Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

We have a black cat named Tokie, named and given to us by our daughter. We didn’t know until a few years with this cat, and this name, that our cat shared the name with a famous banjo player, who uppicked and downpicked her taught strings in clawhammer style. As my wife and I are fans of old-time music this was a pleasant discovery. Yet, we only came to discover the music of Matokie Slaughter (known as “Tokie” to friends and family) through the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who we’d learned about in turn from reading Bill Daniel’s Moslty True: The World’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine, sent to me as a lovely gift from our friend DJ Frederick Moe. Then we watched the documentary “Beautiful Losers” to learn a bit more about Kilgallen who features in the film with her husband Barry McGee, and a slew of other artists. Boy did watching that evoke all kinds of memories from my adolescence and young adulthood as a skateboarder, of the world of graffiti, punk music and hip hop. Memoires of watching Gummo (Harmony Korine was in the film for better or worse). I was still coming up as a teenager when all of these people were making a scene of so much that was to be an influence on me. 

Margaret Kilgallen was a born again folk artist who combined graffiti with her love of traditional sign painting styles, freight train monikers, Appalachian music, and letterpress work. She grew up around bluegrass music, played banjo herself, and used the name Matokie Slaughter in many of her works. Once an artist references another artist, it always gives me a reason to explore. I have always loved the practice of listening upstream and reading upstream. When there is someone whose work I really like, I want to see what influenced them, and I will read and listen to things they say shaped them as a creative person. When I was in my twenties, that person was David Tibet. I loved, and still love, Current 93, but at the height of my obsession with Tibet’s music I went and listened to and read as many of the things he talked about loving as I could. That got me into Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band and so many others, like the venerable weirdo Count Stenbock. The Nurse With Wound list is famous in a similar way for long time heads hunting down obscure music. When there is a writer who I really like, I try to do the same and see what they read, what influenced them, who they liked the best. What they touted as the crème de la crème. Following the influence of one artist to another, in whatever medium, is just a kind of standard practice for me, and it without question leads to finding the good stuff.

I’m writing about Matokie Slaughter today, one because it’s been in the back of my mind to do so since I first learned about her, and two, because she was infecting my dreams. I woke up with the name ringing through my head the morning I started this piece, and I knew it was time to hit the keyboard with her in mind. I’ll circle back around to Margaret Kilgallen in another entry.

Matokie Worrell Slaughter was born in the farming community of Pulaski, Virginia on December 21st, the day of the winter solstice. It makes sense to me because she was light bringer to a world of traditional music. She was born to a family with its ears bent towards music and she was born into a big family. Big families often have “big ears” because in that time period, people had to make their own entertainment and music was one of the cheapest and most satisfying ways to do it.

By the 1930s, as a teenager, she was playing her banjo on the local radio station, with her kin. A lot of folks who heard over the air thought she was a man, because she was bit mic shy with her voice, a lady of few words over the air. I get the feeling she just liked to hammer away at the banjo. By all accounts, Slaughter could saw a mean fiddle too.

In searching for the answer to the question “who was Matokie Slaughter?” I had to investigate the world of old-time music players, record collectors and boosters. This brought me to the work of Charles Faurot who helped the larger world discover Slaughter in the midst of the folk revival that had begun in the fifties and sixties.

Now who was Charles Faurot, you ask? He was another banjo player and music fanatic who liked to collect 78 rpm records of hillbilly music. Faurot was born on October 3, 1935 in Midlothian, Virginia but had moved to New York where he worked at a Manhattan bank. That’s the kind of work I expect makes you appreciate folk music even more, after dealing with the money of citified riffraff all day long. His obsession led him to becoming a song collector when he traveled back to Virginia to record rip roaring banjo riffs for many albums of music for the County Record label started by David Freeman.
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Faurot recalls how he met David Freeman, who was a serious collector, booster, and historian of bluegrass and old-time sounds: “I was married, working for a major bank in Manhattan, living in Brooklyn. I was buying tapes of 78s from Dave Freeman (of County Recordings) but hadn’t met him. One nice Sunday morning I’m going for a walk, out to get the paper. As I’m walking by a rowhouse, the apartment on the first floor had its window open and I could hear someone playing the dobro. So I stopped and…I couldn’t reach the window but said; Hey in there, I hear you playing the dobro. I like that kind of music. Can we get together? And the guy comes to the window and says: We just got out of bed. Why don’t you come back in a couple of hours? So I did and that guy was Bill Vernon.”

