
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995                   TAG: 9503240065
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LITTLE MOCCASIN GAP                                 LENGTH: Long

`WE WERE GOOD, I GUESS, AND DIDN'T KNOW IT'

To visit this remote notch on Clinch Mountain 10 miles into the country from Abingdon is to begin to understand why four godly voices from here never gave into temptation and went nationwide.

This is a place where church singing reigns, not just as a Sunday ritual, but as a way of life, as much a part of the landscape as the rugged terrain, and it is where everybody knows the best of the singers come from the Chestnut Grove Community Church.

Everybody, that is, except the singers themselves.

Even in their heyday, they never knew just how good they were. It is only now, with the release of a CD retrospective, that they are coming to understand their unlikely influence not only on church singing, but in more mainstream folk and bluegrass circles.

They don't sing together much anymore, the three remaining members of the Chestnut Grove Gospel Quartet. Gale Webb, 65, doesn't have the wind he once did, and brothers Bill Nunley, 80, and Jim Nunley, 82, aren't as young as they used to be.

The fourth member of the quartet, Ray Roe, died in 1987.

But once upon a time, they sang together almost every day, bonded by a spiritual purpose and a special blend of voices that needed no accompaniment. They sang strictly a cappella and they did so better than anyone else.

Oh, they tried using guitars and banjos in the beginning, like so many other mountain string bands. This was before World War II, when they called themselves the Moccasin Gap Ramblers - named, of course, for the community in Washington County where they lived and where Daniel Boone once passed through on his way to Tennessee.

Their world in the years before television, satellite dishes and interstate highways was small, defined by the dozen or so families who farmed this country, who worshiped together every Sunday and shared the same dirt-road isolation from the nearest towns, Abingdon and Bristol.

Music, in those days, played an equally defining role. "People, when they got the work done up, they'd go visit," Bill Nunley explained.

And they would make music. Sometimes, when there was a death in the community, they would sit up with the family and make music all night.

Mostly, they sang.

There were few musical instruments in Little Moccasin Gap, so they used what they could - their voices. Even at church, where the small congregation in those hard times couldn't afford a piano or organ, the only music was made by the sound of their voices.

That was when the wood-frame church had only one room with about a dozen pews, when it was lighted by kerosene lamp and stood so close to Virginia 690 that it could have handled a drive-through window.

The Moccasin Gap Ramblers included Bill and Jim Nunley, plus their uncle, Archie Reynolds, another brother, Manuel, a cousin and a friend from church.

Early on, before becoming a quartet after the war, the group stayed with a conventional string band line-up, playing mostly at school dances and other community functions. By then, Bill Nunley had bought a guitar.

He remembers what a novelty that was. "Back then," he said, "it was just something to hear someone pick a guitar. People would gather around. You'd get a crowd on the street."

In the late 1930s, the group played occasionally on radio station WOPI in Bristol, where every Saturday afternoon there was a live talent show hosted by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

The group essentially disbanded when the war came. It took the Nunley brothers beyond Abingdon and Bristol for the first time in their lives.

After the war, they returned home, settled into regular jobs and started raising families. Bill Nunley became a carpenter and cabinet maker. His brother Jim opened a body shop in nearby Lebanon.

They also showed a renewed devotion to the Chestnut Grove church - and to plain church singing.

In 1954, they met Gale Webb, who lived a few miles away in Brumley Gap. Webb sang with a group at his own church, but he had heard about the singing at Chestnut Grove. Everybody in the area had.

"From then on, he never did sing with that other group no more," Bill Nunley said.

Instead, Webb joined with Bill and Jim Nunley and, in the early years, Archie Reynolds to form the Chestnut Grove Gospel Quartet.

"It's just what happens with most groups," Webb said. "You just start to singing together and like it, I guess."

What made them unique was a natural aptitude for a cappella singing at a time when most Southern gospel quartets still used piano accompaniment. Another factor was their ability to read music and sing directly from their church hymnals. "That's where you get your real harmonies," Webb said.

They also shared a unity of purpose. At first, they sang only at their own church, but then started singing at other churches. It became their small way of spreading the good word.

They sang for free, although if they were offered a donation to cover travel expenses, they accepted it. "If they wanted to give us money, that was all right, and if they didn't, that was all right, too," Bill Nunley said.

