Bio

The only living member of his family that worked in the turpentine woods, Music was born in 1960 on the same piece of land where he currently resides on the rural outskirts of Waycross, Georgia. Music began working turpentine in 1967, when he chipped his first tree at the young age of seven. He used to follow his father, George Music, Sr., and grandfather around in the woods before he was old enough to do any real labor, and he would pretend to be working. Music says that he always wanted to be “just like daddy” when he was a boy. However, by the time he was 17 years old, he thought he had had enough of the hot and arduous labor involved in turpentine production. He headed off to get married, residing and working as an auto mechanic in Jamestown, Georgia. But “something always brings you back home,” he says. “You just get to missing it.” He returned to the massive expanse of timber at his home in Waycross after divorcing his first wife, and he is passionate about never leaving home again.

Music has only worked in turpentine on his own land and has never experienced life in a turpentine camp, a typical situation for many white, working class South Georgians. There are approximately three thousand trees on Music’s land that were used for turpentine production. His grandfather Louis worked and lived on the same 10 property even before the current Music home was built in the very early years of the 1900s. At any given time that he and his father were working in the woods, they kept in between 1,800-2,500 faces in production. George Music, Sr., however, supposedly once worked five thousand boxes at one time. Today, Music works as a locomotive mechanic and is a talented fiddle player and harmony vocalist in a local bluegrass band Tri-County.

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