The Pearl Valley Incident
Part I: Miriam Gilley, 1937 and Part II: Everett Skeen, 1927
Miriam Gilley
Pearl Valley
1937
Folks like to say it crashed, but that ain’t so.
When all the papers come along and started asking around, everybody agreed I was the only one who actually seen it. So it’s my story to tell.
I remember because I was about eight months along with Lula. Granny Elsie had been by.
There was a little skift of snow from that morning, but the sky had cleared by midday. All in all it had to have been mild for February because Granny and me sat out on the porch and talked until about dusk. Of course night comes early that time of year. But Granny just had to cross the ridge to get home back then. Before she was relocated.
Walter was delivering candy for a company over in Bristol. It was a good job. But he was gone half the time. Driving from Bristol and back and then up in all the hollers and in the coal camps and whatnot to every little store between here and Gate City.
He was gone that night. Staying with his brother in Clinchport on his route.
We just had Walter Jr. then. Lula was our second. And I didn’t have Clyde until two years after the incident.
After Granny left, my belly was sour, so I fixed me a glass of milk and bread and put Junior to bed. I set up doing some mending and nodded off. So I got the fire set and went on to bed myself.
Now I don’t know how to say this delicately and I ain’t never been one to try. Like I said, I was well on with Lula then. And the second I woke up, I knew I was fixing to have to clean the bedsheets if I didn’t make it to the loo right fast.
I wasn’t fooling with no chamberpot, so I slipped on my shoes and housecoat and headed up the hill to the outhouse. Like I said, there was still a little snow clinging here and there, but the night was clear as a bell. Crisp but not awfully cold.
It was the light I seen first.
The moon was out that night, but all the sudden, it was like there was two moons the way the glow come through the planks of the outhouse.
I finished up my business and stepped out not expecting— well I tell you one thing: not expecting anything like that.
It looked like a pearl. But it shined. Not like a stone reflecting the light. It shined from inside.
It wasn’t the moon. I never thought that. And it wasn’t no reflection off the snow or the clouds like some of them men tried to tell when they came to talk about it later.
Ever which way it moved, it left a trail of crackling light that flashed away like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life before or since. And the way it moved!
I’ll tell you one thing: it did not fall.
At first, it moved almost like a hummingbird. So fast that it was here one second, there another. Flashing across the sky from right around Skeens Ridge all the way over to about Cracker’s Neck.
Then it sort of come to a stop. Right over there around where them pissants from Big Stone built their golf course.
Wait now. Let me back up. When I first seen it. Well to be honest, the first thing I thought was that it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever saw. The way it moved in that shimmering cloud. A pearl as big as the biggest building you ever seen.
And I set right down there on the stoop of the porch and said a little prayer. Because the thought did cross my mind that the Revelation was upon us and He was fixing to let loose the seven seals. And you know what got me up? I thought to myself, “Well, I ain’t heard no trumpets yet!”
That’s when I remembered Walter’s camera.
I’d been mad as a wet hen when he come in here with that thing. A Kodak Brownie Number 2. He paid two dollars and seventy-five cents for it from some man over in Coeburn. “Where in the Sam Hill did you get two dollars and seventy-five cents for durn nonsense?” I says. Oh, but it would pay for itself he said. He’d take it with him on his route and make pictures of people on the birthdays and at wakes and whatnot. And he’d sell them and make big money.
Well, there sat the camera, so you can guess how that scheme had turned out.
Now the papers said I’d never touched the camera before, but that ain’t so. I had fiddled with it a time or two. I made a picture of Junior one afternoon right after Walter brought it home. And I made one of Walter and his brother Inman when he was over. That one didn’t come out on account of how much I moved. So I’d had some practice.
Anyhow, I grabbed the camera and stepped onto the front porch. I held my breath and set my feet. I’d learned that much. I didn’t even know if the thing would make a picture in the dark, but I figured as bright as that thing was shining, it was worth a shot.
So, I wound the key, pushed the little lever until I heard a click and that was that.
I was fixing to take the camera back in the house when the pearl gave a sort of quiver, hanging there in midair above Grindstone Ridge. Like it was moving fast enough to pop.
