About The Madison County journal. (Hull, Ga.) 1989-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 18, 2024)
PAGE 4A-THE MADISON COUNTY (GA) JOURNAL. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18. 2024 Opinions “Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. Hen ry Wa rd Beeche r Christmas carols The mountains By Loran Smith As we approach Christmas, we keep hearing those traditional holiday songs that we hear over and over, year after year: Jingle Bells, White Christmas, The Christmas Song, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. How nice. These titles are but a small number of many Christmas favorites but cer tainly not inclusive. For example, this abridged list does not include any of the faith-based hymns, such as Silent Night. What I like about these wonderful songs is that they have stood the test of time, representing home, family, and togetherness—underscoring the sim ple things in life. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” has sold over 50 million copies, not only the best-selling Christmas song of all time, it’s also the top selling single ever. That fact is confirmed by “Guiness World Records. One of the interesting vignettes about White Christmas, is that it was written by Irving Berlin, a Russian bom immigrant who was Jewish and did not celebrate Christmas. Lean back and hum the lyrics and make yourself aware that Bing Cros by’s crooning music was not what I call jackhammer music. He sang with out amplifiers, thunder, and bombast. I used to tell my kids I could make the music they preferred. When they scoffed at my suggestion, I explained that all it took was a steel drum and a chain saw. Hello, neighbors. I had to meet my parents at Mema’s place at 11:00 a.m. last Sun day. I also had to: a) load my recycling box and var ious loose recyclables into the car’s trunk, b) remember to bring the notebook with my chocolate chunk brown ie recipe for the afternoon’s grocery trip, c) remember to bring reusable grocery bags for said grocery trip, d) brush my teeth after drinking Sun day morning coffee, e) make sure I brought origami paper with me to Mema’s so I could work on folding animals for this year’s Christmas calen dars (more on that another time), f) wear a raincoat. Nothing particularly unusual about such a list—I am pos itive we all have them, every day. I left the house in plenty of time, though I drove my usual slower-than-you pace to get to Mema’s, putting me there right at 11:00 a.m. No sign of the Moaks’ vehicle. The weather was wintry-wet, so I sat in my car. My first move By Ronda Rich In my hands, I held the battered straw hat, holes torn in a couple of places. For a solid block of time, I studied it, having taken it down from the fireplace mantle. I choked up. It probably cost no more than a quar ter yet Oscar Cannon, no doubt, wore it for half a century or more. That’s how our mountain people were: you used something completely up or fixed it if it broke. My Great-Uncle Oscar is an Appala chian legend. So much so that an Ap palachian history center once held an entire program on him. The stories of his brilliance, common sense, and kind heart abounded for two hours. To the man who wore that old hat, I owe a lot. Daddy used to visit him almost every Saturday and sometimes he’d say, “Lit- tle’un, wanna go?” Long before there were safety laws or vehicles with seat belts, I’d climb up, into the ancient pick-up tmck, stand beside my Daddy with my arm around his neck, and hang on tight as we chugged and sputtered to Uncle Os car’s farm with the stream that twisted through the yard. If you stood at the end of the dirt driveway and looked to the right, you could see the Appala chian trail. When the state highway department decided to carve a road out of that solid rock, winding up through the moun tains from Turner’s Corner, the engi- Perhaps my favorite Christmas tune is “The Christmas Song,” which has the most pleasant sounds when sung by Nat King Cole and Mel Tonne. On trips to New York at Christmas, I could not wait to walk over to Rockefeller Center and hear Mel Torme singing such smooth and uplifting lyrics while the ice skaters glided around the ice rink. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, “Jack Frost nipping at your nose, “Yuletide carols being sung by a choir, “And folks dressed up like Eski mos.” Torme once said that the song was written during a hot July summer. The lyrics came about when he and Robert Wells concluded that by thinking about winter scenes and low temperatures, they would feel cool during a time of dreadful heat. