The Morning News from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 32

"rrrrrnT' EntertainmentArts 1 6 Home Sunday Nw Journal, Wilmington, Jun 5, 1977 SUfl photo by Bill Ballenberg Ola Belle Reed, son Jerry and husband Bud sing out a tune learned in the mountains. Staff photo by Bob Herbert Ted Lundy keeps an old musical tradition in the family by passing it along to son Ted Jr. music north They their he couldn't put the music aside for good. He found a few folks who shared his interest in traditional country music, including one convert, "an Italian fellow who learned how to play the guitar." And now, like Ola Belle Reed, Ted Lundy, with his group, the Southern Mountain Boys, is keeping his heritage alive through music. Both represent the continuation of a culture which has sustained Americans for over 200 years, and which still might if we'd let it get through the chaos of sales pitches, instant history and electrical static that fills the air these days.

lessons she learned at home. Back in the mountains, she says, people were poor but they didn't add to the burden by heaping unnecessary cruelties on one another. "I didn't know that people didn't love one another because of race or nationality," she says, seated in her living room in rural Cecil County, near Rising Sun. She found it out in her new environment. But instead of going along, Ola Belle fought it.

She spread the word she had learned back home. She combined her grass-roots, populist philosophy with her music, much in the manner of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, to whom she has been compared. "No matter how much education you Second of two articles By GARY MULLINAX For 18 years Ola Belle Reed had lived in the mountains of North Carolina. One of 13 children born into a family on the New River, Ola Belle grew up in a world in which all the connections were made, all the touchstones firmly in place. She knew who she was.

She was. secure. Then her life was ripped up by the roots. Her family, hit by the Depression in the late 1930s, followed economic possibilities to the North. When she reached the family's new home in Cecil County, she felt cut adrift.

"It was so quick when we left it nearly killed me," she now says. "I was the most lonesome, homesick idiot you ever saw." But Ola Belle knew how to stay strong in the alien environment. She took along those roots that had been torn loose. And she drew on that heritage to become a preserver and maker of the kind of country music that had surrounded her all her life. Ola Belle Reed never forgot the Ola Belle knows what her kind of music is called, and she can't understand why those who play the modern verion of it try to cover up its identity.

"I call it hillbilly," she says. "I never knew that was derogatory. After all, you can go barefoot with dignity." After Ola Belle began a successful career playing that music, she wasn't really surprised at the course her life had taken. "I've always known what I'd a be a-doin'," she says. "Of course I've been lucky, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would She began her career by playing at picnics and carnivals in Cecil County and southern Chester County, with her brother, Alec Campbell, in a group called (after the old home) The New River Boys and Girls.

Soon, she hooked up with Arthur Woods of Yorklyn, and his North Carolina Ridge Runners. That group had a regular program on radio station WILM in Wilmington. A photo of that group from the '40s shows Ola Belle dressed in cowboy fringe and cowboy boots. Later, she had a regular program broadcast (by special hookup from the family's general store in Oxford, Pa.) over clear-channel WWVA in Wheeling, W.Va., probably the most significant country-music station in the country. Roy Acuff, the dean of country music during the '40s, in 1946 invited Ola Belle to join his band.

She said no. "To tell you the truth, I just never cared to go anywhere like that," she 1 says. "The music we play here (with Alec and the New River Boys and Girls or with her husband and son) is just as important, even if we're playing just a little picnic. "People are the most important part of my music." Ted Lundy sits at the kitchen table in his Wilmington home and recalls his early days in Delaware, when he have, or how high up you are, if you got any brain in your head you know there are many cultures in this world and it behooves you to recognize that," she says. "They can call that radical if they want to." And the Reed family, which includes husband Bud and son David (another son is a minister in Wyoming), lives by those words.

Their farmhouse is always open to those who need a friendly ear. "Kids old and young, black and white, come here and spend some time," says Bud, a Maryland native who specializes in Jimmie Rodgers tunes (from the 1920s and 1930s) as part of Ola Belle Reed and Family, a group which also includes David and is much in demand by major festivals and colleges throughout the country. Open houses were common back in Ash County, N.C., and one thing a person learned from all that visiting was music. "I always played back home but I never played professionally," said Ola Belle. "My daddy was a violin player and a fiddle player you get the difference? and I remember my sister having a dulcimer.

And the whole family had guitars and pump organs. "I learned most of my songs just from hearing other people play them. I learned a lot of the old gospel songs, banjo numbers, sit-down pickin' tunes. I've known 'Pretty Polly' since I was a girl. The version we had back in the mountains was very old.

You just grew up with those things. I didn't get my songs out of no books. Ola Belle and her brothers and sisters also developed their musical talent in churches. "We'd walk as high as five miles to sing at a church it didn't matter what kind it was. They didn't ask us what religion we were." Ola Belle has kept up her ecumenism.

"We'd go play now at any church that would invite us," she says. Does she attend church regularly otherwise? "My church is right here at the house," she asserts firmly. In the mid-1950s, Ted Lundy was a young man looking for work. There wasn't much of that around Galax, his family's home in southwestern Virginia. So he hit the road.

