ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702070009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BURNT CHIMNEY
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
The one-room building behind Billy Wayne Dudley's home in Franklin County is filled with swirling, glittery banjo melodies each Tuesday morning.
The door opens just a crack every few minutes and another man squeezes in, pulling a worn black case behind him. Balancing it on a pile of cases in one corner, he lifts the lid and plucks the strings of the instrument inside. Each man sits for a while on one of the overstuffed sofas that line the walls, drumming his fingertips against the wood of his instrument, before jumping up when a particular song calls to him.
A pink fly swatter hangs on the wall amid distinctly masculine decorations - a tapestry of dogs playing pool and a Hank Williams Jr. poster. A kerosene heater glows in one corner, but the concrete floor sends a chill through the scattered strips of carpeting.
By 10:30 a.m., there are 20 men in the room, ranging in age from 35 to 81. Some wear overalls and sneakers; others prefer dress pants and loafers.
Those at the periphery laugh over Styrofoam cups of coffee or tap their feet to "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Mountain Dew" and "Wabash Cannonball." The circle of musicians in the center compresses and forms into layers as newcomers arrive. Their voices blend into a burbling river of sound with one occasionally rising above the chorus like a fish leaping free for a moment before vanishing back into the rhythmic currents.
Wayne Fleming sits in the middle of the room, a dobro cradled in his lap and a blissful smile on his lips. He reaches up, with steel picks on the fingers of his right hand, and gently chucks banjo player Lane Wimmer on the chin after a particularly fine solo.
If there's a bluegrass or old-time country music jam session going on in Roanoke or Franklin counties, it's likely that Fleming will be in the center of it. He's one of the regulars at Dudley's get-together every week; he also plays with Roanoke Valley's Fiddle & Banjo Club and another impromptu group that meets in a Vinton storefront.
Fleming's mother taught him his first guitar chords when he was 5, but the 76-year-old can't remember any time in his life when music wasn't as much a part of him as his fingers and toes.
It has brought him adventure, romance and recognition from some of country music's greatest stars. But even if music had brought him none of those things,
Fleming would still be making his way down country roads every week in search of his musical roots. |n n| When he isn't holding a dobro in his lap, Fleming is in motion. Seated in his kitchen, he leans forward to slap the table with both palms, then rocks backward, propelled by a hearty laugh.
"You can tell by talking to me that I'm an old country boy," he said on a recent afternoon.
He was born and raised amid the factories and tobacco farms of Mount Airy, N.C. His father operated a saw in a furniture factory; his mother worked in a hosiery mill - for a while with 16-year-old Andy Griffith, whose charm was apparent long before Hollywood discovered it.
"They were buddies, buddies, buddies," Fleming said of Griffith and his mother. "She called him her boy."
His mother was the musical center of the family. She played piano at a one-room Baptist church and introduced all three of her sons to the guitar.
The first song in Fleming's repertoire was "Birmingham Jail." Armed with his guitar, he headed down to the tobacco market on Saturday afternoons to play for the farmers coming into town.
"They'd give me a nickel or a dime," he said. "Sometimes they'd give me a quarter. It was enough to go to the pictures for a month. One man gave me a big old pork chop sandwich."
The stakes got higher as he reached his teen-age years.
"The area that I lived in was a bunch of Scotch-Irish people and Germans," he said. "Most all of them were very talented with their hands. The menfolks, especially on Saturday night, if you went to go courting and you didn't know how to play guitar, you didn't have no girlfriend."
The Depression brought those light-hearted days to an end. The job he had painting wagon wheels and cranking the bellows at his grandfather's blacksmith shop was not enough. He quit school and went to work at the factory with his father.
But Fleming was eager to see the world, so he joined the Army when he turned 18. He had no complaints when he got his assignment.
"I went to Hawaii and seen all them pretty hula girls over there," he said, his blue eyes rolling in comic exaggeration behind his silver-rimmed spectacles.
Fleming's only lasting romance from his two years on the islands was with the Hawaiian guitar. Even when he's playing the steel guitar or dobro - which have a similar design but are tuned differently - he likes to draw the melody out, curling the ends of the notes as if a hula girl were shaping the music with her hands.
He discovered the Hawaiian guitar at a taxi-dance club, where soldiers paid island women a dime for a dance and the band mixed country-and-western standards such as "San Antonio Rose" with traditional native songs. Fleming bought a guitar and soon talked his way from the dance floor to the stage. He taught the band members new country tunes, and they helped him with the Hawaiian ones.