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” almost didn’t get recorded. At least that is the case with Gene Autry who was the first notable artist to record it. The song was suggested as a “B” side for a record he was producing, but he rejected the idea. His wife, however, convinced him to use it. You know the rest of the story. There is a Georgia connection— though controversial—to the history of Jingle Bells, probably the first Christ mas tune most of us learn. You listen and you want to head north somewhere and find a way to ride through the countryside in a one-horse open sleigh. Waiting The old hat neers announced that Corinth Baptist Church, where Uncle Oscar and Aunt Fairy attended regularly, would have to be tom down. I can imagine the setting of that con versation: Uncle Oscar, skinny as a rail, with a beard that trailed to his chest, standing among the magnificent oaks, in front of that little, white farmhouse. He had a farmer’s stoop, so named because of the plow straps that went over the shoulders and caused a man to lean forward as he coaxed a stubborn mule through the field. He hitched up his britches with suspenders and often wore knee-high wading boots. And, always, this straw hat. Uncle Oscar “studied” on it before he spoke, probably looking toward heaven. “’S’possin’ I move that church? Yu’uns allow that?” The big city engineers, with fancy degrees, laughed. Uncle Oscar, who hand-crafted fid dles and spinning wheels, had a fourth- grade mountain education which is to say: he was bom brilliant. He didn’t learn it. The following I know to be tme be cause my Daddy told it. He didn’t lie or embellish. That’s why folks called him “Honest Ralph.” Daddy was 13 when he ran away from a mountain shack filled with moonshine and daily beatings from his Daddy. His Mama had left two years earlier. The Cannons took in their nephew when Uncle Oscar found him It has been sung by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby and others. You will find on the Internet that Jingle Bells was the first song to be broadcast from space when Gemini 6 astronauts snuck a harmoni ca and jingle bells aboard their flight. The legend of the song suggests that the song was first sung in Medford, Massachusetts in 1850 and was written by James Lord Pierpont, a local, who wanted to commemorate something about the sleigh races that took place in the town at Thanksgiving. Pierpont’s father was a devout ab olitionist, but the son joined the Con federate Army while serving as music director of the Unitarian church which was located on Oglethorpe Square in Savannah. His brother was the minis ter. After his first wife, with whom he was estranged, died, Pierpont married Eliza Jane Purse, the daughter of the mayor of Savannah, Tom Purse. His older sister, Juliet, was the moth er of John Pierpont Morgan, one of the most powerful financiers of the gilded age. When you hear jingle bells, you are listening to a song that relates to snow, the Civil War’s blue and gray, banking, robber barons, one horse open sleighs, and the miasma of Chatham Country. That’s enough to turn the head of the nation’s No. 1 mascot, Uga XI, also known as Boom, who rides on a boat, Silver Britches, which has no sleigh bells. ence, my mind wandered for a bit after I parked. I noticed after a couple of minutes and decided that the pink-tinged gray clouds—trying their best to hide an otherwise vibrant December sunset—were a good opportunity for aware ness. It was not my purpose to pore over every detail, noting, measuring, studying. Instead, it was enough to let time with them be enough. Waiting went from yet anoth er task in both instances to a reward. I thought to myself, “More time, please.” Such bells of mindfulness ring regularly for me. You likely have your own. Yet, in our all-too-human way, we get carried away from being settled just as often. With whatever busies you— for better or worse—in the coming days, perhaps you will also get the opportunity to wait. My hope is that you hear your bells. Thank you for making my life better, Gary. Mindfully yours, Travis. starving while hiding out in someone’s barn. “Son, you live with us,” he said, put ting his arm around my Daddy’s shoul ders. “But you’ll have to go to school and to church.” Daddy was one of the dozen folks that the mountaineer recruited to help move the church. They disassembled the hardy building with its heart of pine walls and floors and the pulpit that set on an eight-inch high stage. “Uncle Oscar numbered every wood en peg and piece of lumber we took out and wrote it down,” Daddy recalled. Using big, sturdy mules that pulled logging chains attached to the timber, they climbed higher into the moun tains, far away from the new road. On a hilltop, overlooking a beautiful, rolling valley, Uncle Oscar, the short- brimmed straw hat plopped firmly on his head, directed the reconstruction. “When we were done, there wasn’t one peg left over,” Daddy said, then smiled slightly. “Not one.” The church still stands there with a ragged graveyard on the east side and a spectacular view on the other. No congregation gathers there any longer in a stunningly gorgeous place. But its legacy will be passed down through the bloodlines of many. Imagine the other stories that straw hat could tell. Ronda Rich is the best-selling of the new Stella Bankwell mystery: Sapelo Island. Visit www.rondarich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter was to respond to a friend’s text message. Of course. Af ter that my eyes darted and my attention flitted from one thing to another, not real ly resting on anything long enough to have a thought about it. A passing tmck with loud exhaust. Tying my shoes since I forgot to do that in the first paragraph. Checking my watch. Anoth er vehicle passing...not the Moaks’. I was scattered. Then, looking at noth ing in particular through my windshield, my eyes focused: droplets of water, barely even specks on the glass in nearly every new ly-fallen instance. Sudden ly, there was clarity for my mind, as well as a purpose for my time. I was waiting, mindfully. The hurried activ ity to beat the clock made me forgetful. With my lens tuned