Circle B Stables / Like A Jazz Band In Nashville / The KVC
A bit of rambling from a practiced professional
This post is un-ironically brought to you by Circle B Stables. Perfect for birthday parties or second dates, Circle B Stables takes you on guided horseback rides through the winding trails of the Kanawha State Forest.
A Mare in Heat
This past Saturday morning I mentally calculated the remaining chances of a proper fall hike and dragged myself out of bed, headed south on Park Road and entered the Kanawha State Forest in a will they / won’t they rainstorm1. I drove to the top of Four-Mile Mountain and hopped on Middle Ridge Trail in shoes I didn’t mind getting wet, and after about twenty minutes veered off the trail up Johnson Hollow to try and get a panoramic view of Hernshaw, WV.
At the top of the hill I got lost in reverie, as one does. I was here two weeks ago just a smidge short of peak foliage, and it seems I overshot it by a few days, but the yellows hung on tight, and those early-autumn shoots decorated the forest floor to offer one that undeniable crispness of color which pushes Pumpkin Lattes and young relationships to a whole new level. I climbed higher until another unmarked ridge rose before me, and followed it further to try and break the horizon but soon decided it wasn’t gonna happen and turned back down into the valley to find my path.
Like a Jazz Band in Nashville
Throughout this portion of the hike a song was stuck in my head— more accurately, an entire album. I’ve been a massive fan of Hurray for the Riff Raff since 2016, and her songs have come to define this time of year. When I lived in LA and the most you could ask from October was a chilly morning or a two-hour drive to find a deciduous patch of woods, her music reliably placed me back in the Northeast state-of-mind, conjuring up images of winding roads and cascading leaves. When a friend uncovered Sundown Songs, and pointed out that Alynda Segarra, the artist behind HFTRR, was featured on some of their tracks, I was immediately sold.
The lore goes like this. In 2008 a group of New Orleans musicians eschewed the sound which defined their city and made a country-folk record titled Like A Jazz Band In Nashville. It is a mess of a record, winding through genres and influences with the precision of a drunken sailor pissing into the ocean. Every time you think you know who the lead singer is, what instruments are being played, what sound-quality the production is going for, the album evolves into something new. One of the tracks is a minute-long spoken recipe for bacon pie, but it isn’t the track called Recipe for Love, nor is it the one titled Bacon Pie.2 It’s the sort of record where you can vividly picture the sessions where it was recorded: corduroy jackets, dozing friends passing a bottle of whiskey, strangers coming in and out to guest-spot on a track and then hit the dusty road. It sounds like it was recorded in what could be safely considered a shack and, upon researching, actually was.
The album was burned onto CDs and passed around town and, despite a whimper of a reception3, became by several accounts the impetus of a country-folk scene in New Orleans which forged the careers and stylings of The Deslondes, The Long-Time Goners, Luke Winslow-King, and my beloved Hurray For The Riff Raff amongst many, many others. It is the equivalent of that first Velvet Underground show, or those early LPs from Elephant 6. No one heard it, but everyone who did started a band. The scattered group of artists ballooned, a second and final CD was made, and in the years since only a few passing remarks in Pitchfork interviews have been the legacy of the outfit. That second record is missing from the internet, and as far as I can tell, you either have one the CDs or you’ve never heard it.
I walked along the ridge with those songs repeating themselves in my mind, was getting lost in their messiness, was thinking how easy they made it sound, thinking I oughta make a folk album. My mind started churning with the names of all the great musicians in the Kanawha River Valley who could be featured, had it plotted out where to record it, how to print it, where and when to release it, what to call it, before remembering with a thud that I didn’t know how to play any instruments. “Ah, darn,” I thought, and noticed that I was incredibly lost.
Bear Food
The Kanawha State Forest doesn’t really do trails very well, nor signs, nor boundaries, really. It’s more convenient to consider it a massive patch of woods with one road and a few buildings. I pride myself on a keen sense of navigation, but my internal compass is admittedly weak when the hills just keep rolling as they do here, and with my mind coming up with an imaginary track listing for an imaginary folk record, my chances were low. I decided to go downhill, but that mysteriously became uphill very quickly, and after about 45 minutes I powered up my video camera for how certain I was that I was about to fight a bear. I picked one direction and stuck to it, thinking I’d need more harmonicas, that maybe a couple of tracks could just be local poets reading their work.
