Joe Wilson sure wasn’t running on sleep when he climbed into a car to be driven to the far side of Thailand at 6 a.m.
The prop plane that flew him and a bevy of roots stars—John Jackson, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, and Buck White—wobbled to the ground in Bangkok just four hours before. The others enjoyed a three-day break from their globe-hopping tour, one that had already taken them from Honolulu to Hong Kong. But Wilson, then the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, was on a mission of mercy.
Bouncing along pitted roads, he tried to catch some shut-eye. The ride was too rough, though, and the views too extraordinary—temples resting on stilts, beautiful lakes, and logging camps where elephants moved the logs. Each scene reminded Wilson that he was far from home, leaving him to wonder how he’d know if the Cambodian dancers he’d been sent to find were, in fact, the real deal. In his words, he “knew about as much about ancient Asian ballet and music as a hog does about Sunday.”
Still, upon learning that Wilson was touring the region, the U.S. State Department had tapped him to visit a group claiming to be Cambodia’s Royal Ballet. These were court performers, sponsored by royalty since the ninth century. Now Cambodia’s royalty was deposed, and the dancers were on the run. It was 1980, and a brutal regime, the Khmer Rouge, was assassinating Cambodia’s intellectuals and artists.
When he rolled into Khao-I-Dang, a sprawling refugee camp on Thailand’s border with Cambodia, this country boy—who had read plenty but didn’t hold a single degree—may have been the world’s least likely emissary. He faced a sea of oxen carts and hungry faces, an overwhelming sight, but stuck to his guns, weaving around blue tarp shelters until he found the dancers.
Despite fleeing their home country and living in abject poverty, they had not give up their art. In a bamboo space with a dirt floor, these performers donned elaborate costumes representing traditional characters—the woman, the man, the giant, and the monkey—and began a stylized routine of tightly disciplined motion, poised legs and elaborate hand gestures refined over 11,000 years.
“This was a scene to test your heart,” Wilson told me, remembering their brilliant show 35 years later. “A big expert from Washington,” he added, sarcastically. “I signed, attesting to their quality.”
But that was just the start of what Wilson did for the gifted refugees. The National Council for the Traditional Arts became the dancers’ U.S. sponsor, raising funds to support them as they established lives here and booking tours to introduce their breathtaking art form to American audiences.
While the court performers sometimes struggled to make ends meet, relying on charity, they wowed everyone who saw them and, in the end, built international appreciation for what had nearly become a lost art. Even as the Khmer Rouge began to lose control in Cambodia, many of the dancers remained in the States.
“Now,” Wilson said, “their children are fine Americans.”
I hit the gravel lot at County Line Café with my wheels hot and shocks bouncing. After reading a half dozen articles on Wilson’s unusual life, I wasn’t about to be late.
Leaving my Jeep in a half-space at the lot’s far end—all that was available at dinnertime in Galax, Virginia—I hustled inside. Some dozen heads turned, locals looking up from their green beans and country-fried steak to see who tore through the door. Upon spotting me, a winded stranger in a blue blazer and loafers—looking more like the D.C. transplant I’d become than the Appalachian native I was—all eyes returned to their plates. All except one.
By the cashier stand, a diminutive older gent smiled wide.
“Joe?” I asked, and he started my way with one arm extended. I’d seen pictures of him online, but they didn’t do justice to his welcoming gait and the mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Mark Lynn, glad as hell you could make it,” he said, shaking my hand and then motioning me toward a good table.
Few things excite me more than home cooking, but Joe Wilson happened to be one of them. Before our menus were even cleared, I started shooting off questions.
He told me about the time he was in Kiev with bluegrass-country star Alison Krauss. After the show, a woman approached the stage in tears, insisting they come to her home for dinner. It wasn’t until Wilson and Krauss arrived that they learned their hostess was, in fact, the first violinist in the Kiev Symphony.
He told me how Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall would stop by the New York office where Wilson once worked, the office of a civil rights fundraiser. The justice would show up later in the day, when he was tired of running around the city. “Sometimes you’d go in,” Wilson recalled, “and receptionist would say, ‘Shhh, Thurgood’s asleep in there.’”
He told me how he worked for country star Marty Robbins, and how Marty’s bouncer Lee Emerson, “the best street fighter there ever was,” got involved with the wrong groupie, a girl with a jealous boyfriend who shot poor Emerson dead right between the eyes.
