Articles and Stories

Humble Lessons Learned While Trying to Play the Fiddle

by Robert Bruce Greene

On the morning before he died, Dad called for his fiddle. Mama made a little choked back cry and put her hand over her mouth and just stared at him, so Grandma and Uncle Wash raised him up in the bed with a large feather bolster and three pillows, to where he was sitting mostly upright, and she laid the fiddle in his lap. It’s hard to think that I know it was three pillows, not two or four, but when somebody’s about to die, it eases it to take note of small things like that. The other is just too much. The same as how I can’t picture his face as he lay there, but I do remember every detail of how his hands moved so slowly and delicately over the fiddle, like the way a blind man touches things. And I knew he was reading the years of black rosin built up around the bridge, and the accumulation of grime congealed in long, shallow ridges between the strings, and the sharp grain on the end of the top where the sweat and whiskers of his chin had eroded away both the varnish and the soft part of the wood. I was too young then to understand all what he was doing, but I look back now and hope that he said goodbye to Mama as well as he did that fiddle, for it was plain how deeply he loved it, and there she sat watching from behind her hands. Then with great effort, he pushed it a little ways across the bedsheet in my direction and said, “It’s up to you to do the playing now, son.”

Before the sun was down, he was gone.

Those were his last words to me in this world. I soon came to know them not as a farewell, but a pronouncement, a spell - sometimes more like a curse - that he laid upon me. A boy the age I was at that time doesn’t really know his father yet, not as he would when a grown man, and so I held on to those words with a kind of desperation, and in my mind they came to stand for everything he was. So, you might say my fate was determined from that moment.

I had been doing my best to play since I was just a sprat of a boy, first sawing sticks of stovewood together in the kitchen, then sneaking the fiddle out of his dresser drawer when he was off to the woods or gone to town trading, until he caught me at it one day. I thought he was going to whip me a good one, for he had admonished me thoroughly to never touch it. But instead, a queer look came over his face and he said, “All right then, let’s see what you can do with it.” So I scratched out a childish attempt at the Sally Goodin, and my fiddling career began. But then he was gone, and me left with his dying wish for me. Well, and for him.

As time went on, I did learn to play the fiddle tolerably well. But learning about music is not learning about life (although when I was older, I came to know a number of no-account fellows who would disagree with me about that). A boy on the verge of growing up is a scared and bewildered thing, and lacking a father, he is simply set adrift in the world to try to figure out for himself what he needs to know to become a man. And I did, indeed, bumble around a good deal in trying.

Young people mostly don’t know why they do things. They just do them because they can’t do otherwise. And it has come clear to me now that I while I thought I was looking for a bunch of fiddle tunes, I was also looking for a whole lot more that I was mostly unaware of – the things other boys learned while tagging along behind their fathers doing chores or around the fire at night .So, I learned what I could as best I could, and the lessons came sometimes small, sometimes big and sudden, sometimes gentle, and sometimes hard won. Often, I didn’t know they were given to me until years later. And some of them came out of the most humble and unsuspecting of circumstances, yet proved in their simplicity to be the most profound and helpful of all. Now, when I think back to my younger years, those humble lessons, and the man I received them from, are what I remember as the small turning points of my life.

Dad had told me about this old man, distant kin of ours, who lived a little ways across the county. Cousin Sammie, Dad called him, and said he had been a good fiddler in his day. So Mama, against her better judgment, as she said, took me over to his place one Saturday evening, and I got to know him, and I ended up wearing out my shoes going over there for him to show me about playing the fiddle. He was a little round man who had spent his entire life in his quiet cove between two shallow ridges, getting by, as did most folks in our country, with a mule, a few well – used acres of cropland, and a certainty that there was no other life worth considering than the one he had inherited from his parents, and their parents before them. He laughed a lot, and when he did, every bit of his body laughed with him in a violent burst of good feelings. He fiddled the same way, with the energy and enthusiasm of a younger man. And he was kind to me, and patient. He showed me how to play the Cackling Hen, to mock the many different sounds a hen makes. He played the Sleeping Lula as if he would saw the fiddle in two, saying, “If you’re going to play it, then play it, by God.” In the winter, he closed off all but the living room to conserve heat, and when he brought the fiddle in from the icy bedroom, he would set right down next to the stove and play, and the moisture would condense all over it as if his strenuous bowing had caused it to raise a sweat. That fiddle, he claimed, had been given to his father well before the Civil War days by a neighbor who had sold off his farm to join a party headed for California, only to have a premonition of his death in a hostile desert cause him to lose heart and give away all his dearest worldly possessions so they would not end up as trade trinkets in some Cheyenne Indian caravan. It was a well made and good sounding fiddle, and he often wondered about the many folks of long ago who had been pleasured by its company, and them now gone to dust but that fiddle enduring on. I listened, and looked for signs of my father’s influence in his fiddle, which was now my fiddle. But mostly all I could see was the lack of him.

