Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 23, 1993 TAG: 9303230106
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ROCK OPERA
Tom Harvey has never set foot in Carroll County, Virginia.But a casual glance at a yellowing newspaper led the 38-year-old California marketing consultant to an unlikely obsession with a notorious crime some 81 years and 3,000 miles distant.
Last year Harvey quit his day job to devote all his time to writing, recording and staging "Sid Allen and the Devil's Den," a rock opera based on Carroll County's infamous courthouse massacre of 1912. The shootout was the bloodiest courthouse gun battle in U.S. history.
The music is available on compact disc and cassette, and the work has been staged half a dozen times in Southern California.
Harvey, who has made a living as a club musician in addition to marketing computers, sounds surprised when he recalls how the project has grown.
"It's been a lot more expensive than I thought originally. I was a little naive, I guess," said Harvey. "God, it took almost a year just to get it written and recorded. And then we started working on the stage format."
It all started in 1974 when he was burrowing through old newspapers in Amherst, Mass., to research the 1912 Lawrence textile mill strikes.
"As I was reading the story on the conflict between labor and management there I saw this sidebar in the paper that said, `Sid Allen and the Devil's Den Gang Still at Large,' " said Harvey.
"Well, I just jotted down a note on the date and the headline and went ahead and did my paper. But nine years later I had moved to California, and for some reason I went back through my notes. I went to the microfiche of the Santa Barbara paper and saw the same headline there. And I realized that this was an event that had national scope," he continued.
He was right about national scope. When gunfire broke out in the Hillsville Courthouse on the morning of March 14, 1912, the judge, the sheriff, the Commonwealth's Attorney, a juror and a witness in an unrelated case were slain. Wire service reports of the bloody aftermath of Floyd Allen's trial appeared nationwide, and journalists feasted on the spectacle of "lawless mountain men" running wild through the Blue Ridge.
Allen, the head of a prominent local family, had been tried and convicted of "illegal rescue of prisoners" after forcibly retrieving his nephews Wesley and Sidna Edwards from the custody of Carroll County deputies. The Edwards boys had been arrested for fighting with other men outside a church service.
Several members of the Allen clan fled the courthouse after the massacre and were captured only after a well-publicized, weeks-long manhunt conducted by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Wesley Edwards and his uncle Sidna Allen were captured six months later in Des Moines. Sentenced to 35 years in prison, the two were pardoned and released in 1926.
Floyd Allen and his son Claud were electrocuted on March 28, 1913, for instigating the shootout, but the verdict and execution settled almost nothing about the case in Carroll County. Partisans still dispute almost every detail, from why the Edwards boys were arrested in the first place to who fired the first shot in the courtroom.
The Allens and their backers claim the Republican "courthouse crowd" had it in for the Democratic clan, and they say it was Clerk of Court Dexter Goad who squeezed off the first shot at Floyd Allen. Most witnesses, however, said it was Claud Allen who first drew and fired. Floyd Allen's detractors paint him as a man of ungovernable temper who believed he was a law unto himself.
Tom Harvey is an Allen partisan - he flatly says that "Floyd Allen was framed.
"The contemporary stories were obviously biased because they depicted these people as totally ruthless gunslinging mountaineers," said Harvey. But he has a novel interpretation of what happened and why.
"As I looked at the Allen event, I said here's agrarians versus industrialists, Republicans versus Democrats, moonshiners versus temperance people, and when I got to thinking about those issues and how they interface today, you're talking about the boundaries of personal liberty," said the composer.
Harvey believes that the local Republican establishment saw the Allens as a threat to their power, and the arrest of the Edwards boys was just "a device to get to Floyd."
But the musician also believes the Allens were victims of impersonal socio-economic forces that even they didn't recognize.
"What was happening in the labor base was that, instead of farming, people were going into the mines and coal was becoming an important industry and the mines were buying up huge tracts of land," said Harvey.
In a telephone interview Harvey was not completely clear about how these forces led to Floyd's legal problems. But he believes the changing economic environment, "along with limitations on personal liberty like the moonshining laws," conspired against free-wheeling clans like the Allen family.
"It was difficult for the Allens themselves to see all these changes occurring in the course of five or 10 years," conceded Harvey.
The composer, who says his musical influences include Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and John Sebastian, describes "Sid Allen and the Devil's Den" as "poly-rhythmic rock." He once considered sub-titling the work "a country-reggae rock opera." The music is mainstream electric rock with Appalachian flavor provided by banjo and mandolin.
Keith Allen Jackson, 29, works in a shoe store next door to the fabled courthouse, and has been listening to the music for a month. Named after the Allen clan, he said, "I don't know how well it would go in this area, but I think it's brilliant."
Jackson, who like many in Carroll County is a courthouse-massacre buff, says he thinks Harvey has a phenomenal affinity for the Allen family and their story. "If there's anything to reincarnation," said Jackson, "Tom Harvey must be one of the Allens."
In the staged version of the opera, the seven characters play their own instruments on stage as they act. "Playing the instruments onstage is somewhat limiting," said Harvey, "but we use a lot of wireless rigging so we have a lot of mobility."
Scenic backdrops depict the courthouse and Virginia scenery, and a rear-projection video camera shows a montage of barroom brawls and other scenes. Local critics have been complimentary.
Harvey reports that the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Bluegrass Society wants to do an almost totally acoustic version of the opera, and the music has been getting airplay on local public radio and progressive country music stations.
"If it belongs anywhere, though, it belongs back in Virginia," said Harvey, who says he'd like to produce the opera in the context of a Carroll County music festival.
"In my heart I feel like we might have struck upon a theme or an anthem for Virginia," said the composer. "My hope is that there is a producer or a label who will step in at this point. If it means selling the house and hocking my horse, I'll do what I have to do."