Old Fort is an old mountain community. Its population hovers just under one thousand, give or take. It's had a number of names since it was created in 1778: Davidson, Catawba, Upper Fort. It first served as a western outpost for American militia. Battles between early settlers and Indians, and between the Cherokee and Catawba tribes, kept things hopping. Life in the town has slowed down since then. The railroad depot, built in 1892, closed down in 1987; passenger service had ended in 1975. The fort for which the town was named has been gone for nearly a century.

It turns out that, every Friday night in the Rockett Building next to the Old Fort fire station, musical groups from all over come down, congregating and milling about and in general making music of various sorts. According to Jim, the groups vary from skilled to the kind which made music often filed under "a joyful noise" in churches, but it is free and well attended and worth a visit.

Thus it was we end up diffidently strolling towards what we figure is our destination. There is a building, and there are folks milling about and talking and sitting a spell, but there isn't all that much music. We nod to a knot of old men sitting by the door and walk into the foyer and then into the room proper.

The room proper is longer than it is wide, with folding chairs arranged some ten rows deep to the front and left the stage. The walls are mostly wood panelling, with brown felt tacked to the back wall and the wall behind the stage to muffle echoes. All the seats are taken; things generally kick off around 7:00 and we are an hour late. The crowd is old, but here and there are a young family with kids, and a couple of teenagers are shoving each other in one section of the seats.

Misty and I stand by the concession stand for a minute, eyeing the 25¢ Cokes and the 50¢ pieces of homemade pound cake on paper plates with plastic forks and the little Zip-loc bags of cheesy snacks and the packages of cheese crackers. I spend a little time looking over the pictures of near-famous country and folk singers stapled all over the wall above the stand. We finally spy a section of wall near the door to the bathroom which is nearly clear of people and edge our way towards it past a row of older people wearing faded dress shirts and fanning themselves with funeral parlor fans to supplement the ten ceiling fans which are doing a fair-to-middling job of stirring up the warm air.

The stage isn't but about a foot higher than the surrounding floor, and has a wall flush up against it on the back and right side. There are two speakers on the wall above it and an aging mixing board in front of it and a number of microphones for the various and sundry instruments. On one wall is a poster which says "Old Fort Mountain Music" and has a drawing of a mountain band on it while woodcuts of dulcimers and guitars and banjos decorate the other.

The band on stage has two guitarists, a guy on upright bass, a fiddler, a banjo-player, and a singer whose main job, apart from singing, appears to be to stand with his arms tightly crossed and his hands jammed up in his armpits and to watch from under his shock of white hair and over his large white beard. Since they were getting on near the end of their set when we arrived, we only hear three of their songs. They play folk tunes with the kind of skill that comes from years of playing just for the hell of it and with the kind of energy that comes from enjoying what you do. On their last song about three people get up and clog in front of the stage on some sheets of plywood laid down for that purpose. Two of them are wearing shoes which jingle and clatter with each stomp. The third, a very old man, makes up in enthusiasm what he lacks in the way of jingly shoes.

I slip into the bathroom at the end of their set, while the line-up of musicians is shuffled and someone makes announcements about an upcoming concert at a local Baptist church. The bathroom has two stalls that are more converted closets than stalls proper and have a door which completely closes you in, two sinks, and a bench in case you are feeling poorly. It is a unisex bathroom, clearly built years before David E. Kelly ever decided that such would make a marvelous plot device.

The second band is similar to the first, with the subtraction of a fiddler and the addition of another guitarist, an accordianist, and one person on washtub. One of the guitarists is eighteen years old, as we are later told, and he stands out among the other white-haired and no-haired musicians. The woman who plays guitar also sings on a few of the numbers; the rest of the pieces are instrumental only.

At one point they perform a song which the accordianist, with his red shirt and red face and white hair, identifies as the Mule Song. It's the story of an ornery mule, and at the chorus the woman does a bray-whistle in the midst of her singing and yodelling. I've no idea how you would reproduce such a sound, let alone do it in the middle of singing.

Many more people clog during a number of the faster songs. Clogging is a strange form of dance to watch, as the dancers stomp and shuffle around, grinning happily, while all the time their hands are more or less held at their sides, only moving occasionally to emphasize one note or another. The old man who had danced earlier dances again, so fast and furiously that someone who walks past him on his way back to his seat feels compelled to fan the dancer's feet with his funeral parlor fan.

In between songs the accordianist talks to the audience, commenting on this and that. Right after the Mule Song he mentions that he's been married to the singer for fifty-two years, and plenty of people have called him a jackass. At another break he lets slip that they are selling tapes of their music over at the concession stand. "We've got tapes. We don't work," he says. Everyone laughs since all of the band except the eighteen-year-old guitarist is far into retirement. "But we've got tapes. Got eight instrumentals, three yodelling. Got the Mule Song." The Mule Song is clearly their signature piece. We buy a tape.

About then a woman tugs on my sleeve and says to me and Misty, "There're two seats that're open. You can have them." We take them gratefully, as we've been standing against the wall for nearly an hour and have grown tired of being bumped and jostled as the bathroom door opens and closes.

The second band finishes their set and begins moving off-stage. The same man as before gets up and makes the same announcements as before, while people walk past us and shoes jingle their way towards refreshment.

The third band is a country and western band, and not much to my taste, but the music is competently done. The singer has steel swept-back hair and a white shirt with a horse rampant on each breast and black piping and plays guitar to go along with his singing. An old woman plays piano, backing up the other two guitarists and the man on bass guitar.

They wend their way through a number of older country & western songs from the 1960's and 1970's. Hank Williams's Kaw-Lija, George Jones's "He Stopped Loving Her Today," and Jimmy Driftwood's "The Battle of New Orleans" make an appearance. By request they play "The Twist." The old man who had been dancing earlier starts twisting up a storm.

By the fourth band we are growing tired. It's been a long day, and the fourth band has the enthusiasm of the previous three bands but not the skill. The fiddler wanders around the stage, hunting for a musical key that is, if not the same key everyone else is using, at least a near neighbor. After the first song a young woman with bleach blond hair and wearing a black sleeveless turtleneck comes up on stage. "I used to sing here Saturday nights," she tells us. "So for those of you who remember me, hi!" She calls her mom up on stage and the two of them sing two gospel songs with the band. She has a good voice.

After those songs the singer calls for requests. "Hank Williams Jr.!" one man shouts. "Hank Williams?" the singer replies. "No, Bocephus!" the man shouts back. We make our way towards the exit.

On the way out we pass one group playing softly in the foyer. Outside another group is playing in the parking lot, a loose collection of people, some of whom had played earlier, some of whom hadn't, who just felt like playing. It's after ten. We find out later the music went on long after that.

If you're going to hear this music, you'd best move fast. Most of the crowd and nearly all of the musicians were old. Cable TV has come to Old Fort, as has video rentals and the pop music world of Britney Spears. In another ten years I expect this weekly ritual to have ended, strangled by lack of participation or a lack of audience.