Alex Martin - Philo Meets the Machine

4. Philo Meets the Machine
Enter Philo Lightfoot, the central figure of this and the next three songs. Although he lived “in town” (Chilhowie, VA) when my father knew him, he grew up in the hollers of the Jamison Gap, which runs between my father’s mountain and the one facing it, and he often visited my father’s cabin on his walks through the mountains, which he knew like the palm of his hand. Many of the hollers’ inhabitants worked in the quarries of Saltville, a few miles’ walk away, and there Philo got his first job. He worked at the commissary, where he encountered a strange machine. Will McKindley-Ward’s vocal tells the story.