Ever since the 1970s’ success of Alex Haley’s Roots, it has been a part of pop culture to ask (or speculate) on one’s ancestry;  hence here is Gary Green’s contribution to that taste of personal pop culture. Above are 8mm home movies shot by his father from 1956 through 1964. Gary notes, “I can think of few things less interesting than home movies”.

As for those roots, I am always amused at the speculation, friends, and even interviewers trying to guess cultural history. Sometimes it is fun to let them believe what they want to, and just play off of that. Sometimes it is equally fun to burst their genealogical bubble and simply tell them that I am "a hillbilly"; though that particular line didn't go over well working for Donald Trump or other real estate moguls in New York City. People see the name "Green" and immediately assume that it was shortened from Greens-tein or Green-berg or other Jewish heritage. When I add the information that my father’s family was a long line of watchmakers and jewelers, that seems to confirm those stereotyped assumptions. I also frequently hear from speculative observers that I must be Irish because I have blue eyes and was born with red hair (that later turned blonde and then brownish before salting itself gray). I have also been told by other wags that they are 99% certain that I am Northern Italian for some host of supposedly deductive reasons the generally seem to be more related to professions than linage. It seems only to disappoint these genealogy pundits when I tell them simply “I am 100% Appalachian hillbilly and nothing else.” In their skeptical disappointment and prognosticating about the lost Tribes of Israel, they obviously never listened to me sing or play guitar on any of my albums or concerts. Otherwise there would be little doubt of that hillbilly ridge-runner heritage; and I NEVER recite the back-to-the-doomsday-book heritage above. I really was raised where it was wrong to cuss, but “Damned-Yankee” was neither a curse nor two words; where one stands up to both the Star Spangled Banner AND to Dixie; and believe it or not, where some storekeepers place all their five-dollar bills face-down in the cash drawer because they don’t want the face of Abe Lincoln looking up at them. In 1851 a watchmaker from Person County North Carolina, Willice Green, married Priscilla Bridges; then, on September 28, 1854 (100 years before my birth) they had a child who they named James Willice Green but called simply JW. Nine years later, Willice was at Gettysburg with a North Carolina Confederate infantry brigade fighting for the lost cause; after the war, he returned safely and continued watch making and farming. In charming North Carolina dialect, on JW’s death certificate, 80 years later, his mother’s name was spelled “Pricilar”; gotta love the hillbilly dialect.  When he grew up, JW married Laura Humphries and on July 7 1885, they produced Cleon Augustus “Gus” Green in Ellenboro North Carolina -my grandfather. JW followed in Willice’s footsteps as a watchmaker as did Gus and in 1918 the father and son opened Green’s Jewelers in Roxboro North Carolina. A true family business, Gus’ cousins and nephews trained under him to become master watchmakers and jewelers…and the business still exists today in its fifth generation of Green ownership —though I have never met any of them and I doubt if they have ever heard of me other than via social media. Gus Green married Mary Collette, daughter of Callie Hudgins and her husband John Collette, a cotton mill worker from Union-occupied Civil War Militia District 792 (between Cherokee and Cumming Georgia and about 45 minutes north of Atlanta). They had three children, Festus (who was born when Mary was 22) and my father, Joseph who was born 12 years later. A third child died at birth. Mary Green died on July 3rd 1930 before Joe was four years old. Unable to raise a three-year old boy alone, Gus soon married Virginia Biggerstaff. Rare as it was in the 1930s for a woman to be a working professional; Doctor Virginia Biggerstaff Green was a chiropractor. My mother told a delightful story of the first time she visited my father’s house, she opened a closet door to hang up her coat and found  —literally— a skeleton in the closet. By the time Joe had turned 16, Gus was in Baltimore being treated for a massive (and family-lore unexplained) blood clot (arterial thrombosis) in his left arm. North Carolina doctors were mystified as to how a routine cut had advanced from a mild gangrene to a massive clot. In those pre-penicillin days, the only hope was miracle medicine being performed at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore. Unfortunately, the prognosis was not good and on May 15 1941 sixteen-year-old Joe Green was again orphaned…left only to his stepmother. Knowing his death was inevitable, Gus turned the family business over to the nephews and cousins that he had trained. And too young to be part of the family business, young Joe Green hit the road from rural North Carolina to join a traveling carnival. Touring with a band of carnies he learned where to put the weighted bottles in the baseball throw; when to hit the vibrator for the ring toss; how to position the plates for the coin flip; how to switch the sharp darts for the dull ones for the balloon pop game; how to comb the hair up on the cat racks so the sucker can’t tell where to throw the ball; …and dozens of other side-show swindles…er…I mean games. He learned that if he got into trouble to yell “hey rube” and an army of carnival goons would come to the rescue. He learned that to send him mail the writer just needed