My first cousin, four times removed, Felix Eugene Alley was probably one of the most respected and worthy individuals of Western North Carolina during his adult life and professional career as an attorney, author and superior court judge in Jackson County North Carolina in the early 1900s till his death on January 7th 1957.
Felix Alley was the youngest son of John E. Alley and Sarah Whiteside Norton Alley. He was born on July 5th 1873 in Cashier's Valley, North Carolina at the base of Whiteside Mountain. Felix's grandparents were Barak and Mary Norton, who are my 4th Great-Grandparents and were original settlers of Cashiers in Jackson County, North Carolina. Alley graduated from Cullowhee High School in 1896 and studied law at The University of North Carolina in 1897–98. In 1898 he was elected clerk of superior court in his native county; he continued to study law privately and was admitted to the bar in 1903. Alley established a practice in Webster NC and represented Jackson County in the General Assembly of 1905. He was solicitor of the Twentieth Judicial District, 1910–14; afterward, he moved to Waynesville, NC as an attorney and remained there the rest of his life. At various times he served as county attorney for Haywood, Jackson, and Swain counties and for the town of Waynesville. In 1933 Alley was appointed judge of the superior court of Western North Carolina, a post he held until his retirement in 1948. He was awarded the honorary LL.D. degree by Western Carolina University in 1952.
But for all of his other achievements, Felix Alley is first and foremost remembered in western North Carolina for a simple musical ballad he wrote for a girl he desired yet couldn't have, a la unrequited love.
Felix Alley was a believer in opportunity and identifying those opportunities that come your way and making the most of them in order to achieve success. He lived this mantra his entire life. Many opportunities came knocking for Felix Alley, and he reasoned that sometimes seemingly unimportant events in life succeeded one another and when taken together as a whole those events connected to give opportunities and one must take full advantage of them when presented.
When Alley was eight or nine years old one of his brothers made him a banjo, using a cheese hoop, tanned ground-hog skin and wood that had been worked into shape using a knife. For strings Alley used J. & P. Coat's Spool Cotton. The boys twisted the strings into varying sizes and then coated them with beeswax. When the banjo was complete, young Felix Alley learned to play hymns on it and old mountain melodies he had heard his entire short life. The way things ended up Felix Alley became the only banjo player in the Cashiers Valley area in the late 1880s and 1890s and, so opportunities arose for him to play music locally for mountain dances in Macon, Jackson and Transylvania counties in North Carolina and in South Carolina and northern Georgia as well. Before he started traveling around, by chance Alley had met one of the executives of the J & P Coat's Spool Cotton company and when that executive discovered that young Felix was using their cotton string to make his banjo strings they immediately asked if they could use his image with his banjo in their national ads. It was something the company never considered as a use for their product but they thought they could capitalize on this new use for their cotton. In return the executive bought young Alley a top of the line banjo and all the strings he would need. Alley took that opportunity and ran with it. He began performing in earnest across the southeast for several years with his new fancy banjo.
In 1889 Felix Alley's life would change forever. It was that year at the tender age of 16 Alley composed "The Ballad of Kidder Cole" It was Alley's one hit wonder that gave him fame from the mountains to the sea as far west as Texas and across the southeast. As Felix said, " It was my first, last and only attempt at poetry, and of course there is not a line of poetry in it." Except for the fact that Ms. Cole did not change her name to Alley the ballad speaks for itself and adheres rather closely to the facts as they occurred. The song quickly became a hit throughout western North Carolina in the 1890s . For the next 40 or so years it was played at mountain dances and by the early 1930s when the advent of the new invention radio hit the southeast it began to garner airplay across the region. On October 10, 1936 reporter John Parris Jr. wrote an article about the ballad in "The State" periodical of North Carolina. For years, according to Alley, the song had been handed around by word of mouth and many words, sometimes entire lines or stanzas were changed around. However Alley himself stated that when he heard versions on the radio in the 1930s they pretty much stayed true to the melody he had written, but he did hear variations on the words that were different from what he had originally written.