And then it just sort of floated down to touch the mountain. At first it looked like a dandelion fluff on the wind, gently settling as it kissed the ridge line. But then I seen that it was moving into the mountain. Inside it. I don’t know how, but for a second, it seemed that about half of the pearl went through the rock and trees of the ridge while the other half just floated there on top like the mountain was nothing but water.
That’s when the explosion happened.
It was so bright and so loud that I turned away right fast.
But I can’t say this enough: it didn’t crash. And it did not fall.
It was more like the pearl settled into the mountain and pushed anything and everything out of its way.
The valley worked like a big gramophone horn. They say they heard the blast as far Knoxville.
Junior was awake and screaming, so I went in and scooped him up. By the time I got back out to the porch with him, lights was coming on across the valley. You could hear people hollering to their neighbors.
And there it was. The Pearl of the Valley looking like it had always been there. Blue crystals, bright as a midday sky, had sprung up from the earth to form a sort of web around it. The Pearl looked secure inside that strange crystal nest, halfway hidden inside the mountain.
Walter was home by daybreak. Word traveled fast. He was worried sick. Junior had barely stopped hollering since the explosion. And I hadn’t even noticed, but the skin around my eye was red as a pickled beet. Like I’d been out in the sun too long.
There was newspaper men and family and all sorts of visitors. They come so fast and so much. And all I could do was repeat the same yarn over and over. It would like to drive a body mad.
And then I remembered the camera. It took a fellow all the way from New Cawkaigne to get it so you could make out much of anything.
But well, that’s how I come to make “the picture.”
And you know, I’m right proud of that.
But of course, there ain’t no end to nothing.
Pretty soon they was all sorts of folks hanging around wanting to hear my story. And one of them folks was my cousin, Everett Skeen.
Now Everett and I had been right close when we was kids. There was only a few months difference between him and me. But I hadn’t seen him much since I married Walter. Until I made that picture, you see.
And then Everett seemed to be around every time the door was open.
It shouldn’t have been no surprise when he come up with that song. And I ain’t trying to be sour grapes. I wish Everett nothing but success with his music and whatnot.
But to hear him tell it, he was the one who seen it all himself. And that just ain’t so.
Everett Skeen
Bristol, Tennessee
1927
Performing Artists
Ron Short- guitar and vocals
Composition and Lyrics
Ben Bolling- songwriter
Ron Short- songwriter
Production and Engineering
Ron Short- producer
Aaron Davis- producer, recording engineer
Jon Cochran- producer, recording engineer
It was a cold and starlit winter morning
In the mountain home I love
When the sky broke open and I saw the glory
Of the wonders that await for us above
It fell, it fell
Where it come from none could tell
From a home in the heavens far away
It fell, it fell
And in the mountain came to dwell
The Pearl of the Valley come to stay
Like a hummingbird it darted across the snow-capped frosty valley
Looking for a blossom on which it could light
Then without nary a warning it plunged straight into the mountain
And the thunder rang out fearsome through the night
It fell, it fell
Where it come from none could tell
From a home in the heavens far away
It fell, it fell
And rang the mountain like a bell
The Pearl of the Valley come to stay
Now the people came for to see this wonder
And its mysteries to explore
But what will come of this precious valley
The Pearl has changed my home forever more
It fell, it fell
Where it come from none could tell
From a home in the heavens far away
It fell, it fell
And in the mountain came to dwell
The Pearl of the Valley come to stay
Well how about them apples?!
I hope you enjoyed Parts I and II of “The Pearl Valley Incident!”
When I began writing the series of short stories that will scaffold this project, I imagined visual art and music— not as supplementary materials— but as integral parts of the overall narrative. I’m excited to explore this corner of the Omniverse with y’all and a HOST of talented friends and fellow artists.
For Everett Skeen’s 1927 “The Pearl of the Valley,” I asked my buddy Ron Short to interpret the song in a style reminiscent of a tune that might have been recorded at the Bristol Sessions. And boy howdy, did he deliver!
Ron Short is a playwright/composer/storyteller/actor with more than a dozen produced plays to his credit including collaborations with the African American theater company, "Junebug Productions" from New Orleans; the Puerto Rican company El Teatro Pregones, from Puerto Rico and the Bronx; and Idiwan An' Chawe from the Zuni Pueblo in Zuni, NM.
