Typing vs Reading Music: Clash of the Titans

There was a Clash of the Titans when I was younger. My mother decided that piano was in my future. Thompson's Piano Series #1

Betty Paris was a friend of my mother's and a piano teacher. Her kids were playmates. I did not think it would be cool to take piano lessons from the mother of friends... so I didn't.  Oh, I showed up after school on Best St, a 20 minute walk from school once a week. I went through the motions, but only learned the last song in the book, "Ode to a Wigwam" . I learned the last page  that after 4 weeks.

I played in the high school band. They wanted me to play the tuba  because I was big enough to carry it around.  I wanted to be part of something that didn't have R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officers Training Corp) attached to it. It was a required course in high school during the Cold War days. You could, however, learn to march in the band. I guess that was the prevailing industrial/military adult logic in 1955.  We could march to the train station and play while they loaded up everybody to go get shot at.

I played AT the tuba. I never learned  read music...I just memorised the piece by ear. I got caught a few times playing something that wasn't on the paper...not that it was wrong, it just wasn't on the score...a BIG "no no" in band competitions. The way to the door was being discussed...and I did not want to learn to march in ROTC style. Everybody my age knew Military Ball Queens ain't as cute as Majorettes!

 I decided football might keep me out of ROTC, and, seeing football started before school started,  I would be playing FOOTBALL before the ROTC radar picked me up. It worked, but presented another set of problems for my teen aged, acne-ridden angst self. I DID NOT have the killer instinct...horrors!

I thought it sorta' funny when somebody blind-sided me..I did it to other people... turn about was fair play.  The coaches did not find the humor in my being blocked out of a play. I was the cause of game winning touchdown once. I ran many a lap to attone for my slovernly ways. The coaches never forgave me! I keptplaying 'casue I had seniority, and  because their wasn't anyone else to play my position who wasn't in the 8th grade.  I have always thought that people getting all fired up and screaming at the top of their lungs at a pointy ended ball was a little strange, but it kept me out of ROTC. i guess coaches get excited cause they don't want to be fired and then rehired by a C class school in a small town below the "gnat line".

I never learned to read music out of stubbornness. I never learned the football " play book" because I really wasn't interested.. Why did I learn to type? I don't know, honestly. It was a high school elective class. I took it instead of shop 'cause my girl friend at the moment was taking typing?  However, if you do something for 42 minutes a day for a year you,  you learn some of it...just enough to pass the class.

 I sorta' wish I'd learned to read music  rather than  type, but then this blog would be impossible hunt and peck. I like to compose, or "write songs", as people say now. Everybody with a guitar is a singer/songwriter. The reason for wanting to learn music is knowing how to write music down. I  try to remember how something I thought of yesterday on the tractor sounded. All I get is tractor noise.

Sloane Staggs, a wonderful old friend and mandolin player from WV, was a butcher. He wrote tunes for mandolin, and to remember them, he put a piece of red butcher paper up on the wall of the shop . When a tune came to him, he would notate it on the paper and take it home to work out on the mandolin that night. I still play a couple of his tunes...and remember seeing the "shaped notes" on the butcher paper.

I can now type song lyrics on the computer, save them to a file, edit, print, and get 'em back anytime I need them, as long as the system doesn't crash and I pay the electric bill.  I still have to keep the tunes on tape, or in my brain...or in my guitar.

 Notes would be better! Maybe I should have just learned  to do both, type and read music. I might have had to take ROTC...bummer. I  might not have played football...no biggie. I might not have learned to improvise on the TUBA...

Hmmm, reckon I could learn to read music at my age? Or maybe a program on the computer that will transfere melody to note...I'm looking, any suggestions?

My Music Buddies Vol. 1-1: Ricky Lee Roberts

I told you guy that once I started this nonsense I'd start posting a few music things.

I have played over the years with a bunch of unsung GREAT musicians who live on the underbelly of the beast rather than fighting the system set up by the money machine.

Ricky Lee Roberts, his brother Randy and I had a couple of bands in West Virginia. The first was The One Night Only Band...the last the Hooker Holler Symphony.

I found Ricky Roberts just out of High School, just learning to play fiddle and mandolin. I had advertised in a local paper for old musical instruments...Ricky and his brother Randy were the first to call...they had the 30's style Sears and Roebuck instruments that fit perfectly into the poplar music of West Virginia economics of the time...I had a boat load of those myself!

Ricky is a natural musician.. He can play a tune on anything from a penny whistle to a Sitar. He once had a audition with Emmy Lou Harris, has taught in a number of music camps, and played behind chicken wire in more bars that I have ever been in, although we played a few in the 70's, he's still doing it! Yes, folks those places still exist in America!

It has been "told" ,as they say up in the mountains, that one member of the family in a generation get "the gift" of music. Ricky was the one in his generation. Allan Jabbour documented the Hammond Family of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, in a wonderful collection of stories, photo, interviews and tunes. I think it was Rick's great grandfather Manson Roberts that married into the Hammond family. He was a fiddler as is . Rick's Uncle Ralph, who in his 80's "still scratches around".

