Music and the Mountains.

Bishopville, Lee County

I was born in Hartsville in July 1990 and grew up around Bishopville, in South Carolina’s Pee Dee region. It was small, but when I was little I didn’t have much of a concept of somewhere bigger. It was the world I knew. The feeling that there was a lot more out there came later, as I got closer to leaving home.

Virginia was already at the edge of the map — my father’s mountains, visited but not yet mine.

One of the sounds I remember most is a crop duster on Saturday morning. I’d be lying in bed, not wanting to get up, listening to its drone get closer and farther away, rising and falling as it went over the fields around the house.

We played “torpedo” with corn stalks, throwing them with a big clump of dirt still attached to the roots. The weight pulled them through the air. We played in the swamp—the place associated with the Lizard Man—but the snakes and turtles were more immediate concerns to us.

Behind Aunt Margie’s house was a little shack somebody had built. We climbed onto its roof and jumped down onto the trampoline, or jumped from the trampoline into the pool. We climbed over a car hauler and through an old school bus out in the swamp that I remember as being there from Hurricane Hugo. Once, when I was about twelve or thirteen, a neighbor came out with a gun and told us to get off his property. I was scared for my life.

That was part of Bishopville for me: cotton fields, the cotton festival, football games, the prison, church, and the go-kart races. At the races, I entered the footraces on the track. I ran barefoot and won week after week. I don’t remember exactly how much the prize money was. I remember how fast I could run, and how good I felt at it.

Nanny: singing, harmony, and change

Nanny nurtured my singing. I remember her singing in the kitchen. She was creative, and I recognize something of myself in her.

We listened to the Judds while riding in her Oldsmobile. I was fascinated by harmony: voices that sounded beautiful together because they were so similar, and voices that fit together beautifully because they were so different. I couldn’t do it then. I learned more as I got older, and I still don’t think I’m particularly great at it, but I love the challenge. I love singing with other people and finding that blend.

I also remember listening to “Landslide” in the car with her. It was powerful. Even then, I knew it was a moment I would remember. I felt something about change: things come to an end, people leave, and you can feel sadness before the loss has happened. It was almost an anticipatory sadness.

I sang in church, recorded voice and instruments onto cassette as a child, learned piano by ear at ten, and picked up guitar at thirteen. Nanny belongs to the beginning of that musical life, and to the songs I still return to.

Poppy: humor, skill, and stubbornness

Poppy is where my middle name comes from. He is one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. He was handsome, really funny, and an incredible storyteller. He has sayings you don’t forget.

I remember being out on the deck after church when he jumped, still wearing his church clothes, and belly-flopped onto a float in the pool.

I remember working with him in his shop. During an ice storm in the winter of 2004, we were putting down flooring at Aunt Margie’s house with no heat when I heard Britney Spears’s “Toxic” on the radio for the first time. That song is tied to that room, that cold, and being there with him.

Poppy left school young, worked on farms, and wanted to work on cars. He was drafted and served in Vietnam. He could work on cars, do plumbing and electrical work, and build a house. I was always impressed by how much he knew how to do.

One time, after a plumber found snakes under our house, Poppy came over, taped up the vents, and smoked them out. That is the kind of thing I remember him doing: figuring out how to handle something that seemed impossible to me.

I recognize his charisma in myself—the humor, the moments when I can be fun, animated, and the life of the party. I also recognize his stubbornness, rigidity, and sense of how things are supposed to be. His fortitude, resolve, and tenacity are part of what I carry from him.

When I was a teenager, he told me, “Randy, you’re the only one who’s gonna be able to pull your own head out your ass.” It pissed me off. I had dropped out of school and was struggling — moving between family members while my family came apart, trying to understand the absence of a father I had never met.

Poppy was a steady male presence in my life. There was help in that relationship, and there were difficult lessons about masculinity, too. Some things are still private. I want to leave room for the humor and capability I admired, alongside the stubbornness and the parts I’m still working through.

Momma: the green Pontiac and the kitchen table

I remember riding with Momma in her green Pontiac, listening to the CDs she bought. REO Speedwagon, the Eagles, KC and the Sunshine Band, Terry Jacks, John Denver, Elton John, and Bob Seger. Then the country music: Reba, Dolly, Martina, LeAnn, and Shania.

She worked servicing ATMs and transporting money, and sometimes we went along with her. Those rides are where I heard so much of that music.

At a flea market, we saw a puppy I wanted. After we left, I sat quietly in the back seat looking at a picture of a dog that looked like it. I wasn’t complaining or saying anything. Momma looked back at me, and we went back. We came home with three dogs that day—one for me, one for Chad, and one for her. Ward, Mandy, and Alli Cat. They were with us for a long time.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her, smoking cigarettes and talking. It could be gossipy. There was always something happening in the family, somebody fighting about something.

