Somehow it seemed highly appropriate to visit Mary Jane Queen during a Dogwood Winter.

The sub-freezing temperatures last week probably reminded many folks that they live in the mountains, no matter how apart from them they might have grown. Sometimes it takes a ride up places like Johns Creek just south of Cullowhee to remind us of the natural treasures in our region, the ones we have lost and the ones that are vanishing a little more each day.

Something about winter refusing to give up in these mountains assures me that not every mountain tradition is gone. The morning chill lingers a bit longer up on Johns Creek, but I suspected that Mary Jane Queen’s house would have a warmth that could endure through anything.

I was not mistaken. The small house, nestled among vegetable and flower gardens in a deep hollow beside a gurgling little creek, had that inviting charm that says, “Welcome,” even if you don’t know who lives there.

An 87-year-old woman with a bright smiling face and a Myrtle Beach sweatshirt answered my knock, and I immediately felt at home.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in the house was her latest banjo. I won’t call it new, because it had a few years on it, but the handmade open-back model was a beauty, with a solid, heavy neck, a finely carved fiddle-style peghead and a deep, mellow tone not found in a factory instrument. It was a banjo that deserved loving and experienced hands.

It’s easy to think of Mary Jane Queen as the Maybelle Carter of Western North Carolina, the matriarch of a large musical family that continues an inherited legacy despite various musical explorations of her children.

Mary Jane describes her Queen Family band as “just nine of us,” but the number varies according to who is available. The band stays true to its tradition of mountain folk music, and received Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Award in 1999. Although Mary Jane is a fine two-finger frailing style banjo picker, she is perhaps best known as a ballad singer.

Her authentic and sometimes chilling renditions of ballads has earned her the Folk Herirtage Award from the Folklife Section of the North Carolina Arts Council. Just last weekend, she was awarded the Brown-Hudson Award from the N.C. State Folklore Society during its annual meeting at WCU. As her unpolished voice attests, no one has ever questioned Mary Jane’s right to play this kind of music.

It’s a legacy based more on oral tradition than recordings, and indeed, the recorded legacy of the Queen Family is a recent one. But the band can be heard in all its traditional glory on a home recording called “The Queen Family of Western North Carolina,” which features the ballads, “William Reilly” and “Saro Jane.” The WCU-produced “The Music of Mountain Heritage Day” is an anthology of various performers at the university’s annual event and features six cuts of the Queens, including Mary Jane’s versions of the chilling ballad, “All Through the Cold Scenes of Winter,” and the domestic slice of life, “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again,” which has become the band’s most requested song. The band kicks the CD off to a rousing start with “Meet Me Down On That Long Georgia Line,” which showcases Henry (Mary Jane’s son) Queen’s driving clawhammer banjo and earnest vocal.

Mary Jane likes to look at her family as a union of royalty, a case where a Prince married a Queen. Mary Jane’s maiden name is Prince. The family had always been musical and she remembers her father as an exceptionally talented clawhammer banjo picker. Her mother was a singer and her brothers were among the first on Caney Fork to purchase guitars.

The Queen family was no less talented. Mary Jane’s husband, Claude, played banjo in a two-finger up-picking style and Claude’s father also played the banjo. Mary Jane heard family stories of legendary jam sessions in a barn on Caney Fork that would last until “chickens crowed for daylight, and they never played the same song twice, unless someone requested it. Now that’s knowin’ a lot of songs.”
As music changed around them, the families held true to the old-time sound.

“We didn’t go with the bluegrass music,” she said. Mary Jane paused, chuckled and added, “Maybe it’s why they didn’t put us on the map. I’m just tellin’ it like it is.”

One senses from talking to Mary Jane that she looks back and wishes that more of the past had been preserved, particularly recordings. She expresses puzzlement at why folklorists didn’t record her earlier, and she remembers great local musicians who have died.

“But they was never none of it recorded,” she said. “My daddy was a great banjo player, and he was never recorded. And I think people missed out on a lot by not hearing it.”

Remarkably, a significant part of the Queen legacy has emerged and found a younger audience.
“Henry has done more with the music than any of the rest of my family,” she said.

Henry Queen and his bandmates in Smoky Mountain Drum and Bass have generated regional excitement with a high energy fusion of old-time fiddle and banjo, electronic rave rhythms and a hoedown sensibility that seems to have sprung from the canvas of Salvador Dali. Whatever it is, and however much the band might enrage purists, Mary Jane has the final word: “I LOVE IT!”

Her son’s band is one aspect of the new she has welcomed. Others haven’t been received as warmly. Claude died 16 years ago and Mary Jane remembers the close-knit community she and her husband had known.

“But now these people have passed away or moved away and other people moved in, and I don’t hardly know anybody on Johns Creek or Caney Fork anymore,” she said.

As old-timers move out, newcomers move in, and Mary Jane doesn’t hide the fact she is worried about encroaching development. She picked up a real estate supplement of a local paper and showed me an advertisement for a 55-acre development on Caney Fork with 23 homesites. She remembers the exploitative practices of the timber industry that had employed her family members who tried to make ends meet, but now she fears that developers will ruin the land she has loved so much and destroy the sense of community along Johns Creek and Caney Fork.

Perhaps those memories moved her to show me one of her most personal possessions. It’s a notebook full of her favorite songs and poems, most of which she has committed to memory, including a tribute to Henry sung to the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball.” Reading them is only half the experience. One has to hear them recited by Mary Jane herself, as she did with this original tribute to her homesite:

In the beautiful mountains of North Carolina
Where I spent my happy childhood days,
Running these mountains, valleys and dales

On the head of Johns Creek
I met and married my true lover
And here in this valley I’ll spend the rest of my days.

In this valley our eight children have a home.
It was a pleasure to watch them grow,
But one day my true love had to go.

Now I walk this beautiful valley alone.
Yet, I am not alone
For Jesus, my Lord, is with me
And He will lead me home.

Mary Jane rummaged around to find another book. This one, she said, was about history. She pulled out The History of Jackson County and opened it to a page that featured a photo of her with a banjo. She broke into a proud yep-that’s-me-right-there grin and laughed loudly.

“You know, there’s not a lot of people who live to see their picture in a history book!”

 

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