 Stelle Elam
Mrs. Stelle Elam (nee Stipp) was born in Louisville, Illinois in 1902. Her
family moved about a good deal, though always staying in Southern Illinois. Her
father, on the other hand, had done a bit of traveling in his own day, even
journeying as far as Colorado before returning home in a covered wagon.
At the age of ten Stelle first took up the fiddle. Her brother brought his
fiddle home one day and took the trouble to show her how to play "Soldier's
Joy." Little Stelle tried and tried until she got more and more notes to
sound right. She very often heard her uncle, Jack Stipp, play the fiddle, too,
and she would go home to try to reproduce what she had heard. In fact, since she
was around her uncle Jack a lot (or made it a point to be), she learned most of
her fiddle tunes from him, even more than she learned from her brother.
Her brother (how much we owe to the generosity of that brother!), seeing that
Stelle was indeed serious about taking up music, bought her a fiddle of her own,
and the young apprentice set about acquiring a repertoire of tunes. To put it in
her own words: "I just staggered around over several of them until finally
I got them learned."
Several years later Stelle took a liking to the five-string banjo -- so much
of a liking that she traded her fiddle to get one. She learned to chord on it
and shortly afterwards was proficient enough to play "Buffalo Nickel."
Soon after, she was married, and when her husband presented her with a new
fiddle, her short flirtation with the banjo ended. By the time she had given
birth to the fourth of her seven children she was already in demand for dances
and parties. Southern Illinois square dances are still remembered with affection
by many residents of Champaign and other nearby towns. Usually held in a barn or
grange hall, the dances went on till dawn or until people began dropping from
exhaustion and/or surplus beer. Wives, children, and babes-in-arms were brought
from miles around in buckboards and Model-T's, bearing box lunches and various
liquid refreshments. As is to be expected, the strain on the musicians who had
to satisfy all this pent-up enthusiasm was terrific. Lyle Mayfield avers that he
heard Mrs. Elam "fiddle for five hours straight, standing up all the time,
and never play the same tune twice."
It is impossible to discuss Stelle Elam's art without mentioning her uncle
Jack, another fiddler still remembered by the old-timers of Southern Illinois.
Jack looms as an interesting figure in our study of country fiddlers, for he
learned some of his songs not by ear but by note from sheet music which he would
buy whenever he needed a new tune. Though Stelle herself never learned to read
music, she practiced diligently under her uncle's guidance; for her father had
told her that "Uncle Jack plays 'em by note, so if you learn 'em from him
you'll learn 'em right." One thing she never could seem to learn, however,
was Uncle Jack's method of bowing: he held the bow at the end, like a classical
violinist, but Stelle chokes up, like a batter about to lay down a bunt.
Mrs. Elam's husband died five years ago in an auto accident, but Stelle's
life since then has hardly been that of a lonely widow. She has a large crew of
grandchildren to keep her busy, and she still uses her shiny red Czech-built
fiddle to chase the blues out of her white frame house on cold winter nights.
She also plays a catchy honky-tonk piano. Though she no longer plays for those
all-night parties, she still maintains herself in practice, as we discovered to
our pleasure when we asked her to perform for our Club. Her debut on our state,
as well as her remarkable performance for this record, prove that she still has
the same musical skill that first set Illinois' feet tapping 40 years ago.
 Jim and Cecil Goodwin
The Goodwin brothers, Jim and Cecil, were born in 1906 and 1911,
respectively, in Crawford County, Illinois. They are the sons of Willard
"Pop" Goodwin, who was born in Crawford County in 1880. Their music
reflects the stormy and rambling life they led before they settled in the city
of Urbana, and which they continued for some time before assuming the more
permanent way of life they now lead, with Pop working as a maker of home-made
kitchen knives and son Jim assisting him. Cecil is employed as a foundryman.
If one were to ask them what their favorite sport is they would probably say
"talkin' " or "tellin' tales"; for though Cecil is an expert
hunter and fisherman and Pop and Jim are real craftsmen in their back yard knife
shop, they are most accomplished at regaling their visitors with the
tall-but-true tales of the years when they rambled around the country in search
of various kinds of work and fun. Though they all are ready wits, the honors in
the yarn-spinning department will have to go to Pop, for the simple reason that
he's been at it longer. At 83 he is as sharp as the knives he makes.
