Monday Memories

How does one stay as busy as I at my age? It’s not hard. Just quit saying, “no.” Actually, I sort of like it. I pass a golf course every once in a while and ask myself, “What the hell?”

One of the things that keeps me busy is my continued relationship with Arkansas Municipal League. Not only are they fine people who do good work, but they pay me to visit some of the finest cities you can imagine. This week, they are paying me to go to north Arkansas and visit with the folks at Eureka Springs, AR. Going there, I get to pass through some towns where I’ve worked, including Harrison, Berryville, and Green Forest.

Harrison was the first vacation destination for our entire family, along with my Sainted Mother’s brother’s family. We took it when my little brother got old enough to travel, a long time ago. I can still remember, as we flatlanders hit the hills, my cousin JoAnn (Harris) Jacks singing “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain.” Good memories.

Berryville fostered a folk song based on a self-initiated travesty many years ago. Seems a prisoner in the town's old wooden jail devised an escape plan that involved setting his bunk afire without realizing that the entire local law enforcement group was off with a posse, I still remember the line from a tape I heard in college: “I’ll weep and wail, in the Berryville jail, Carroll County, Arkansas.”

But it’s Eureka Springs that can make my heart beat a little faster. That’s where my first serious girl friend was raised. Her name was Margaret (Moke) Hull. She stole my heart and I didn’t get it back until Brenda Cole sashayed by me in a parking lot in Little Rock eight years later.

In the interim, I passed Moke’s childhood home on a business trip to Eureka Springs once and saw her parents sitting in their front yard. I couldn’t help but stop and visit. They were kind enough to say that they might could have remembered me were they younger. "Mokie" achieved a PhD after she saw through me and practices somewhere in New York City. So much for common dreams. Things work out for the best. My clearest memory of Moke was of the time she and a college friend dressed in their best plaid skirts and silk blouses and performed Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve Been Doing Some Hard Traveling” at a gathering during the folk music craze of the 1960s. I don’t know why, but I still think it was kinda funny. I mean, hard traveling?” Really? Well, it was the 60s.

Anyway. I’m gonna have a fun week. Hope you do.

Ahh. Going to Eureka Springs.
Tough job, but somebody must.

Balance

Do things ever ooze into your head and refuse to leave? For me, it often relates to folk music. There was quite a craze about it in my developing youth. I’m talking about real folk music, not the stuff we sometimes call it these days. As explained in a Library of Congress publication:

“Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.)”

These ballads moved from place to place, even from continent to continent. Sometimes wandering minstrels altered them to fit local traditions.

Anyway, there is a type of folk music referred to, if I remember right, as “recognition ballads.” The protagonist wanders off one day, or is impressed to sea, or lured away, or simply forgets about things as men still do. He’s gone for years and, upon return, his true love doesn’t recognize him. Nobody does. His true love may have married, may have killed herself from lovelornness, may have lost interest, may not believe him, or suffered from a lack of ardor. There are countless combinations permutations. Sometimes, he reveals the truth and the listener imagines what occurs after the denouement.

These were songs from olden times. I don’t recall hearing one in which the long-suffering true love welcomes the wanderer in and introduces him to her wife, Sally Ann. That would have spiced up the old minstrel’s life, eh?

These were also times before cameras or video phones. How the hell is a poor girl, whose true love left to go a’whoreing 20 years ago, supposed to remember how he looked.

It’s interesting to think about such anonymity. You could just disappear. Click off. Đi-đi mau Vamoose, Geh weg. Nobody would know a thing about you. Or care.

It’s a lot different now. For example. I was just thinking of a two-inch Forstner bit I need for a little project I’m doing for a friend. Having said that, by the time I visit social media again, I promise you that there will be a dozen ads for the bit on my computer screen.

I don’t think I could slip out and come back as a mysterious stranger. It seems that the universe demands balance. We give up our privacy but gain ease of spending money on things. We sleep in a warm room on a full stomach but worry about water damage each time it rains. We use individual motorized vehicle for even small journeys but our eyes sting, and the Earth melts from the pollution they cause. We can keep up with the news constantly, but we find it harder and more frustrating each day to know the truth. Here's an old Carter Family song of hope based on the recognition theme and performed by Doc Watson and family.

It’s pleasant to think I still can recognize my wife, and that she recognizes me when she wishes. Wait here while I go wake her up and find out for sure.

Don't get me started: Good souls ...

After a rain-soaked weekend, one can almost hear, of a Monday morning, the collective groan of folks going to work. It reminds me of the words of Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Over the years, we tortured poor Thoreau until his words were quoted as, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

Actually, I’m not sure that I “agree 100 percent with his police work,” in either case, to borrow a quote from Sheriff Marge Gunderson of Brainerd, N.D.

I’m afraid there is a tendency for us to assume that having great “songs” inside us must demand that one have a great position in life. I’m afraid there are souls from the highest skyscrapers in Manhattan that not only lead lives of quiet desperation, but could only spew songs of imbecilic ineptitude. Just read today’s newspaper.

Conversely, I have the singular honor of having known, once, a beautiful soul named Almeda Riddle who had so many wonderful songs in her heart that one could hardly count them. Born in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she received a welcome in such far-off places as the hallowed halls of Harvard University. This was back in the days of folk music, a time I miss a lot.

She could be “misunderestimated,” as all wondrous souls are. Once, after appearing at a Folk Music concert in Little Rock, a “journalist,” having expected, I suppose, to see Joan Baez, or Joni Mitchell, gave Almeda’s reedy voice a scathing review. There was a great scurrying next morning by her hosts to hide the trashy review from her. As far as I know, she never saw it.

At party back then, fueled by a tragic volume of alcohol, I was induced to play “The Wildwood Flower” for her and even to sing along with her heart-piercing voice. She took it in stride like a true saint. She’d heard worse, I imagine.

But as for me, I would not trade that moment with “Granny Riddle," for days with the “beautiful people” who are writhing in the fetid swamps of America today, dominating the headlines from cold hearts and empty souls.

To have known her is a song in itself.

Morning Thoughts: January 7, 2018

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.