Samantha Crain parks at the Garage

Stepping across the street from the Garage in Winston-Salem last Friday night to discuss her new EP, The Confiscation, Samantha Crain, is stopped at the door by the bartender.

"I'm sorry," he says. "We don't allow children in here."

Blinks of surprise follow reassurances that Crain, a petite, full-lipped beauty with a brunette braid coiled around one shoulder, is indeed 21 years old.

She is the youngest and newest member of Ramseur Records, a Concord, NC-based record label managing stanchion bands such as the Avett Brothers and the everybodyfields. She and her band, the Midnight Shivers, are also recipients of the Oklahoma Gazette's 2008 Woody Award for best folk band. Further lifting the wings of this phoenix of a band is the honor of having a day officially dedicated to Samantha by the mayor of her hometown, Shawnee, Ok.

"It was really cool to receive the award in the spirit of Woody Guthrie because he is the epitome of Oklahoma," says Crain.

She has been writing stories since she was a child in composition notebooks her parents supplied.

"As soon as I could write stories about people, I did. I was quite the little liar and exaggerator and still am," she says with a smile.

The Confiscation is a compilation of five short stories Crain wrote and turned into songs. Each song has a different narrator expounding themes of betrayal, redemption and good versus evil.

In the process of taking the EP to the next level, she e-mailed Dolphus Ramseur, president of Ramseur Records about the possibility of opening for the Avett Brothers.

As the winds of fate and serendipity blow, Crain says she and Dolphus Ramseur, head of Ramseur Records, "found each other."

"We just started talking and everything fell into place," she says. "He's more interested in the long career than the fast buck."

Jacob Edwards, on drums, coined the name the Midnight Shivers, "because they needed something that evoked nighttime whisky drinking and front-porch smoking." He's joined by Andy Tanz on bass and back-up vocals and, for the tour, Nate Hendrix on electric guitar. The Midnight Shivers anchor the traditional folk-rock rhythms and steer Crain's Dylanesque acoustic guitar and harmonica duets.

Samantha's youthful appearance is in direct contrast to her velvety, sonorous voice thick with flavors of dark chocolate, licorice and nutmeg, melded with a unique blend of round vowels.

"As a child I had a lisp or a speech impediment," she explains. "I was from a family that was either very eloquent of had a very Southern drawl.

"When I sing I can make up words that sound like how I want them to be. Words are things that I experiment with. I can rhyme and mold anything together and I never sing the same song the same way. The tone and timbre is me but it's a whole new game each time.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers' 12-song set struck all the right notes, fusing a palpable collaboration of bands such as the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, Bob Dylan and the Band, all musical influences.

Four songs from The Confiscation were featured beginning with "Beloved, We Have Been Expired," a weary resignation of love's flame burning low, of "being the forgotten change in the pocket of your old winter coat." Crain explains the verse of this song: "The floors I sleep on at night, they speak to me. Their strange voices tell me all thing true.They say if something's dead, it's dead. There's no reviving it, just bury it and move on."

"Two years go when we started touring we slept on floors anywhere we could," she says. "I would lie on the hard floor and think about everything. I had really good therapy sessions, imagining hands coming out of the floor for a massage. Floors were the source I could go to to figure things out."

"Traipsing Through the Aisles," is a pulsing, surprisingly happy-go-lucky, shrug-of-the-shoulders song despite the theme of remorse as thick as a wet wool blanket.

"I'm lost inside my home and my clothes, in the rows of my mind and I know it's not a sign I just messed up this time.

"I did something wrong." The tenth song plays possum with the crowd, the band pretending to fumble for a song as the singer's back is turned, when in fact she swivels around with harmonica to lips, blasting the audience with all the vehemence of a Southern Baptist preacher pummeling his fist on the pulpit and spitting warnings of fire and brimstone.

"The River," conjures grim images of a man around town that discovers little girls playing beside a river.

"When he finds them the rest makes me shiver, he holds them down when their feet won't reach the ground and he waits for the struggle to end." Crain says this song was inspired by a Flannery O'Connor story of the same name that she and two friends read and decided to write their own version. Crain decided for her story that the man is purged of guilt and repents by agreeing to be baptized in the river where, "the preacher holds him down when his feet won't reach the ground and he waits for judgment to come, yes he waits for the Lord's will to be done."

"Writing is a meditation for me," she says. "I sit down and the chord progressions just sort of happen. The melodies are in my head. I keep journal entries in images. The best songs are the ones you can feel, see and smell."

When asked why only five of the twelve lyrical miracles performed Friday night were released as an EP instead of a complete CD, she responds with a lightening bolt of bare truth.