All things come to Ricky Lee Roberts. Instruments just found their way to him...a Gibson F2 mandolin, a D-28 Martin guitar, fiddles from antique shops and where ever they lay, and countless other instruments with good pedigrees just happened to Ricky...instruments know! Rick found an old Maybell mandolin in an abandoned house...just called to him..."here I am". His SS Stewart Special Thoroughbred banjo just jumped in his hands for a couple hundred bucks. All good instruments seek him out, I'm telling you.

Ricky moved up in Hooker Holler, Keyser, WV mid seventies, moving into our "canvas" apartment (pop up camper) in the back yard. I had part time work and  Ricky was full time practicing to become a musician. He got up at 8:30,  had coffee, and began his practice regimen with an hour on the mandolin, an hour on the fiddle, the same on the guitar, and picked up bass on the side.

He could learn any song in about as long as it takes to sing it once, and could play it on all the instruments as well. The whole process was repeated after lunch and an hour nap. We practiced an hour or so a night most nights. I went to sleep listening to Ricky playing on the front porch swing. I'd wake up in the early hours of the morning and he would still be playing.

Rick and I did school programs, a curious blend of folklore...songs tunes and stories...designed for elementary and high school audiences. During the summer? what ever, where ever at least three to four days a week. We played a lot of music and had a network of pickers who visited regularly on the "music quest". Some even went on to become solid citizens and wonderful musicians...like Rick.

I remember driving to some gig  with Ricky sitting in the backseat...he didn't care much for driving. He used that traveling time for practice and figured out how to  play Fisher's Hornpipe in every key as an exercise before we got to the job. I  learned to  play it in the key of D, if that counts.

I guess that Rick decided that music was his chosen calling. He moved to Nashville, and made a living on the under belly of the Nashville scene... I sorta' lost track of him...I think he did property management on the side. He hooked up with Roy Acuff's brother, and did an album with him. I remember him telling me they played for the Tennessee Homecoming Halftime show one year....

The old Hooker Holler Symphony did a vinyl in the mid 70's. It  was never released because us "hill hippies" were financially  embarrassment for a time. Wish I knew if the original 2" tape still existed...I doubt it.

We recorded  in a converted bread truck at my farm. Ricky did keep the out takes on a cassette. He put them on CD and sent it to me for Christmas one year...we were pretty good on the outtakes.

Rick is still living back in W Va now. He said it was a pretty to see Nashville disappearing in his rear view mirror. He plays with Mike Morningstar now. (pictured above with Ricky who is holding his mandolin). Mike and Rick have known each other since high school.  They stay busy all around Central W Va or anywhere they can get a job. I caught up with them on You Tube...

Played some good tunes and rode some long nights with them Roberts' boys in my time! Like to try them times again. I could do without the chicken wire and the shoot outs...but that's another story.

Me? A Bald Headed Hippie

 This picture typifies where I have spent most of my life being a bald old hippie. I belong there, I searched it out... it just felt better than anywhere else, especially towns and cities.

My daughter advised me that I was a bald headed hippie... by reading Omnivore's Delima. I'm sure she meant it in the nicest sorta' way. She wants to borrow the book from me. It'll scare the pee out of her, being the hard nosed emviromentalist that she is. It scared me!

I was reading the like of the Last Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening and a host of other "concerned youth" publications before she was born.

I was taking water samples of the upper Potomac River with a Hach water testing kit I spent 100 dollars on in 1973...only to have the EPA ignore our plea. We found the mill purchased a "permit to pollute". So yes, I'm guilty of being somewhat of an old, fat, bald hippie...

I actually earned the name "hippie on the hill" for refusing to use fertilizer on a garden that didn't need it. I am not a food snob, and definitely no a restaurant goer. I will eat most anything that don't eat me first. I've been  to pick morel mushrooms in the quiet, drippy, sunrise of an April morning in the mountains. I've frozen my butt of sitting in a tree stand to hunt the King's deer. Never like hunting, or butchering much, but it's part of the Omnivore's Delima. Again, an old bald hippie.

Meat is good, veggies are good, fruit is good, and all are better if you control where they come from, and how they are raised, which takes a little work and planing. This is not available to most of the American Public anymore...they are too busy trying to keep body an soul together financially. Even old hippies have that problem now days.

I'm big  old and fat...strong as an ox, happy go lucky, interested most everything except modern culture, sports heroes and movies. I can still work. I enjoy working the ground, making pottery, planting garlic and living with someone who shares the same values...an old bald HAPPY hippie.

Rivers are cool, springs are cooler. Water is not a right, it's a necessity that we all need to share...period.

Mountains shouldn't be torn down for coal. "Crime lights", or security lights are an American passion and paranoia. They waste of electricity that could save tons of coal a year. This statement is not aimed at anyone in particular...I just think motion lights are more effective and efficient that giving the power company 25 dollars a month to have a light come on at dark every night. How can one sleep with that thing shining in the window. Yeah, just an old bald hippie talking.

Don't like loud music...any songs with more than four chords are suspect. Stories are good, TV sucks, for the most part. Old people and their stroies are the best. Nothing like a rocking chair and a few old hippies to talk to. Guess I qualify.

