“Rocky Road a Song to Kilby”
By Tom Rettew

Kilby Snow was singing a song he wrote and playing the autoharp.

The 30 people jammed into Mike Hudak’s living room in a big house near Stanton Station Saturday night were rapt.

“This is rough old road I’m traveling and I’m knee-deep in the blues – Every time I think I’m winning I find out I only lose – Well I’ve learned a lot of lessons that was never taught in the schools – For this rocky road I’m traveling is a road that’s walked by fools.”

The audience was young – most in their early 20s. They had beards and headbands, suede vests and flare bottom pants. They were as casually buy hip-ly dressed as any rock idol’s fans – but the music they were hearing and helping produce was country music, folk music, Blue Ridge mountain music, bluegrass sounds and tunes.

“I’ve been cheating on my baby, I broke all the rules – So I’m headed for heartaches on the road that’s walked by fools.”

In between lonesome-loser and backwoods-church songs, Snow recounted incidents in his 65 years that traced his own rocky road.

He was blinded in his left eye by a stone chip when he was “chopping sticks;” at age 6 “he was feeling very happy” and still very young, when he “lost his mother” and was raised by his father, “who had a rough time, although all we four children got some schooling.”

The gathering at Hudak’s was a tribute to an acknowledged master of the folk and bluegrass idiom, a genuine hero or guru to these and countless other young (and older) country music fans.

Snow grew up in hard times in the hills of Virginia, near Galax, and began to play an old 5-bar Zimmerman autoharp at age 4. When he was 5, he won a $20 gold piece as first prize in a Winston-Salem, N.C., fiddlers’ convention.

“In ’32 I was chipping a plow (sharpening the point) and a piece of steel hit me in the right eye. This time there was a doctor around and they got it out.

“In ’59 or so I was working for the State Highway in West Chester (Pa.), and we was unloading this calcium, little round pellets, and one bag broke and I slipped on the stuff.

“Went to the doctors there and they said nothing was wrong. Went to the Lancaster hospital and they showed me the X-rays, which showed clear as anything them busted discs, three of them. They said those first doctors didn’t want to find anything. Got me $13,000 from Pennsylvania in a disability. I should have sued them for more.

“Got me a Buick station wagon to travel around the music festivals. Now the Buick’s got a good big motor. A big Buick will go. I can go down to Virginia 85 to 90 all the way on the good road, till you get into the hills and then you can’t get up any speed on them crooked roads.

“Had her up to 120 once. Maybe that’s why the speedometer broke. But now the transmissions broke, too. Those Buick’s got too much power for their transmission.”

Later in the cluttered kitchen, while Kilby, bent by his bad back, was having a cup of coffee and talking more to his followers, the hostess, Ellen Hudak, said, “Don’t pay too much attention to Kilby’s estimate of his speed. He only goes about half as fast as he says.”

“Went off one of those windy roads once, but I never got hurt in an accident in any auto,” Snow, a legitimate hard-traveling man, said later. “Been driving ever since I can remember. Learned on a 1913 Copperhead Ford.”

Joining in with Snow on bluegrass tunes were:

Host Hudak, on harp and fiddle, harmonica, and Hawaiian guitar. Hudak has helped Snow get three records pressed and distributed and he and his wife Ellen are organizing Snow’s next cross-country tour, beginning in December. He’ll play a concert at the University of Delaware Dec. 12.

Wilmington Municipal Court Judge Carl Goldstein, on guitar and mandolin. He is a long-time devotee and friend of the Hudaks.

Jim McCarthy, former University of Delaware student and folk music festival organizer, Saturday played a number of sizes of harmonicas and guitar.

Ann Yerpy of Wilmington, alternating guitar and banjo, learned about folk music in college and is intensely interested in the traditional sources, the Scottish and Irish ballads particularly. She wore a kilt.

Mackey Morgan, of Wilmington, on guitar. His interests vacillate between this kind of music and auto-sprint racing, which he was involved in yesterday.

Half a dozen others, all young, played other autoharps, guitars, tambourine, kazoo, and spoons.

Some guests had a little to drink. Snow and Hudak like a nip now and then; some Boone’s Farm apple wine and Gallo red was consumed, but it was not a drinking party. Music was the focus, the total reason. Church music – small, frame, backwood fundamentalist Protestant church music – made up about half of the tunes and subject of the songs:

October 26, 1970

“I will arise and go to Jesus – He will embrace me in his arms – in the arms of my dear Savior – O there are 10,000 charms.”

Even when the songs weren’t gospel, there was the smoky aura of rural religion:

“On this road of wine and women, life is nothing by a chance – You can eat your pie and have it, pay the piper when you dance – I’ve been cheatin’ on my baby, I broke all the golden rules - … Someday like me you’ll find there’s no place to turn around – Better walk the straight and narrow and live by the golden rule – Or someday like me they’ll find you on the road that’s walked by fools.”

