In the summer 1979, after listening to high school classmates Nate Pack and Joe Shelton — aka Big Joe Shelton — rhapsodize about it for years, I drove to north Alabama for a bluegrass festival at a place called Horse Pens 40. I wasn’t much of a bluegrass fan, but I had just started taking pictures several years earlier and thought I might spend the day hanging out with Nate and Joe and maybe photograph some musicians.
Carol Walden, Nate’s little sister, reminded me of this last week. Carol sent an email suggesting I include David Dove’s Christmas light display on Ellis Road off Highway 50, if I do a Christmas light tour column. (Send your suggestions, dear reader.)
Carol also wrote, “I always remember being at Horse Pens 40 many years ago watching Doc Watson. I was (standing near you) snapping away … when I realized I had no film in my camera! … Gosh, did I feel stupid! Miss those days, the wonderful old camera with a roll of film. I do not like digital cameras!”
I share Carol’s feelings about digital photography, an alien medium to me even after 15 years of it. However, I had film in my camera that day and was able to photograph Doc while he was waiting to go on stage.
“We saw lots of big names in blue grass there,” Carol wrote in a follow-up email, “Grandpa Jones, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, The Red Clay Ramblers, and so many more.”
Horse Pens, a series of natural rock formations atop Chandler Mountain near Steele, Alabama, has a rich history. It served as a refuge for horses and their owners during the Civil War and is said to have been a hideout for moonshiners and outlaws on the lam. A stable area with hidden passages to a room with a viewing port and stone escape door was said to have been used by Lamar County native Rube Barrow, the notorious train robber and outlaw.
When the area was settled in the late 1880s, the deed refers to the property’s acreage as “the home 40, the farming 40 and the horse pens 40.”
Around 1960, Warren Musgrove, a newspaper reporter from Huntsville visited the mountain to do a story on tomato farming in the area; apparently the place is famous for tomatoes, as Carol confirmed in her email.
Musgrove was taken with the beauty of the place and the acoustic quality of the natural amphitheater surrounded by the rock formations. He eventually bought the Horse Pens and developed it into a venue for bluegrass and gospel concerts.
“There is a good deal of history behind the park,” Carol wrote. “I haven’t been back since those years, and I think they may have bluegrass festivals there, though not as big as they used to be. I remember they grew tomatoes up there and they were some of the best tomatoes I had ever eaten!
I don’t remember much about the day; I made pictures of Doc and Merle Watson and hung out with Nate and Joe and listened to the music.
Joe and I both remembered Norman Blake stopping his performance to demand Musgrove remove a heckler who shouted his disapproval during Blake’s performance of “Sauerkraut ‘N Solar Energy.”
“We would stay in a tent when we went,” said Joe. “We’d cook out, you know, eat, drink and be merry.”
Nate was determined to get a closer look at Norman Blake, one of his bluegrass idols.
“I went over to the tent and there he was, this hippy-ish kid, who smelled terrible, eating Van Camp pork and beans out of a can,” Nate said. “I was in awe.”
At a later edition of Horse Pens, Nate would run into another Lowndes County bluegrass fan, Marilyn Noland. Apparently, Nate was awed by Marilyn, too. They’ve been married 38 years.
Perhaps this holiday season is the more fitting time to remember the passing of Homer Cantrell, who died in April. Homer was a friend and the Cantrell brother most responsible for the dazzling, chaotic Christmas light array he, his brothers and their wives constructed each Christmas season near Caledonia. I was an unapologetic fan of the Cantrells and for years dragged friends, our children’s friends and readers of this column out to McCullough Road to see Homer, Lewis and Zeke’s Christmas extravaganza. Those visits are Christmas memories we hold dear.
Here’s a quote someone sent me last week: “The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.” Louis de Bernieres, novelist (b. 8 Dec. 1954)
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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