Pop was widowed while his boys were still growing up, so he and the boys
began moving around, all three of them leading a bachelor life. They had first
moved up to Urbana in 1920, where Pop went to work paving Green Street. He later
got work in the Big Four Railway (now the Peoria & Eastern) shops, which at
that time employed 400 men.
The boys first remember "makin' music" at "Jenkins '
place," which was probably in Vandalia, where they were living when still
quite young. Jim says: 'We had a ukelele for a guitar and a cigar box for a
fiddle. I got the hair for the bow right out of the old horse's tail.."
Cecil agrees that some sort of band started when he was 16 (1927). Mrs. Goodwin
died the following year when Cecil was 17 and Jim 22. Pop was only 48 at the
time, so it was into the Model-T they went, off to seek their fortunes in hard
work, hard play -- and music. They wandered about in Central and Southern
Illinois, worked their way into Michigan when the fruit needed picking, and
eventually wound up in Arkansas as lumbermen. They quickly tired of that trade,
however, and returned to their native state.
Back in Illinois again the boys began playing for dances. According to Cecil:
"We didn't have much of a band; me and Jim played most of the dances
ourselves. Our first dance was right under a shade tree; we played platform
dances; we played up at Thomasboro and for the employees at the cannery at
Gibson City." The boys were doing all of this at the same time that Smiley
Burnett was beguiling Midwestern ears over station WDZ at Tuscola, then the
country music center of Illinois.
In 1931 the Goodwins were asked to perform on WDZ. Needing a name in a hurry,
they quickly settled on "The Sunshine Merrymakers" as the official
title of their group. They had an offer from WLS in Chicago soon afterwards, but
they turned down a chance for an audition to the National Barn Dance, figuring
that their music wasn't good enough. They began rambling again, this time to
Kentucky, to which they returned a dozen times or more during the years of the
great depression. "We'd go down to Kentucky," says Cecil, "just
to travel and see friends. We'd stop to play somewhere, and they'd come from
over the hills to see us." This was usually in the region of Gradyville and
Columbia, Kentucky, an area for which the Goodwins developed a great affection.
They consider the region just the opposite of Arkansas -- a state they vow never
to visit again.
In such a manner the Goodwin family weathered the depression, . but in 1936
the wild and woolly ways of the Goodwins came to an end. Cecil had married
Juanita Hutson (whose father, Henry, had taught Jim how to play the fiddle), and
the habits of the Goodwin boys were cutting into Cecil's efforts to solidify
the life of. his own new family. He laid down the guitar, swore off the
late-night fiddle and dancing parties, and used his music only for the enjoyment
of his family or at the local Church of God or Salvation Army services. As for
Jim: "When Cecil quit it threw me off, balance so bad I had to quit
too."
And so it remained for 26 years, until Campus Folksong Club members
approached the Goodwins and asked them to record some of the old ballads and
dances. Now the little house in Urbana is once again ringing with G7ths as the
boys recall the old-days in the songs of their youth. Pop has benefited too; the
members of the record production staff have been very -good about buying his
knives.
 The Mayfields
When Lyle and Doris Mayfield first appeared at our folksing, Lyle, amazed at
the reception he and his wife had received from the students, stepped to the
mike and said: "Down home they call us a bunch of hillbillies; up here
we're known as folksingers."
The change from country musician to campus figure was not a difficult one for
Lyle, for his life, like that of his wife, has been a story of transitions --
some of them rather difficult. Lyle was born on March 4, 1929 in Greenville,
Bond County, Illinois, the son of Clyde and Grace Mayfield. Doris was born
August 18, 1928 to Carl and Esther Mindrup of Staunton, Illinois, in Macoupin
County. Doris represents a variant strain in Southern Illinois tradition, for
she comes from a region of German-Swiss settlers, rather than the Anglo-Celtic
mainstream that populates the area. Lyle has even taped a collection of
Schottishes, polkas, and Viennese waltzes, played by one of the old residents of
the region on the accordion. Doris learned to strike her first guitar chords
while she was still living at home; her father used to play the guitar quite a
bit. Her real musical development began, however, only after she married Lyle in
1950.
Since 1948 Lyle has been a printer, a trade which he entered shortly after
graduating from high school. His education had been interrupted by a two-year
Navy hitch, most of which he spent on Midway Island as a Seabee.
