Bluegrass Jam at Richard’s Coffee Shop
Not all of it is fun and games but some of it is.
Cool air hit me in the face along with the cheerful hornet’s buzz of voices as I swung open the back door to Richard’s Coffee Shop. The music was in full swing. Dang. I thought I would be here early enough to get a good seat. Oh, well.
You got a machine gun in there?, he said grinning at the fiddle case slung over my shoulder.
Nah, I quipped back, it’s my lunch.
Laying the case on a table I unsnapped the flaps that held my newest source of frustration and future pleasure. If I could ever learn to play the damned thing.
I lifted out the fiddle, snapped on the shoulder stand and rosined up the bow. It will be a long time before, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, Looking for a Soul to Steal comes out of this fiddle. I just got I’ll Fly Away and part of Ashoken Farewell. But I do love the soulful sound of a fiddle. It can cry, it can chop and it can squeal like a stomped piglet.
Making my way through the seated audience toward the player’s circle with a hopeful smile on my face, I overheard the up-close and personal sounds of the players arguing over who wrote Jerusalem Ridge, Bill Monroe or Kenny Baker.
It did my heart all kinds of good.
These were real sounds. No manufactured and slicked up, smoothed out and made perfect sounds. These were real people playing for the joy of it, for the attention it brings them, and for recognition in a place where everybody knows your name if you go around the circle and tell it to them.
I can barely play this screech-plank and I want to be in that circle. I want people to smile when I take my turn and sound out a beautiful collection of perfectly crying notes. Sometimes I can do it a few notes at a time and it is heaven. I usually play behind the scenes and try to find the notes that sound good with the melody, trying to keep the screeching to a minimum.
Today there are so many players I can hardly hear my own instrument. I stand at the back of the second row of the circle after I get some help with the tuning from another one of the fiddle players.
Pull you up a chair there and come on in, a head turns and shouts in my direction.
I took a seat.
It’s always like this. Come on in and play. Have a seat. Maybe they were being nice and maybe they want my instrument at seat level so it doesn’t drown out the other players. I nodded and smiled at the folks I recognized and they nodded back.
I saw Tom over there. He bobbed his head in my direction and then he brought a copy of a Virginia newspaper. Tom pulled a chair over beside me and remarked, They got some good pictures in here. You’re in some of them, and handed me the newspaper.
Tom had had a weekend picking at his farm in rural Virginia. Tom had invited me to come to the picking the weeks ago and I decided I would do it. He had told me he’s equipped with an arsenal of slingshots to keep the cows away as we sat in the player’s circle under the trees. I packed a tent and a cooler in my 17 year-old soccer-Mom van and headed north.
I looked at the photos of the gathering under the trees at Tom’s farm and read the article.
Not bad.
I thought I would get here early enough to get a seat on the first row, Tom said as he propped the rim of his banjo across his thigh and waited for someone to call out a song. They seemed to be more interested in talking this morning than playing.
I get so frustrated because I can’t play well yet. Sometimes I can play along and sometimes I just have to stop and listen. But I go anyway. I go and I keep going. Wherever there is a place to play I go and sit down and squeak and scratch along. But when I get few notes together or play a song all the way through I am in heaven. It’s like that lingering buzz you get from a night, or 10 minutes, of good sex.
Keith wasn’t there that day. He was playing his guitar somewhere else, performing with a band. Keith is a good guy doing the best he can. The first time I met him he said, They call me the guitar man.
So far he’s the only person I’ve heard call him that. He is a wound up talking machine. It’s like he has all this living to do and has to get on with it. He is a converted Catholic minister and visits the prisons to take communion to them. He just wants to make his life mean something. He wants some focus I think. He wants to calm down and live a beautiful life.
Keith had told me he is estranged from his daughter. I got no more details, but he sees his grandson quite often. I think the guitar and the music has saved his life and is still saving his life. Keith has had a hard time since he got back from Viet Nam at the age of 19. I would be distressed to find out later that he had been diagnosed with leukemia from his contact with Agent Orange.
Music has charms to soothe the savage breast. It sure does something to mine.
The circle eventually pulled itself together enough to scratch off a few songs, some of which I could play. There was so much talking in the room I could barely hear my instrument and couldn’t tell if I was playing the right note or screeching to high heaven.
Mark stood up and announced that one of the players had a birthday. He was 96. He played a beautiful guitar. We sang Happy Birthday to him and he told us all the things he had going on in his life. He buys old guitars, fixes them up and loans them out the young folks in the community. If they like it and learn to play he gives it them. Scot free. Something tells me they have to learn to love Jesus along the way as part of the bargain for receiving a free guitar.
Hey, another birthday, Mark called out a girl’s name who is turning 18. We all swiveled our heads in her direction as she ducked behind the coffee counter in appropriately expected mock shyness. Another round of Happy Birthday and a voice shouted out, throw her clothes out in the yard and break her plate, meaning that now she’s 18 no more free room and board. We all knew this was not going to happen.
Well, that’s what my Dad did to me when I turned 18. That’s probably true.
Another voice from the other side of the room, Yeah, and look how that turned out. We all laughed.
It’s getting a little too crowded in here for my introverted sensibilities.
There was a table of baked goods in the back along with a donation jar. I went to have a look. These folks were always doing fundraising for war veterans and were planning to open a military museum. There were photographs and old uniforms all around the room. I stuffed a couple of bills in the jar and took a doughnut hole and a quartered scotch egg.
A scotch egg. Who made these? Who knows about scotch eggs? And who took the trouble to make them? I asked around but no one fessed up to making the eggs. I wanted to know if they were deep-fried like my recipe. They looked like they were.
Tom, sitting beside me called out then next song, Let’s play Redwing. Good, I know that one. There is a buzz of discussion as the players look at each other. Tom said it again. No one played.
Tom, what key? I said.
G, he answered.
I stood up and called out in my best middle school teacher voice. We’re playing Redwing in G and two beats later we were all playing Redwing.
This was wearing on my nerves, I wasn’t playing very well.
I could feel the liveliness of sandpaper sludge creeping up my spine. A sure sign that my anxiety is rising.
There was an open seat on the first row where I might be able hear the songs better. I got in the seat, played along on a few tunes and actually started to relax. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a knobbed walking stick swing back and forth, then point to the chair I was sitting in. The stick swinger announced loudly, That is my seat.
The sandpaper rose and makes it to the back of my neck.
Well, you weren’t sitting in it, I thought to myself. Slowly, I got up making eye contact without saying a word.
I thought this was enough fiddling for today. And took my fiddle out the back door, then realized I had left the case. Rather than walk back through that mass of people, I walked all the way around the building to the front entrance to get my case. I started packing up my fiddle.
Tom was regaling his audience with his signature piece, The Possum Song, to the tune of, The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
In the holler, the foggy holler, the possum sleeps tonight.
Down the hillside and through the backwoods, the possum crawls tonight.
He’s on his way, he’s on his way, he’s on his way, he’s on his way. he’s on his way, he’s on his way, he’s on his waaaaaaaaay.
A friendly woman helped me hold the case open so I can fit my fiddle in telling me how much she enjoyed listening to me play. I smiled and felt better and thanked her for the polite lie.
I backed out of the front door, as the possum met his fate to the refrain of, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plate, he’s on the plaaaaaaaaaate.
I felt the sand rise up and it felt alive and familiar. I welcomed it as a sign that I was awake and alert. I welcomed it as it was and didn’t try to change it. It is as it is. It’s hurting no one, not even me.