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Section
1: The Legacy
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Berea
College student David Hawthorne learns tunes from Callie
and Charles Isaacs at Kirby Knob in Jackson County,
Kentucky
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Godfrey
and Bessie Isaacs were raised in the Kentucky Mountains.
After they were married in 1919, they traveled
across the border to Ohio where Godfrey found a job
working in a steel foundry.
They returned to their homeland in Kentucky after
the depression began and in 1933, Godfrey traded his
mule for a piece of land in the mountains near Berea. On this piece of land in the backwoods of Kentucky, Godfrey
and Bessie built a home and raised a family of seventeen
children. There
was no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing and
the family was very poor, but there was warmth and
happiness in the home and a strong focus on the Bible.
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Godfrey
became a Pentecostal Holiness preacher and riding on a mule, he
visited the folks who populated the remote mountains and
preached in a small one-room schoolhouse nearby.
Godfrey and Bessie loved to sing the old-time mountain
songs and their love of music was passed on to their children.
This love became a passion for their son Joe and his two
brothers Charles and Herman.
The
family home is still proudly standing in the hills of Kentucky
and Joe's sister Edna lives there today.
We'll visit her at home while she butchers hogs, hanging
them in the old smokehouse that Godfrey built many years ago,
and chat with her as she cooks lard and puts up canned meats on
the wood stove in her kitchen.
We'll
take our viewers on a bumpy ride in Joe's jeep down the
back-country dirt road that leads from the family home to the
backwoods home where Joe's brother Charles and his wife Callie
have lived for many years.
We'll hear them sing and talk about the old days and the
mountain ways.
To
help round out this section of the program, we'll be using
photographs of the family that were taken by neighbor
photographer Warren Brunner who has documented this family and
recorded scenes of Appalachian life for over forty years.
His fine photographs have been published in magazines,
calendars and books for many years.
The music score will include selections from a
professional recording that Joe made in 1968 of Bessie singing
songs that she had been singing all of her life.
We'll
let Joe and Charles tell the story of how Charles and their
brother Herman sang and played the guitar and mandolin, and how
in the early 1950s, Charles purchased an old wind-up phonograph
and a stack of 78-rpm records by bluegrass musicians Bill
Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs and Molly O'Day
and country singer Hank Williams and how they would listen to
them for hours. Also,
they will tell us that sometimes someone would drive up to the
old home in a car and the boys would get a chance to listen to
the Grand Ole Opry on the car radio.
Being exposed to music in his younger years, Joe longed
to become a musician himself.
He had learned to sing many bluegrass, country and
mountain songs and he sang harmony parts with his family, but he
was too poor to buy an instrument to play.
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