Another basic element of most folk, country, and mountain music is present in Snow’s songs: The cheating woman and the loser man. Snow writes most of his songs, the music and the words.

“Mean women, mean women is all that I hear – They’ll take all your money and call you their own – And leave you downhearted and nowhere to roam. – They’ll tell you they love you, but boys there’s no doubt – Their boyfriend’s just waiting for you to step out.”

The solution that Snow sings of is typical, too:

“Boys, here’s the end to all that stuff – There’s no use of nagging and starting a fuss – Just catch you a train while she’s havin’ fun – and tell the conductor to see that it runs. – Then keep on riding to the end of the track – Then keep on riding for there’s no coming back – for that old alimony is all that she craves – ‘till she knows you’re safely in your grave.”

Snow left his wife in 1925 and roamed the Deeper South. He made money playing and spent freely. In 1929 he returned to Virginia “and met my wife the second time and decided we might make it this time, which we did; working and playing in places and enjoying life and learning much better notes on the harp.”

He and his wife are still together. She is down home in Fries, Va. His sons Jim and Tom both play the harp.

Snow will tell you he was “just playing plain notes” on the autoharp, a zither-like 36 stringed instrument with thumb and finger picks and the chords produced by depressing damper bars. Older harps frequently have a 37th string. In the late 1950s, he moved to nearby Chester County, Pa., and was dissatisfied with his music.

“I heard these sounds (usually produced by other instruments sometimes), at Sunset park near Oxford and the Old Fiddlers Picnic at Lenape, both in Chester County and they haunted me and I said, “Well, I can’t get them. And then I done got a few drag notes, so I kept working on them, and got some more drag notes and back notes and back slurs.”

Drag notes are an approximation of a slur upward in pitch by striking one or two notes open, with bar up, and then one with the bar down. For example, with a “C” chord, one would drag the pick upward in pitch across the “D” and “D#” strings, bars up, and then the “E” string, bar down.

This is a technique to Snow, according to Mike Seeger, producer of Snow’s newest album, “Kilby Snow: Country Songs and Tunes” (Asch Recordings AH 3902). Seeger is a half-brother of folk great Pete Seeger and is “the longest together member of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the oldest, best-known, and best bluegrass groups.”

Half notes are those played in rapid succession; back slurs are runs downward in pitch.

Snow plays left-handed with thumb and forefinger, with the finger doing most of the work. He makes his own picks, usually out of springy brass, often from an old-car headlight rim; in a clever design so both catch the strings perpendicular while the finger is about 55 degrees.

Hudak arranged to have the latest recording taped at Unionville High School, one night when it was empty, through the cooperation of the principal. He has played with Snow often and it was Snow who got Hudak interested in the autoharp. Hudak is in the musical instrument repair business, repairing and making all kinds of stringed instruments.

A porch at Hudak’s rambling high-ceiling home contains a flat-white painted bass, several violins hanging by coat-hanger loops, a box full of various size Hohner mouth organs – harmonicas is a more common name – a tape recorder and many tools and pegs and strings of his second trade.

By day Hudak, 37, works for Diamond State Telephone Co. and helps raise four children, ages 7 to 16. Yesterday at 2 a.m. after the last chords, he had to drive into Wilmington to move all the telephone company clocks back one hour to Standard Time.

By then, Kilby Snow, who has been staying with the Hudaks, was asleep, perhaps dreaming of earlier hard-living rambling days and nights and long-gone sweet girls. As he sings in “The Cannonball”:

“My good gal she left me, she even took my shoes. – Enough to give me these broken weary blues – And now she’s gone, solid gone. – I’m goin’ up west, I’m goin’ up West this fall. – Luck don’t change I’ll not get back at all. – My honey babe, I’m solid gone. – Yonder comes a train, coming down the track – Take me away but it’s not a-gonna carry me back – My honey babe, I’m solid gone.”

Kilby Snow will go on his tour. He won’t get rich. There won’t be any one-millionth copy gold record, like Johnny Cash. He won’t get rich, like Cash. But Snow is already rich, as rich in experience and in music as a man can be.

Hudak is sure Kilby Snow will be back in his living room again. His friends, young, middle aged and older, will be back, too with their instruments and music, writing down the words and chords of Kilby’s songs, and they will all play and sing some more, more of the old songs, the same songs and maybe others Kilby recalls or writes. Kilby Snow won’t be forgotten while he’s gone. None of them will ever forget Kilby Snow.

(Reproduced by Mike Mueller, August 18, 2005.)