THE NARROW ROAD

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to eternal life, and only a few find it.”
Matthew 7:13–14

Dolly is dead, and with her goes an entire generation of country musicians raised in stark poverty that somehow forged incredible artistry.

It's well known that Dolly Parton grew up in a shack with eleven siblings and had almost nothing. It's equally well known that she became one of the most prolific and profound voices in the history of country music. The mystery is what happened in between.

The conditions that forged that generation are still here, woven deeply into the fabric of this country. The road from New York City to Los Angeles can take you straight through the living body of American country music: the Blue Ridge, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Nashville-Memphis nexus, and the folds of southwestern Virginia where mountains close in around tiny patches of farmland and the road begins following the shape of the earth.

Clinch Mountain. The nativity scene, where the music rose from the ground and into the hands and voices of the folks who lived there, on homemade or catalog guitars. Maces Spring. Poor Valley.

My own sojourn back to this womb was quite intentional. I'd seen footage of Johnny Cash and Cowboy Jack Clement driving some beater car into Carter country to visit A.P. Carter's grave, drunk as fuck, slurring “Let's have a drink with the old boy!” There was something hilarious and holy about it. It sold me on the pilgrimage.

Riding close to the road in a small open convertible makes the landscape indecently intimate. You can smell every broken blade of grass. Roadkill announces itself before you see it. At speed the turkey buzzards lift from a carcass and fly right past your face.

The roads wander through tiny tributary valleys and dead ends, the hollers of Appalachia. Small patches of farmland surround peeling houses. The usable earth appears in scraps between the hills, little patchworks wrestled out of difficult land. By early summer the kudzu is already climbing over everything, strangling the trees under green blankets.

Imagine winter when the roads became nearly impossible and families were thrown back upon the mountain and one another. A few houses, a church, whatever could be harvested, hunted or repaired. Music made because there wasn't much else to make it with but your family and close neighbors.

Farther in, odder things begin to appear. A railroad car serving as someone's home. A tiny Pentecostal church. Children's toys and tricycles abandoned in yards. Curious dogs running free. Broken fences that don't seem to contain anything except land. Farm equipment rusting wherever someone stopped using it.

Flotsam and jetsam curated by time and indifference.

What came out of that hardship was beautiful: songs about mothers and dead children, betrayal, murder, prison, God, flowers, trains, true love, lost lovers, leaving home, trying to get home. The unbearable isolation of being alive and the hope that somewhere beyond it something might still be waiting.

So much early country music sounds plaintive, painfully sincere. There isn't enough distance between the people singing and the things they're singing about for irony to get in.

Eventually the Carter Family Fold appears, a giant weathered barn sitting in Poor Valley with CARTER FAMILY FOLD stretched across its face. The real place. Not Nashville. Not some preservationist reconstruction of an extinct world. The ground itself. The land where the Carter family lived and worked and sang, where A.P. went out collecting songs that had already been moving from mouth to mouth through these mountains for generations.

But the Fold wasn't what I had come for. A.P. Carter was buried farther in, at Mount Vernon Methodist Church, so I kept going.

The road got smaller, at first almost imperceptibly, then unmistakably. Narrower and narrower as it rose, surrendering to nature instead of conquering it. The foliage moved closer. Branches reached across from both sides until there was barely enough room for the car. I was moving slowly now, pushing through dense summer growth with the sides of the convertible brushing the bushes, leaves scraping the doors and branches reaching into the car.

The narrow road.

Road, trees, foliage, mountain, everything closing around me until I could see only a few yards ahead. Then suddenly I pushed through.

Blinding sky.

The little white church stood completely exposed beneath it, its steeple the tallest thing in sight. I stopped. These people had put their church as close to heaven as they possibly could. I'm not a religious person and praying isn't my business, but something struck me hard. For a moment I felt intensely joyous and devotional.

The Carter family plot was maybe fifty feet ahead. I walked over and there was A.P. Carter. No grand monument or theatrical shrine to a man whose work had traveled around the earth, just a grave in the family ground, in the same mountain soil everything else had come out of, and above him nothing but bright sky.

For people whose lives were hemmed in by mountains, poverty, winter, work, death and circumstance, heaven was the one direction that remained completely unobstructed.

They buried their dead where they could face the heavens, and ascend.