Category: St. Clair Entertainment

Keeping Springville’s ‘colorful’ music spot alive

Story by Paul South
Photos by
Michael Callahan, Susan Wall,
Jerry Martin and courtesy of Local Color

In the late fall of 2016, Merle Dollar and husband Garry Burttram announced that on New Year’s Eve, their iconic music venue, Local Color, would take its final bow.

But Bobby Horton, legendary fiddler of the equally iconic Alabama bluegrass trio, Three On A String, was skeptical. Three On A String would play that “final” performance.

“I wouldn’t be surprised a bit of Merle and Garry reopen,” he predicted. “They love it too much. I wish they wouldn’t close.”

It turns out, Horton, like a musical Jeremiah, was a prophet.

“Bobby got his wish – sort of,” Dollar says.

Local Color is back, but without Burttram’s delicious cornbread cooked in a hubcap-sized cast iron skillet and chicken and dumplings. The wildly popular stage opens a couple of times a month, not as a traditional business, charging only a cover to pay the bands.

Dollar reminisced about Local Color’s 2016 final curtain that wasn’t.

“The patrons were mourning and grieving and crying, and the musicians were so nostalgic already. Really gloom and doom.”

The building was up for sale, with a buyer on the horizon, but after two months, Erick Smith of the rockabilly band Cash Domino Killers approached Dollar with an idea – a house concert. No food or drink, save what patrons would bring themselves, sort of like a covered dish dinner, or an all-day singing and dinner on the grounds, but with furniture.

Dollar ran the idea by her sisters, who with her own the building.

The response: Why not?

The result? A packed house.

“Everybody came in and brought their own food and their own beverages and just paid a cover charge at the door for the musicians, and we had a grand night.”

Fast forward a few weeks after that grand night. The expected sale of the building fell through. And it looked as though Local Color had danced its last.

Dollar and her sisters decided that Local Color deserved one last send-off, a last waltz, if you will. They called on their old friends, The Martini Shakers, another rockabilly act that had played the place for years. The response from the joyous crowd ignited another idea. The girls decided to host house concerts once or twice a month, getting the word out to Local Color die-hard regulars.

“We’ve had some remarkable crowds,” Dollar says. “And we’re just doing it at our leisure.”

 Merle and Garry are retired now, traveling to Scotland and Disney World and keeping up with kids and grandkids.

And now, virtually every weekend, music again rings from Local Color. To be clear, it’s show business but no business.

“It’s strictly a house concert. I want to stress that it’s a non-business. The family is hosting different bands to come in. I get requests all the time from musicians to come in and play,” Dollar says. “We’re strictly a non-business.”

She added: “It’s just one of those magical things that just refuses to go away.”

Local Color looks and feels the same, except for the patrons who bring their own snacks, from popcorn and pop, to sacks of fast food, to gourmet munchies and bottles of Merlot.

But while the food brought from home varies with every patron, the reaction is universally the same to the Local Color house parties: “Why didn’t you do this sooner?”

“It’s been so heartwarming to know that people are so excited to come back again,” Dollar says. “It really was such a downer (when Local Color closed). Once it started buzzing through the musical community (about the house concerts) it was like, euphoria and ‘hallelujah’ and ‘Oh, boy!’ One person stopped me in the grocery store and said, ‘It’s about time.’”

 Along with the music dates, it’s also a gathering spot for Merle and Garry’s family get-togethers, holiday dinners, baby showers and the like. And the family – through Merle and her cousins, Sylvia Waid and Peggy Jones, who form the Andrews Sisters-style Something Else Trio – provides the musical heartbeat.

“There would be no Local Color without ‘Something Else,’ Burttram says.

Dates are booked through July, but the spot remains for sale. “Three months, who knows what can happen in three months.”

 

Encore performances

The acts, jubilant to return to  this intimate spot where the music seems all that matters, include The Cash Domino Killers – named for music legends Johnny Cash, “Fats” Domino and “The Killer” Jerry Lee Lewis, pay homage to the timeless tunes of the 1950’s. Through the, you’ll hear the sounds of The Million Dollar Quartet (Cash, Lewis, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins), The Drifters, The Tams and others. The band has played Local Color for years. Like Three On A String, it has helped define the venue as one of Alabama’s great small music spots.

Another fan favorite, The Dill Pickers, a musical comedy ensemble, also draws packed houses.

“They’re like a comet,” Dollar says. “They show up once in a blue moon.”

 

No place like ‘home’

Thanks to the bands, Merle and Garry and their families and fans, Local Color lives on.

“Even while it’s sitting there empty, it still has that aura, that mystical feel about it. There’s something about that. I don’t know what it is. People walk in and say, ‘I’m home.’”