 Red roses are nice but a field of Queen Anne's Lace, Golden Rod, Iron Weed and Jo Pie Weed trump a rose every time.

Oh. by the way, I planted my collard plants by moonlight last night...I could see perfectly well. No smog. The plants were glad to get in the ground without frying in 96 degree heat on Sept 21. I'll have to shade them today...but planting at night listening to owls, crickets and some insect I never heard before was neat. Old bald hippies don't like to fry in the garden if they don't have to.

I guess I am an old bald hippie...I imagine the only difference in myself and the real 60's and 70's hippies is that Credence Clearwater Revival, Goose Creek Symphony, Ozark Mt. Daredevils and Taj Mahal were as close to rock and roll and psychedelia as  I ever got in W Va! I admit I did listen to the Beatles once, but I didn't inhale.

 Course the corn likker and homemade beer weren't THAT bad on Sat night. Yeah, old bald hippies celebrate Saturday night, not as late, or as boisterously as we used to! 

Food

I finished the Omnivore's Delima last night. I found it quite interesting. Zea Mays, (corn, to you) has gone from a "royal bastard" to conquering the world. NAFTA has sent enough cheap corn to Mexico to start another revolution by tanking their corn economy. I heard that on the radio  before I went to bed last night...I thought it was a drug cartel problem. Is their something ADM and Monsanto don't want us to know?

 I woke up to NPR, telling me of the war going on as to whether to label Salmon as genetically engineered fish flesh. Man, things go to hell in a hand basket overnight, don't they? Even in Danielsville, Ga.

The problem of industrialized food has become well documented. The problem of what is organic and how organic is it, has become a subject of much debate..."organic" this, "organic"that... who knew that additives are perfectly legal in "prepared" organic foods?

 Mama's 92, and I think part of her longevity  can be attributed to the fact she grew up on 'farm groceries". The whole family of 10 kids contributed to the feeding of a family. I planted buck wheat in my garlic platches this year, buying a 50 lb sack. I told her about plalnting buck wheat, and her first reaction was "Bring the sack so I can run my hands through it. We used to grow it and have a huge bin in the grainery full. I loved to run my hands through the cool kernels."

As a kid, we churned our butter, made cottage cheese, grew veggies, butchered our own meat when I was growing up in the 50's. That was 5 miles from the center of the University of Georgia...hell, you can just now start raising yard birds for eggs in you back yard in Athens, Ga now, so long as you don't have a rooster to wake the neighbor Hood.

I got a response on my post last night from friend, neighbor and blueberry grower. He let me in on the fact that Einstein has weighed on my story of the "solution to the problem  being more complex than the problem itself". Einstein said, somewhat paraphrased, " the same thinking that gets you into a problem cannot get you out of it".

Gonna' take a while to turn this food mess around, it seems.That's the  thought for the week on this beautiful Monday morning in paradise.

It's gonna' be 96 today. What's this? The 20th of Sept? The  beginning of fall! Ninety Six degrees!

The fashion market moguls ain't gonna sell any factory raised sheep wool plaids in Danielsville this month with these temps! Turn them sheeps out on the grass and contemplate global warming. Cotton fall fashions next year, perhaps?

Hay!

There is a law of something that pertains to the inability of man to bale hay...without the utmost frustration.

There is an  story of the farmer who joined the new world order by buying a tractor, mowing machine, rake, and shiny new HAY BALER. He abandoned his horse drawn mowing machine, horse drawn "buck" rake, and the horse drawn hay wagon and stout sons to stomp the hay around the hay stack. The cows could eat the hay from the bottom, and the hay would slide down the pole until it was all eaten. The horses helped eat the hay; their compenstation for devotion to the task of making hay...as if they had a choice.

The tractor ran fine, a shiny new Ford 8N, the 501 Ford mowing machine performed flawlessly. The rake raked the hay in long windrows. The baler, oh, dear friends, that evil invention, the baler! It started the days work picking up hay, stuffing it into the baler chamber where it was neatly chopped and packed  out the rear to the marvelous device called a "knotter". The knotter ties perfect little knots, rendering hay into small 50 pound packages to be stored in a hay shed. HAY SHED! Nobody said anything about a hay shed!Something else not need with the old system. Bales need dry storage...hay stacks just create their own thatched roof.

About 4:00, the knotter stopped tying the neat little knots on one side of the bales. All work stopped. After a very frustrating 30 minutes, a low rumble was heard in the distance. Rain coming. Hay in the field. Baler broken. No horses, just a broken baler that wouldn't tie...the neat little knot.

The farmer, in dispair, shouted to the heavens. "Sometimes the soulution to the problem is more complex than the problem itself...I'm just trying to get the hay in!".

This statement has been flung to the heavens by thousands, no millions, of farmers around the world who ever engaged in baling hay. That damn little knotter!

I flung stuff at the sky a few times in the last two weeks myself...but the damn hay is done! I guess horses and hay stack have their place...don't know that I'm capable of that technology anymore.

Thanks to the neighbor who has a new baler and a big heart!