Active Grange revival

There are venues, some but not many, where soulful women still rake a knitting needle over the ribs of a washboard while a fiddle plays to the thudding bass of a galvanized bucket and string.

Newman Lake Grange is one such place. There, on the first and third Sunday of every month, the Country Jammers eight-man band strums up a special mix of old-timey music and honky-tonk twang. This motley crew of musicians, mostly over the age of 60, covers Patsy Cline with haunting accuracy, churns out hits from Hank Williams Sr. with soulful cowboy sorrow, and even socks it to Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA.”

The audience is mostly senior citizens familiar enough with the Jammers’ set list to sing along. The music starts at 1 p.m. and lasts until dinner. The show is always free.

“These old people, you start playing something slow for them and they might throw something,” said Bill Fautch, the Jammers’ accordion player.

Fautch and the other members are mostly lifetime musicians. They know about 160 songs. Four of the players once performed with the Mountain Musicians, a popular local bluegrass band, but the Musicians’ concert schedule was rigorous.

On Starr Road north of Trent Avenue, where the Grange is located, the performance demands are considerably less, even though the door to the barn-red Grange Hall opens early and the gravel parking lot is 40 cars full before the end of the first set. This is a friendly place. The faded print on the tow-away sign beside the front door reads like invisible ink. The cacophony of music and social chatter pouring out the hall is audible from the street.

The Grange Hall wasn’t always this lively, said Lucille Mott, a hall member. The building was mostly dark five years ago and in danger of being surrendered to the state Grange organization, which may have sold or shuttered the building had things not turned around. Sunday dances with the Country Jammers were instrumental to getting the hall off life support.

“We really turned things around,” Mott said, “not only with the Country Jammers, but we also have an open square dance the fourth Friday of every month. The Boy Scouts meet here. 4-H uses the hall. We have a dictionary program. We give all the little third-graders in East Valley School District a dictionary.”

Sundays with the Country Jammers is one of the most popular aspects of the Grange’s revival efforts. The regulars who attend give the event a real homey feel. There are two blue-glass candy dishes full of peppermint bark and pecans, sugared and roasted, at the front door. Cold cuts, sandwiches and salads line the kitchen counter and the coffee pot seldom runs cold or dry. The opportunities to actively participate in the performance are endless.

At the end of the Jammers’ first set, members of the audience form a jug band on the middle of the dance floor and play for a short while. They play coffee-can bongos, washboards and guitars consisting of ventilated cookie tins on sticks strung for sound. Eight of the performers are women decked out in red blouses and hot purple blazers.

The garb is common stock among myriad groups of senior women across the United States who meet socially as “Red Hat Societies.” Women in the jug band however, prefer to be referred to as the “Hotties.” There’s one man, Leroy Imus, in the band who is in a ecidedly unpurple dress. His instrument most resembles a guitar, but its parts are unmusical.

“This was cut from the side rail of a water bed by an 80-year-old woman,” Imus said of his instrument.

Taking the floor, the Hotties and Imus make a show of tuning their untunable instruments, and then bang out a hillbilly song that’s good enough for clogging. The crowd rises and soon everyone is doing the stroll, dancing down the middle of the group in Virginia-reel fashion as the band plays. The scratch of the knitting needle has charmed the rhythm out of bones old and young. Soon the Country Jammers have joined in and the thudding washtub bass reverberates through every chest.