He told me about hugging Rosa Parks—“steel in a cotton print dress” he called her—and how his civil rights work parlayed into fundraising, which eventually merged with his love of music, building him a new career. He told me about literally writing the book on the Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail; about leading the Blue Ridge Music Center; and about his semi-retirement in 2003, which brought him back to the mountains to Fries, Virginia, just a few miles from where we sat.
He told me enough stories to fill four books, and that was before we even got to dessert. By the time we each dug into a heap of blackberry cobbler, I was chewing dumbstruck, watching the man across from me. He was no taller than a sprite, stooped from age, in plaid flannel and sensible shoes, looking like any other septuagenarian in Galax. But God Almighty, what kind of crazy life had he led?
Covering Car Seats wasn’t the work Wilson had in mind when he went to Nashville. Unable to finish college because his family didn’t have the $1,500 he needed for tuition, he packed up some books, his most prized possessions, and thumbed his way to Music City. “I’d always listened to the Grand Ole Opry and had always heard all this music from there,” he said. “Wanted to see some of it, see if there was anything I could do.”
The Opry didn’t fling its doors open for Wilson, but two other institutions did—Rayco Racing Division, where he landed a job, and the local Unitarian Church. At the latter, Wilson found himself surrounded by Southern progressives and their Northern counterparts—fired-up students such as Diane Nash, a former Chicago beauty queen who led the movement to integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and who would emerge as one of that era’s great community organizers.
“Beautiful and voluble” is how Wilson describes Nash, and when she invited him to attend a planning meeting, he couldn’t resist. He was quiet at first, saying that he was “a mite shy then,” but by the end, Wilson was part of a gang, five or six white boys who would go to the lunch counter at Harvey’s, a downtown Nashville department store.
This unassuming crew established themselves as regulars in advance of the city’s first sit-in.
“They had a contest for apple pie—million-dollar apple pie,” Wilson recalled, so that’s what he ordered. Day after day, for weeks on end, he saddled up to the long, chrome-lined counter and quietly ordered. Reminiscing, Wilson laughed, admitting that he still can’t eat apple pie.
When the day of the sit-in came, Wilson and the other whites took their places just before the African-American students showed up. Waiting on his meal, he watched Harvey’s refuse his new friends service, the police called simply because they tried to order sandwiches. Normally meek, Wilson’s voice rose up. As the manager shut the store down, he called out in an unmistakable Tennessee mountain drawl, “Hey, we want to eat!”
Though the police told him and the other protestors to leave, they had accomplished their goal. Harvey’s was a test-run, the precursor to weeks of civil disobedience. Within three months, blacks had the right to dine wherever they liked in Nashville, and soon after, Wilson headed to Birmingham, ready to make his voice heard in a new town.
There, he used his good-old-boy charm to infiltrate Ku Klux Klan meetings, publishing articles in the national magazine The Progressive, naming names and bringing that group’s nefarious activities into the light.
By the time Wilson and I finished our dinner and reached the Front Porch Gallery and Frame Shop, the place was hopping. It is the one spot in southwest Virginia—maybe the world—where you can buy local art, get it custom-framed, and listen to live mountain music under one roof. Twenty-plus locals had packed into the place, all on folding chairs softened by rough-cut foam wedges. The night’s headliner, local picker Steve Lewis, looked the part of a backwoods professor, complete with glasses that dangled from his neck and a camouflage cap. As he fiddled with his guitar, Lewis told corny jokes (“Why don’t you ever see hippopotamuses hiding in trees? Because they’re really good at it!”).
The crowd howled until the music started, and then everyone leaned in, bobbing their heads along to expertly wrought old-time and bluegrass tunes. Over the next two hours, the musicians led the kind of give and take that only works in a small space, bantering with audience members and welcoming playful jabs from the crowd mid-show.
I scuttled around the room taking photos, while my companion for the night sat in his folding chair, smiling ear to ear and tapping his toes. Wilson was the one who suggested this place, a stop along the Crooked Road, the music trail he helped found 12 years ago—a fact that didn’t escape Steve Lewis.
After one rowdy tune, all the musicians paused, creating a hush, which Lewis filled by saying, “We have someone special with us tonight.” He then rattled off Wilson’s many contributions to local culture—how he put mountain music on the map with more than 70 music tours and festivals; how he brought the world to Galax’s doorstep, first with the Blue Ridge Music Center, a performance space and museum committed to the region’s signature style, and then by developing the Crooked Road, which weaves across 19 Virginia counties and generates around $13 million in annual economic impact.
