His name was new to me, and these many years later I have lost it from memory. He was a tall man, bowed but not bent. He wore bib overalls.. His long face was weathered. Thinning, salt-and-pepper hair was slicked straight back. His fingers were knobbed and gnarled, his few teeth badly stained.
In his rough hands the fiddle looked like something he'd picked up by mistake. When he appeared, the little pickup band went silent with something like awe. One of them bent to whisper to another. I caught only " .. thought he was dead." The tall man tucked the fiddle under his chin, and put the bow to it, and soon turned every head within earshot. The high, sweet music was pure as moonlight.
Wordlessly, one by one, the others joined in. The bass player first, softly, then the guitar, then the banjo, each finding his place and staying faithfully in it, so that what they made together was seamless and perfect -- and would be heard, we all knew, only once, in this moment they had conjured out of nothing.
We were in a vast Carolina pasture. It was my first fiddler's convention. My friend and I had gone on a last-minute impulse. Though we would have been horrified to hear it said of us, I think that in some corner of our minds we were city boys presuming to go and peer at the rubes.
However I found there a portal to a realm of art and culture that has fascinated me lifelong. From that muddy field I went on to learn about John and Alan Lomax, folklorists and musicologists who field-recorded thousands of American folk songs for the library of Congress and hugely affected contemporary music. (The FBI didn't like Alan Lomax's leftist attitudes and subjected him for years to one of their zany snooping enterprises.) I learned about such unlikely pioneers as Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who sang his way out of a Texas prison (pardoned by a governor who enjoyed his stuff) and may have single-handedly saved the 12-string guitar from fading into disuse and obscurity.
I learned about the songs people used to preserve the heritage they brought to America from all over the world. In some you could hear the skirling of bagpipes, in others the groans of slaves. Some were beautiful, some not. Some of the stories they told were uplifting, some not. But the songs and their stories were true, in the way that a thing is true if it says something right about the work and reward of being human.
I am in mind of all this because of the death of Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson, the North Carolina mountain man who exerted his own transforming influence on American music. He is remembered as a guitar stylist, and that he surely was, changing our very concept of the instrument and its uses. He is remembered as an exemplar of Appalachian roots music, and that he surely was, singing out the dignity and grace of a people subjected elsewhere to rude caricature.
But his music crossed many boundaries of style. In this he was an exemplar of more than lore and technique. In Doc Watson -- as in Leadbelly and many others -- the inborn genius of the man lay in his being a lens upon the alchemy of music in the human spirit.
We are creatures who gaze at stars and see faces in the clouds. And the music that comes down to us from always and everywhere tells us this one more thing about ourselves: No ghastly grief or trial has ever been able to make us into creatures who imagined to live without husbanding our memories, or without singing.
The novelist William Faulkner knew that art is a manifestation of the better parts of us. When he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, he spoke of it this way:
" ... I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
Music is also the poet's voice, of course. Doc Watson knew that high art in poetry and music may be found in cow pastures as well as concert halls. Thus, when he chose the inscription for a statue erected in his honor, it said: "Just One Of The People."
Yes, precisely.
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