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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3370 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Scrugg’s Style Banjo Jim Doss 1. After a hard day at work, I sink into the warm arms of the living room couch, necktie draped like a flag of surrender across my chest. The stereo’s green light bathes my face in its healing glow. Bluegrass songs like \i[Roll in My Sweat Baby’s Arms, Salty Dog Blues,} or Foggy Mountain Breakdown fill the room with sound. Their notes carry me back to the haze of the Blue Ridge, the scent of split oak and pinesap, and cold stream water sipped from a cupped hand. Even as my MTV-suckled kids laugh in the next room, clapping and stomping their feet as they shout out what few words they know in an exaggerated southern twang, I feel myself drifting away. I rise through the wood frame of the house, rush past the office buildings and freeways to merge with the smoke that roams across the mountain ridges, settles into the hollows, and amplifies those solitary voices sitting on the cabin’s front porch who sing to satisfy no one but themselves. 2. Saturday evenings we huddled around the Philco, listened in the darkness as static rolled into the clear voices of the Grand Ole Opry live from Nashville. Grandmother’s rocking chair rolled back and forth over the pine floorboards in rhythm with the music. Grandfather’s always-lit cigarette moved up and down as if he were strumming a guitar. My seven-year-old mind followed the vacuum tubes’ glow filtered through holes in the back to become dots of orange crawling across the family room wall like fireflies. The game was to identify the patterns in their shapes. Some weeks everything was gunslingers and horses, other weeks rocket ships, meteors and aliens. But most weeks they were banjos with fingers flying across the strings, banjos that filled the skies instead of stars. 3. Whoever said a banjo looks like a teardrop sliding down a string or a full moon weeping notes into the night sky knew what they were talking about. 4. Five strings and ten fingers is all it takes. A strap across the right shoulder. A cowboy hat cocked just so to make the acoustics right. 5. One mike for the entire band. That’s the way it was done. The routines choreographed like football plays— charge straight up the middle, do your showing off, then break for sidelines and fall behind to play backup for the next soloist. You can see it on the old black and white film clips; hear it in the radio mixes, and on the 78’s. 6. In the pawnshop window rows of guitars and banjos do a slow twirl around someone else’s misfortunes. The Gibson 49 Classic catches my eye that some poor fool sold for less than a third what it was worth. I want to make it sing with the desperation and heartache he felt when he damn near gave it away. I want it to wail with his hunger and the shrill voice of his landlord demanding back rent. I want it to soar with the sweat and strain it takes me to grow my pile of ones and fives to match the six hundred dollar price tag hanging from its throat. 7. Boo says, “Daddy, how come you can’t play and sing as well as those fellers you listen to on the records?” 8. A banjo lays in its open case like a question mark wrapped inside a question mark. 9. Listen carefully as the breeze drifts across unmoving strings. In the silence you can hear the night train blow its whistle, see the dogwoods bloom into crucifixes with the blaze of spring, and feel the tender loneliness as the mountains and her people call out for company. 9. At the family reunion, our hillbilly heritage is on full display. Cousins from the rowdy side of the family sneak sips of homemade moonshine behind the barn, chase the burn with beers. Properly lubricated, they stroll around front under the shade of oak trees carrying a couple of guitars, a banjo and a dobro on their tipsy ramble through the country music hall of fame. My kids stare at me in wide-eyed disbelief as the band starts to play, slightly out of tune. They continue on, song after song, until they almost sound good, like they belong to us, to this place. Several older couples rise, and begin to two-step on the red clay. With each pivot, each stride, a pollen-like dust collects on the tops of their shoes as the music carries them deeper into a vision of their younger selves. 10. Banjo notes fall around the dancers like the water they were conceived in, water they were born from, water they were baptized with, and the water they must drink each day to stay alive. 11. Inside me there is a voice that longs to be set free. Not the voice of a nightingale, but the voice of a tin-man who discovers the heart that always existed inside, the voice of a paper lion finding his courage. My hands move over the strings and frets the way wind blows through the pines: sometimes ferocious, at other times almost silent. 12. Stephen Foster was right. A song just ain’t much of a song without a banjo in it. |