He went first to Tennessee, then to West Virginia. But in his year and a half there, he didn't find the job prospects much better than they had been at home. Then he came to Wilmington, where an older brother had already moved. He got a job driving a truck. The music he had learned, literally at his mother's knee, was put aside even as his memories stayed with him.

"I was so homesick when I was first here I went back home every weekend," says Lundy in his soft southern jrawl. "And country music records made me even more homesick." Soon, however, Lundy realized that Staff photo by Bill Ballenberg Ola Belle Reed gestures to the people she has spent her life standing up for. Charleston Spoleto USA: a good beginning in Stage Lights needed to emphasize that this is a festival city. Ashley Cooper, writing in the Charleston News and Courier, suggested in a tongue-in-cheek manner that the city should more closely emulate practices in Spoleto, Italy. The New York Times recently noted that the Italian town draws "a surreal passeggiata of Roman princesses, blue-jeaned students, chic Milanese dressed in tomorrow's clothes, socialites from Newport and Palm Beach, international jetsetters, film stars, press agents, Indian potentates, Greek shipping magnates, hairdressers, homosexuals, heterosexuals, the serious, the frivolous, the rich and less rich, even the religious." It described Spoleto as a "relaxed and permissive town where music spills out of the windows 24 hours a day." This hardly describes Charleston in 1977.

Cooper writes: "I just hate to think that some little Italian town knows more about whooping it up than our own dear Charleston. I believe it's time all of us gave some real thought to raising hell. Let's drink wine out of goatskin pouches, turn the bulls loose in King Street and see how many of our matrons will be willing (nay, eager) to turn in their wedding rings for the duration." Cooper may have a point, though exaggerated. But for a starter, Spoleto Festival USA 1977 is a good beginning to what could be an idea whose time may have arrived. small country village in England in the 1930s, the four-member cast includes a retired Canadian businessman, his younger wife (about 40), a spinster housekeeper and a 17-year-old small-town youth.

The husband has brought his homesick wife back to her native England and hired a native housekeeper to help with the chores. One day the wife employs Oliver, a shy, uneducated town youth, to be a handyman and chauffeur and to teach her to drive. She seduces the youth and has' an ongoing affair to the chagrin of the housekeeper. The husband, almost totally deaf, is apparently ignorant of the situation until one day he fires the young man leading to a series of tragedies. The cast of Christina Pickles (Molly, the wife), Michael Higgins (her husband), Pauline Flanagan (the housekeeper) and Tom Waites (the youth) is excellent, especially Waites, who is one of the best examples of perfect casting I have ever seen.

If the first act can be doctored to become more than a lengthy introduction to the characters, "Molly" could be another success for playwright Gray. Although Charleston seemed to respond to its sudden notoriety (thefestival was covered by a number of national publications), it still needs to learn how to touch all the senses. The few banners that hung from overhead wires were dull in color and easily missed. Bold, colorful banners are By PHILIP F. CROSLAND The Spoleto Festival could be the biggest thing that has happened to Charleston, S.C., since the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, It's old hat in Spoleto, Italy, where the gala 20th anniversary season of the Festival of Two Worlds will be observed June 22 to July 10.

But for Charleston, this was something new, and the port city (population 70,000) gave full media coverage newspaper and TV to the 12-day festival, which-its sponsors hope will become an annual event. I was there only for the first two days and the first two major events, the American premiere of opera, "The Queen of Spades," which was a highlight of the 1976 festival in Spoleto, and ithe world premiere of "Molly," a new play by Simon Gray, author of and the current Broadway hit, "Otherwise Engaged." Many more were scheduled be-, the festival comes to a close including a new staging of "The Consul" by its composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, founder of the original Spoleto Festival and instigator of the Charleston fete. In addition to major evening "concerts at the spacious Gaillard "Auditorium and the cozy, beautifully renovated Dock Street opened in 1736 as America's 'first building designed specifically for theatrical events, there were chamber concerts, daily jazzl brass and intermezzo concerts, film and lecture series, most of them free, and concerts in at least a dozen of Charleston's historic churches every afternoon, providing a veritable plethora of culture in settings of indescribable beauty. The auspicious outdoor opening on May 25 featured Menotti; Nancy Hanks, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; South Carolina Gov. James B.

Edwards; Christopher Keene, musical director for the festival; Major Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston and other political and cultural leaders. "The Queen of Spades," sung in English was the first major event and Charleston society was out in force. The opera featured the same leads who had sung the roles in Italy last year.

Not knowing the story and given a program without a synopsis, I was a bit fearful of being kept in the dark, but every member of the cast sang with near perfect diction and my worry was needless. The setting and lighting contributed to the mood of the somber plot which included unrequited love, sinister schemes and a tragic ending. The leads could act as well as sing and the four hours passed quickly. "Molly" is a play that starts slowly, then picks up steam in the second (and final) act. Set in a $Ht0 if EP''I i P.

M. (ulm 1,,1 mi, iiMBiiiiaiuMMMafiiiHiiiii Ill II.IHIMUMMWM MMMll Gian Carlo Menotti has brought the Spoleto Festival from Italy, to Charleston, S.C..