'Merry-Go-Round' keeps live bluegrass playing

MOUNT AIRY -- This is the 15th story in our "Open Road" series. Look for it every Tuesday.

In the awning-covered alcove of a vacant storefront on North Main Street, a half-dozen tourists crowded around the bluegrass band Mountain Rain, sheltered from a spitting sky.

As the band rang out a final chord, stand-up bass player Brandon Bowles shook out his left hand, examining the blisters from seven hours of playing since the night before.

"I'll go rest two or three hours, and I'll be ready again," Bowles said.

The scene of musicians and listeners on the sidewalk repeats itself each week outside the Downtown Cinema Theater, where station WPAQ broadcasts the "Merry-Go-Round," one of America's longest-running live bluegrass and old-time radio programs.

It airs every Saturday around lunchtime, as it has for 62 years. The AM signal travels over the Appalachian foothills as far as Charlotte and Roanoke, Va., and streams all over the world via wpaq740.com.

"We feel like we're second only to the Grand Old Opry," says station heir Kelly Epperson, whose father Ralph Epperson founded WPAQ in 1948 to broadcast local Appalachian music.

As the "Merry-Go-Round" starts at 11 a.m., about 50 senior citizens spread out in the back rows of the 250-seat movie theater run by the Surry Arts Council. Others gathered two hours earlier on the sidewalk, where musicians jam while tourist families and old-timers listen in.

By 10 a.m. Saturday, Mountain Rain was competing with members of Hickory Flats for an audience - and for sonic purity, filling Mount Airy's small downtown with a clash of melodies.

Listeners had to huddle in close, almost mingling with the players to hear each group clearly.

Hickory Flats, a family band led by 68-year-old patriarch Arthur Cox, joined in with a handful of "Merry-Go-Round" regulars under the theater's marquee.

"I was just trying to decide whether to go down to my car and get [my guitar]," said Lance Cummings, who'd come down from Gahanna, Ohio, for the weekend. "It looks like they have enough."

Jump in and hang on

A fiddle, mandolin and second guitar sounded so good backing the Flats' four-part harmonies that Cox invited the players to join their core of bass, banjo and guitar on stage for the "Merry-Go-Round."

A few out-of-towners always show up, but most of the musicians know each other at least by face or name, and playing together happens naturally.

"You never know who you're gonna end up with," Hickory Flats' bassist Chandra Harmon said later.

Eighty-year-old guitarist Ray Cockerhan said it's been that way since the beginning. He started jamming downtown when he was 10 years old, even before the "Merry-Go-Round" began. He's played on the stage many times, but illness has kept him from playing much in the past couple of years. Now he goes just to listen and see his friends.

"I really miss that picking," he said. "We knowed one another and played with one another, so we could go up on stage and play together."

Playing in the "Merry-Go-Round" doesn't require an audition, just a love of the music brought to the mountains by Scotch-Irish settlers. Few of the musicians are professionals; they're businesspeople, retirees and government workers who play on weekends. Sometimes, a group will deliver a CD to the station during the week, and WPAQ will play it on-air right away.

"If a band calls up and wants to play on the 'Merry-Go-Round,' we usually will just look up and see the next available time, and we'll sign 'em up," said Epperson. "I've never known us to really turn down anybody if they make bluegrass or old-time mountain string music."

Even so, there's almost a year's wait for the next available slot.

Music, heart and soul

Some musicians, like members of Durham's Carolina Chocolate Drops, find their way from the Triangle, but most come from Surry County and across the Virginia line.

"This is the heartland," Epperson said. "This area's known for Andy Griffith and Mayberry and everything, but when it comes down to it, the music is the heart and soul."

Hickory Flats' guitarist and tenor Buck Cox had just played the night before at a weekly jam at the Lambsburg Community Center in Virginia, where he ran into Dennis Cain, the mandolin player who ended up joining him on stage the next day. Bowles, the Mountain Rain bassist, had played till the wee hours of the morning at another session in nearby King.

"If you had a mind to, you could go to a jam just about every night of the week," said "Merry-Go-Round" co-host Tim Chadwick, who runs a Thursday night jam at the nearby Andy Griffith Playhouse. "Music is real important in this area."

By the time Hickory Flats took the stage, Bobby and Mary Ruth Matthews had found their seats in the back row, the same ones they've taken almost every Saturday for more than a decade. Their friend Hoover Brown hooted and hollered from the lobby as Hickory Flats played the country classic "Mule Skinner Blues."

The Matthewes and Brown, all retired, also go to Chadwick's jam at the playhouse every Thursday, along with more than 30 other fans who regularly attend both shows.

"It's just a regular old gang, that's what it is," said Mary Ruth Matthews. "We likemusic all around."