The place still has flawless acoustics, so perfect that folks swear you can hear smiles from the audience, that sits in rapt attention, drinking in the music.

“You can hear them smile,” Dollar says. “You can hear them cry. You can feel it. It’s palpable. The emotional connection that you have with your audience, you feel it, they feel it.”

Local Color, it seems, has indeed taken on a life of its own, past what even its owners expected. Like The Little Engine That Could from children’s literature, it chugs on. 

Says Dollar, “It’s a light that refuses to go out.”

As for the fiddling prophet, Bobby Horton, he’s overjoyed at Local Color’s revival. He compares the place to “a musical community center. Most people are so comfortable there, both players and people sitting there. It’s got that magic. You can’t build it. It just sort of happened because of Merle and Garry setting that atmosphere.”

Horton adds: “People are thrilled to be coming to that little ol’ place over there. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful.”

And as for his prophecy?

“The blind hog found the acorn on that prediction,” he says. “I’m so glad it did.”

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Susan Wall

Late in the evening, about sundown,
High on a hill up above the town,
Uncle Pen played the fiddle, Lordy, how it would ring,
You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing.

Bill Monroe’s Uncle Pen would have felt right at home at Old Valley House in Gallant. That’s where local bluegrass musicians gather for a monthly jam session every first Friday. With their guitars, mandolins, banjos and the occasional Dobro and fiddle, a stage-full of homegrown performers makes the rafters ring and the audience sing to old-timey tunes. Some of those tunes are mournful, some are spirited, but all are certified crowd pleasers.

Adron and Joyce Willingham and their son, Mark, turned Adron’s 200-year-old, four-room family home in Gallant into a tiny version of the Grand Ole Opry. They knocked out a wall between two of the rooms, built a small stage, brought in durable, hard-plastic chairs and a sound system. The people started coming. The music officially begins at 6 p.m., but the musicians start straggling in about 5:30 to tune up. The room seats 40-45 people. It’s free, and anyone is welcome to come and play, sing or just listen.

“Last month, there wasn’t even standing room,” Joyce Willingham says at the April event.

Although the venue is never referred to as a version of the Opry, the front of the main room bears an uncanny resemblance to its Nashville godmother. Three steps lead up to the small stage. In front of those steps, there’s a table with two- and five-pound bags of Martha White Flour, one of the longest-running sponsors of Grand Ole Opry segments. There’s even a fake microphone patterned after the real one in front of the Opry stage, only the Gallant version has the letters WAM printed vertically on each side. Any traditional country music fan worth his Ernest Tubb albums knows the Opry is broadcast by radio station WSM. Joyce explains. «That’s for Willingham, Mark and Adron,” she says. «They left me out.”

Her husband says this is the oldest house in the Greasy Cove valley. It’s where he spent some of his pre-teen years, until his family moved away. In 1964, he returned and bought the property. He built a house behind the old one. In 1989, he started the Friday night jam sessions. “We had one every Friday night for 10 years or more, then we stopped for a while,” Adron says. “We started back with every first Friday about 10 years ago.”

Old family (Willingham) photos and pictures of previous jam sessions line the walls of the main room, along with LP album covers and stringed instruments such as mandolins, guitars and dulcimers. A strand of Christmas garland laced with red and white bulbs drapes the weight-bearing ceiling beam between the stage and seating area. Overalls hang on what used to be an entrance door, while framed, original posters of shows by Hank Williams and Flatt and Scruggs hang on the wall behind the stage. Overhead, two ceiling fans are ready to stir the upcoming summer air, while 45 RPM records dangle from the ceiling.

 Regulars greet each other like the old friends and relatives they are. Light chatter goes on throughout the session, but it doesn’t seem to bother the musicians or other audience members. Most nights, five to seven musicians show up and sit in chairs in a semi-circle on the stage. Tonight, there are nine. Larry Battles plays mandolin. He has come to these jam sessions since they started. James Keener and Phillip Mulkey play several stringed instruments, while Mark Willingham plays guitar and banjo. Jerry Womble plays 12-string and six-string guitar. Most of the musicians are members of gospel and/or bluegrass bands. Mark and Phillip, for example, are part of The Backwoods Boys, a group that plays at churches and festivals throughout the South.

At the Old Valley House, they play classics such as, Nine Pound Hammer, Shotgun Boogie, Fireball Mail, Where the Soul Never Dies, Sweet Bye and Bye, and I Saw the Light. A few audience members sing along with them on the gospel songs.

Phillip Mulkey does vocals occasionally. He sits stage left, facing one of three microphones. When he sings, others join him, some providing vocal harmony, all doing instrumental backup. Someone yells out, “Do The Preacher and the Bear.” Keenor obliges, but can’t recall all the words. Some folks on the back row of the audience start a discussion about who recorded that one. A newcomer remembers it was Phil Somebody, but when she tries to Google it, she discovers the house is in ‘Cell Hell,’ with no service except in certain areas of its yard. (Turns out Phil Somebody was Phil Harris.)