He is one of the editors and the author of "Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater Volumes 1 and 2."
Now retired after 40 years from worldwide travel and performance he lives on a mountainside in Scott County, VA with his wife Joan and their two cats, "Hey Buddy" and "Bella Grace."
He spends much of his time kayak fishing in the Clinch River, playing music and writing new songs for his "hobby-band,” Ron Short and The Possum Playboys, voted best Americana Band of 2024 at the Appalachian Arts and Entertainment Awards.
I’ve known Ron my entire life— and what a privilege it is to call him a friend! Ron is an absolute Renaissance man and one of the most electric entertainers I’ve ever experienced. So, I wanted to share with y’all a few questions I asked him about “The Pearl Valley Incident.”
BEN: When we first talked about this project, I told you I had written my original draft of “The Pearl of the Valley" with songs like “The Cyclone of Rye Cove” and “Wreck of the Old 97” in mind. It occurred to me that an event on the magnitude of a spaceship crashing in Powell Valley would probably be described in song. I love those early-20th-century story songs that were sort of headline news stories of their day. “Wreck of the Old 97” is one of the first songs I remember my dad teaching me on the guitar. Do you have any songs in that genre that you love?
RON: Love may not be the right emotion to describe it but growing up Appalachian sure had its share of disaster songs. Murder ballads of course were often written about true stories and mostly involved the murder of young women by jealous lovers or as in "Pretty Polly" to cover up a forbidden pregnancy and the loss of social status: "Willy oh, Willy, please don't take my life my life/ Polly, pretty Polly that never can be, your fast reputation means trouble to me."
Then in Appalachia, coal mining disaster songs were sadly too often composed about real events and loss of life. But the song that I recall that had the earliest impact on me as a child was "The Titanic" (Were You There When That Great Ship Went Down). It was an event almost equal to a space ship landing but instead it was a disastrous reckoning for the megalomania of a society that had come to believe that we were invincible and this "space ship" was proof of our invincibility.
BEN: I also told you that I based the melody on “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow.” I think that may be my favorite Carter Family song, but the song itself is way older than the Carters. It seemed a natural melody for a character like Everett Skeen to know and appropriate. Can you tell me a little about your approach in playing the song? I think our readers would be especially interested to hear you talk about your guitar stylings.
RON: I am very lucky to count myself as a radio child. I grew up listening to the stories of my older relatives, and my father and mother. These were stories as old as American culture and were often directly connected to our Scots-Irish/English cultural history. And there were stories of disaster and violence right in our own family and in the lives of our neighbors. When I was growing up, Appalachia was a very violent place, at least where I grew up. There were stories of murders, abandoned children, cheating wives and husbands and violent feuds, often between moonshiners.
So when I started listening to radio, it was like a continuation of the stories of my own community but told in a much bigger landscape and historical time.
My musical education started with the songs of my Mother and Father and my extended family. We were known as a musical/singing family. I had one uncle in particular who was musically gifted and would have been a "star" by today's standards. He played guitar and even as a child, I could tell he had his own style, because it was so distinctive. I have tried to copy my memory of his playing. Of course, I recognized that Maybelle Carter had her own distinctive style. But, I also learned that Maybelle copied the guitar playing of Leslie Riddle, a Black man from Kingsport, Tennessee who often played with the Carter Family when they needed him.
Most music in the modern world is influenced by music from all over the world. The fact that Beyonce is now flirting with "Country Music" is just a continuation of the Carters flirting with Black music. Maybelle Carter was a banjo player when she was a teenager and lo and behold Rhiannon Giddens, a trained opera singer and co-creator of the "Carolina Chocolate Drops," a Black string band, has carried Beyonce back to that music with a statement that says, “here is our heritage, our history, our musical voice, our music.”
There is a reason that people all over the world recognize how important American music is because it reflects and contains strains about people from all over the World.
BEN: You’re one of the best storytellers I've ever met. Do you have a favorite story of the paranormal in Appalachia?
RON: I have never see a UFO or anything that struck me as an alien from another world, although I do know some pretty strange people.