Chad: almost twins, then separate lives

Chad and I are close in age. We were basically the same size for a long time, and Momma jokingly tried to pass us off as twins. We shared a lot of things.

When we got in trouble and were sent to our rooms, we talked to each other through the vents. Then we got in trouble for that too.

We fought and argued. Chad was gifted at sports, handy like Poppy, and a wild child. We both had it tough. We were separated when I was twelve and he was ten,and after that we had to live our lives separately.

Now he has his own family—my sister-in-law and my nephew. I love them.

Dial-up, loud guitars, and finding other people

By around fifth or sixth grade, there was AOL and AIM. Slow dial-up internet. Later came Myspace, before Facebook.

I used LimeWire to find music and music videos. When YouTube came along, there were more performances and interviews to watch. I watched Tori Amos and Nirvana, and stayed up taping Nirvana specials on VH1 Classic. Music could arrive through Momma’s CDs, Nanny’s car, the radio, television, or an internet connection that took forever.

I was always talking to some girl online, trying to get her to like me. I was a little lover boy, without fully understanding my sexuality or attraction. Most of my friends were girls. In that small world, I stood out from the other boys.

I played in pep band, and we had our own little band too. We played out by the edge of the swamp, loud enough that the neighbors came over to complain about how loud—and how bad—we were.

We went into a studio once. I insisted on playing “Violet” by Hole, and we recorded an instrumental I had written. We weren’t ready to record. We never even went back to pick up the CDs, although I would love to have a copy now.

We played Pearl Jam covers and tried to be Eddie Vedder. We tried Smashing Pumpkins, but the drumming and guitar parts were beyond what we could do at the time.

As a teenager, I went to a coffee shop in Hartsville, the town where I was born. There were live performances and open mics, and young people from the nearby governor’s school. Arty, nerdy, intellectually curious kids found each other through Myspace and then met up in person. I drank coffee, heard music, and made friends, including people I’ve known ever since.

I earned my GED in the early winter of 2008 and left for SCAD in Savannah that August. The world beyond home was becoming something I could actually enter.

Britton and Charlene: a home, a haunted house, and a film

Britton is more than a brother to me.

I remember praying for a friend. Making friends was difficult because I was intense. Britton was a different kind of intense, but intense too. We both knew what it felt like to be picked on. We found each other through the Spice Girls.

His mother, Charlene, helped raise me. After Momma and my stepdad separated, I moved between family members. I went to live with Britton and Charlene, and they took care of me. Britton had been helping care for his mother from a young age.

We wrote movies and made movies. We also did ridiculous things, like putting eggs in the road or burying a bag of soup that we said was haunted. We lived together in a house we experienced as haunted. That is an important part of our shared story. Strange things seemed to happen when we were together—funny things, serious things, things we kept talking about afterward.

The music I connect with Britton includes the Spice Girls, the Mamas and the Papas, Bob Dylan, Alanis Morissette, Mariah Carey, the Grease soundtrack, and All Saints. We loved “Never Ever.”

Ant Farm was an early version of the film that became The Town We Ran Away To. We sat on the roof of his house writing the script and listening to Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine. That album and Cat Power’s The Greatest were especially important to me during that time.

It was a way of imagining a life beyond Bishopville.

I made the music and acted in it. Britton directed, filmed, and edited it. His girlfriend acted in it too.

We worked on it from the time we were fourteen until we were almost nineteen. Eventually, it became about finishing it. We were determined, and we did. I’m still proud of us for that. Not overthinking everything, and actually finishing something together—that is part of what I carry from those years into my creative work now.

Britton is loyal and genuinely kind. He came from the same world I came from. We still don’t go very long without talking.

Miss Bailey

Miss Bailey taught my orchestra and chorus classes. I loved music and wanted to participate, even when other students didn’t want to sing or risk being seen trying.

Momma got me a violin, and Miss Bailey offered to teach me during class time. I remember her attaching a little piece of foam to it with a rubber band. I was left-handed and had learned guitar left-handed, so learning to bow a traditional violin felt awkward.

We only got through a couple of lessons before she died. I remember how nice she was and how good a violin player she was.

Daddy and the journey to Clintwood

Daddy died on June 4, 1990, a month before I was born. I never met him. He had an older brother and two younger sisters.

As a child, I asked Momma questions about him. Sometimes she would call his family and ask whether I could come stay for a couple of weeks. She had only known him for about two years. Going to Virginia gave me a chance to learn things about him that she couldn’t tell me.

Clintwood, Honey Camp, Haysi, Pound, and Grundy belong to this part of my story—the places I connect with my Virginia family and those mountain visits. The journey to Clintwood and Dickenson County is part of the memory. You leave the interstate and still have a long way to go into the mountains. Highways give way to smaller roads, then the holler. You lose your cell signal.