"I only had five-hundred dollars," she says. "That's how much it costs to record five songs.

Originally Published in Yes! Weekly

Sam Quinn's Posthumous visit with Gram Parsons

Sam Quinn and his band, the everybodyfields, recently stayed at The Joshua Tree Inn, where legendary singer/songwriter Gram Parsons died from an overdose of drugs and alcohol in 1973 at the age of 26.

Sam , Jill Andrews, Josh Oliver, and Tom Pryor, comprise the everybodyfields, whose music has been described as, "a fresh set of fingerprints in the archives of bluegrass, country, and folk, music." The band was touring the west coast, or "left coast", as Sam likes to say , when Sam and Josh found out they were booked to stay at The Joshua Tree Inn.

The Joshua Tree Inn is a simple but mythical motel in California, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles.It was popular in the fifties for Hollywood rabble rousers and trendy in the seventies for rockers and celebrities. These days, the main attraction is room number eight, where thousands of fans pilgrimage every year to pay homage to Gram Parsons.

"I've been a huge Gram Parsons fan since I was eighteen," says Sam, who turns twenty-eight in April, 2008. "It was really far out to find out we would be staying in the Joshua Tree Inn. I had just waked up in our van about a mile away. I knew we would be in the vicinity, but sharing a wall with Gram, no, not a chance."

"We walk in and the lady at the front desk, gives me a key to room number 7, the room next to the one Gram died in," says Sam. "There was a concrete slab in front of room number eight with beer and liquor bottles, an old busted up guitar, and Mexican candles on it."

"The room was the same as when Gram died in it. It was like a shrine to him with CD's and a log book where could write notes about Gram. There was a painted sign that said, Safe at Home. (Safe at Home was the title of Gram's one- album novelty with The International Submarine Band.)

The Joshua Tree Inn is said to be "the final resting place" of Gram's spirit. Global traveler's leave tales in the eulogy book attesting to "feeling" Gram's spirit in the room or experiencing odd incidences. One guest recorded, "Richard asked Gram to give us a sign, and the radio came blaring at us with country music at 2:39 a.m."

Possibly the most moving entry is that of Gram Parsons daughter, Polly, whom he saw little of during the seven years he was her father, wrote, "I know your beautiful angel wings must reach far across the desert when you soar…for here you will always be truly safe at home."

"I closed my eyes and thought about all the things that led up to his death,' says Sam. "I thought, man, there's been some abuse in this room. It was kind of creepy being in a room where somebody has died."

Sam didn't put any tokens on Gram's shrine but "went back to room number 7 and drank lots of beer. I figured Gram would want me not to waste beer."

Gram Parsons "cosmic American music," a blend of country and rock, inspired musical giants such as The Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Dwight Yoakum. Thirty three years after his death, Grams' genius ripples through time, influencing bands such as the everybodyfields, the Jayhawks, and Wilco.

Gram Parsons was born Ingram Cecil Connor III, in Waycross, Georgia, on November 5, 1946. His family was extremely wealthy and cursed with tragedy.

Gram adored Elvis Presley as a boy, the Journeymen as a teenager, and Merle Haggard and Buck Owens as a young man.

He was a beautiful boy with an inordinate intelligence, dangerous charisma, and a passion for music. The girls loved him.

Gram made a single-record with The Byrds, two albums with the Flying Burrito Brothers, and two solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel. All sold poorly during his life but gained notoriety after his death.

Gram's posthumous fame was due partly to the media attention of his "partial cremation," in the Joshua Tree National Park, where road manager, Phil Kaufman, stole Gram's casket, took it to Joshua Tree National Park, and ignited with kerosene as a pact he and Gram had made.

Sam and Tom were bewitched with the Joshua Tree National Park.
"Spending time out in that desert was some of the most amazing times I've ever spent. It ups the ante for being out there, the terrain and the atmosphere trying to take your moisture out of you."

In the biography of Gram Parsons life, Twenty Thousand Roads, author David N. Meyers describes the desert as "like no other." "Joshua Trees are large, slow-growing yuccas that are remarkably humanoid in shape and evocation. Dotting the Park are enormous piles of softly rounded boulders that, like the Joshua Trees, seem somehow animated. They form phantasmagorical shapes against the Park's infinite blue sky and deep silences. Joshua Tree feels like the end of the world, but a benign one."

Sam says that he and Tom" went out for two days in a row, hiking and sitting on rocks so high that the trees in the desert looked like nipples. Every now and then we'd run into a purple cactus. It was so magical. We were both completely floored. It was beautiful, so much light. Everything wanted to stick, poke, or bite you."