to address it to his name in care of Amusement Business Magazine Nashville Tennesse and it could be forwarded to him whenever he requested it on the road. He learned all the tricks, frauds, and scams of the bearded lady; the snake girl; the gorilla man; the smallest person in the world; the largest horse in the world; and all of the midway sideshows that thrilled small town chumps and their families. He learned to watch the yokels step right up for one thin-dime, one-tenth of a dollar to see this wonder of the world.” Truly, in my own childhood, going to state fairs or traveling carnivals was an amazing experience. My father would either explain why I should not play a certain game, or he would simply play it and win for us. While other kids were begging their dads to let them toss the baseball at the cat pins or shoot the over-inflated basket balls into the too- small hoops, my father was reaching under the counter and asking the carnie not to hit the vibrator to move the pins when I tossed the ring. And to make it all even more cool, he spoke to them in some kind of special carnie secret-code language that indicated he was a member of their special club. It was just too cool. But most importantly in my father’s youthful “runaway and join a carnival” adventure, he had learned to deal blackjack to the locals who would flock to the “back room” at various side show tents. He learned all the gambling games and how to cheat the locals out of their money (and yell “hey rube” if he got caught). He learned to double talk, to short change, and every card mechanic’s trick available on the 1942 carnival circuit through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama and the other states on the circuit. At 16 he was a genuine card hustler on the payroll of a traveling carnival. Three years later (and four months before his 19th birthday) as part of the generation that saved the world, my father was onboard a ship slated to be the first invasion force to hit the beaches in Japan.  With high school diploma in hand as soon as he had turned 18, in December of 1944, he had attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps. A previously undiagnosed heart murmur kept him from flying; indeed it was the same heart murmur that would lead to open heart surgery 35 years later and that I may have inherited myself. But America was at war and on March 30, 1945 (a year after D-day, two months before VE Day, and almost six months before VJ Day) the US Army’s 165th Infantry Brigade accepted his enlistment “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law”. At 5- feet-and-six-inches and 160 pounds, his enlistment document showed his occupation as “Civil Occupation: Car Mechanic, Railway or Locomotive Mechanic or Signal Mechanic, Railway or Salvage Inspector (Salvage engineer).”  It also listed his educational level as “four years of high school” … which was a slight lie since North Carolina  only offered 11 grades instead of 12 back then. He had worked most recently for the Seaboard Railroad and had developed an interest in the work of an electrician.  In fact, his first choice had been the Army Corps of Engineers; but every able-bodied man had been assigned to the infantry to hit the beaches of Japan. If the invasion was successful, and if he lived through it, there was a tacit promise from the Army that he would be transferred to the engineers.  The Japanese invasion was planned to be a Normandy-style top-secret “hit the beaches” campaign. The blood bath was expected to surpass the 5,100 allied troops that had died on D-day on the beach in peninsular France. Literally less than a week from the assault, on August 10th 1945 the ship’s Captain announced to all hands that (as my father understood it at that the time) “some feller named Adam (atom) had made this real big bomb that was so big that when Truman dropped it Hirohito and Tojo just gave up.”  Spared likely death during an invasion, 18 days later Joe Green became part of the first allied occupational force of Japan. And, just a few months later he was transferred to the Corps of Engineers, given the rank of Sergeant, and on the way to becoming a master electrician. After the war, instead of returning to the road life of a carnie, Joe Green went to work in his army-trained profession as an electrician. He signed back on with the Seaboard Airline Railroad as a signal maintainer riding the rails from the station yard in Hamlet North Carolina down to Winter Haven Florida. Seaboard operated, among many other trains, the main passenger line from New York to Florida: the sleek and high speed Orange Blossom Special. Immortalized in the great fiddle tune written by Ervin T. Rouse (and later made famous by Johnny Cash) that train was the primary transportation for Northeastern snowbirds and tourists visiting Florida.  