The quartet's reputation quickly spread. By the late 1950s, the group had its own half-hour show every Sunday afternoon on WBBI radio in Bristol. The group continued the show for nearly 30 years.

Performances always attracted a crowd. "We had times the studio was so full we couldn't hardly handle it," Webb said.

Even their practices were popular, he said. "Some nights, there would be a house full of people waiting for us."

In 1962, the group suffered a setback when Reynolds died, and it took almost a year before the group found a suitable replacement in Ray Roe of Chilhowie.

It was with Roe, however, that the quartet ultimately found its biggest audience. With the encouragement of an announcer at WBBI, the group went into the studio with Roe and recorded the first of nine albums.

Initially, the group was dubious, ordering only 500 copies of that first record, thinking even that many would be hard to unload.

"We had them sold before we got them," Bill Nunley said.

Subsequent recordings like "When I Shall Ride The Clouds," "The Little Old Church By The Road," "The Light On The River" and "We've Traveled A Long Way ... Singing For The Lord!" only did better and better. In one 18-month period alone, mostly at church appearances and through the radio station, they sold more than 50,000 albums, an astonishing number.

At the same time, they were traveling every weekend to perform at churches in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, they once played to an audience of 3,000 people.

"At one time, we were booked up a year ahead," Webb said.

Nashville courted them, but they resisted, fearing that Nashville would try to control them. Also, the road-weary life of a professional musician was deemed unappealing.

In addition, they were invited to perform at the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C., and at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap. "They really pushed hard," Bill Nunley said.

It was always a temptation to play those festivals, he said. But it would have taken them away from where they thought they belonged.

"I guess we felt like that was a little bit too big for us," Webb added.

Had they played those festivals, some say they would have become nationally recognized.

"They would have been invited to sing around the world," said Joe Wilson, director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts in Washington.

Their influence has stretched almost that far anyway, Wilson said.

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley was the first to pick up on the quartet's singing style and incorporate a few a cappella numbers into his own repertoire. Wilson said this set off a wave of a cappella singing among folk and bluegrass people, most notably Doyle Lawson and Ricky Skaggs.

"It's deeply traditional stuff," Wilson said. "I think it would appeal to anyone who has ears."

Oddly enough, the members of the quartet seemed surprised by such praise. "We were good, I guess, and didn't know it," Webb said.

At least until recently.

A new CD retrospective titled "The Legendary Chestnut Grove Quartet," released by County Records in Floyd, has helped them to understand. It includes 15 selections from the 108 songs the quartet recorded, plus glowing liner notes by Wilson, and it has been sent to 250 gospel and bluegrass radio stations across the country.

Gary Reid at County Records said probably nobody will get rich from the album. The three remaining members of the quartet were paid $1,000 in advance for the album, plus they will earn 75 cents on each copy sold.

But Reid said money wasn't the primary factor in issuing the collection. More important was giving credit to the quartet for essentially introducing a cappella singing into bluegrass. "We felt people should be aware of where it came from," he said.

To further honor the quartet, County Records plans a record release party April 14 in Abingdon with invited guests Ralph Stanley and Doyle Lawson.

Meanwhile, Little Moccasin Gap remains much as it did 50 years ago, only the roads are paved and the Chestnut Grove church now has a piano. But church singing endures here. Everyone still knows where it endures supreme and where it will continue to endure, that is if Bill Nunley has anything to say about it.

Today, under his direction, the church is nurturing a new quartet with a younger generation of singers. Bill Nunley hopes the group will carry on the a cappella tradition. He said it is an important part of the heritage here.

In the liner notes to the new CD, Joe Wilson reflects on the value of such a heritage and the role that people like Nunley or places like Little Moccasin Gap play in preserving it:

"Who can doubt that a measure of the strength of our nation - in music as in other affairs - comes from its small communities and the keepers of its deepest traditions?"

ITTLE MOCCASIN GAP - To visit this remote notch on Clinch Mountain 10 miles into the country from Abingdon is to begin to understand why four godly voices from here never gave into temptation and went nationwide.

This is a place where church singing reigns, not just as a Sunday ritual, but as a way of life, as much a part of the landscape as the rugged, coal-rich terrain, and it is where everybody knows the best of the singers come from the Chestnut Grove Community Church.