Here from my cousin Judge Felix E. Alley himself are the words to his famous "Ballad of Kidder Cole"
"My name is Felix Eugene Alley,
my best girl lives in Cashiers Valley;
She's the joy of my soul
and her name is Kidder Cole
I don't know--it may have been chance,
'way last fall when I went to a dance,
I planned to dance with Kidder the live long night
but I got my time beat by Charlie Wright
So, if I ever have to have a fight
I hope it will be with Charlie Wright
For he was the ruin of my soul
When he beat my time with Kidder Cole
When the dance was over I went away
To bide my time till another day,
When I could cause trouble and pain and blight
To sadden the soul of Charlie Wright.
I thought my race was almost run
When Kidder went off to Anderson;
She went to Anderson to go to school,
And left me at home to act the fool.
But she came back the following spring,
And oh, how I made my banjo ring;
It helped me to get my spirit right,
to beat the time of Charlie Wright.
Kidder came home the first of June,
And I sang my song and played my tune;
I commenced trying with all my might
To 'put one over' on Charlie Wright.
I did not fell the least bit shy,
On the fourth of the next July,
When at the head of a big delegation
I went to attend the big celebration.
When the speaking was over we had a dance,
and then and there I found my chance
To make my peace with Kidder Cole,
And beat Charlie Wright; confound his soul!
Charlie came in an hour or so,
But when he saw me with Kidder he turned to go
Back to his home with a saddened soul,
for I'd beat his time with Kidder Cole.
I've always heard the old folks say
That every do will have his day;
And now all of Charlie's joy has passed
For I've succeeded in beating him at last.
Oh, my sweet little Kidder girl!
You make my head to spin and whirl,
I am yours and you are mine, As long as the sun and the stars shall shine
Oh, yes my Kidder Cole is sweet,
and it won't be long till we shall meet,
At her home in Cashiers Valley
Where she'll change her name to Alley.
I like her family as a whole,
But I'm especially fond of George M. Cole;
I believe I shall like to call him 'Paw'
When I get to be his son-in-law.
Some of her folks I don't like so well.
But I may some time, for who can tell?
And after all between me and you
I'm not marrying the whole durned crew."
Some other interesting notes on the ballad, Alley's competing suitor in the song, Charlie Wright(also a cousin of mine) was a cousin to Felix Alley as well.
The story behind the song was uncovered by John Parris, who interviewed Alley in 1955 for one of his columns that appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times. The column was subsequently reprinted in Parris’s first book, Mountain Bred (1967), and in the chapter on mountain folklore that he contributed to The History of Jackson County (1987).
Kidder Cole’s father was a merchant in the Cashiers area and later the high sheriff of Jackson County. The dance that sparked the contest for Kidder’s attention was held at the home of Charles Grimshawe, a physician from England, who had settled in Cashiers.
“Young Felix was late in arriving at the dance,” Parris recorded. “And through the doorway he saw, to his bitter disappointment, that Kidder Cole had been claimed by his cousin, Charley Wright. Charley was bigger than Felix, and he let it be known right away that Kidder had promised him all the dances that night.
“’Before the night was over,’ Judge Alley recalled, ‘I had commenced composing the ballad. While Charley danced away the night with Kidder I reeled off stanza after stanza of the ballad.’”
In reality, Alley composed the ballad over a period of several months. But did he actually win “the belle of the mountains?”
When quizzed on that point by Parris, he replied: “‘Why, no, neither Charley Wright nor I won the heart and hand of Kidder Cole, although the ballad indicates I was the lucky one.’”
Kidder Cole got Felix Alley's heart and Charlie Wright got his goat, but puppy love wrapped up in a banjo ballad made him famous. Felix Eugene Alley was a one hit wonder before his time, in what was in all aspects, a life well lived.
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