Each year, a quarter of a million people visit Grandfather Mountain. I don't know how they got together that metric. It might count all the people that head up that Profile Trail, or the buses that bring up hundreds of be-kilted Mc's and Mac's in July. We always came up from the Pineola side, passing the big old yellow sign for “North Carolina's Top Scenic Attraction.” Plenty people arrived from the yon side, dropping off the Parkway onto 221. On decent weather days they'd pass by rows of white shelves covered with jams, chow chow, molasses, and especially—honey. That's where Floyd Gragg, the one and only, kept his stand.
I remember pretty vividly the first time Ray and Bruce Dellinger took me out to visit their first cousin out on the mountain. Floyd had a small arsenal of fiddles, banjos, and guitars and you should have seen him play those things. He'd tear into Sally Gooden, working his bow like lightning, he'd get down his old car-crash Martin and flat-pick like Doc Watson or Don Reno. He wrote songs too, and I remember a great one he made about Dale Earnhardt. Floyd owned the most beautiful Gibson 5-string I have ever seen and man, he could make that thing talk. When the old picker ended a tune he'd say something about not having played in several months. I'd pray to myself, Lord, if only I can be that “rusty” one day.
Floyd was a great old-time storyteller too. I loved to hear him tell about the old man that got choked up on peanut butter so bad that he outran his team of horses to get to the spring, or about his hilarious old Uncle Obi. Sometimes I would spend hours up there just listening to tales about musicians and people out on the Grandfather, til it started to get late in the day and Floyd would say “it's getting near Shank's time.” I'd help him pack up and head on home, where I'd try to get that old-time banjo lick of Floyd's (I never did.)
There's no telling how many people stopped out there at Floyd's stand over the years. I wonder how many of them knew how special he was. Maybe they just assumed that most mountain people could play the fire out of everything with strings on it. Over the past year or so I tried to catch Floyd out at his stand, but he wasn't ever out there. I didn't see him when he was very ill, which in some ways was a blessing. My last memories of Mr. Gragg are of a man out on his mountain, content to be Floyd.