Copyright 2003 Winston-Salem Journal
Winston-Salem Journal (Winston Salem, NC)
August 3, 2003 Sunday, METRO EDITION
SECTION: E; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2087 words
BYLINE: Journal Story and Photos By Ted Richardson

Larry Pennington should have been on stage that night in Galax, Va. Instead he crouched in a far corner of the Fairview Ruritan Club while Big Country Bluegrass, Pennington's band for 15 years, opened his medical benefit concert with "Blue Ridge Baby Blues."

A substitute banjo player stood where Pennington used to stand.

As the band rolled through one of Pennington's favorite tunes, muscle spasms rolled across his forearms, wildly out of sync with the music, crippling the hands that had once played banjo so well.

Pennington is a picker from Ashe County who has won more blue ribbons than anyone on banjo at the Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax. He had just found out that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Pennington's motor neurons and his muscles were deteriorating rapidly. With no cure in sight for the disease, it is likely that Pennington will eventually lose not only his ability to move but his ability to eat and breathe.

His hands were still strong enough that night in May 2002 to sign a few autographs. But they were too weak to play the banjos packed away in his attic, to hunt with the guns stored on his racks, or to farm the tobacco and sugar cane trusted to his daughter and son-in-law.

"The loves of my life were playin' music, farmin' and coon huntin'," said Pennington, who will turn 57 Monday.

The disease that stole his loves away surfaced two years ago. Pennington was digging a fence post in the rocky earth near the hog pen at his home in Warrensville when his hands began to feel numb and weak.

"I thought it was because I was working so hard, but I guess it wasn't," he said.

The weakness in his fingers never went away. "I picked up the guitar and my little finger couldn't reach the straight A chord," Pennington said. "Next thing I knew, I couldn't reach it on the banjo, either.

"I didn't mention this to the others for a while. I thought, well, I'll get through this. It'll get better.

"I've never been one to complain."

Pennington kept the problem to himself until, in the middle of recording his 10th album with Big Country Bluegrass, he had to quit playing. "I was hittin' the notes, but I was having to look down," he said. "I used to never look down."

Pennington eventually finished the recording, but he soon went to Boone for his first medical evaluation. The doctor told him that he had less than two years to live.

The first person Pennington told, outside of family, was Tommy Sells, who plays mandolin in the band that he co-founded with Pennington. "When he first told me about this, we both cried like babies over the phone," said Sells, shortly after playing the first set of the benefit concert. "He was the only banjo player we ever had. Me and him stood beside each other for 15 years."

Sells fought back the tears, turning away from Pennington who wore a miniature gold banjo pinned to his black leather vest. At an adjacent table, band members' wives sold raffle tickets for strawberry pies, a German chocolate cake, a country ham and a hand-crafted Rosewood guitar - all means to raise money for Pennington's looming medical expenses.

From a coal stove to the Grand Ole Opry

Pennington learned to play banjo back home in Warrensville in a white house along the Sugartree Branch of the New River. An acre of tobacco rises steeply above the house on the west slope. Five generations of Penningtons and Poes rest beneath a more gently rising east slope.

When Pennington was 11, his grandfather, William Poe, gave him an old Roebuck Silvertone "clawhammer" banjo.

"I just grabbed that old banjo and started thumpin' on it - and thumped out a tune," Pennington said.

Pennington's father, Harrison "Hack" Pennington, worked in a sawmill and played banjo in an "old-time band." Pennington said that his father would go to bed early, but his mother, Belle Poe Pennington, would sit with him past midnight, next to a coal stove, listening to him play.

"When she could finally recognize a tune, I knew I was getting' somewhere," Pennington said. "She was a faithful listener."

Pennington fell in love with bluegrass music by listening to Farm and Fun Time on the radio. The midday program played a big part in Pennington dropping out of school after the fifth grade.

He said he routinely jumped off the bus before it reached school, after his father had left the house for work. He would walk several miles back home to practice banjo and to listen to the Stanley Brothers and Earl Scruggs on the radio.

Pennington remembers when his uncle, Dale Poe, drove him up to Galax for the first time. "That's where they do that three-finger roll (on the banjo)," Pennington said. "I told my uncle that I'd have to get me another pick." Pennington said the new style was tough to learn. "I put the pick on that third finger and just kept tryin'," he said. "One day it just went to workin'."

It was then, in 1962, that Pennington entered his first solo banjo competition at the Old Fiddlers Convention. "I played 'Lonesome Road Blues' and my heart was makin' 900 miles an hour," he said.

Young Pennington had to stop in the middle and start all over again.

He returned the following year. "I didn't mess up that time," he said. Pennington won third place for his performance of "Shortnin' Bread."

Pennington joined the Lincoln County Partners, his first band, later that year. He was soon playing live every Saturday on WKSK radio in West Jefferson. He then played for six years in the High County Ramblers with his cousin, Raymond Pennington, and Wayne Henderson.

Larry Pennington would eventually win a total of five blue ribbons in the bluegrass banjo competition, the most ever won by a single picker at Galax, and an achievement he shares with the late Ted Lundy. Pennington also won several ribbons on guitar and in the band competition.

Through most of the '70s and '80s, he traveled around and played in stores and bars with anyone who happened to show up. "I finally realized that this floatin' around just ain't gonna work," he said.

In 1987, Pennington met Tommy Sells at Henderson's shop while fixing his banjo. The two decided it was high time to start a band. "We got tight," said Pennington. "I remember thinking, 'I ain't gonna quit this band.' I wanted to go as far as I could, as quick as I could."