Following the printing trade, Lyle and his growing family (now numbering two
boys and a girl) wandered across Southern Illinois, settling in such places as
Hillsboro, Millstadt, Gillespie, Mechanicsburg, Decatur (where Lyle worked for
Rand-McNally), and Nokomis, where he owned, operated, edited and wrote a
newspaper. Any attempts to compare him with the young Ben Franklin will be
appreciated. Lyle moved to Champaign in the autumn of 1962 to become the day
foreman in the Daily Illini print shop, where he quickly got to know the college
students. Due to his wide travels, experience, and self-acquired knowledge he
was perfectly at home in the university atmosphere. He was even more at home
when he began to mix with the members of the Campus Folksong Club.
The story of Lyle's development as a country musician is better told by the
man himself, so we shall quote here from his own condensed biography, which he
dashed off one lunch hour in the composing room:
"My musical 'career,' if you can call it that, began with a 25-cent
harmonica. My father played the 'mouth organ,' as my mother called it, and she
had developed quite an affection for the instrument. So at the tender age of
six, Mom walked me into the Greenville Music Store, purchased a 25-cent Hohner
'Old Stand-by' (it now sells for $2.25), handed it to me and said, 'Play.' I
played."
After nearly driving his mother mad with his sounds, Lyle decided to play
the harmonica to his do, who promptly responded by howling as if in his last
agony. The budding musician, undismayed, simply decided that the dog was trying
to sing along.
"The thought of playing anything other than the harmonica never
seriously entered my mind until I was about 12 years old. At that time I became
entranced with a $5.95 guitar in our Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Family finances
would not permit the purchase of that particular instrument, and anyway, the
catalogue was soon used up. With the disappearance of the pages of the catalogue
my interest in stringed instruments waned for the time being."
"It was probably just as well I didn't get too interested in the guitar
at that tine, because for the next three years I was busy listening to and
learning the songs of my environment. Many of them I already knew from my
mother, but at this time in my life (12 or 15) I began to be more cognizant of
what songs were being sung by the people around me. One of my favorite pastimes
was to take long walks in the country, accompanied only by my old
"singing" dog. While there in the privacy of the creek bottoms and cow
pastures I would sing at the top of my voice, doing, my best to imitate the
"hillbillies" of the day who were popular on the radio and old
graphophone records. If anyone had heard me sing I would have been mortified
just plum to death. The dog just wagged his tail in gratitude that I was singing
instead of playing the harmonica."
"In the fall of the year that I turned fifteen I was walking down the
street of the business district in my home town when I met a friend and
schoolmate, Johnny Herrington. Johnny was one of my idols -- he played
piano-accordion. Tucked under his arm was a guitar. It was old and cracked, but
it was a guitar, and my eyes lit up like Christmas-tree bulbs and my ears went
out like morning glories to the sun. 'Where are you going with that git-tar;
Johnny?' I said. 'I'm going to sell it to you,' he replied.?'
"How much are you going to sell it to me for?"
"Six dollars and a half."
"Make it six dollars and you might make the sale."
"O.K."
"With the purchase of the guitar I also talked Johnny into agreeing that
he would teach me enough chords to start me off playing the critter. He went
directly to my home with me, where Mom met us with a look of dismay. I don't
recall correctly, but the dog probably left immediately for the woodshed. Within
the hour I had learned G, C and D chords."
"Progress on the guitar was faster than on the harmonica, and in a
matter of weeks I was playing the accompaniment to and singing my first song:
'Cowboy Jack'."
Johnny Herrington stayed with Lyle almost the whole time, fulfilling, if
anyone can, the roll of teacher in Lyle's musical development. At the same time
Herrington was working four nights a week with a local dance band, "The
Melody Makers," and when Lyle's playing. had improved sufficiently he, too,
was permitted to work with this outfit.
Probably most prominent in Lyle's career is his stretch with the Okaw
Ramblers, a group whose operations span three generations and whose personnel,
taken over the years, now number somewhere in the thirties. Working in such
bands, playing on the small country radio shows, playing for dances, picnics and
church socials -- to say nothing of square dances -- Lyle picked up and worked
out the various methods and styles of playing which he now uses on his various
instruments and in his songs. At home he continued to study his music. Naturally
Doris fell in with his activities, and Lyle obliged by instructing her in the
use of the guitar. Together they developed their duet style, thus giving their
group a wide range of vocal and instrumental styles -- too wide, we regret,
to be included wholly on this record. With Doris a on the guitar, Lyle has been
able to develop freely his skill on the mandolin (played in the old,
pre-bluegrass style), harmonica, bass, and even the fiddle. Last Christmas
Professor Doyle Moore presented Lyle with an autoharp, an instrument which he
quickly mastered.
