Today the wind flew wildly through these mountains. The trees on the ridge across the road swayed all day sounding like a long freight train. Down here in the low place between ridges the tree branches barely moved. It was a quiet day. Too cold to enjoy being outside. The Appalachian Mountain Girls entertained me with their rollicking old time fiddling and picking, their lively spirit and the fun they have making music.

Seeing Rita in my memories of watching her play that old-time fiddle always kicks my mind out of gear a little bit. It sounds to my ear like a man in his seventies from up in a holler where his daddy made liquor. And it's Rita, a young woman.

Alice Gerrard's fiddle comes to mind when I hear Rita. Alice has the same uncanny soul for the music of this region of the Blue Ridge that makes her fiddle and banjo, both, sound like it's some old man who has sat on his porch and played this song his entire life, polishing every detail of it with every lick. It's that haunting melody of high and low strings. The sound has the feeling of sorrow and joy all mixed together, one drawn out in one part of the song, the other drawn out in another part and dancing all around together as in life.

The old timers, the people before electricity and machinery, who made this same music that people drive from all over to hear at fiddler's conventions, played for dances and entertainment. Their music was meant to keep the people on their feet sweating off calories.

When I listen to Tommy Jarrell and Kyle Creed I know that square dancing in a barn where everybody knew one another all their lives, kickin' up their heels a-lettin' 'er rip, was the best kind of entertainment. The audience was one with the music.

What we call old-time is the way music was made in Civil War days and the Revolution, all the way back through our history as a people to the first ones here and those before them in the British Isles. Our old-time music is as traditional American music as you're going to get.

Right here in these mountains it is very much alive; a lot of bands all around are playing it well. The Appalachian Mountain Girls have for me the sound particular to the central Blue Ridge. They represent it just right. My friend Lynn plays the bass on their album, Keeping Time. I've seen them in concert and am here to tell you she is not afraid of those bass strings. They do just what she tells them to do.

Amy, the guitar-picker, I knew in Charleston before coming to the mountains. Her family, parents and brother frequented the bookstore I worked in. We were the only Worthingtons in the phone book. For fun we called each other cousin.

Then one day after I'd been here for quite a long time, 10 or more years, Amy showed up at the Alleghany News. Later, she took a job at the Galax paper and after some years became editor, which she is now. Amy is someone truly in touch with herself and she's one who loves the mountain people and mountain culture with all her heart. Not so much an implant, but a graft.

Amy the clawhammer picker recently left the band for whatever reason somebody leaves a band, a different story for each one. I love her clawhammer. I love her singing too, especially when she sings Old Rattler and Sixteen Chickens and a Tambourine. Lynn the bass player is now the banjo picker and a new member, Katherine, is slapping the doghouse bass.

A week or so ago they played on 98.1's live broadcast from the Rex Theater and I had to miss it. I wanted most to be there and couldn't make it. Bummer.

I had something in mind to play on the radio show Saturday, but when I went to pick it up, it didn't feel like that's what I wanted to play. I looked around and there it was, Appalachian Mountain Girls. I missed them at the Rex, so I wanted to hear them and wanted just as much to play them for everybody listening who missed them, and give the ones who heard them a chance to hear them again.

One of the great joys of my life is being able to play the music of these mountains to the people of Alleghany. Too much of the false and materialist has gone into music made for the charts, for cookie-cutter consumption in the world of pop music, Nashville, Detroit, L.A. or NY.

More and more I want to hear the music of these mountains played by people who saved and pooled their money to make an album hoping to get a return on what they put into it. To my ear, that's where American music really lives.

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