I have one story of the paranormal in which I was a participant and even years later, it is not something that I like to talk about, because I was shaken to the core of both my intellectual and spiritual beliefs.
I was working with Roadside Theater and scheduled for a two day storytelling/music residency in East Liverpool, Ohio, known primarily as the home of Farberware, probably the most famous and collectible tableware in America. My sponsor thought that I would be entertained and amused to stay at a B&B housed in the former East Liverpool Funeral Home. Besides Farberware, East Liverpool's other great claim to fame was the killing of the notorious bank robber/murderer "Pretty Boy" Floyd by FBI Agents under the command of Melvin Purvis, who had already participated in the killing of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
Floyd was brought to the Funeral Home in East Liverpool and put on display in the basement embalming room where various policemen, FBI Agents, and politicians had their photos taken with Floyd's corpse before he was drained of his blood and embalmed so he could be sent home to his mother in Oklahoma.
My host at the Funeral Home B&B was sure that I would deem it an honor to be taken to the basement and shown the steel table where Floyd was embalmed and to see the very utensils used in his embalming, complete with a wall full of photos of the event. I swear I have never been less entertained in my life and removed myself from that horrible place as soon as I could.
I was thankful that my room was on the third floor and retired for the night because I had a long day of performance and workshops scheduled for the next day.
I knew something was wrong even before I woke up. Someone was sitting on my chest and I couldn't move or breathe.
I struggled up to a squatting position with my back against the headboard of the bed to see a wave of energy moving at the foot of my bed. I have never felt such seething anger in my life. It was like something was crushing my chest and my brain and I actually felt like my skull was changing shape as the force drove me against the headboard. I never saw a full shape or any features but I saw waves of grey and bluish energy gripping the footboard of my bed. And though there was silence in the room, in my head there was a roar emanating from the figure.
I managed to grab my pants and a shirt from the chair by my bed and I fled down the stairs out the door and to my car where I spent no time before blindly fleeing the B&B.
I somehow found a motel by the road. Luckily it was brand new and they had a room and luckily they never questioned a very shaky barefoot man wanting to check in at four in the morning. I didn't go back to sleep and I sat in my room, with every light on, until daylight, questioning my sanity... seriously wondering if I was losing my mind.
After 10 mg of Valium, I was able to call my sponsor and ask her to retrieve my clothes and instruments from the B&B. After telling her why, she implored me to not say anything about this while I was in East Liverpool for fear it would adversely affect the reputation of the B&B which provided their visiting artists with rooms for free as a donation to the Arts Council.
I didn't say anything and I told no one, before now, but my wife Joan. In fact, I still don't like to talk about it because I can still feel the pressure on my brain when I recall this spectre... I still don't know what to call it and I don't want to know. And, if I never tell the story again, that's alright with me.
"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an’ they hurt ‘im, caught ‘im an’ hurt him so he was mad, an’ the nex’ bad thing he done was mad, an’ they hurt ‘im again. An’ purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an’ he shot back, an’ then they run him like a coyote, an’ him a-snappin’ an’ a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An’ he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin’ chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn’ hurt ‘im. He wasn’ mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed ‘im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was.” ( Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck)
BEN: Y’all. Please show some love for Ron Short! If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in the central Appalachian region this summer/fall, you can catch him performing with the award-winning Ron Short and the Possum Playboys on the following dates:
June 15, High Knob Music Fest, 5 PM, Norton, VA
July 12, Summer Music Concerts, 12 noon, Kingsport, TN
July 20, Chillin' and Grillin' , 3 PM, Wise, VA
July 27, Hard Rock Casino, 6 PM, Bristol, VA
September 21, Heritage Days, 12:30PM, Old Russell County Courthouse
September 21 Bicentennial Celebration, 5 PM, Wise, VA
October 11, Fall Fling, 12 noon, Wise, VA
October 11, Big Glades, 5 PM Wise, VA
As always, we appreciate your spending some time with us here at The New Futurists. Watch this space for the next installment of “The Pearl Valley Incident” in July! Until then, stay cool and I’ll see you in the funny papers!
Ron's ghost story. This is a very cool project, guys!
love that sheet music art