Joe Green was in Seaboard’s Jacksonville Florida  dispatcher station one night in 1949. The stationmaster had been watching the wall board that tracked train locations. Under normal conditions, as a train traveled along the rails it would trip a signal every few miles; that signal would turn on a light on a map board at the stationhouse. By measuring the time between two lights along the way, a stationmaster can not only determine the location of a train, but its speed and whether or not it is on time. On this particular night, one of the lights came on and when the second light was schedule to come on 15 minutes later nothing happened. A half hour later, still no light. My father was a signal maintainer; chances were that he needed to go out and see what might be wrong with the signal… but on this night the dispatcher held him back. “I don’t have a good feeling about this; there is something wrong with my Orange Blossom Special,”  he told my father. They waited for the time that two more signals should have been tripped, and still no light. As my father began to analyze the possible causes of such a malfunction (simply shorting out the signal would have made the light come on and stay on), the phone rang. An old farmer, obviously hollering into an old-style phone was so loud that Joe Green could hear him even through the phone was in the stationmaster’s hand. “Is this the Seaboard Railroad? Mister your Orange Blossom Special is wrecked all over this swamp and there are bodies all over my orange grove,” my father heard. As popular as the Rouse/Cash song became, I always meant to write a song about that great train wreck; no one ever has. By the time you are reading this, I might have done so. Dorothy Helen Mosley first saw Joe Green, from nearby Ellenboro, when she was about eight years old and he was ten; he was carrying a stack of comic books. From the tiny mountain cotton mill town of Caroleen North Carolina, my mother was a church pianist and a music teacher in the same school she had attended a decade earlier. She was one of several rotating hosts of a local radio show featuring her piano playing and performances by various school-age kids. She had (rare for a woman) a college education, and a following of private music students in addition to the public school students. An only child (though her mother had 11 brothers and sisters), her parents had both worked in the textile mill. They bought supplies at the company store. They banked at the company-owned bank. They lived in a company-owned millhouse across the street from the cotton mill and the dead-end railroad line that brought the cotton to the mill. They had telephone service on the mill’s phone exchange. Except for my grandfather’s barber shop, they lived totally at the pleasure of the owners of Caroleen Mills. My grandmother quit her job to raise their daughter, and my grandfather went to work every morning at 6am and got off work at 2pm. He would change from his overalls to slacks and short-sleeve white shirt, have lunch with the family, and then open his barber shop until 9pm every night. Such was life in the mill town into which Dot Mosley was born and raised. Much earlier, in the late 19th century, during the heyday of the North Carolina  textile industry, it was common for mill owners to name their mills for female members of their family; and the towns supporting the mills adopted the mill name. Consequently, North and South Carolina are sprinkled with little towns with names like Henrietta, Holly, Latta, Caroleen, and so on; towns that at the time were no more than company stores and millhouses. The town of Caroleen was founded in 1895, and named for the mother of one of the owners of nearby Henrietta Mills (named for the mother of another of the owners). Dorothy Helen Mosley (Dot, as she was called) was born in Caroleen in October of 1929 (just weeks before the stock market crash) to Myrtle Murray Mosley and her husband Harry Thomas Mosley a loom mechanic and the town’s only barber (and  —straight out of an old West movie—  keeper of a public bath tub). Dot's maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Short Murray, was known throughout the southern Appalachian mountains as a “good witch” with the biblically-mystical powers of making warts disappear, taking the pain away from burns, curing incurable disease…and anointed by God to name unborn children. (Amongst my favorites of her naming conventions were the twins, “Palmer” and “Chalmer”  — pronounced with a short “ă” as in pal and chow.)  I remember seeing her a few times before her death in 1957; she always dressed like a Pilgrim: long black cotton dresses with handmade white lace collars around her neck. She had promised to pass the “secrets” of her holy magic along to my mother but “lost her mind” (apparently from Alzheimer’s; she died of a cerebral hematoma) before her death at 95 years old. Elizabeth Short, the witch, was married to George Washington Murray Jr., a mill worker who official records report died at 56 in 1924 but whom my mother (born in 1929) clearly remembers. They had twelve children named for flowers, for Romeo and Juliet, and a half-dozen other monikers of witchingly divine providence. My grandmother, Myrtle Rose, born in 1898, was neither the youngest nor the oldest of the litter. My grandfather, Harry Thomas Mosley was born in 1901 in rural South Carolina to Elzie Van Mosley (born in 1869) and his wife Willie Belle Butler. Census records report that Elzie was a farmer and “mill hand” but family lore is that he made his money from royalties on patents for farm machinery and improvements in existing farm machinery. A search of the US Patent office records finds no mention of him; but that would not be unusual. In those days (and many long years afterwards), inventors (like songwriters) sold their inventions for either a flat fee or a “royalty schedule” and gave up all claim of being the creator.  The Mosley family all concur that Elzie was an inventor for a living. Elzie’s parents, Hecter (sic) and Elizabeth Gibson Mosley also had deep roots in the southern Appalachian mountains. Like the Green's and the Murray’s they were Confederate, Baptist, and pure “hillbilly”.  