To paraphrase a saying attributed to Ulysses S. Grant, my
father could whistle two songs, one was the hymn “Farther Along.” The other wasn’t.
Oh, he liked music. He just never pretended to be an active participant.
He loved to close the grocery store a little early and bundle us off early to some
live performance. Famous artist or unknown, it didn’t matter to him. He wasn’t
above hauling the whole family down to a small venue in Rison, Arkansas to hear
a young singer who had no arms, their molecules having obviously reassigned to
his lungs. It was quite a show as it turned out, although I never heard of the
artist again.
But, as I said, some of the artists we saw were well known.
The group Johnnie and Jack played once at our high school auditorium, and they were
famous. Perhaps their most popular song was “Poison Love.” Check it out, and
note the fancy Latin-like rhythm guitar work by Johnnie Wright. This “Rhumba
Beat” became associated with them on such classics as “Down South In NewOrleans.” That’s steel guitar legend Shot Jackson with them on the videos. I
hope he was there with them in Pine Bluff. Heck, I don’t recall and I didn’t
even know who he was then.
Johnnie was also famous for being married to music legend
Kitty Wells for a few days short of 74 years. She wasn’t with them the night we
saw them, though, as far as I can remember. She may have been busy recording “It
Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
Oh, and that music on the video? That was a genre called “Country
and Western Music.” It became extinct somewhere around the early 1980s. Those
of us who were privileged to hear it while we were growing up still miss it
after all these years.
The biggest shocker, to me at least, about our musical pilgrimages
came to me in the 1960s. When they made that awful, terrible, pathetic,
laughable film about the life of Hank Williams, I was telling my mother that I
had gone to see it. She looked at me and said, “Well you saw the real Hank
Williams once.”
“I what?”
“He came to Robinson Auditorium and your daddy took us all
to see him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You weren’t but about three or four.”
From all accounts, he was sober for that performance. It was
a Sunday I think. Daddy remembered Hank saying of the song “My Bucket’s Got A
Hole In It” that it “ … has been buying a lot of beans for me and the boys
lately.”
I wish I could say I remember it. I do remember seeing those
giant (fake) columns at the front of the building, and if I allow my mind to
run wild I can conjure up the image of a man with dark circles around his eyes
singing away. That may be pure imagination. At any rate, I can say I actually
saw the man. I suppose if he had been armless, I might have a stronger recollection
of it.
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| A life much too short |
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