The summer heat holds long over the hills and the pavement, and a man who works with his hands knows that nothing good comes without a price. You see it in the high, clear lonesome sound of a banjo played clean, and you see it in the blue oak smoke drifting off a steel pit at dawn. The tradition does not care about the heat, but the men who keep it are made of blood and bone, and they wear out just the same.
Allen Mills died on the eighteenth day of August in Virginia. He was eighty-eight. For forty years he drove the bus for Lost and Found, played the upright bass, wrote the songs, and talked to the crowd. He was the last of the original men in that band. When a man like Mills leaves, he does not just take his bass. He takes the long night drives between small towns, the dirt roads, and the way the music sounded before everyone tried to make it clean for the radio.
Up in Ohio, at the Brown County festival, they cooked beans and fried fish in the open air. Edgar Loudermilk took a hand-carved walking stick, and the people sat on lawn chairs and listened to Lorraine Jordan and Junior Sisk. Across the state lines, at the Industrial Strength gathering, younger men like Carson Peters played alongside the old hands like Larry Cordle and The Seldom Scene. Down in southwestern Virginia, the people who run The Crooked Road are looking for new halls and outdoor stages to keep the trail open for another year.
It is good work. The old recordings matter, but a song must be picked in front of living people to stay real. The meat trade is harder now. In Pflugerville, Brotherton’s Black Iron is closing its doors before September. John Brotherton is gone, and the price of brisket, the cost of wood, and the heat have broken the math. In Austin, Kyle Stallings at Rollin Smoke is fighting the same dark numbers. A small man selling smoked beef today stands against high grain, high rent, and the long, dry spells when nobody walks the asphalt.
Yet the big operations move forward. Terry Black’s put six big post-oak smokers down in Houston, burning fast and hot behind glass. Two Texas pitmasters, Jonny White and Chuck Charnichart, are taking their post oak, green spaghetti, and lime ribs up to Greenpoint in Brooklyn. They call the new place Kirbee’s.
Out in the yards, companies are building heavier iron and finer wood. True Caliber built a new social grill out of rich sapele wood, and Ooni brought in an executive who used to build European cars to run their board. The big stores are cutting prices on steel cookers, fighting for the last of the summer money. It is simple enough. The music and the smoke come from the same country. You build a fire, you tune the wood, and you stay until the work is finished.