So the marrige was as Southern as one can get. Harry and Myrtle Mosley were deeply religious and leaders in their local Baptist church. During the great textile strikes of the 1930s, Harry T. Mosley crossed the picket lines, scabbed on his co-workers, and then turned around and used his wages to run free soup lines out of his home to feed strikers. The braided paradoxes of “mountain folk” is more twisted than fiction could tell. Their only child, Dot was raised in the church, became a church organist, and attended an even more-rural and isolated mountain college run by the North Carolina Baptist Association. Unlike neighboring Bob Jones University where prospective graduates were required to stand on street corners and preach to passersby, Dot’s college was so rural there were no street corners. One of a few, but growing, number of college-educated women, Dot was on the road to a life as a church organist. (And her parents always had high hopes for me to become a fiery Baptist preacher.) As my father later noted, “the only thing wrong with the Christians is that they cut back on the lions about 2,000 years too soon.”  The southern parados continued. The Civil War was 70 years in the past by the 1930s, but it was still the pre-LBJ deep South with not-so-subtle nor faint racism. While my grandparents certainly could not have had slaves in the twentieth century, they did have African American “help” (servants) who (not so) coincidentally shared the same family name; apparently they were decedents of the Mosley family slaves. Inez Mosley, the family “mammy” and “help” was still working for my grandparents well into the 1950s that I can remember. She used to tie knots in the four corners of a handkerchief and wear the cloth as a sort of slave-style cap; many times since then I have created such caps for myself when working in the hot sun. That is the only pearl of wisdom I can remember from Inez; she was old and I was a toddler. My mother, in a “Driving Miss Daisy” moment, once told me “we always invited Inez to sit down at our table and eat lunch with us just like anybody else.” It was a different historical epoch than the 21st century and THAT gesture was an amazing liberal if not out-and-out radical behavior for the 1930s’ deep South. Far beyond accepted “Christian charity” it was pure extremism and raised the eyebrows of all the “good white people” in the community. Well into her eighties, herself, my mother recalled "I didn't care what people thought." The more rural pockets of the old South, like Caroleen, were still living in a time that was, at best, a generation or two behind the rest of America…which was itself insanely backwards by modern standards.   (Though the original Ku Klux Klan had died out in the 1870s, there was a huge resurgence of organized hatred in the 1920s as Klansmen openly served in state legislatures, US Congress, and governors of several states). The culture of the ruling class of any epoch of history, always becomes the prominent popular culture…even (as history has shown many times) when that culture serves to oppress the ones who adopt it the strongest. For example, just look at the most rabid pro-war forces in the 1960s, the Ronald Reagan supporters of the 1980s, even the George W. Bush supporters of the early 21st century. And Inez Mosley actually did call her own grandchildren “pickininnies”. The apple indeed sometimes must fall a long way from the tree; who would have ever thought that Harry and Myrtle’s oldest grandson would be marching in Civil Rights rallies throughout the South, playing guitar and leading crowds singing “We Shall Overcome” alongside Ralph Abernathy, Hosa Williams, and arm-in-arm with Coretta Scott King?. What audience of marchers and protesters would expect,in the same concert, to hear Hank Williams songs, Pete Seeger tunes, and Gary Green originals?  Yes, the apple may fall far from the tree; but clearly the paradoxes continue. Music teacher and semi-celebrity (at least locally) Dot Mosley apparently had a host of suitors, but Joe Green continued to court her over the years and in 1950 they eloped to Atlanta. Four years later, I became the firstborn of three boys. Clearly my mother’s music and the rich mountain gospel roots (though she is quick to point out it is not “holy rolly”) taught me to rock & roll and be a radical. After all, she was the one who put me in front of that black and white television to see Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen Show. But if Dot Green taught me to rock and roll, it was clearly Joe Green that taught me about gambling…and a lot more. Railroad families got to ride for free; and on the trains I learned the meaning of all the signals and even how to stand by the tracks and give hand-signals to the caboose to tell the workers they had a  smoking hot box or other problem. (Old railroad car axels were connected in a box that was padded with wet cotton. When the cotton would dry it would sometimes catch fire, beginning with smoldering. Railroad yard employees would signal the caboose that they had a smoking hot box, so they could put more water in the al box.) But by the time my two brothers were born (1958 and 1961), my father had left the railroad, taken his electrical skills to other venues and was starting to apply some of his old carnie skills as part salesman and part installer of commercial electrical products. After General Eisenhower was out of office and America embarked on a New Frontier, Joe Green also embarked on a new life, finally melding his carnie-days skills and his people skills to step into the world of sales and the sales management. By bother Ron was born on Valentine's Day in 1958.  