"Being there was like a re-start button on life. People were so laid back. It is an artists' community. We could hear crows out there and you could hear the wind off their wings."

"When we left, we got back in the van and rode for ten hours. I took a lot of notes and got some tunes together. It was the right place and right time for every thing to gel. I could clean out the cobwebs instead of getting marred down in the things that don't matter."

Gram Parsons often visited the desert to fuel his creativity and find solace from the many demons that tormented him. Suicide, depression, and alcoholism ran like threads on the underside of a tapestry through his family, weaving generations of dysfunction.

Like the lyrics to Sam's song, "Aeroplane," from the everybodyfields CD, Nothing is Okay, "what holds me up is going to burn me in the turn around," so did Gram's final hours at the Joshua Tree Inn surrounded by the desert he so loved.

"I have a big spot in my heart for Gram," says Sam. "GP and the Grievous Angel was my favorite CD. The more I listened the more I found to listen to. "We'll Sweep out the Ashes," was a big one."

"I was coming to grips from growing up in Eastern Tennessee. I was trying to shake that off, getting out of "Po-Dunk," town. It hit me around the time I left there that I was ashamed that I thought that for so long. It was a rite of passage."

Gram Parsons made country music cool in a time when some people considered country singers on the same level as white trash red-necks.

"Gram was a piss and vinegar kind of guy, a show boat who had a lot of issues, but when he opened his mouth, he really showed up", Sam says. " He was such a good singer. He wrote some amazing chord changes. The song, "She," was such a vocal showcase for Gram. This performance of this song is insanely good."

"One time somebody came up to me after a show we did. I was standing next to Jill, who's usually the one who people say her song really touched them. This guy comes up to me and said, "Yeah, that song really touched me. You've become everything to be a country music singer. It was one of the best compliments I've ever had."

Sam says, "It's the soul that comes out, not the notes or timbre. That's what Gram had. It resonates with me. Those twangy songs spoke to me on a primordial level. They got under my skin. He is so cool and always will be."

The Joshua Tree Inn is for sale for two million dollars.

Interview with the everybodyfields

TheEverybodyFields, a band from Johnson City, Tennessee, lead by Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, literally shushed the usually rollicking crowd at the Garage in Winston Salem, N.C., last Friday night, enchanting the beer drinking, stogy- smoking lot .

Like a fresh set of fingerprints in the archives of bluegrass, country, and folk history, the conjugal synchronicity of Sam and Jill’s voices carve a new niche in the music genre, as if they dashed a sprinkle of special Eastern Tennessee seasoning to make a brand new recipe.

Jill’s harmonies lilt like liquid silver, as serene as a Nightingale, dovetailing in perfect concord with Sam’s ardent crooning.

Their lyrics are potent poetry, masterpieces quilled by erudite masters who have tasted the bitter bile of a broken heart, throbbed with desire in newfound love, and fallen headfirst into the dark, black abyss of loneliness.

There is an underlying current of electricity between the 27ish duo. Jill places her hand affectionately on Sam’s leg and they hug with genuine care. They also banter and barb with that “you know I’m kidding but I’m half serious”, sparring about Jill’s old boyfriends and Sam’s girlfriend whose photographs he forgot to credit on their last CD.

Sam and Jill met as camp counselors in 1999 in Johnson City, Tennessee, where Sam was already playing the guitar and singing.

“I was envious at his ability to NOT be a camp counselor and play the guitar around the campfire with his friends because he didn’t want to hang out with the kids,” Jill explains.

“I had pigtails and hair down to my butt,” chimes Sam, who coined the name TheEveryBodyFields from the backyard of his home in his early 20’s, where “we hung out with people and drove around drinking beer with our eyes closed.”

“I liked that the name included everybody,” says Jill. “Everybody and fields aren’t usually put together in one space.”

The band toured the East coast in the early years behind the wheel of their Buick Rendezvous, booking gigs under Jill’s pseudonym, Ellen Y Larson.

The first song together was, “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning,” as performed by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

Inspired by artists like Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, Wilco and the JayHawks, Sam and Jill write their own songs, with the exception of one.

“Sometimes our song writing is a collaboration, but most of the time it’s his song or my song,” says Jill. “Or, we’ll take a song to each other and say, “Hey, can you help me out?

"For me,” she continues, “when the feeling isn’t there, I can’t do it. I have to be alone. I put on these “weed eater” earphones when we are traveling in the car so I can think.”

“I stop a lot of songs to sit on them awhile,” Sam grins. “It’s tough to be your own boss when your fiends are all slackers or border line losers.”

