Building the Song of the Mountains franchise

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

It takes a lot of stuff to make a TV show. Even one that uses a single set. Maybe especially one that uses a single set when it’s a stage where musicians perform and the look and sound have to be just right for both the audience and the viewers at home.
Song of the Mountains, filmed for PBS on the Lincoln Theatre stage in Marion, is just such a show, and the Virginia Tobacco Commission has granted it $49,000 for equipment.
“I don’t want to say new equipment,” said the show’s host and executive coordinator, booking agent and behind-the-scenes organizer Tim White, “because most of what we have is new. We just need more of it. There’s all kinds of things you can buy to make it better.”
On the list is a soundboard that puts control of how the music sounds in the hands of a technician who knows what to do with rows and rows of knobs and sliders. Also needed are monitors, he said, that let performers know how they’re sounding, and microphones that are the first element in the audio chain of events that takes sounds from the stage to the auditorium and to a recording medium.
SOTM has worked around its equipment needs, White said. The added equipment will also make editing the show, picked up now by 161 Public Broadcasting System affiliates, easier.
White is also continuing to look for, and finding, benevolent assistance in transforming the old Baldwin’s building between the General Francis Marion Hotel and the Lincoln Theatre into the Song of the Mountains Museum.
“We’re moving along with that,” although from the outside, until recent painting, progress has been hard to see.
Inside, work was delayed by the discovery during removal of the dropped-ceiling of an ornate, stamped tin ceiling above it. The tin work is worth preserving, according to White, and some “ugly conduit and junk that don’t need to be there” at the ceiling will be relocated.
Additionally, plans changed with the discovery of a “nice brick wall with a lot of character,” he said.
On Thursday, White was out soliciting in-kind donations from building supply companies, and having some success, he said.
“The biggest thing is for someone to donate flooring,” he said.
Over the next 60 days, White said, “you’ll see a lot happening. It’s been happening inside, but it’s hard to see.”
At that point, White predicted, the volunteer force driving the store-to-museum transformation will grow. He’s seen that happen on other projects with which he’s been involved.
“Once they see progress, it snowballs. Once we get a bit further along, we’ll see more people get involved.”
White wants to see brought to the museum the same kind of grassroots involvement that restored the deteriorating Lincoln Theatre largely through volunteer help.
For the museum, White invites the community to consider donating instruments no longer played and that may be stored in closets and under beds. Those instruments, he said, help tell the story of the region’s music and of those who have played it.
“Even though they were never famous, this is a way to make them famous,” White said previously.
“The people that are the unknowns of bluegrass music, in their day, they weren’t unknowns. They were people that were very popular, maybe in their hometown, in their own community ... if it hadn’t been for those people who did not become rich and famous off their music, in my opinion, the music would not have survived.”
In addition to artifacts, such as one of three Jimmy Rodgers guitars in existence and an accordion owned by Jeanette Carter, the museum will also host a gift shop and sell Song of the Mountains merchandise.
White said he is “bombarded” by requests for tapes and DVDs of Song of the Mountains episodes, requests that cannot be honored until licenses and artists’ releases are secured, a project White has on his to-do list.
White said the Song of the Mountains museum will have a space where local musicians can play, perhaps on Tuesday evenings. That would be reminiscent of the Monday night when pickers circled up inside the late Carson Cooper’s music store farther down Main Street.