Jesse Wright sits in for a short while, playing guitar. His wife, Alice, is in the audience with their two sons, Gavin, 3, and Garret, 7 months. The boys are clapping in time to the music. “That’s Daddy,” Gavin says to the stranger seated next to him. The stranger, also a newcomer, turns to his mom and says, “You know what’s missing?”

 “No, what?” Alice responds.

“A fiddle.”

“I play fiddle,” she says. “Just not tonight.”

A man in the audience shouts out, “Get That Wildwood Flower going on that banjo,” and the guys crank up an instrumental version of the old Carter Family favorite. Mark Willingham jumps in with his guitar to play the part Mother Maybelle Carter did on her trademark autoharp. “Hey, Phillip, let’s hear that new instrument you got,” someone else yells.

 “I’ll get it in a minute,” Phillip replies.

 Soon he pulls out a tiny, handmade instrument he found at a garage sale for $2. Neither he nor anyone in the audience knows what it is. It’s about the size of a mandolin, but its body is skinnier. He says it originally had 10 strings that he replaced with mandolin strings. He plays it like a mandolin, too.

At 7 o’clock, hats come off and the retired Rev. Darwin Cardwell blesses the food that people brought. One by one, folks stroll into the kitchen and chow down on pimiento cheese sandwiches, chicken-salad sandwiches, pigs-in-a-blanket, hot dogs, store-bought mini-cupcakes and homemade German chocolate cake. It’s like a church potluck, but with finger foods instead of casseroles. The small kitchen is cramped, with its wood-burning cook stove, cabinets, two tables laden with food and another with coffee and soft drinks. Iron skillets hang from the walls, and a shelf holds old clay crocks and a cookie jar.

After supper, Adron takes to the stage and channels Roy Acuff by singing Dust on the Bible and Wreck on the Highway. Adron’s brother, Rayburn Willingham, follows with The Great Speckled Bird, another Acuff number. Then the group breaks into, “Kaw-Liga,,” one of the last songs recorded by Hank Williams before he died in the back seat of a Cadillac.

Jerry Battles says his late father, Arvie, helped found these jam sessions. He points to a photo of Arvie on a table beneath one of the glass-enclosed guitars on display. “He lived for this Friday night,” Battles says.

More bluegrass, country and gospel songs spill out. The audience softly joins in on Build My Mansion Next Door to Jesus and In The Sweet Bye And Bye.” The repertoire tonight includes Old Rattler, Rocky Top, and Dueling Banjos,” before Vernon Bishop does his instrumental version of I’ll Fly Away on the Dobro.

Adron goes outside, then comes back in with an arm load of logs. During winter and chilly spring cold snaps, he keeps a fire going in the fireplace of the main room. Old-timers recall when homes like this were heated by fireplaces. «You’d stand facing the fire and fry your front, then turn around and fry your back,” one woman commented

“Hey, Joyce, remind me to bring those folks leaving now some bush onions,” Phillip Mulkey yells from the stage as a couple gets up to go.

“I got some, too,” Joyce answers. She explains to the newcomer that bush onions are like green onions, but are grown in the winter.

The April session breaks up at 9:15 p.m., about 45 minutes earlier than usual. Rev. Cardwell prays a dismissal blessing, asking God to see everyone home safely. Several “amens” follow his, and folks start drifting out in twos and fours. Already, they can’t wait for the next first Friday.

Springville’s ‘colorful’ music spot closing its doors, unless …

Story by Paul South
Photos by Susan Wall
and Jerry Martin
and courtesy of Local Color

Imagine a magical music box that when opened played music from virtually every era. And from the box wafted the sweet aroma of cornbread cooked in a black, cast-iron skillet and chicken and dumplings like your Grandmama used to make.

And imagine a place so intimate and acoustically perfect, you could, as Merle Dollar puts it, “hear the smiles” of the audience.

So it is with Local Color, Springville’s musical treasure box. But unless Dollar and her husband, Garry Burttram, find a buyer, this precious box will be locked after the iconic Alabama bluegrass trio, “Three on a String,” plays the venue’s final show on New Year’s Eve.

Dollar and Burttram taught in area schools until both retired. But instead of kicking back, the couple went to work. Burttram and a partner went into the barbecue business, which later expanded into a burger and barbecue restaurant. But Garry “got tired of all the grease.”

So in 2001, Burttram and Don Dollar, Merle’s former husband, decided to open a different kind of place. At the same time, Merle and her sisters were renovating the site of what’s now Local Color.