Sam and Jill’s first release, “ Halfway There: Electricity in the South,” featured the song written by Sam about the plight of the victims of progress in the Roosevelt Era , “T.V.A., which won first place in the Chris Austin song writing competition at the 2005 Merlefest in Wilkesboro, N.C.

“And God, the Father, said,”Jesus Christ, I don’t know about this electricity. They use the day to steal the nights and made my waters rise, and trying to take my job away

Jill’s song, “The Silver Garden,” from the same release is a profound, though somewhat impatient promise to her sweetheart.

“There’s a part of you, deep inside of me, not the part that hides, not the part that leaves. You’ve loved me for years, I won’t ask you again. There’s nobody else, don’t ask me again. And I’ll go to the Silver Garden to be with you.”

Their second release, “Plague of Dreams,” in 2005 features the song, “Magazine, in which Sam writes that he’s, “two feet knee in doubt, a round of bases and at home I’m out. But if you’re never home, I doubt, that you’ll ever see me out. The parking lot is a hiding place, ‘cause under the cars you can’t see my face.”

Sam actually did hide underneath his family car when he was a boy playing Little League and got tagged out.“Everyone hated me because we lost the season because of me, so I went out to the parking lot and hid underneath our car,” he explains.

Unlike the first two releases which features Sam and Jill on vocals, bass, and guitar, former member David Richey on dobro, and guest musicians on fiddle, Sam and Jill’s third masterpiece, “Nothing is Okay,” expands the usual musical line up with lap steel instead of dobro, keys and drums.

Outstanding on this CD is Jill’s song, “Wasted Time, a desperate bargain with her lover, co-written by Megan McCormick , is a two- in- one song bridged brilliantly by an interlude that ends with Sam’s repetitive and reassuring words, “It’s not your problem”

“Hey, it’s me. I know it’s 3:00 a.m. Saying please, pick up the phone, I’m all alone and need a friend. I’m so grateful, and you’re so tired of me. If you hold me now, I promise to let go when you leave.”

On stage at the Garage, Sam and Jill play two riveting sets, trading bass and guitar back and forth like proud parents of new babies.

Jill’s beautiful, unclouded face is unperturbed as she closes her eyes during each song.

Sam, with his quirky, curly brown hair and thick muttonchops, turns his head sideways, almost grimacing with emotion as he sings, the perfect contrast to Jill’s tranquility.

He takes a step back and nods his head in steady affirmation while Jill stills the crowd to silence with, “Wasted Time, accompanied by Josh Oliver on keyboards and vocals and Tom Pryor on lap steel.

Pausing between songs, Jill tells the audience wryly, “Sam has this cryptic way of telling us what we are playing next. He plays the G cord and he thinks we should know what the next song is.”

Sam takes a sip of red wine and slams the house down with “Don’t Tern Around.”
He likes to misspell words on purpose because he thinks it looks “neat.”
“Terd looks better than turd, don’t you think,” he muses.

They close the second set with another new song,“That was my favorite show I’ve ever seen these guys do,” says David Butler, a 50ish volunteer DJ for WQFS 90.9 from Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C.

“I love TheEveryBodyFields. I find them totally unique. I’ve never been to the Garage where you didn’t hear loud conversation and beer bottles breaking. There were a couple of numbers where it was “whisper quiet.”
David Butler and countless other fans believe Sam and Jill will be quite famous.

“I wouldn’t want to work for someone else,” admits Sam. “I’d just like to keep making records with 100% artistic freedom.

“I’d like to be widely respected and to have enough money to build a house,” says Jill. I’d want to be like Gillian Welsh, who can still walk down the street unnoticed.”

Their upcoming tours include gigs on the West Coast, the Midwest, as well as their well traveled route along the East Coast.

In the meantime, Jill says her dog just died and she thinks about her all of the time.

“I cried in the car coming here today,” she says.
Sam looks surprised. “I was asleep,” he says.
“No,” corrects Jill gently, “You were in the back seat.”

Visit the everybodyfields' website

It’s sad to see family business closing its doors.

I open the glass door framed on either side by two large windows displaying living room and dining room furniture. A bell jingles as I step into a brick building with high ceilings on East Market Street in Greensboro, North Carolina.



Walking down the narrow, rubber covered aisle flanked by more furniture stacked in tiers along the walls, I make my way to the desk in the back where the proprietor of Dabbs Furniture Company sits watching my approach.



It’s 1981 and I’m 20 years old, a student at Guilford College. I’ve come to announce my intentions to a man I haven’t seen in a long while.
“I’d like to learn the family business,” I say.
“Great,” replies my father, Bob Dabbs. “You’re hired.”



