Feature
Fiddle & Flag
Hand on Heart, Bow on String
Every county fair in the Upper South books one grandstand act for one night in late summer. More and more of them are booking the same one.
At the county fairgrounds in Sparta, Tennessee, the grandstand fills from the top down. By half past seven on a Saturday in August there were people on every bench and children along the rail, and the smell of the livestock barns had given way, mostly, to the smell of funnel cake. On the stage a five-piece band stood in a line, facing the flag.
No instrument is tuned and no note is played until the anthem is over. That is the rule. A girl from the county high school sang it. Clayton Redmond, who leads the band and plays the fiddle, held his black hat over his heart with his right hand. The band stood with the crowd. When the last note had gone out over the infield he put the hat back on, and not before, and the piano started the boogie.
No instrument is tuned and no note is played until the anthem is over.
Fiddle & Flag are from Cookeville, an hour or so up the road. Redmond, whom everyone calls Cap, was born in Putnam County in 1947. He was drafted in 1966 and served three years in the Army, including a year in Vietnam with an engineer construction battalion, and came home a Specialist Five. He works in his father's hardware store on the courthouse square. On Saturday nights he works here.
The boogie that opens every show belongs, note for note, to Kay Ashworth, who plays piano, sings harmony and writes every chart the band plays. She writes them in pencil, on manuscript paper, at her kitchen table in Cookeville, and brings a revised set to every rehearsal. The part of the boogie that everybody assumes Cap is making up as he goes is written down. She carries three sharpened No. 2 pencils in her jacket pocket at every show. We counted.
Eddie Lee Brannon plays lead guitar and answers every fiddle line a hair behind and a little louder. Marvin Toles plays bass, stands stage right, plays root and fifth and has never been late for a downbeat. Rusty Gaines plays drums. He joined in 1980, at nineteen, and wears a blue headband to every show.
Since 1980 the band has played grandstands in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Missouri, and VFW post halls in between. In 1982 it bought a used motor coach. A small flag rides on the door. It is replaced every year on June 14, and the worn one is taken to the nearest VFW post and retired properly. Since last year Gaines has kept a ledger of the pies given to the band at post halls, by date, post and kind. Chess pie leads.
Two summers ago, on the Fourth of July, rain closed this same grandstand at 7:40 in the evening. The band carried its instruments to the livestock show barn and played the full set unamplified to the two hundred people who followed. A good number of those people were in the grandstand again on Saturday. Several of them told us so before we had asked.
The new record, Seventy North, is named for the highway out of Cookeville. It was written on the coach, arranged at Kay Ashworth's kitchen table and recorded in four days. It has a song called "The Pie Table" and a song called "Kay's Chart," and it ends with "Fiddle Fire," which is how the show ended, too. Afterward a woman from the fair board handed Gaines a pie wrapped in a dish towel. He thanked her, and wrote it down.