Pennington quickly made a name for himself. "He would turn heads," said Gary Poe, the host of a bluegrass radio program in West Jefferson. "His timing was perfect; his notes nice and clean. There was never any struggle to it. It was just natural."

"Besides Earl Scruggs, he's the best banjo picker that's ever been, at least around this part of the country," said Jones Baldwin, a longtime friend of Pennington's.

Pennington recorded 10 CDs in 15 years with Big Country Bluegrass, playing either his 1928 Gibson banjo, or a 1973 banjo hand-crafted by Henderson. The band made it as far as the Grand Ole Opry in 1999, where it blazed through a rendition of the Martha White Flour theme song.

"We got it down pretty good," said Pennington.

The final set

On the first day of summer, 2002, Hayley Mash carried her father's banjos down from the attic. After tuning the old Gibson when Pennington's hands weren't strong enough, Mash sat down with Preston, her 6-month-old son, in her lap. Pennington, with the banjo propped on withering legs, struggled through half a tune and then stopped.

"My fingers are like fish hooks; they won't turn loose," he said.

"I think you'll have to take over this job," Pennington said, casting a weary glance toward Preston, who had just heard his grandfather play for the first and last time.

"Larry doesn't like asking for help," said Anita Poplin, Pennington's girlfriend. She first met him in 1994 at her uncle's grocery store while she was learning to play fiddle.

But as Pennington becomes ever more helpless on his own, he depends more and more on his daughter, his girlfriend and his sister, Barbara-Jean, with whom he lives.

Barbara-Jean cooks for her brother and spoon-feeds him in his wheelchair every morning and night. Poplin stops by between 12-hour shifts at the Leveton Electrical plant to massage Pennington's hands and to hoist him into bed from his wheelchair. Mash bathes her father and often drives him to the ALS clinic at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center three hours away in Winston-Salem.

"I wouldn't rather do anything else," said Mash, who left Warrensville for the medical center with her father and Poplin early one morning last October. On that visit, Pennington complained of painful joints and swollen hands. He was already on eight different medications.

Five months later, Pennington could barely walk. He was advised to prepare his living will.

Four months later, he was bound to a wheelchair. He could barely talk. Poplin relayed Pennington's slurred speech to doctors and nurses. Turning repeatedly to a list of hand-written questions for the clinic staff, Poplin escorted Pennington from speech therapist, to social worker, to clinical dietitian, to occupational therapist.

"We were wondering what exercises Larry can do to strengthen his legs," Poplin asked Terrie Walker, the head nurse,.

"The damage is already done to his motor neurons. His legs aren't going to get stronger," said Walker. Her manner was much kinder than her message.

Dr. James Caress discussed with Pennington his option to have a feeding tube surgically inserted as swallowing becomes even more difficult.

Caress said that half his ALS patients decline the procedure, particularly when the disease starts in the limbs.

Pennington said he would have to think on it a while.

"Sometimes I wonder, 'Why me?' But most times I just accept what's happening," said Pennington. "I can't do nothin' about it, so I just have to live with it."

Pennington hopes others won't have to suffer as he has. He voluntarily donates his blood and spinal fluid to help doctors find the elusive cure for ALS. "Maybe somebody can get some good out of what I'm doing. Maybe someone on down the line will be able to keep picking," he said.

Meanwhile, Pennington is savoring the short time he has left with his loved ones. "I aim to enjoy every day to the fullest," he said.

Sometimes, he and Poplin just drive through the mountains, "riding the ridges" as they say, to soak in the beauty. Pennington said that it's something he rarely took time to enjoy before.

Last summer, he and Poplin camped with Poplin's niece and nephew at Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia. As the sun set behind the mountains, Pennington told "boogie man" stories while the children roasted marshmallows. After mashing a cheeseburger flat so Pennington could better grasp it, Poplin settled down by the fire to play a fiddle tune.

Pennington fumbled with his Cheerwine bottle, using both hands to lift the hidden Evan Williams bourbon to his lips. He reminisced about the Galax Fiddlers Convention, when he camped for three straight days and played banjo until 3 a.m.

The children scurried back to the tent, and their giggling soon faded behind the crackle of the embers. Poplin hopped into Pennington's lap and loosely clasped her hands behind his neck. The two sat as one next to the dying fire.

Poplin then gathered Pennington's sweat suit and, in the darkness, helped him wiggle it on over his clothes. Gathering her strength, she hoisted Pennington's body over the precipice of the tent's nylon doorway and watched him fall uncontrollably into the far right seam. She crawled in behind him, extinguished the lantern, and nestled up close.

The music never ends

Pennington's next road trip with Poplin will be to the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention on Wednesday to hear her compete on fiddle. "He says he's my manager, and he's not gentle with me, neither," said Poplin.

Pennington once taught Poplin by playing alongside her in the den where he learned to play banjo so many years ago. Now, he just listens, calling out tunes.

During a recent jam session at his house, Pennington sat in his wheelchair between Jones Baldwin, who was playing guitar, and Poplin on fiddle.

Pennington's foot never tapped the floor, and his body never moved to the rhythm, but his broad smile beamed across the room.

"The music is still in my head," Pennington said, "just like it always was."

Donations in honor of Larry Pennington can be made to ALS Association, 6512 Six Forks Road, Suite 602A, Raleigh, NC 27615, or call 1-877-Lou-Gehrig or 919-844-4257.