Late in 1962 Lyle gave birth to the latest of his brainchildren -- a new
instrument called the "guitalin" -- a cross between a guitar and a
mandolin. He played it the next week at the folksing (the number was
"Wildwood Flower") and immediately several local enthusiasts began
lining up to get a guitalin of their own. Nate Bray of the Bluegrass Gentlemen
used ore in the Gentlemen's new 4.5 rpm recording "Barbara Allen," and
Lyle believes that the instrument can become a legitimate part of the country
string band arsenal. He is now experimenting with various configurations and
combinations of string arrangement and sounding chamber sizes, striving for an
ideal sound that will combine the volume and richness of the guitar with
the virtuosity of the mandolin. He has even strung one of the instruments as a
guitar, with the top two strings doubled like a mandolin.
Beyond Lyle's musical talents and his warm out-going traits that have
propelled him fully into Club activity, he is remarkedly articulate about his
own song-bag. His consciousness of the function of folksongs in his repertoire
is clear. He can both write and talk about his songs with-the skills of a
folklorist. We quote below his comments on two numbers:
"The Black Sheep"
Of all the songs I sing this one is probably the most truly traditional. It
is one I learned completely by listening to my mother sing it. She used it as
a lullaby when I was little and some of my earliest and fondest memories are
of Mom rocking me to sleep in her squeaky old cane-bottomed rocking chair, the
squeaks of the rocker keeping perfect tempo to Mom's squeaky rendition of the
"Black Sheep." As I grew older Mom simply sang the song for her own
enjoyment. Actually I never really tried to sing the song myself until I had
joined the Navy and was shipped over seas to a God-forsaken rock in the middle
of the Pacific ocean called Midway Islands. It was here in 1947 that a
homesick sailor wrote home to his mother and asked her to send him the
complete words to the song so that he could sing it to his equally homesick
buddies. The song has been with me since then.
"Drink 'er Down"
As you know, I am a person who is almost violently opposed to consumption
of alcoholic beverages. Therefore, to say that this song is traditional with
me would be almost sacrilegious. I have to admit though that I did learn it in
a very traditional manner. The story of this song being in my repertoire
begins on a rather sad note (as many of my notes are). It starts with the
divorce of my parents in the early thirties. This event necessitated my
spending one winter living with some close relatives while my mother and
sister worked to keep body and soul together. I was only five yeas old at the
time, but just to keep me out of the way my cousin sent me off to school with
her own brood of eleven children. This gave me a luxury I have been ever
grateful for -- my one year spent in a one-room country school. For some reason
during my free hours I was attracted to the cow-barn where my cousin's husband
was constantly singing while he worked. A man trying to raise eleven kids in
the height of the depression had to sing or he might have gone stark, raving
mad. The one song I most vividly remember was this one. He sang it to the
accompaniment of the milk squirting from the cow's udders into the galvanized
milk bucket. Recently I consulted my stepfather about the song. He told me
that he and his brother learned it from their uncle and their father. Figuring
it generation-wise, this song must be at least 70 to 100 years old in our
family tradition.
CFC 201 marks the Mayfields' first attempt at a recording though they have
worked professionally and over the radio. Listeners will detect such old
favorites as "Put My Little Shoes Away" and "Letter Edged in
Black" ("tear-jerkers," as Lyle calls them), as well as the previously unrecorded and uncollected "Drink
'er Down." The Mayfields' love for strongly emotional songs of home and mother reflects the
difficulties their families experienced during the depression and war: Lyle was
the victim of a broken home, and both Lyle and Doris were in the type of area
and type of family that suffered heavily during the years of the Great
Depression. Like the other artists on this disc, they represent faithfully the
musical tastes and the personal experiences of the people of rural Southern
Illinois.
NOTE: The Mayfields are still
around and still making music. For more information, visit The
Mayfields page at the website of RTS Records.
 The Reynoldses
Club members met Lloyd and Cathy Reynolds at a December, 1961, folksing
during; the Club's first tender year of operation. A member of their Church had
attended a Jimmie Driftwood concert on campus and had learned about other Club
activity. He, in turn, persuaded the Reynoldses to attend a folksing where they
sang, initially, with trepidation and concern. How would college students take
to their Gospel music?
