Now & Then Musical instruments make life interesting

Today, when music players are going electronic and digital, some people might wonder what there was to do back in the days not so long ago when most people didn’t have electricity in their homes, when electronics hadn’t been dreamed up yet and when digital was for mathematical types who talked about base-two numbers. Well, one of the things there was to do was to play a musical instrument. We didn’t have electrified musical instruments, but the old instruments made music very well, and lots of fun was to be had.

The first musical instrument in our home was an old Ellington upright piano, built around 1920.

My dad’s grandfather and grandmother Holcomb at Elm Springs had the piano before us, and Dad and Mom got it before I was born. My mother began playing piano as a little girl, growing up in 1920s in the Valley View community between Pea Ridge and Bentonville. In those days, Albert E. Brumley was composing songs and playing music all around southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas. He played for singings at Valley View, and Mom was enthralled by his freewheeling style, the runs, improvisations on the fly and playing all over the keyboard. Momshaped her own playing by listening to Albert E.

Brumley.

A second musical instrument I remember in the family was my Grandpa Clement’s fiddle. Grandpa Burton “Curly” Clement was an old-time fiddler. He would strike up “Turkey In the Straw,” “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain” or the “Arkansas Traveler.” He could play quite well, even though he only had two fingers on his left hand. He had lost the middle two fingers in a saw rig accident. He used to saw wood for people using an old saw rig with a hit-n-miss engine turning a long belt and a circular blade at the back. One day he got his hand in the saw, and lost two fingers. But he could still finger the fiddle with his first finger and the little finger. My uncle Charles also played the fiddle some,but he passed away in the mid-1960s, and Grandpa’s fiddle passed to my mother. She later gave it to me. It still plays pretty well, but it plays better when somebody other than me has hold of it.

My great-grandfatherJohn W. Nichols and family had an old cabinet style Edison record player, made in the 1920s. It played round disk records about a half inch thick, using a diamond-pointed needle and a large bell-shaped horn to amplify the sound. The sound was (and is) a little scratchy, but was amazingly strong and effective despite not having electric sound amplification. The player and the old records still play OK even today. I remember as a very little boy, when we went to Aunt Anna’s house, I always wanted to crank the Edison, to wind the drive spring and then to hear it play music. I did lots of asking, but I learned soon that asking too much might get my request turned firmly down. I had to ask politely, without pleading, or there would be no music.

Around 1950, my folks bought “us” a guitar. The guitar has been part of my life ever since. The first time I ever played in public was for a Christmas program at church. I learned to strum chords in the key of G, and I strummed while my family sang a Christmas carol. I later learned to pick out a few tunes on the guitar, and still later I tried to play like Chet Atkins.

That was an ambition that fell short. I never learned to play nearly as well as Chet Atkins. I like to play secondwhile someone else plays piano, violin, accordion or mandolin.

Also, in the early 1950s we came to have a mandolin. I think my dad may have suggested buying that. At least in the beginning, Dad wanted to learn to play it. He ordered a set of mandolin lessons from the U.S.

School of Music. I wish those old lessons had been preserved, but they have been lost over the years.

As I recall, we all tried the mandolin, and I still love it today. My dad’s efforts on the mandolin didn’t pan out quite as he had hoped. Dad had large fingers, and even though strong fingers are an asset on the mandolin, large finger tips can be a problem. He would open the lesson book, look at the chord pattern pictured on the page, and try to get his fingers into position.

Finally, after he found that his fingers wouldn’t fit the strings even if he took his right hand and tried to force his left-hand fingers into place, he said maybe I better just stick to tapping my feet!

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 05/12/2010