As Lewis talked, heads nodded, and when he finished, the applause was more than polite. Enthusiastic and loud, it was interspersed with whistles and one shout of appreciation. “Thank you, Joe!” someone called behind me, and I realized that people in this room already knew my tour guide for the night. They knew he was instrumental in reviving bluegrass and old-time music, in giving our culture a new life.
They knew what I was just figuring out, that this old man whose eyes now faced the floor as he blushed is, in fact, Appalachian royalty.
1938, Trade, Tennessee: Wilson was born in a two-room house, in the center of a county that some 60 years before had sided with the Union during the Civil War. I asked how racism struck him then, being raised in a place where there wasn’t much of it, how he came to know it existed. Wilson rested his spoon and told me about his good-hearted mother, a woman who married at 16 and made up for what she couldn’t provide in material wealth with a strong moral compass.
“We were building a barn,” Wilson explained, saying he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old at the time. A white man from another town, Mountain City, Tennessee, had come to help lay the concrete foundation, bringing with him three black hired hands.
Partway through the morning, the white man asked Wilson ’s mother, “Well, when it comes to eating, what are we doing?”
She said, “Well, we’ll all eat together.”
“No. No,” the man told her, as if she’d suggested the impossible. “Can’t eat together!”
Without missing a beat, Wilson ’s mother motioned toward the black workers: “Well, that’s the hardest work there is to be done, so if they’re going to eat separate, I’ll feed them first.”
“That struck me,” Wilson said, shaking his head at this early encounter with racism. His mother’s simple solution—to let the black workers eat first—showed him that mountain folks could teach the world a thing or two about fairness.
“We ended up all eating together,” Wilson added, lifting his spoon and digging back into his cobbler. “And it was just fine.”
Days after my Galax visit, I was still puzzling over Joe Wilson—civil rights activist, tour organizer, record producer, and folklorist who brought everything from mountain music to Cambodian dance to the forefront. I marveled at this man who’s been declared a Living Legend by the Smithsonian yet doesn’t hold a single degree.
How does all that come together? What’s the common thread?
I jotted off an email, peppering Wilson with follow-up questions, hoping one would reveal some unifying theme. He replied the same day with answers both thorough and patient. I scanned them, but his reminiscences, long paragraphs full of beautiful memories, only deepened the enigma. Maybe some lives are just like that, I began to think: disjointed and wild.
Then, just about to shut my laptop, I spotted Wilson’s simple closing: “Life is short for all of us, Mark Lynn, but it should never be boring.”
That was it; this one sentence brought everything into focus. Wilson left his mountain home, looking for adventure, a way to break into country music. He ended up traveling the world, helping the oppressed and not just landing a job in the music industry but reshaping it. He sat at the juncture of two great movements—one for civil rights, the other for traditional arts—and he did it all without a college diploma, without anyone’s permission. His path has been unpredictable, inspired, and sometimes chaotic, but not once, not for a minute, has Joe Wilson’s life been boring.
If you're an old time music fan, you know Galax, Virginia. It's no bigger than my thumb—just a few thousand residents—but home to more musical talent than five Nashville's rolled together.
I drove down there last week, and before I even hit the town's limits, I began to see signs for performances. There was the "special preacher's choir" at Galax Pentecostal Holiness Church; gospel singing on Tuesday nights at the local Bojangles (yes, the biscuit place); and a live radio broadcast of Blue Ridge Backroads from the historic Rex Theater.
Picking and choosing would have been tough were I not visiting with one of the area's foremost guides. Joe Wilson is a self-taught folklorist, activist, and advocate for traditional arts. In future posts I'll tell you all about his amazing work, which includes leading the nearby Blue Ridge Music Center and literally writing the book on Virginia's heritage music trail. For now, suffice it to say that Joe wouldn't steer me wrong.
Our night started at County Line Cafe, a classic, roadside eatery with an overflowing parking lot and rocking chairs out front. My simple dinner was good—soft green beans, mac and cheese, and potatoes mashed thin. Desert was great—blackberry cobbler. But what really stood out was the crowd. It looked like everyone knew everyone, country folk slapping backs and traded corny jokes, and I was reminded just how sweet small town life can be.
