believe it or not, still produce a tiny amount to this day.
During this same period, Granddaddy also wrote “The Story of the Mighty Mississippi,” which Ernest Stoneman recorded for Victor in 1927. Though Stoneman ranks high in country music history, no tales of handsome Harrell royalties survive for this tune.
To that point, clearly Granddaddy Harrell made a lot of money. One particular kitchen table story was indeed a kitchen table story. He had come home from New Jersey and immediately spread $1,300 cash from record-making out on the kitchen table. A quick internet check shows that would equal over $22,000 in 2024.
Granddaddy’s last Fieldcrest Mills paystub shows the most he ever made in the mills was less than $1 an hour. On this final payday, July 11, 1942, he grossed $20.30 for working 28 hours.
Kelly Harrell could spend it too. A man who loved his dram, he also loved to spread his largesse widely among his many, many friends. One story had it that he would host gatherings in boxcars on sidings near the mill. And a well-heeled Kelly would happily treat. In later years, one of his old friends told me Granddaddy was “the best liked man in Henry County, Virginia.” Already showing signs of the heart problems that would kill him in 1942, he didn’t let arrhythmia, or his bad asthma, interfere with his ability to down a full tumbler of moonshine without putting down the glass—a skill witnessed by both Uncle Gene and my own daddy. What followed on Granddaddy’s return to the house on Seventh Street was another story, as Mamma Lula hated every aspect of alcohol, and at times she made him spend all night on the porch. (My daddy couldn’t stand that, and discord was sown that lived on long after Granddaddy Harrell passed.)
Not only a recording artist, Kelly also sang publicly across the region. Event posters show him and Ernest Stoneman scheduled to perform at the 1927 Bristol sessions, doubtlessly helping Ralph Peer convince area talent of the rewards that might be had from Victor Records. There were numerous musicians around to join in, including Charlie Poole, a man whose drinking habits were even more notorious than Granddaddy Harrell’s. Uncle Gene recalled Poole spending the night at Seventh Street, his sleep being regularly broken by the need to go outside and throw up. I don’t think Mamma Lula liked Charlie much.
The decades have flown past since my Fieldale days, so you might think the spirit that haunted the Seventh Street house is at rest. Well, no. Just as I was starting to write this story about Granddaddy an email popped up from, of all places, “peermusic.” The royalty account for Granddaddy’s old songs was passed on to me after my mother died. The checks that show up from time to time may be small, but they’re still a sweet reminder of events that took place almost a century ago and made an indelible impression on my family, and obviously on me. By all accounts Ralph Peer was a snob who found his artists and their music distasteful. Yet to him, and of course to Crockett Kelly Harrell, I’ll raise a glass tonight as I sing from Granddaddy’s best-known song:
I’ll pack my grip for a farewell trip,
Kiss Susie Jane goodbye at the fountain.
I’m going, says I, to the land of the sky,
Away out on the mountain.
***
Ken McFarland, who reports for Pie & Chai from a small town in Vermont, was born in Martinsville, Virginia, and grew up in Durham, North Carolina.