Sammie kept rabbit dogs, and said we would go hunting in the spring. He made my acquaintance with Jack and Jeb and Jennie and Julie, and they got to where they made an uproarious welcome when they heard me come whistling up the lane. But his heart was bad, and we never did go to the fields. So he taught me to play the Big Eyed Rabbit, and Whistle Up the Dogs, and the Rabbit in the Bean Patch. And he played the Fox Chase so I could hear the barking and squealing of the hounds on the trail, and he said he reckoned that was the next best thing. Which it was.

I learned a world of fiddle tunes from that old fellow, but what I’ll always remember best is when a neighbor stopped by one day and Sammie said to him, “This here is my cousin John’s boy. He’s here to learn to play the fiddle, and he’s doing a first rate job of it. I think the world of him, now, I do. He’s just like my own boy to me.” And when I headed home that evening I was walking on air, because someone a whole lot like a father had seen me in my lonesomeness and had given me a place to be.

It seemed like Sammie knew a tune for every occasion. If it came a storm, he’d show me the Lightning in the East. When the neighbor girl got proposed to, he showed me the New Married Couple. In the winter he played the Snowstorm, and in the spring, the Blackberry Blossom. When one of the kinfolk died out, he remembered Somebody’s Buried in the Graveyard, and he played it and sang, “Somebody’s buried in the graveyard, somebody’s buried in the sea. Somebody’s buried in the graveyard, who thinks a heap of me.” And he’d laugh his joyous laugh with every part of his body.

One of the fine pleasures of early summer is the apple called the Early Harvest. It’s the first apple of the season to ripen, good for pies and sauce, and for eating out of hand if you catch it just right. Most young people will sooner or later be impatient and get into some when they are still green and hard and bound to wrench the gut. Then when they are yellow and past their prime, they are dry and mealy and to my mind like a mouthful of dust from the sawmill. You’ve got to eat them when they are at that fleeting stage between the two.

One day I arrived at Sammie’s and found him behind the house on his hands and knees filling crates with big yellow Early Harvest apples. Yellow, headed toward white, and ripe to splitting open. And he looked up and said, “Fly in here young man and get you some of these apples. They’re perfect – dry and mealy – just the way they ought to be.”

I took a few home in a little poke sack so as not to hurt his feelings, but left them along the way for the groundhogs. And the walk home gave me time to study on both the unaccountability of different folks' tastes and the intricacies of a new tune, the Apple Tree Blossom, which came to his mind while gathering those sorry excuses for apples.

When I grew a little older, Sammie taught me how to second him on a fiddle tune. I got to where I could play a tenor part while he held down the melody. Sometimes, he’d have me play the low part on the coarse strings while he played it on the fine, and then we’d switch the other way around, and maybe then come back and play it together – meet in the middle, he’d say. It was pretty music, especially when we played Maggie, or Sweet Bunch of Daisies, or some other walse type piece. And he went to church a time or two with me and Mama and we played old fashioned hymns such as Pass Me Not, and Jerusalem My Happy Home, and The Lily of the Valley. He told me about when he was a young man he promised to play for Sunday church with a Hounchel boy who picked the banjo, but when they met up there this fellow was drunk and started into a hoedown piece, We’ll All Get to Heaven When the Devil Goes Blind. Sammie experienced a horrified moment before he realized that the congregation didn’t know the difference - thought it was just a high spirited hymn tune - so he fell in with him on the fiddle and together they desecrated the house of God that morning.

Anyhow, we were doing real well, Sammie and I. But along about the middle of my teen years, I began to run with a couple of school pals and my interests diverged. I didn’t get over to Sammie’s for a month, then two. Somewhere back in my mind, I knew I was letting him down, that he was probably setting on the porch looking for me in the evenings about sundown. But I had laid the music aside in favor of the girls and night roving with the neighbor boys. About half way through the third month I had a letter arrive – the first I had ever received in my life. It was from Sammie, and it consisted of two lines: “We were doing so well together. And now you’ve dropped me.”