“The whole premise was to do really good food and have music. It would be a great place to do art stuff and have t

With a budget of practically zero, Garry and Merle scavenged for chairs and tables and poured do-it-yourself sweat into the place. And by the first weekend in October 2002, the doors opened, offering classic Southern cuisine.

It was not a sparkling opening night.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Dollar said. “To open smack in the middle of the college football season was not a good idea.”

It became clear Local Color needed a hook. Sylvia Wade (Garry’s sister) and our cousin, Peggy Jones, had been singing together for 20 years, crooning tight Andrews Sisters’-style harmonies and became the “house band.” Soon, they brought in local musicians and storytellers.

“Everybody who plays an instrument in Springville or the surrounding area has played our place at least once,” Merle said.

Soon word got around. The first big-name to grace the Local Color stage was a Birmingham-based jazz singer Elnora Spencer.

“Elnora could blow the walls out,” she said.

Before long, Local Color, with only about 70 seats, became a hot venue for local, regional and national storytellers, singers and musicians performing all types of music from jazz to Celtic, even 19^th-century Alabama tunes set to jazz arrangements. Trumpeter Robert Moore, for example, traveled from his home in Portland, Ore., at least once a year to play Local Color. And Steve Young, writer of the Eagles’ hit, “Seven Bridges Road,” has also played the room.

And then there is Bobby Horton. Part of the iconic string band “Three on a String.” Horton earned national acclaim for his work in the dazzling documentaries of filmmaker Ken Burns, the scores he wrote and played for 21 films of the National Park Service.

The band performed at Local Color at least eight times a year, including a “Month of Sundays,” where each Sunday for a month, Three on a String brings a friend along to perform to sold-out Sunday shows.

Horton has played as part of the trio and has performed his solo act a number of times, including an annual performance of Civil War-era music and a musical history of Christmas.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve played there, but every time I do it’s very special. It’s just wonderful,” Horton said.

Horton can’t put a finger on what has made Local Color so wonderful and so popular over the years. Merle is the bubbly one who greets the public. Garry cooks great food and is sometimes “crotchety.” Horton loves them both.

“Garry’s the tension, and Merle’s the release,” Horton said with a laugh.

“They’re definitely a part of the Local Color family,” Dollar said

As far as its restaurant menu, diners make a reservation for the night, giving Local Color a classic “supper club” feel.

“We’re not fussy, not prissy, but we do try to keep it classy. Dinner is served from 6 to 7:30, then the lights go down and the performance begins. Quiet from the audience is expected.

“We frown heavily on talking and yakking during the performance,” Dollar said. “People are paying money to see a particular group and they are entitled to the best possible time they can have. Once the music starts, that’s when the magic happens.”

There is something magical going on. Even with a concrete floor, a metal ceiling and narrow walls, Local Color seems to defy the laws of physics and acoustics.

“There’s something magical about that room. It’s got a resonance that is so good,” Dollar said. “The audience is so close, and the musicians are so close performers can literally hear the people breathing. It’s just like they’re in your living room.”

Horton agreed. You can see every single person in the room and that is very fun,” he said. “You play in a big venue and you love the people, but you sure can’t see ’em.”

As for the acoustics, Horton said, “The minute you walk in and start to play, you just get the warm fuzzzies. It’s great.”

And, it’s a place to test the waters for new material, Horton said.

“We looked at it as one of the strong suits for playing there,” he said.

That intimacy no doubt plays a role in the packed houses over the years. But so do the dinners. Remember the chicken and dumplings and cornbread? That’s just part of a limited menu.

“It’s just great, old-time Southern cooking, which I love. You can’t find that very many places anymore,” Horton said. “It’s biscuits and stuff your wife won’t let you have at home because of your diet, but you can have ’em at Local Color.”

Springville is a very artsy part of St. Clair County,” Dollar said. “They love music. They love theater. We have several authors who live in the area. It’s just a hotbed for entertainment kinds of things. I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s the water we grew up with. Springville seemed like an area where this would go over. We thought if we liked it, people would like it, too.”

Indeed, they have. But Merle and Garry have decided to close up shop, to enjoy retirement and do other things. It’s something they’ve kicked around for years.
“We kind of wanted to go out on top, and we have really good memories,” Dollar said.

Horton is grieved by news of the closure.

“If you wanted to copy that place, you couldn’t replicate it. It just sort of happened. I’m just so sad that they’re quitting. I can’t stand it,” Horton said. They’re going to miss it more than they know. And so will I.”

As Local Color’s last waltz nears, Dollar knows the tears will come. It’s bittersweet.

“I’m going to miss it like crazy,” she said. “At the same time, there’s so much life to be lived out there. We’re ready to take the next step.”heater and all the things that we loved to do,” Dollar said.