Mill Song

In 2005 Boogaloo produced their best summer play to that date: Mill Song. Again, with a script by Betsy Vanderford and direction and songs by Ralph Lawson. For the local community this is a long-awaited production, dealing directly as it does with events in and around the long-time hub of Union life.

Storylines in Mill Song include:

• A local boy who makes it big as a radio performer.
• The story of a young mother in an abusive relationship who loses her husband and father on the same day; only to find love and happiness right at home (it's complicated!)
• A mill worker who comes down with "the awfullest case of kin-folk."
• A dream fulfilled for a girl who wants to be "Textile Queen."
• A fishing expedition... but fish aren't the target.
• A mistaken case of marital infidelity.
• A mill worker perseveres in the face of personal tragedy.

I play Harvey, a domineering, abusive husband and moonshiner in a dry county. It's a heavy part and I've only got two scenes to establish exactly how evil, mean, wicked, bad and nasty this fellow is before he's offed in a mutual struggle to the death with the village constable. (So I'm probably meaner on-stage than the fellow was in real life. But maybe not... keep reading!)

By the way, if you've ever wondered why our group is named "Boogaloo", this production removes the confusion. Long ago, but still in living memory, mill workers were not paid in cash. They were paid in "boogaloos"... company coinage. The workers could spend these boogaloos at the company store, or they could use them to buy regular currency. Since converting to cash involved currency exchange fees there obviously was a huge incentive to spend at the company store. Mill Song is replete with the terminology of the textile mills that dominated this area. People held jobs as "spinners" and "weavers" and "doffers" and "carders".  Spinning and weaving are fairly self-explanatory terms. A "carder" tends the carding machine that combs the cotton to remove foreign matter and prepare it as "sliver" (which rhymes with "MacGuiver", not "liver"). A "sliver" is a large, loose rope of  cotton.  This gets spun into yarn and then thread. A "doffer" is someone who replaces full bobbins with empty ones.

If you didn't work at a mill, most of your neighbors and relatives did. Boys and girls grew up to replace their parents working in the very same jobs. It wasn't unusual at all for children as young as twelve to be employedas doffers and sweepers. It seemed at one time that the mills would always dominate the culture of this area. 

Everything changes. Today very few people in Union are employed by textile companies. The mills owned by Milliken have largely been shut down. Conso has moved away, most of their operations now residing in India and China. A couple of weeks ago I watched as the historic Buffalo Mill was torn down. (It now only exists in effigy in the mill town diorama in the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia). Mill Song is a lament for this rapidly disappearing culture.

Life Meets Fiction

Just after our final performance on on Sunday, June 19th, 2005, I was approached by a fellow as I was pumping gas. As it turns out, he was the grandson of the man I portray in the performance. With him he had "Harvey's" daughter-in-law, a charming silver-haired lady. He also had a newspaper clipping from February 16th, 1933, which I was privileged to read. Whereas in the play "Mr. Ellis" and "Harvey" meet in a mutual duel to the death over Harvey's illegal moonshine trade, the reality was slightly different, and in some ways even more exciting.

Harry Willard Jr. was just two years old when his father died, and the above story was told to me by his wife and son. They had driven down from North Carolina to see the play because they'd heard that their own family history was in it. As they had moved away years ago, it touched them that their memory was preserved and even performed years after they thought they had been forgotten.

One of the best things about performing these plays is meeting the people involved and learning the history upon which our plays are based. Boogaloo's mission is truly to preserve Union County's history through performance.

Songs