Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part Four)
After he first wrote his name he began writing songs too, and met the fiddler Ray Jim Lyall while in prison and they played together in spare time and when he was released he joined Ray Jim’s bluegrass band, The Yokel Pilgrims.
They toured Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama again, playing fiddle and harmonica and banjo and stand-up bass, snare drum and steel guitar before a hundred and even a hundred fifty somewhat enthusiastic fans a show.
The song that gave them a small following in certain circles was their bluegrass cover of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” They each sang verses, but Thomas Diggs stole each show from his amphetamine laced kicks sliding across the stage and hyper paced guitar licks and wild-rage performances, letting those angels-banned-from-Heaven imprisoned inside him race all through his bones, looking like a man succumbed by exorcism.
Ray Jim would let the shouting of fans die down some from the previous song, and in hoarse voice wallow out, “Alright now, whoow, alrighty.” And he would eye down Thomas from behind their microphones, while they tuned their instruments and say, “Tommy, I believe you had a question for me.”
“Well yeah,” Thomas would say, checking a note or two on his guitar. “I think we all want to know. Where’s she been and when is she coming?”
And the audience would roar while the band went straight into chorus singing acapella in low-toned lungs styled after a funeral procession, which was followed with savage screaming from the band members, and duck calls and cowbells from the audience, and blank rounds fired into the air and ceaseless, un-abandoned shouting.
The drums banged recklessly like an announcement of birth, and then for the twelve minutes that proceeded the band would search their instruments with their fingers as it were sparked from their soul, with lightning drawn out from the strings and from the piano keys, and bellow out with the audience, “When she comes!”
They sang about her laying down with the scum of this world, skin cloaked by the heat of the sun, spending her time with the mortals upon earth, one day she would slay the dragon that she had once brought strings and sealing wax, but it would ferment again from the dust and dirt, flying woodenly over her while she was giving birth, her moaning in horrid pain with the pitiful seed in the clouds of Heaven, and her fleeing and hiding in the wild horse-chestnut trees, running by night and her feet would sparkle as they were dressed by the moon, she’s been farming twelve oxen and milking twelve fine cows, her heart breaks still for her children cursed by fate since dawn, struggling to fight the god of time and god of the tides, She’ll be deep in a flood from the dragon’s breath, the bubbles on the surface are the stars that crown her head, and she was swallowed up by a whale been hunted since man became flesh, she’s been weaving seven years through Hell on a crimson shell, she’s been singing seven long years with a golden tongue, been singing about change coming, ain’t looking good but still singing she’s borne by angels, in Hell she sings down a long dark road, the fire down there flashed within in her eyes, she’ll keep on until she finds the wicket gate, and she’s the mother of saints and she’s slaying the dragon she once bore and she once raised, when we ask and ask where has she been, and ask to see her distant light, and vomit all day and shake and cry all night, oh mama! She’ll be risen by the seed where the flowers come from, and she’ll be coming around the mountain.