Fleming was shipped back to California to be discharged in September 1941, but the paperwork had not been completed when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His military service was extended indefinitely. He remained in California, training radio operators, until a communications center was set up to handle military radio traffic between Europe and the United States. Soon Fleming was back on an island, but this time it was Iceland.
His memories of Reykjavik are considerably less warm than those of Hawaii, but he made the best of his time on the island, which is just below the Arctic Circle.
He had left his Hawaiian guitar behind, so he set to work during his free time making himself a steel guitar from a slab of Masonite. His first sergeant showed an interest in the project, and, once the instrument was completed, got him gigs at the officer's club.
Not surprisingly, the officers' favorite song was "Aloha." Fleming remembered playing the song as many as 10 times a night. In return for making the evenings more bearable, he was excused from the frigid early morning reveilles.
Once the American forces were marching through Europe, Fleming was pulled from Iceland to follow the troops. He had little time for music as he made his way through France, Belgium, Luxemburg and Germany. While traveling through Europe by jeep, he saw "those places where they burned people up." The Holocaust is about the only subject he doesn't care to talk about.
After the war, Fleming returned to Mount Airy and made his second steel guitar. He played along with the radio until a Grand Ole Opry traveling show came to town one weekend. The leader of the group was Sheb Wooley, who wrote the song "Hee Haw." He agreed to let Fleming play at the local show, and was impressed enough to keep him with the band for the rest of the tour.
The tour ended in Nashville, where Fleming hooked up with Milton Estes and the Musical Millers, playing for $50 a week. It was with the Musical Millers that Fleming made his debut on the Grand Ole Opry radio show.
"My knees was just a-knocking and everything," he recalled. "I was really flabbergasted."
The steel-guitar player caught the eye of Ernest Tubb, who invited Fleming to join his band on a national tour.
"In six months time I'd gone from a nobody till I was with the No.1 band," Fleming said, shaking his head.
Over the course of the tour he met country greats such as Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Minnie Pearl.
"We rode together in the back of a Cadillac many miles. She's a sweetheart, a princess," Fleming said of Pearl. Catching himself talking about her in the present tense, he added, "I guess she's really an angel now."
Fleming also played with Tubb in the recording studio on country hits that included "Rainbow at Midnight," "Filipino Baby," "Drivin' Nails in My Coffin" and "Let's Say Good-bye Like We Said Hello."
The next tour Fleming was hired for was a double-header featuring Curly Fox and Texas Ruby. But his days of year-round travel ended when a station wagon carrying members of the band flipped over in Alabama.
"Cowboy boots, Western clothes and everything was just thrown everywhere in the ditch," Fleming recalled.
Most band members had only minor injuries, but Fleming was paralyzed from the waist down. He lay in a hospital bed for a week, waiting and hoping for feeling to return. When it did, a week later, he walked out of the hospital and onto a bus for Nashville. His first night back on stage was a painful one, though, and he realized his lifestyle would have to change.
He returned to Mount Airy, but he couldn't tear himself away from his music. He moved to Roanoke County to play with a local group. But when the other members decided to take their show on the road, Fleming stayed behind.
He had other things on his mind - first and foremost a young woman named Van who worked behind the lunch counter at McClellan's Five and Ten Cent Store in downtown Roanoke. They were married in 1948, and after 49 years of marriage she still laughs at his Dolly Parton jokes.
In the 1950s, Fleming appeared on local country music television shows, including the Straw Hat Hoe-Down on WSLS. But with a family to support, he decided at last that his music and his career would have to become two separate entities.
Today, Fleming lives in a small white house in Southeast Roanoke County with a ham radio antenna in the back yard. He's retired from General Electric, and music has regained its inevitable dominance in his life. When he's not seeking out the companionship of local musicians, he's generally in his living room, dobro on his knees, playing along with the radio. |n n| Back in Burnt Chimney, Fleming is taking his turn with a solo. He chooses "What A Friend We Have In Jesus," a song that has been special to him since his mother used to play it back home in Mount Airy on Sunday mornings.
The other musicians join in. Some lean back with eyes closed, letting the music flow out of them without effort. Others are more tentative, allowing their more experienced brethren to take the lead. Fleming looks up from his stool, taking in the group with his smile. A few minutes later, when he takes a break, he's still smiling.
"When I get around a group like this, I'm in seventh heaven," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 182 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. 1. Wayne Fleming (right) plays theby CNBdobro during a Tuesday-morning bluegrass session in Burnt Chimney.
He accompanies (left to right) Edward Montgomery, Charles Hopcroft
and Lane Wimmer. 2. Lane Wimmer (right) of Floyd County breaks into
an impromptu flatfoot dance while Billy Dudley (left) and other
bluegrass musicians play in Burnt Chimney. color.