I do tend to think that there were more do-it-yourself entertainers in years gone by. Do-it-yourself music-making and other do-it-yourself entertainment are still alive today, but I’m thinking we could use more of it. We would be better off with more do-it-yourself music, art and writing, and more of entertaining ourselves by pursuit of creative interests and discoveries.
I am amazed at the availability of entertainment today, provided for the most part by technologies that weren’t available at all a generation or two ago.
Today, if people want to do so, they can spend every minute of the day with the sounds of canned music or talk in their ears. They can keep in constant touch with the world’s “noise.” They never have to spend time with their own inner thoughts. They never have to experience solitude.
They never have to discover if there is anything inspiring within themselves. Rather than discovering a depth of enjoyment and resilient durability within oneself, rather than exploring one’s deep inner resources, we have the capability these days just to ride the crest of the world’s noise waves like an empty bobbing bottle.
I suppose that for any of us, old or young, when entertainment is not readily available to us, we are more motivated to create our own. People in earliertimes could not rely on electronics for canned entertainment; there were no electronics. Only 70 years ago or so, most people in our area had no electricity in their homes. Nearly all the millions of people of the world who lived before 1945 got by all their lives without ever havinga TV, ever seeing a TV or even imagining a TV. But we shouldn’t suppose that their lives were dull. They found ways to enjoy life and living, ways to entertain themselves, without electronic gadgetry.
I never remember a time in our family when there wasn’t a musical instrument in our home. Our piano was just always there, in the corner of the living room. It was mostly my mother’s piano, but we kids started early learning little tunes on it, with Mom’s help. Even Dad would occasionally sit down at the piano and sound out chords. I don’t remember his ever trying to sing to his own playing, but he would sing with a group when we had visitors. Having some music, singing together with the piano, was just something we did when “company” came. The twopiano tunes I remember learning first were, “Jesus Loves Me” and “You are My Sunshine.”
A little later, when I was about 10 years old, the folks bought us a guitar. In those days electric guitars were only heard on the radio.
Today, our guitar would be called an acoustic guitar. It relied on the resonance of the body to strengthen its sound. There was no amplifier or speaker. Our guitar was a flat top design, with a large round sound hole under the steel strings. As with all steel-stringed guitars, getting started playing meant suffering through a time when your fingers were too sore to press the strings. But, the fingertipstoughen and the fingers become stronger. We first learned to finger chords and to strum the beat while we sang. Sometimes it was church songs, and sometimes western cowboy songs like “Home on the Range,” or “Red River Valley,” or “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” My first time to play in public was in a church Christmas program. I can’t remember the song.
We sang as a family while I strummed chords on the guitar. I only knew G, C and D7, but that was all our song needed.
A year or so later, Mom took an interest in the mandolin, and we bought one of those too. We all took a turn at learning to play it, and most of us learned to form chords on it. We never picked out tunes. We just played chords and sang.
My grandpa Clement, our mother’s dad, was a fiddler;
as was my uncle Charles, mother’s younger brother, and Uncle L.A., Grandpa’s brother. We didn’t learn the fiddle from them. I guess the fiddle was kind of off limits.
It was always put away until Grandpa or Uncle Charles got it out to play. A fiddle is like a mandolin, in that the four fiddle strings are tuned the same as a mandolin. But a mandolin has two strings for each pitch, whereas the fiddle has one; and a mandolin has frets, while a fiddle has none. Grandpa’s fiddle came down through the family, and I have had it since 1974. It still plays fine, if a good player gets hold of it.
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Editor’s note: 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.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 09/08/2010