On the way to the hospital to bring him and my mother home, my father hit the brakes to avoid a collision. I tumbled from where I was playing on the back seat to the floorboard of the car and snapped my collarbone. For decades, my mother enjoyed telling the story of getting a call from my father saying “I am going to be late picking you up, I have to take Gary to the emergency room.” He explained nothing beyond that, and hung up the phone. In the 21st century Ron teaches at a university, holding a PhD and a couple of Masters. His two children, Mary and Daniel seem to be the only next generation of the Greens. Our brother Keith was born in February of 1961. Keith is the big (well over six feet), stable, normal one of the three Green boys of our generation. He owns a residential construction company, is a private jet pilot, and lives in a large home that he built. As soon as each of the three brothers could hold  "hold"  a deck of cards, he taught us how to "magician's force" a card to the top of a deck, how to deal seconds, how to spot a cheat…and the most important childhood lesson: never burn a face card. Thanks to his training, by age 12 I had been thrown out of my first casino; well, first thrown out and then offered a job a shill by a bingo hall (a wanna-be casino) in tourist-Mecca Myrtle Beach, South Carolina during a family vacation. It seemed that I had been finding, collecting, and playing the hot cards all night, every night, for a week. Traveling with my father on his sales routes I spent hours exploring small towns in Eastern Kentucky, Western Virginia, East Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina; towns like Martin, Melvin, Pikeville, Harlan, Hazard, Elkhorn City, Wise, Haysi, Bristol, Kingsport, Church Hill, Johnson City, Jonesboro, Gate City, Big Stone Gap, North, Buford, St. Paul, Kingston, Harriman, Abington, Cherokee, Chimney Rock, Bat Cave…and the list goes on and on. I wandered the main streets and alleyways in every one of them and more.  I can’t EVEN remember all the places we lived; and I can barely remember all the places I went to school: East Point Georgia, Kingsport Tennessee, Dekalb County Georgia, Nashville Tennessee, and Gastonia North Carolina; only five towns but eight different schools. So I would break open a new pack of bicycle playing cards for any group of kids anywhere. Shuffle and shuffle again; then let any one of them cut and reshuffle. With the deck back in my hands, I would offer, “Pick a card from the deck; any card; pick a card. Look at your card; show it to your friends, but don’t let me see it. Ok remember your card. Now slide back into the deck.” Using any number of cheesy magician’s tricks I would mark the location of the card or adjacent cards. Shuffle and shuffle again. Position the card to the bottom of the deck and glance at it to identify it. At this point the “trick” was over; it was just a matter of taking their money now. “Here, you shuffle. Cut the deck. Shuffle  "Shuffle"   again. Now let’s turn the deck face-up and divide it into two piles.” I would count the cards, putting every second card into a pile at the right and the others into a pile on the left. All the while, I would say things like, “I hope I can remember how to do this trick; there are too many card to make this work, I am gonna use just half of the deck.” The sucker would, of course, see their card and know if it had ended up in the left of the right pile.  "Which pile do you like best: the right one or the left one?” If their card was in the right pile and they picked the right pile then I would say, “ok great; let’s use the one you like then and throw the other one away.” However if they chose the other pile, I would say. “ok great; let’s save this pile for later and use the bad one first.” Either way, we would end up playing with the half of the deck with their card in it. I would then repeat the process, dividing the remaining deck into two piles and forcing play with the portion of the deck that had their card in it. If they started to catch on to my word tricks, then I would “throw away” the portion of the deck with their card in it and continue to play with the remaining cards. Finally, I would narrow the choices down to six or seven cards. I would ceremoniously pick up those cards and shuffle them carefully. I would then discard, face up, three of the cards —making certain that one of the discarded cards was their chosen card. With the remaining three or four cards I would again double-talk something about how difficult this trick is and I hope I get it right. One at a time I would turn the remaining cards face up, until there would be only one face-down card remaining. All the while, the sucker’s chosen card was face up in a discarded pile. With great pomp, I would start to turn over the final card and the stop, and announce, “I think I remember for sure how this trick works. I will bet you 25¢ that the next card I turn over will be your card.” Totally aware that their card was NOT the face-down card, most kids would take the bet, with the expectation of taking advantage of my inept work and cheating me out of a quarter. Once we “shook” (hands) on the bet, I would casually move my hand over to the discard pile and flip their card upside down, leaving the face-down card untouched. In fact, the “next card I turned over” was their card. Twenty-five cents for me. Okay, it was not a lot of money; but comic books were 12¢ and candy bars were a nickel. So for an eight-year-old, it meant the latest issue of  Batman or Detective and a Three Musketeers bar…with change left over. Living large; life was good. Good grief… I have talked enough for right now; maybe i should be planning my next book… Gary Green, Spring 2011 (eight months before his parents’ deaths)