to the stippled scene, my to- do list changed immediately. Look, breathe, smile, all with an inner quietude that made me think, “How big can a raindrop be while still mak ing no noise when it lands?” Simplicity and profundity for a mind and spirit that needed it. By Travis Moak The barely-drizzly Sunday morning wait was not the first instance of mindfulness while letting time pass for me last week. Not even two days earlier, once again in my car, I sat in the parking lot of Zeb’s BBQ. My friend Car los was running behind for a rare chance to meet for sup per. As with Sunday’s experi- If you grew up in the 1950s like I did, there were many simple things that were very extraordinary events to me. One of these was our annual trip to “the mountains.” This was almost always in the fall when the leaves or the deciduous (hardwood) trees were do ing something called “turning colors.” I was way into adulthood when I learned that these colors were always in the leaf They were just eclipsed by the overwhelm ing green of the chlorophyll. When the weather gets chilly, the tree stops making chlorophyll and the colors of the other chemicals in the leaves are then visible. Mountain expeditions in my family were made up of six people. These were my parents, my grand parents and my brother and me. My grandmother had a baby blue Cadillac sedan. We all got in that monster, with plenty of room to spare, and took off for the Blue Ridge Moun tains. It was a lot later in my life that I learned that this was a more than five hundred mile long chain of mountains that are part of the Appalachian Moun tain chain that runs along the east coast of the United States from New York to Alabama. The Blue Ridge is the chain that runs along the southeastern side of the Appalachians and are closest to us here in Northeast Georgia. It was always puzzling to me to hear my mother and my grandmother continue to “ooh” and “aah” about all the colors that were displayed on the mountainsides. For me, once I saw the first batch that we came too, there wasn’t much difference in any of the trees after that. Of course, we did other things like go to “Ghost Town in the Sky” in Maggie Valley. We also went to Vogel State Park and rode in foot-pedal-powered pad dle boats. We also visited many different waterfalls and climbed to the top of Brasstown Bald at 4781 feet above sea level. We also went to the Smokey Mountains and walked up to Clingmans Dome near Newfound Gap, which is 6643 feet above sea level. There are more than fifty mountains in the Southern Appalachian Mountain chain that are over 6000 feet above sea level. At an early age I often wondered why my family was so fascinated with the mountains and why we had to make a pilgrimage there every year. Later, I learned that my daddy’s grandmother and grandfather were from Habersham County. If you go to Clayton, you can see Yonah Mountain very well. It is not very far from Springer Mountain, the Southern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which goes from Georgia to Maine. My son and I were lucky enough to catch the mountain hiking bug when he was very young. Once I exposed him to this simple joy of life, he never lost it. He is now fifty-four years old and has the honor of being the only member of our family to hike the 2198 mile long Appalachian Trail, the longest in the world. If you study the wonders of Georgia, you know that we have a very diverse landscape stretching from our approximately 110-mile Atlantic Ocean coastline to the 150-mile northern border connecting us to North Car olina and Tennessee. I can’t really say that any one of the many regions, between these elevation extremes, or any of the wonders they hold, are my favorite. I have canoed the swamps of the Okefenokee and paddled the upper regions of the Chattahoochee River. These are all wonderous places to me. Maybe, I do like the moun tains just a little better. There are not nearly as many bugs there as below the “gnat line” that runs from Au gusta, through Macon, to Columbus. People below this line are thought to be more friendly but if the truth is known they are really not waving at you; just shooing away the gnats. If you have not done it, jump in the car or on your scooter (motorcycle) and take a ride to the higher ele vations. This is fun all summer since it is always cooler up there than down here in the warmer piedmont region between the Blue Ridge and the Coastal Plain. I find the people up there to be extremely friendly and hos pitable. The little towns all around northeast Georgia are also really beginning to understand contemporary tourism. An early departure to have lunch in Cleveland, Hiawassee or Blairsville, will enrich your heart and get you home before supper time, with plenty of time to explore along the way. You won’t be sorry. By Charlie Snelling The Madison County Journal Danielsville, Madison County Georgia 30633 Merged with The Danielsville Monitor and The Comer News, January 2006 A publication of MainStreet Newspapers Inc. MIKE BUFFINGTON, Co-publisher SCOn BUFFINGTON Co-publisher CALEB ROLLINS Editor Subscriptions: $45/year — $40/seniors POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: THE MADISON COUNTY JOURNAL PO Box 908 Jefferson, Ga. 30549 The Official Legal Organ of Madison County, Georgia-Periodicals postage paid at Danielsville, Georgia 30633 (USPS 011-097, ISSN 1074987X)
