Scott, Landon, and Glen Alexander at the Old Jail, Statesville – Landon’s Report

This article filed under: Walker Family Band

For the past six years Scott and Glen Alexander have presented a free Christmas Concert at the Old Jail in downtown Statesville as a benefit for the Iredell Arts Council (http://www.iredellarts.org/index.html).  I was happy to be asked to join them this year; I met Glen last winter at a weekend workshop in Savannah, but this was my first chance to play with him for real.  He brought his fiddle, mandolin, guitar, bouzouki (a larger mandolin-type instrument borrowed from the Greeks and adapted into Irish music), and even the ‘cello, which he says he plays only once a year – hard to believe since he shows the same skill and ease as he does with his prize-winning fiddle and everything else he plays. 

Glen’s game plan for the concert was to have no plan – always interesting for musicians.   We started with some traditional Christmas songs, moved into a few old-time and Irish tunes, and ended with a Christmas sing-along.   And Scott played his beautiful guitar piece East of Easter, Glen adding delicate touches with his fiddle.  The audience, seated in what had been the rec room of the old jail, kept their coats on against the chilly air which seeped in through the steel doors, but were warmed by the music and delicious hot cider furnished by our genial hosts Donna Guy and Dusty Rhodes.  It was standing room only and a fine time for all.

My idea of a county jail comes, I guess, from Gunsmoke or Andy Griffith, but this jail was not built for the amiable town drunk, rather for what must have been some VERY desperate characters.  The walls were concrete almost two feet thick, with all kinds of strange jail appurtenances – ominous steel doors opening into spaces inside the walls, official peepholes - eye-sized holes covered by a swinging steel plate on our side, and on their side spreading out into a conical opening in the thick concrete to give a field of vision.  All the doors were steel, even in Donna’s studio – obviously the jails’ former office - where she has taught music for twenty years.  Upstairs there were some larger rooms converted into teaching studios, but back there, back in the dark-and-spooky section were still concrete and steel cells hardly touched since the old days, grubby and full of junk, and the folks who work there now all told of their encounters with the ectoplasmic (ghostly) gentleman in twenties garb who appears up there from time to time.
 
The large first-floor room where we played was still horribly unpainted since those days, with high windows, ragged steel girders across the ceiling, and those weird cone-shaped peephole indentions in the walls, but built into the room was a friendly wooden floor seating about 60, and a nice little stage.  It was surely dank and visually offensive to a first time visitor, but the crowd seemed unmoved by the surroundings, and surely enjoyed themselves.  We saw some high school friends of Scott’s, and most surprising, his ‘cello teacher from ECC (now of course, ECU) Don Tracy and his wife Gretchen, retired now in Salisbury.  Don actually gave me my first bass lessons, during a visit with Scott from my Navy duties in Norfolk.

Thanks to all who came to hear us and support the work of the Arts Council, and thanks especially to Donna and Dusty for making us feel so at home and creating such warmth and happiness in that building, which has obviously been part of some very tough lives.

Leave a Reply