It must be explained that this was quite a radical notion at the time. The Club was still in its formative stages. Many of the members were still in the
Kingston Trio stage of development, and exposure to honest and sincere Gospel
singing was a bit too wild for their tastes. Many of our members, fancying
themselves intellectuals., were embarrassed by a display of simple religious
feeling. But this made it all the more necessary that the Reynoldses be
permitted to go onstage. We felt that if we were going to be a real folksong
club, dedicated to acquainting our members with all the musico-cultural
expression of the life of the people, then country Gospel singing deserved a
legitimate place in our presentations.
Actually, our fears were grounded in sand. For the greater part, the
Reynoldses were met with enthusiasm. Their simple but dedicated faith and their
fine musicianship earned them many return invitations to the folksings, and
culminated in our almost immediate decision to include them on this record.
They have likewise been of service in the non-religious area of folk music, for
Lloyd Reynolds' experience on the guitar and country fiddle long precedes his
conversion to the Church of God, and his repertoire of country tunes was of
material benefit to the Philo Glee & Mandolin Society when the trio, during
the fall of 1961, sought authentic music for their Club record (CFC 101: Philo
Glee & Mandolin Society).
Beyond swapping songs and playing together, Paul Adkins, Jim Hockenhull,
Doyle Moore, Lyle, and Cathy made frequent appearances at old folks' homes and
hospitals in Champaign County, bringing cheer to shut-ins. The Reynoldses have
continued to work with Club members. As recently as April, 1963, they appeared
at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, as part of a guest concert presented by UI
Campus Folksong Club members.
Lloyd was born in Effingham County in 191.. Cathy, though she has lived most
of her life in Illinois, was actually born in Arkansas. Her year of birth is
1922, but in 1926 her family moved north to Illinois and settled in Flora. Cathy
's father was a carpenter; Lloyd's was a farmer. They met in 1939 while Lloyd
was working as a section hand on the Illinois Central Railroad.
Lloyd learned music from his mother. She played the French harp, but Lloyd
took up the guitar, starting, as he remembers, at about the age of 20, when he
was attending dances at the local grange hall. There was not much actual
instruction, according to Lloyd. "Each Saturday there'd be a dance at the
local grange hall. I'd take the guitar up to one of the boys and have him tune
it for me. Then I'd try to play with them."
Up until 1950 Lloyd and Cathy played standard country tunes, with a few
Gospel numbers included just to round out their repertoire. They traveled around
the country as Lloyd changed jobs, going as far away as Texas. For many years
Lloyd worked as a roustabout in tile oil fields, but the oil fields in this case
were usually located in Illinois.
Then, in 1950, the change occurred. Mrs. Reynolds was asked by a neighbor to
attend a revival meeting at her church. She went along and was saved that
night. Then she went home and prayed again. "It doesn't matter if you're
saved in church," she says. "It's when your all alone that matters. I
went and prayed that first night and I really felt converted. I felt the Lord
had saved me. When I got home I really felt conviction." The revival
meeting had moved farther down the line from Mt. Vernon, the town where they
were living at the time, so Lloyd followed it to the next town and came back
saved.
In 1957 the Reynoldses moved to Urbana after a session of rambling that took
them to Texas and Kentucky. Lloyd found employment at the Universal Bleacher
plant (just around. the corner and down the street from the Mayfield house), and he and Cathy have stayed in town ever since. They have made many friends,
especially those they met through the Club, and their music sessions with the
Mayfields have been highly productive for both families, as well as for the
Club.
The tunes the Reynoldses favor are the standard Gospel hymns and songs that
have flourished in this country for generations, as well as numbers that have
been written more recently. Some of the songs were learned in their various social traditions before they even met (
"Farther Along" and "Life's Railway to Heaven")., but the
majority are those which they have heard in the churches and revival meetings
which they have attended constantly since their conversion ("Lord, Build Me
A Cabin In Glory Land" and "Tramp on the Street"). They and
their, music furnish us with an instructive example of the religious life of
this area of the country, while displaying at the same time an infectious
musical drive of their own. We feel that this record would hardly be complete
if it did not present openly and candidly this most important facet of folk
culture in the southern Midwest.
biographies by:
Fritz K. Plous, Jr.
"Green Fields Of
Illinois" was a record of traditional folk music performed by artists from
southern Illinois, released by the Campus Folksong Club of the University
of Illinois in 1963. It was accompanied by a booklet with extensive
documentation about the artists and their songs. At this website I have
reproduced much of the content of that booklet as well as some of the images and
cover art.
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GREEN FIELDS OF ILLINOIS --