I guess there at some things in everyone’s life they wish
they had taken advantage of once. One of mine had to do with hitchhiking. No,
it wasn’t the time I was picked up by three cowboys in Wyoming and invited to
go with them to Montana to work on a ranch.
Nah, it wasn’t that exciting. This happened when I was hitchhiking
to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, from Fayetteville, to see a college girlfriend who
had invited me up for the weekend. It was during the height of what we now call
“The Folk Music Revival.”
Someone had let me out in a little crossroads called Goshen,
Arkansas. I think it’s a bigger crossroads now, I don’t know. I lost both the girlfriend
and the urge to hitchhike about the same time.
I’m standing there when a thin little man comes across the
road to pick up his mail. He looked like he could have easily been the father
of Popeye the Sailor Man. We chatted. Somehow the topic turned to music and he
said that he was a folk-singer and banjo-player. My ears pricked up at this revelation.
He further stated that he had entertained many a college student in his home.
Allow a digression. In those days, there was a wonderful woman,
Mary Celestia Parler, who taught a course in folk music back in Fayetteville.
As part of the course, each student had to find an original folk singer or artist
and file a report on them. Her view was that, “if you throw a quarter anywhere
out in those hills, you’ll hit a dozen of them.”
As a result, folk singers and musicians were sort of the Boston
Mountain versions of rock stars.
Back to the side of the road. This cat, (oops, flashback)
uh, dude, uh, man pointed to his house, wrote his name and pone number down, and
invited me to come and hear him play sometime. I can’t for the life of me remember
his name. I’ll call him “Mr. Capps.”
Of course, I took him up on the offer. A friend had a car,
co we rounded up a couple of more aficionados, stoked up on whatever we could
afford, and “set-sail” for Goshen of a Saturday night.
Well, this fellow could play the banjo. Further, he
played it “clawhammer” style, or perhaps it’s sophisticated cousin, “frailing”
style. Don’t quite remember. What I do remember is that the first thing he played
was “Bluebells of Scotland,” a popular but not well-known ditty. But on that ancient
banjo in the hands of that sparse little man, it was one of the most beautiful
things I’ve ever heard. Hear a vocal version here.
Mr. Capps become a good friend and frequent guest at our impromptu
“hootenannies.” It wasn’t far to Goshen from Fayetteville. Someone would fetch
him and we would play until he got tired, which was usually long after the rest
of us got tired. He could always revive us, though, with “Bluebells.”
It all ended not badly, but sadly. Mr. Capps began to imbibe
a bit as the gatherings progressed, and, as gateway sins can do, his
transgressions escalated. After a few unsolicited and unwanted “touchings”
on some of the females of our group, he became uninvited and forgotten, by most
anyway.
I saw him later at a little event put on by some group. My
girlfriend and her friend were on the program. They sang Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve
Been Doing Some Hard Traveling,” which was odd in that neither of them, in their
matching sweaters and short plaid skirts, possessed any internal knowledge of
hard traveling of any sort, save perhaps a long walk to a particular class from
their sorority house.
Backstage, though, Mr. Capps professed to remember me and asked
why he didn’t see us anymore. I told him we had been too busy studying. I waited
for a lightening bolt. When it didn’t come, I asked him to do Bluebells of Scotland for me, which he did.
I never saw him again.
But how I wish I had borrowed a recorder and made one more
trip to the land of Goshen. Who knows? By now I may have been able to warm
someone’s heart with that simple little song, from that simple little man, in
that simple little place, in those much more simple times.
I think about that sometimes when I see these million-dollar
extravaganzas on TV.
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