gasped. There it was: “lw-1919.”
“May I play it?”
He jerked his neck back, somewhat surprised, but with that much interest, perhaps this person did know how to play. “Sure. Try it out.”
Susan sat on a stool and played the banjo. Her fingering was good, but her intonation was off since it was a fretless banjo. She played “Sourwood Mountain” almost the same as Harry had played it moments before.
Meanwhile, Mac had returned from making reservations for dinner and stood, listening to his wife on a borrowed banjo. He hadn’t heard her on the banjo since last year. She had sold hers when her arthritis had gotten too bad to play. This was a much smaller wood-constructed banjo without the heavy resonator on the bluegrass banjo she had played. He didn’t interrupt her.
Once she finished, Harry reached for the instrument. He nodded appreciatively. “I can tell you play, but you aren’t used to this little gem with her unimpeded fingerboard. Where did you learn?”
“Music is in my family. I studied the violin when I was in school, but my, well, I was advised to learn how to fiddle. I pooh-poohed the idea until I realized the advice was right on and took up the banjo. My uncle Roby taught me then. By the way, this is my husband, Mac McBride.
“And you? You say your grandmother was the source of your banjo style and versions of ballads and folk songs?”
Harry nodded. “Yeah. She played on up till about a year before she died. When I was, what? Twelve, I guess. Dad learned from her, and the two would play together, switching off between banjo and fiddle. I don’t play the fiddle, but Dad still does at age eighty-seven. He can’t remember anyone’s name, but he remembers how to play his fiddle.”
“Does he live here?”
“In a retirement home in Tampa now.”
Susan snapped her blue eyes, trying to imagine the old man playing those old tunes perhaps the way her uncles would play when she was a girl. “I’d like to hear him someday, if I ever get to Tampa. So your grandfather, did he play as well?”
“He was out of the picture, I guess, before I was born. But Grandma said she learned from him. That’s all I know.” Harry acted as though he was getting uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation and feigned another appointment. “Nice talking to you, ma’am. I need to get going. Pressing matters.”
As Susan and Mac went their way, she said, “This might be an interesting honeymoon!”
Chapter 3
Luther
Willson’s Cove, North Carolina, October 1921
Music was practically what Willson’s Cove was all about. It was almost like an enclave of the Willson family; the clan had been there for several generations and were all kinfolk. There was probably no one, even in the extended family, who was not musical. Pickin’, singin’, and cloggin’. They did it all. Luther Willson was not only well-known for his great singing voice and picking the banjo—“banjer,” he called it—but his musical instruments were renowned as far away as Georgia and Florida for his superb handcrafted quality. He was a luthier extraordinaire.
*****
Luther picked up the small grip with the few clothes Susanna, “Zanny,” had fixed up for him. She was a good seamstress, and he could proudly wear anything she made for him. He would wear his suit and his snazzy derby hat.
He had crated up the instruments; six banjos and two fiddles were in a wheelbarrow that two of his children, Rancie and Harvey, took turns pushing.
As they walked along, Luther didn’t have much to say, but Zanny did.
“I’ll miss ye, Luther, this winter more’n ever.”
Zanny was beginning to show. She was carrying their ninth child, and it would be due before he returned in April.
“Too, the church is ’thout a preacher, and who’ll fill in the preaching each Sunday with ye gone? Who’ll be a-visitin’ the homebound, prayin’ with the sick? But the money ye kin make in Florida.” She understood that both with the sale of his instruments and the money he got from singing in restaurants and churches, they could not afford to do without. “Ye gotta go, Luther. I know it. It’s jes harder ever’ year.”
Luther looked straight ahead, and he put his hand over his heart. He readily told Zanny every day how much he loved her. She was a sweet, trusting soul. Seeing him leave was torture for her. Yet he knew that she would see to it that life would go on.
Getting to Luther’s destination was torture, too. The narrow-gauge railroad to Johnson City, Tennessee, then to points south: Chattanooga, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and on to Tampa and St. Petersburg. It was an agonizing trip, but he would make some money on his musical instruments; enough to send money back to Zanny and the children and have some left for his time in the sun. With his “weak” lungs, he would benefit from warmer weather of Florida. He wouldn’t need to hire a room. There were “friends,” he told Zanny. (But none he would introduce to his family.)
When Zanny tearfully, but without complaint, voiced her disappointment that he needed to be in Florida for six months, he shared his reasoning. “Why, Zanny, all them rich folks from the north winter in Florida. Half of the population in St. Petersburg are people with money to spend from their businesses up north. If I don’t take advantage of their desire for somethin’ new—they love mountain music—I’d be amiss. In the long run, it’ll mean more for you and the young’un. And another big reason, and I hate to admit it, I need the warmer weather for my health. This cold weather in these here mountains gonna kill me if I stay another year!”
Now he had to leave.
Five of the eight children still lived at home, and they went to the station with him, along with Luther’s dog, Dook II. They all formed a circle with their mother around Papa. He prayed with them, kissed the children, pulled Zanny as close as her pregnant belly would allow, and gave her that kiss that always welcomed him back, even if she had suspected his philandering. He boarded the train.
As the train pulled away, Luther saw Zanny scratch behind Dook’s ears as she watched the train. Little Delphy was in the empty wheelbarrow, and Harvey had already started to push her toward home. Not Zanny. She’ll watch until the train disappeared around the mountain heading down to Tennessee. He knew she would refuse to cry and hold her head high. He visualized her following the wheelbarrow and leading the other children on foot the three miles back to Willson’s Cove.
As they walked, she would point out different trees and quiz them on what they were. They would pick up the pretty leaves to keep so they could show Papa when he came home in the spring. They would dip them in hot “parry-fene” wax to preserve the color. They would stop by the spring house and pick up milk to take to the house, and when they got inside, she would give them milk and cornbread.
He could see her at night, every night that he was gone and after the children had gone to bed, reading her Bible and praying. Zanny’s not a good reader. I taught her to read and write, but she doesn’t always understand what she reads. Sticks to the Psalms, the book of Proverbs, and the Gospels. If Luther were to look in her Bible, he would see where teardrops had fallen on the pages of her well-worn King James Bible.
Zanny loved her family and her god. Luther knew that