Now who is Bill Vernon, you ask? He was the New York son of a corporate tax attorney. He also happened to share the love for this style of music. His father had a career as a lawyer all planned out for his son, who he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Who knows? It might have happened if his son had never turned on the radio and had a chance encounter, a fated encounter, with the music of Flatt & Scruggs. He scrounged his way through a bit of college, and ended up working as a clerk on Wall Street, somewhat in the shadow of his daddy’s line of work, but it was only to support his habit of collecting hillbilly 78s. Record collecting sure is habit forming, a kind of sickness that hardly sleeps and never stops.
Music is a gateway drug, and Vernon soon moved on from just collecting, to writing about bluegrass for the British rag Country News and Views. It didn’t stop there. Music needs to be shared like it’s the gospel, and he got himself a radio gig on the Pacifica station WBAI (home to other great programs like the hacker stalwarts of Off the Hook). It was a great place for him to showcase his growing collection of music. This set him up to get yet another gig writing for Billboard magazine, where he helped them compile the weekly country music chart. He was a busy man, all while moonlighting on Wall Street to pay the music bill. If you are a collector, it’s a bill that can make it difficult to pay the water bill and the electric bill. It might have also had something do with any bills he may have had for alimony. His love of music had, in his reckoning, cost him three marriages.
 So Faurot had met this cat and got to be friends with Bill Vernon and his first wife Mary. Bill was in on the scene there in New York and introduced Faurot to David Freeman, who then started taking his new friend to concerts organized by Loy Beaver. Beaver was another music fan who had to work day gig to support his habit. In his case, he was a mortician and one of his claims to fame was the distinction of being the man who embalmed Franklin Roosevelt. 

Come November of 1964, Charlie got the opportunity to record the music of Wade Ward from Independence, Virginia. Ward had previously been discovered and recorded by John Lomax, the father of the folklorist Alan, after he’d discovered him at the Galax Fiddlers Convention in 1937. Alan went on to record Wade Ward as well, getting him on tape several other times at the end of the thirties and into the forties. It must have been something for Faurot to meet these storied and feted players.

The next summer Faurot himself made the pilgrimage to the Galax Fiddler’s Convention and he had his tape recorder with him capturing the old time sounds of George Stoneman, Kyle Creed, and Fed Cockerham. They all had different styles, but they all sounded so good, he wanted to get the music out on vinyl and approached David Freeman with the idea. Freeman thought it was a good one and the project went ahead. Freeman even got Bela Bartok’s grandson to do the mastering on the tapes.

In 1967 Charlie headed back to Galax, this time with Richard Nevins. They rented a house in town to use as their base of operations on their mission to record. Everyone who was anyone with a banjo dropped in to record: Kyle Creed, Dan Tate, Tommy Jarrell, Oscar Jenkins, Fred Cockerham, Gaither Carlton, Sidna Meyers, Esker Hutchins, Oscar Wright, Willard Watson and Matokie Slaughter. Faurot and Nevins were thus able to make their own link in the chain for reviving old-time music, and the first record of this material came out in 1965 on County Records, simply called “Clawhammer Banjo”.

​Matokie’s hit number, “Big Eyed Rabbit” features on the later album “More Clawhammer Banjo Songs & Tunes From The Mountains” from 1969. This one also features her version of “Stillhouse.” It might be something you’d want to sip a bit of shine while listening to. All of these traditional tunes, she’d picked up from listening to her father play music, songs passing from generation to generation.

From my digging, it seems that when the banjo material recorded by Faurot eventually got re-released on CD in the form of a three-volume set simply called “Clawhammer Banjo.” Faurot recorded and put out a ton of other records for County, and it’s possible some of the other material comes from those compilations.

With all this looking around for traces of Matokie Slaughter, I’m not much further in knowing who she was as a woman, as a Virginian, as a person. I do know she liked to participate in all kinds of musical get togethers, workshops and festivals and that she later formed the band Matokie Slaughter & The Back Creek Buddies. Her sister Virgie was involved with that project as was Alice Gerrard. Their only release was on cassette, an album called Saro in 1990. Luckily for us Alice Gerrard has a bandcamp page and she put the album up there, where it has also been re-released on CD (for all you collectors out there).

Now who is Alice Gerrard, you wonder? For her efforts as a musician and old-time music booster she was nominated for a Grammy in 2015 and inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2017. (Bill Vernon the son of the tax collector was another Bluegrass Hall of Famer, honored for his radio and writing efforts.) Gerrard plays guitar, fiddle and banjo, and worked as a duo with the late singer and songwriter Hazel Dickens as the Strange Creek Sisters. They put out four albums on Rounder and Folkways and their influence pushed bluegrass deeper into mainstream country when Emmy Lou Harris took up their arrangement of “Hello Stranger.” At the time, Gerrard and Dickens had just made history as the first women to record a bluegrass album (as opposed to just appearing on compilations put together by song collectors).

As I mentioned at the beginning, I first got hip to Slaughter reading about the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who had started putting up a Matokie Slaughter moniker on freight trains as a homage to her banjo playing hero. Kilgallen fictionalized, or folklorized her in her other art work.

Our daughter had given the name of our cat Tokie, because she looks like a rabbit (she had lost her tail when she was a kitten). She tells me that “Tokki” is Korean for rabbit. I think it’s a nice synchronicity that the song Matokie became most famous for is “Big Eyed Rabbit.”

Slaughter died just over a week after her eightieth birthday, on the last day of the previous millennium, December 31, 1999.

​This was the world Matokie Slaughter was a part and parcel of. I wish I could find out even more about her. In the meantime, at least I have her music to listen to as I ask the question, “Who was Matokie Slaughter?”