Selling furniture and keeping accounts was a sweet deal for a full-time college student. I had flexibility to leave for classes and during slow times, I studied, struggling to stay awake as the steady hum of the tall, oscillating fan stirred the air.



A few months later, my adored, older brother, Steve, announced his intentions to join the family business.
“Great,” replied our Dad, delighted to receive the heir apparent.




Steve and I laughed away the tedium of slow summer afternoons entertained by a steady cast of characters which included the young, charismatic Reverend Michael King, and the lady who talked so fast her teeth clacked. We never could understand what she said.
My father’s loyal co-worker of several years, Bob Oakley, a/k/a “Snook’ums,” so named for the cartoon character with the lock of golden hair across his forehead, served as mentor and translator.




I became accustomed to seeing street people relieve themselves and take sips from mysterious bottles wrapped in brown paper bags in the alley that separated the building from the huge, spooky warehouse where most of the furniture was kept.




Working in the family business was not always easy. Emotional baggage had to be checked at the door at 9:00 am and retrieved after hours. During more than one Thanksgiving family meals, the carving knife danced almost telekinetically in each of our hands, as if to carve someone or something other than the turkey.




I resented being the first to express interest in the business only to be shoved aside when the male heir arrived, automatically earning a higher salary and securing his place as future owner.




“Well, after all,” my father explained. “You’ll want to quit working and raise a family one day, right?”




Three years later, I graduated from college and took a giant step across the street to sell advertising at the Greensboro News and Record. It was a hard decision but the right one.




In 1986, Dabbs Furniture moved to a larger location on Lee St. Joined now by my younger brother, David, a photographer by trade and mountain man at heart, the Dabbs Dynasty was complete.




As accurately predicted, I happily married and retired to raise a family.




Eleven years after moving to their final destination on South Holden Road, the daily grind of managing a “Mom and Pop” store combined with heavy competition from overseas has taken its toil.




The Dabbs boys have spilled blood and sweat and cried tears, but they’ve run a successful and lucrative” b’ness,” as my southern father often inflects. They are tired, but the burden has been lifted. The store is closing in March of 2005.




Looking now at the glass windows covered by signs announcing “Going Out of Business Sale,” I am saddened. Reels of film thread through my head as I struggle not to cry.




I am four years old, sitting in our black Valiant with my brothers and our mother, Jackie, at Rex Anderson’s Esso next to Mitchell’s Clothing store on East Market Street, having just visited our Dad two doors down, letting the “Tiger fill our tank.”




I am six, in a plaid dress and white bobby socks, skipping down the aisle at Dabbs Furniture, thrilled to be watching my first color television program, The Wonderful World of Disney.




I am twelve, fetching a glass of grape juice for my Dad who is sprawled on the den sofa watching Sunday football on one of his three televisions, stacked crudely but effectively on an early version of the now popular wall unit assembled with bricks and plywood. He is exhausted from working six day weeks.




I am sixteen at Southeast High School, laughing when the boys yell, “Hey, will a Little Dab really do ya?”, referring to the radio commercial we ran at the time.




Thirty years later, I am watching my daughters visit their beloved “Grandabbsy” at the store on South Holden Road. The girls are fascinated by the 1958 R.C. Allen typewriter their grandfather still uses to pound outraged letters to newspaper editors, government officials, and anyone else who gets his goat.




Uncle Steve cracks them up making announcements about them on the P.A. system. Uncle David rests his feet, shattered by a fall from the roof of his log cabin a few years ago, making long stints on the concrete floor agonizing painful.




The girls never leave empty-handed. There’s always a hand fan, a ruler, or a pen with the Dabbs Furniture logo. More often, their doting grandfather slips them a little cash. They like that best.
They’ll have lots of souvenirs and memories, most notably tapes of the television commercials they often starred in.




There are no heirs now. Our sons Max and Ross lead golden lives at Duke University. Our daughters Caroline, Virginia, and Emily are too young for the passing of the torch. Steve and David have no children. I have no time.




Though I’ve often teased my husband, Robbie, that he only married me because I’m heiress to the Dabbs Furniture Empire, there remains a yearning , put aside so many years ago by the young girl who first announced her intentions to run the family business, growing stronger now in the woman who dreams of resurrecting a new furniture company sprung from the roots of grandfather Henry Dabbs fifty-four years ago, and perhaps one day propagated by his great, great grandchildren.




Like a tongue that can’t resist probing the gap where a lost tooth once was, I return to the idea again and again. I can’t help it. It’s in my blood