Hee-Haw

And Bab-O

            Donald Trump said something so stupid the other day.

            Nothing new there, you’d think, but this thing was so euchhh.

And if I were too delicate to handle off-color remarks, I wouldn’t be so eager to celebrate Roni Stoneman, Queen of the Banjo, who recently passed away.

           The late great country guitarist Chet Atkins told me something about Roni Stoneman that I want to share with you, but I guess it requires some explanation.

            First you have to know about Bab-O. My mother used it. I have used it. It's still available, I gather, in specialty stores. But when I try to tell the story Chet told me about Roni Stoneman, people don't seem to know about Bab-O anymore. Here's what Bab-O is: a strong granular detergent, like Ajax and Comet (if you've heard of them), for scouring tough, deep-down dirt and stains.

            Then you have to know that Roni Stoneman was a tall, lanky bluegrass picker and singer who grew up in a one-room mountain shack with a canvas roof and sixteen music-genius siblings, and went on to become as accomplished on the banjo as Bill Monroe and much funnier (she says he fired anybody in his band who smiled during a show) and to star on Hee-Haw, the hillbilly TV-sketch show. "I was just born squirrely," she would say.

            Then you have to know that Ms. Stoneman's remark to Chet was in a spirit of jocular eroticism.

What happened was, Chet was playing with an all-star bunch including Ms. Stoneman, when she came up behind him and whispered, "One of these days I'm going to put something on you that Bab-O won't get off."

            When she died, I found several interviews of her on the Web. She grew up performing in a notable family band with some of her brothers and sisters, using a banjo carved and strung by her father.

            One time they were to play in some kind of competition and her brother Scott, their fiddle-player, unwisely was drawn into drinking with some of his competitor fiddlers, and they got him drunk, stole his fiddle, locked him up in an outbuilding, and took his pants. The other Stonemans found him laughing and crawling around on a dirt floor and whooping, "I ain't got no britches on!" They needed the prize money bad. They wrapped some kind of drapes around him and got him to the competition and he played lying on his back, no shoes on, and won the prize! "I'm so humiliated," said Roni’s pretty sister Donna, the mandolinist.

            "That's the difference between Donna and me," says Roni.

            The trouble with bluegrass today, she says, is lack of showmanship. "These young kids stand there like zombies, each one with their own mike. We had two mikes for the whole band -- Daddy showed us you got to get . . .  over . . . to a mike when you want to be heard" -- and she mimed the moves involved, a-thrusting and a-swinging -- "so we had movement."

            In one show, though, which you can find on Youtube, Donna did some marvelous dancing, kicking up her ankles in the most amusing way, while Roni stood there so stock-still and straight-faced that she seemed to be made of stone except for flying fingers. "I tell these kids today, don't play for yourself! Play for that audience! I don't care who they are!"

            Well, except for a crowd of debutantes who were looking at her and at Donna, and giggling and whispering, in a way that did not strike her as respectful, "so I said to them, 'I see y'all talking about us. Just remember, we all die in doo-doo.' Maybe I was bad for saying that. But I meant it."

            She also blacked out her upper middle tooth. Or maybe it was really missing and she filled it in when not onstage. Some day, she said, she wanted to put the Tammy Wynette wifey-anthem "Stand By Your Man" in perspective by singing it herself while "looking all beat up. Blue lips, black eye, arms on slats, finger marks on my neck . . . "

            Then in one of the online interviews online, she veers toward politics. Uh-oh.

            "They talk about taxing the rich! If you tax the rich, how are they going to pay me?” She broke off -- “don't get me started . . . "

            Could it be that Roni voted for Trump? I sure hope not.

            But could be. Chet Atkins wrote me in a letter once, "the people don't know shit. They believed Hitler and Roosevelt."

            Chet grew up poor in the hills himself, where folks felt they could get along very well without the New Deal. Felt insulted by it, even. Still, to lump Hitler and FDR . . .

            I'm not going to quote that particularly stupid thing Trump said the other day. Lots of white people standing behind him seemed to like it. Good country folks, could be. I believe in my heart that Roni Stoneman wouldn't have liked it. It was too coarse, without being country, or jocular, or erotic, at all.