I left the cafe in a Galax frame of mind, which was fitting since our next stop was at America's most peculiar picture frame shop. Founded some twenty years ago, The Front Porch Gallery and Frame Shop redefines multipurpose. It provides custom picture frames, of course, but that's just the start. This little shop off Route 221 also showcases the owner Willard Gayheart's sketches. Inspired by mountain music scenes, Willard, a spry octogenarian, brings legends like Doc Watson and Ralph Stanley to life on the page. His hyper-realistic drawings have won him the nickname "Norman Rockwell of Appalachia." Art, as it turns out, is just one of Willard's talents. He also plays some mean guitar, usually alongside his son-in-law Scott Freeman. Now Freeman, being from Galax where town codes seemingly prevents a building from serving just one use, uses one corner of the frame shop to teaches music students, and he converts that same space into a stage for public performances every Friday night.
(Yes, that is four uses for one tiny store. Should we pause and call Guinness Book of Records?)
By the time Joe and I arrived at the frame shop, things were hopping. Twenty plus locals had packed into the room, all sitting on folding chairs softened by rough cut foam wedges. Willard was tuning his guitar on one side of the stage while his son-in-law did the same to a mandolin on the other. Between them, local picker Steve Lewis was looking the part of a backwoods professor, complete with glasses dangling from his neck and a camo cap. As he fiddled with his instrument, a fine guitar made by luthier Wayne Henderson, Steve told yet more corny jokes:
"Why don't you ever see hippopotamuses hiding in trees? Because they're really good at it!"
The crowd howled until the music started, and then everyone leaned in, tapping their toes and bobbing their heads to expertly wraught old time and bluegrass tunes. Over the next two hours, the musicians led the kind of give and take that only works in a small space, bantering with audience members, welcoming playful jabs from the crowd mid-show, and calling friends to the stage, right up from their folding chairs, to play a tune or two.
All the while, I snapped photos. A few are below. I can't say they represent life in this Appalachian hamlet. After all, I was only there for about six hours. But I do hope they show how charming one night in Galax can be.
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TR: Alright John, let's start with the fiddle. How did a nice Canadian boy like you end up playing such a Southernfied instrument? JS: I started playing violin when I was six and went to Indiana University for classical violin performance. I got sick of it and put it down (I thought!) for good in 1991. Then I heard Irish fiddle for the first time and also bluegrass fiddle. I picked up the instrument again and got a gig with a Montreal band that played both styles. TR: How did fiddling get you to where you are now? JS: I just stuck with it. I stayed with the Irish band until I moved to Toronto, where there was, and is, an excellent acoustic music scene—lots of bluegrass and old-time. I formed a new, acoustic group (Creaking Tree String Quartet) and a bluegrass band (Foggy Hogtown Boys), the latter of which is still going strong. In 2008, I decided to make a group where I could front a band and do all the lead singing. New Country Rehab was born. TR: When I listen to New Country Rehab, I hear a bunch of different influences. How would you describe your sound? JS: We start with a template of a country band—fiddle, electric guitar, double bass and drums, and just take the music into outer space. For every traditional element there is something original and exciting...crazy guitar riffs, Latin-flavoured drum and perc grooves, surf-rock bass lines, big fiddle melodies. The thing that keeps it all together is the intent of the band. We are singing about timeless and time-honoured themes: love, loss, spirituality, crime and redemption, sinners and saints. TR: How has mountain music—old time and bluegrass—shaped the band and your musical life? JS: I was always drawn to the sound of the fiddle played in the southern styles. I don't know why—I never grew up around it—but it just feels like the right way to use the instrument. Once I started getting into the songs and the musicians who were playing it, it was game, set and match. I'm hooked for life. TR: When you've toured around the South, have you found favorite spots to play? JS: Lexington and Nashville are great. Virginia looks like it will be a great place to discover. And my Mom grew up in West By God Virginia, so I'm hoping to play some shows there. We feel like kids in a candy store at this point...American audiences are great, and we are thrilled that we're being well-received. TR: What about favorite spots to eat? I mean good eats is half the reason to go on tour, right? JS: At this point, we're all just trying to stay lean! Southern cooking is a vortex of flavour and fat. I try to get salads as my main course whenever possible and whenever the spirit stays strong, although I'm a sucker for brisket. I'm gonna start writing songs about arteriosclerosis soon. TR: Finally, I have to ask...is Showman your God-given name? It couldn't be more perfect for your chosen career! JS: Yup and yup. I'm glad it suits what I'm doing, because in grade school people turned it into bad things. "Shitshow" and "Showgirl" were some of the funniest. Sometimes I still get "Snowman" from well-meaning and short-sighted hotel clerks. As for the name itself, it's pretty rare. There are only a few of us up in Canada. I think there are maybe a couple hundred in the U.S. though! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiBUrnMY_Qw
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