A young man in his impatience to get on with life can be a selfish thing, indeed. Sammie’s letter woke me up again, and I was back over there the following Saturday. But something had changed. We hadn’t played but a little while when he set down the fiddle and looked square at me and said, “Son, I guess I never told you that I was of the Mormon faith, did I?” After which he handed me a bent up Book of Mormon, opened another himself, and began quoting me passages which he said he found particularly instructive, and it was a believer’s duty to pass the truth on to others. That made me extremely edgy, so I kept trying to steer him back to the fiddle saying such as, “Sammie, did you ever know a piece called the Snowbird?” Or, “I was hoping you could show me how to shuffle the bow on the fine part of Stepping in the Parlor.” But he would not be swayed from his mission, and at last I made some excuse about having to be back home early to milk because of Mama had not been feeling her best lately. I packed up my fiddle while he continued to preach me the gospel, and I eased across the porch to the steps, with him following close behind me, Good Book in hand. And I began to see that he was enjoying himself immensely, although he tried his best to hide it. I made my final apologies and started to retreat down the steps, when he caught my arm and said, “Son, do you think the only thing I ever do is lay around the house and play the fiddle?”

Something changed between us after that, for the good. Sammie was no longer just the man who showed me how to play the fiddle so I could keep my father’s memory alive. And I was no longer just a lonesome boy looking for someone to stop up the hole in his life. We became friends, and we recognized each other. Well the truth was, he had always recognized me. It was me that had to make him real.

I reached the end of my teens about the time Sammie reached the end of his eighties, and I always made sure to get over there at least twice every month, for I could see that he was beginning to fail. His wealth of tunes, once numbering in the hundreds, dwindled to a few dozen, and when I’d suggest playing the Old Sage Fields, or Down the Road From Here, or one of the other rare old pieces he’d gotten from the old folks in his youth, he would cast deep into his memory and come up empty handed, and say, “Well, how about the Sally Goodin? That’s as good a piece as they is.”

Then other times, I’d stop over and he’d be on the porch playing a tune I’d never heard before. “It’s the Duck River,” he’d say. “I haven’t thought of it in forty years. It come to me in the night, and I got up and played it like as if it was just yesterday.” And we sat on the porch, and the whippoorwills started up as darkness fell, and the katydids began calling back and forth across the clearing.

Sammie brought out a coal oil lamp, and we watched the moths blunder about in its light. Every now and then, one would flutter over the top of the lamp chimney and with a little hissing sound, it was gone. And I’d look over at Sammie and want to hold on to him, hold him back from going.

I pushed him to show me the old hoedowns, for he still had several that I was afraid would end up going to the grave with him. But more and more, he’d play a slow piece, a hymn or a walse, instead.

“Sammie, won’t you show me the Long Bill Cheatham?” And he’d look over at me and say, “Son, when you get to be my age, you just want to play a walse.” And so we did.

“ I could knock a banjer with the best of them when I was your age,” he said one night. All our years together and I had not known that he ever played one.

“And I had some of the finest fiddlers to follow as ever was – Theo Jarvis down on Straight Creek, and Bob Mosely who barbered in town, and Ed Harland, a tenant on the Prater place. They was fiddlers galore back in them days, and them old gentleman didn’t cut the tunes up the way these new fiddlers does. They played smooth and sweet, and they played to suit theirselves…..Ah law, what times we had. And now they’re gone, every one of them old musicianers of my youth, and I’m the only one left. And it’s a comfort to me, son, to know that you’ll be carrying on some little bit of this music, because I reckon you’re about the only one besides myself that knows anything about it.” With that, he began to hunch his shoulders, and his chest heaved, and I could see tears running down the creases in his face.

That wasn’t our last time together – nothing so dramatic as that. Sammie got older and frailer, and in his time he passed away. But that occasion was maybe his final great gift to me, for he showed me that even after a long full life, there are still losses to be reckoned with, and yet often something gained in exchange. In losing my father, I had gained Sammie, and I hope to think that while losing the time and people of his youth, he had gained me. He once revealed to me that he was mostly illiterate, and while it hindered him in the world some, he counted it over all as an asset, because reading and writing had a way of coming between a man’s mind and his feelings for the world. And that’s how it was with his music and his life. It seemed to spring unstudied from the woods and the fields and the creatures of the earth into him and through him, and so, perhaps, into me.