For years, if you wanted to reach somebody at Granny Rita’s, you called the landline. Now there is Wi-Fi, and that has changed what it feels like to be up there.

That was where I saw snow. It could be really cold. People spoke differently from the people I knew in South Carolina, with different words for things. I sounded different to them too. The food was different, sometimes unfamiliar to me.

I’ve always been close to Aunt Michelle, who is about thirteen years older than I am, and to my cousin Grace, Aunt Kim’s daughter. On those visits, my family showed me photographs of Daddy and told me what he was like. I was learning about him through people who had known him much longer than Momma had.

When I was little, I didn’t understand how young my parents were, or how briefly they had known each other. I think they were really in love. Their story was also tragic. Understanding both took time.

Grandpa Rad: photographs and family stories

Grandpa Rad died in 1993. I have a faint memory that I think could be him, but I don’t really remember him. I know him largely through photographs and family stories.

In one photograph, he is up in a tree. I keep that picture in my apartment. In another, he wears a coal lamp and is covered in soot, standing beside a little boy whose identity I don’t know.

I understand that he worked as a coal miner. He drew diagrams and building plans, and may have taught at a technical school. Those details are pieces of a life I am still learning about.

The family burial place is near the foot of Birch Knob. That place connects the mountains to the people in the photographs.

There is a family story about Grandpa Rad and Poppy meeting years before my parents got together. Poppy was stationed at Fort Campbell around 1966 and ended up at a cockfight in a holler where Grandpa Rad was. Later, they realized they had met long before one man’s daughter married the other man’s son.

I think Grandpa Rad was a flawed man, but a good man. I think he loved his children.

Granny Rita: the effort to stay close

When I was little, I ran into Nanny’s house and jumped into her chair. Granny Rita was sitting there, and I hadn’t realized it. When I saw it wasn’t Nanny, I started crying.

Looking back, I feel bad about that moment. Granny Rita didn’t get to see me often. She was a connection to Daddy, and she made such an effort to be in my life.

She sent cards, sent money, called, and tried to talk to me. Her house was full of photographs of her children and grandchildren. She kept making the effort.

I had heard she was a tough woman who ran a tight ship when Daddy was growing up. They didn’t have much money. She worked her whole life, and I think she wanted her children and grandchildren to have better than she did.

She and Grandpa Rad separated, and she never remarried. She is very religious, but she never pushed it on me. I never felt judged by her or pressured by her faith. I didn’t begin going to church with the family until I was older.

After I turned eighteen, I made more of an effort to be in her life. I went to stay with her, spending time in her house and sleeping in her old Appalachian basement. I really cherish those visits.

The Breaks, Birch Knob, and belonging

On one of those childhood visits, my family took me to the Breaks for my birthday. I remember looking over the gorge toward Kentucky and feeling as though I had never been so high up or seen a view like that.

I thought about the people who had come through those mountains before us. I was overwhelmed by the beauty, but I also felt connected to a culture, a region, a place, and a history.

Birch Knob gave me that feeling too: looking out over the mountains, so far from anybody, feeling as though I was looking over the top of the world.

I remember spring before the heat of summer, when the weather felt almost magical. Church outside. Taking the dog to clear river water. Walking trails around Pine Mountain and the Cranes Nest.

The community felt different from what I knew in South Carolina. In my experience, people there were very tightly connected. I couldn’t go anywhere without somebody talking to me, recognizing me, or explaining how we were related. Sometimes it startled me. People would look at me and say I looked so much like Daddy.

The music belongs in that Virginia thread too: Ralph Stanley and the Carters, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. The family connections to the Carters and Stanleys are part of the history I’ve heard about. As I’ve gotten older, Tyler Childers and Sierra Ferrell have joined the music I connect with those mountains.

I have always said that the two things that call to me are music and the mountains. And they always will.

The life that followed

At fifteen, I was behind a microphone at WAGS AM in Bishopville, hosting country programming. At the University of South Carolina, I was on-air and producing at WUSC 90.5 FM.

I came back to school through a GED and stayed for the BSW and the MSW — macro social work: policy, organizations, coalitions, the public systems underneath people’s lives. Britton was there at graduation, part of a friendship that had already carried us through so much.

Richmond is home now. I perform piano, record and produce music, collaborate, work in advocacy, and keep the 1,000 Songs practice moving. I host and produce The Degrees of Freedom: A Mental Health Journey.

Randy Bryan is the recording project. Randy Bryan Moore is the person around it. These people and places belong in my biography because they belong in my life: Nanny’s Oldsmobile, Momma’s green Pontiac, Poppy’s shop, Chad on the other side of the vent, Britton on the roof with a script, Miss Bailey beside a violin, and Granny Rita’s house at the end of the mountain roads.

There are things I know clearly and things I am still learning. There is loss, humor, music, family, and the effort to stay close. That is the life the work comes from.