We’d print it on CDs, of course, and would wait at least a few months to put it online, if ever. The goal wouldn’t be to play live, would just be to get as many talented musicians as possible into a room for a few different sessions, ask someone the weirdest song they can think of and change the lyrics. We’d need banjo, we’d need slide— copper slide— and I knew just the people to do it. We’d have unreliable back-up vocals, record everything in one take, and release it in late-September, just before the first frost. One or two songs would have to be really sad, but the rest could be that tongue-in-cheek self-serious vibe which comes off as silly. Maybe we’d even screw up some lyrics, and you’d hear people laugh in the background, and we wouldn’t even edit it out.
I came to a road, chose left, and kept walking. There was mud up to my knees and I couldn’t help whistling one of the songs I’d come up with, a re-telling of Black Jack Davey from the perspective of the kidnapped princess. Maybe we could record that one in Thomas, maybe we could do a road trip of the entire state, get some of those hermetic artists scattered across West Virginia to throw down a riff or two. A car passed by and I asked which direction the top of the mountain was, and two miles later I was back at my car, removing soaked-through socks and jotting down some notes for the record’s packaging. Brown lunch bags, of course, and a list of all the collaborators on the front. We’d call it the Kanawha Valley Connection, maybe the Kanawha River Collective, maybe just KVC, and we’d put any money we made on it towards a statue, that’s right, a statue. Even sculptors need to eat.
Circle B Stables
As I drove back through the forest I paused in the road to let some kids on horseback pass, and saw to my left a massive stable. I pulled in and strolled around, found a beautiful mare named Hollow tied to a post and gave her a big ol hug before heading back to the car. I was stopped by a woman named Brittany, who asked if I wanted a ride. I should note here that in the name of free gas I was driving my news van, which should come as no surprise to readers of the mouse-car moment. She said the ride was on the house, and I warned her that I wasn’t exactly here in a professional context, which was probably evident in my rolled-up muddy dockers, barefooted and wearing a silly hat as I was. She said no problem, and we took off into the hills talking about Vermont, about road tripping the California One, about how she grew up using these stables and how they’d been shut down for years, til she re-opened them a few months ago. I was itching to get home, to learn an instrument so I could make an album, but what kinda folk musician would I be if I wasn’t decent in a saddle?
Brittany and I passed through streams as our separate mares hashed out some stable-rivalry and she told me about tracking down horses in Indiana, Oklahoma, and I day-dreamed about an album cover with negatives of a bunch of hipsters dressed as ranchers leaning against a gas station window-front. As we rode I decided we would film our first and only music video here, getting as many collaborators as possible on horses and shooting it with a Super 8. I realized we would need to write lyrics about stealing away on horseback in the dead of night, about tearing bodices and hopping trains. I made a mental note that once I learned an instrument, I’d then figure out how to hop a train. It was all coming together.
I promised a rambling essay and you got one. The truth is, most of us don’t ever get around to making a folk record. Most of these rambling ideas— the ones we conjure up to lull us into sleep, to kill a few dead minutes, to silence some bitterness, some sadness— don’t turn in to anything at all. But stuff still exists, and everything that exists had to come into existence, some of it being brought there by someone who thunk it up. There’s something afoot in this town, some bouquet of inspiration which artists whisper about in conspiratorial tones. It seems every week a new performance rocks the community, a new album drops and drives everyone to their recording studio to try and match it, a new poster advertises a new poetry night, a new arrival sparks a new sound. Back home I call a segment producer and we plot a shoot for Channel 8 news at Circle B Stables, and I schedule a fiddle lesson with the violinist from a local band. There’s too much talent lying around this town, and it probably shouldn’t be me, but someone oughta make it physical, oughta make something messy, something silly which we can point to in twenty years and say, “it was kinda like that.”
This classic descriptor of rom-coms, when you think about it, makes no sense. We think it means, “will they, or will they not,” but it doesn’t. Both “will they” and “won’t they” mean “will they.” I guess it’s pretty accurate since, in the end of all those movies, they will.
It’s the one called, inexplicably, Places I Once Knew.
Only one track crests 100,000 streams on Spotify