Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

From left, Hunter Wilson, Eric Wilson, Trevor McKenzie, Jim Lloyd and Aaron Litz pick some at Lloyd's barber shop in Rural Retreat.

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Audio gallery

• Hanging out at the barber shop

About the record

• "Season's Greetings from a Small Town in Virginia" features 21 tracks.
• Cost is $15, plus $2.40 for shipping and handling.
• Call Jim Lloyd at (276) 686-5976 to purchase. Or drive by Lloyd's Barber Shop to pick one up.

Hear sound samples

• "Jesus the Christ Is Born", by Elizabeth and Sandy LaPrelle
• "What Child Is This?" by Trevor McKenzie

Lloyd's legacies

• Jim Lloyd is an accomplished musician, a small town politician and an entrepreneur. But his broadest fame may have come in "Clapton's Guitar," the best-selling book about guitar maker Wayne Henderson.
• In it, Gerald Anderson says, "When our friend Lloyd the barber gets to bragging, we tell him that his best work is going to be grown out in two weeks."

RURAL RETREAT — The customer in Jim Lloyd’s chair is being persnickety. The man wants a haircut that doesn’t look like he just came from the barbershop, but doesn’t look like he needs to come back any time soon. And he needs his beard trimmed — the part that’s grown in, not the part that’s still on the way. And maybe take a little off those wiry brambles he uses for eyebrows.

“I can do that,” Lloyd says as his scissors make their first dive into the customer’s hair. “I’m getting so good at this I’m thinking about trying to get my license next year.”

Lloyd pauses to laugh across the black-and-white checked floor toward the loafers and customers who are simultaneously audience, straight men and co-comedians in his day-long floor show.

The 41-year-old Lloyd is barber, booster and vice mayor of Rural Retreat, a town of about 1,350 souls that was once the cabbage capital of the world. Rural Retreat is famous for being home to the real Dr. Pepper — Charles T. Pepper, a pharmacist who had a soft drink named in his honor because, the legend goes, the drink’s inventor wanted to court Pepper’s daughter.

But Pepper’s drug store burned down years ago.

The town’s train station, one of those immortalized in an O. Winston Link photograph, sits empty, a “For Sale” sign draped across one end. The old town hall is now Heritage Hall, home to the local historical society. But a couple of doors up the hill, Lloyd’s Barber Shop is still alive and busy.

When it’s open.

Locals will tell you — even while he’s cutting their hair — that Lloyd the barber is never at work. He’s always off on some musical adventure or other. Playing at a festival. Teaching would-be banjoists. Collecting and trading stories and songs. Even at the barbershop, he gives guitar and banjo lessons, and he’s likely to pick up his accordion to demonstrate why the four-button model is better than the Cajun two-button version if a person wants to play old-time fiddle tunes.

But Lloyd is also quick to tell he’s not the only music maker in Rural Retreat.

“I’ve always thought there was a lot of talent in town and somebody should get it together and record it,” he said.

So he did.

He put four bands, a duo and five soloists on a CD called “Season’s Greetings from a Small Town in Virginia.”

“Everyone except the sound man is connected to Rural Retreat,” Lloyd said. “We’re going to adopt the sound man.”

Besides Lloyd, who plays guitar, mandolin, bass and banjo — at the same time — on the CD, the name most recognizable outside Rural Retreat may be Elizabeth LaPrelle. LaPrelle has travelled with the Crooked Road tour and appeared on public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” The project also includes two 17-year-old students of Lloyd’s, Kelsey Tibbs and Trevor McKenzie; gospel band Family and Friends; bluegrass group True Grass; pianist Curtis Vaught and vocal groups New Harmony Trio and Wythe Harmony.

“They live out on Hogback Road,” Lloyd said of the four-woman group, “so we wanted to call them Hogback Harmony, but they wanted to go with Wythe Harmony instead.”

Lloyd isn’t a Rural Retreat native — he grew up in the coal fields — but he is a fixture. It can take a while to become accepted in a small town, he said, recounting how he walked into a local store and gathering place for years with hardly any acknowledgement from the regulars.

One day, Lloyd says, he was nearly through the door when a fist caught him square in the chest, sending him tumbling back into the parking lot. Lloyd picked himself up and walked on in. He saw that the fist was attached to a massive young man who seemed to think propelling Lloyd onto the blacktop was the funniest thing he’d ever done.

“I just walked over and picked up a bottle of IBC Root Beer and tapped that guy on the shoulder and when he turned around I hit him just as hard as I could, right smack on the forehead,” Lloyd said. “He kind of staggered back, but he didn’t go down. I thought, ‘Lord I’m in trouble now.’ ”

“What did you do that for?” the big man asked.

“You just hit me.”

“I was just playing.”

“Well, I play rough.”

At that, Lloyd said, one of the old farmers nodded at him and smiled. When he came into the store after that, the old farmers said hello. Before long — maybe a year or so later — they started inviting him into their conversations.

Now Lloyd’s shop is the center of a running conversation that’s entertaining enough to a newcomer but more interesting when Lloyd shares some background.

The old guy Lloyd gigged about being a Yankee moved to town decades ago, playing the obnoxious Yankee stereotype to the hilt.

“He’d walk in and say, ‘Hi, I’m George the Yankee. I’ve been there, done that, know all about it. Let me tell you about it,’ ” Lloyd said when the shop slowed down.

Eventually the old man’s children made him move into an old folks’ home in Bristol, Lloyd said. He’s escaped from that now and slips up to Rural Retreat every couple of weeks.

Another customer was a fighter pilot in World War II. He was shot down over France. After hiding him out in a barn, the Resistance got him out of the country on a bicycle.

People and their stories come and go in a shop decorated with memorabilia from times long gone. There are photos of Uncle Dave Macon, a Grand Ole Opry star in the 1920s, a crank wall phone, a cathedral radio, a sign advertising Dr. Lynas’ Hair Grower and the good doctor’s toilet cream, which promises to beautify the complexion. A miner’s helmet that belonged to Lloyd’s grandfather hangs near an old straw boater.

The place is cluttered with pieces and parts of various instruments and a few shot gun barrels. Complete instruments cover the walls and many of the room’s flat surfaces: banjos, guitars, a cigar box fiddle and a potato bug mandolin.

Over in the corner sits a computer and boxes of CD holders, the production center for Rural Retreat’s Christmas CD.

“There’s enough talent here to do another one with a completely different set of performers,” Lloyd said.

And he just might do it.