My
father begged to take piano lessons when he was a boy, but his mother refused.
“Boys who play piano are sissies,” she said. Most everyone in rural Kentucky in
the 1920s and ‘30s agreed. Piano-playing boys grew into men who cooked, helped
with the housework and treated wives with deference. They were henpecked,
tied to their wife’s apron strings . . . sissies.
Not long after marrying my mother in 1938, he purchased his first piano: a used upright, hauled it home and began to play. He played by ear, but as his right hand quickly tugged a melody from the ivory keys, his left hand moved enthusiastically across the lower notes, keeping time with the pedal-pumping work boot with little connection melodically to the tune being played. The result was unique, strangely appealing, like the compositions by modern composers I would hear at concert halls later in life.
The desire to play struck him at odd moments: when he returned from a day of plowing crops on his Farmall tractor, hoeing the garden; sawing and hammering in his workshop. When the first notes echoed through the house, we children rushed to the piano and watched fascinated. He played Hank Williams mostly, some Glenn Miller, but always ended his impromptu recitals with “Down Yonder”. The song’s fast tempo excited the old upright: it fairly bounced on the floor.
My father never went to college, and making a living for a wife and ten children severely limited his options. He farmed, then worked at the uranium plant: quit when he realized it was a dangerous place to work. He started his own business hauling sand up a nearly perpendicular hill to the barn where he washed it in a machine he had invented. He delivered the sand to golf courses for sand traps and to contractors for building projects. Handicapped by the lack of demand for pristine silica sand in rural Kentucky, he closed the business, and worked in maintenance at the local hospital until he retired. He later served four years as county judge.
Projects flourished on the perimeter of his working life. The family farm straddled the New Madrid fault. He studied firsthand accounts of the devastating earthquakes of 1811-1812 that told of oil spewing skyward from cracks that opened in the churning landscape. He studied the farm's geology, deciding where lakes of oil might be hiding, organized a company, sold shares and drilled (unsuccessfully) for oil. He was convinced that a correctly designed magnet motor could revolutionize the world, but died – from cancer that may or may not have been triggered by his days in the uranium plant - before construction began on the Hadron Collider: a network of superconducting magnets that stretches 17 miles underground near Geneva, Switzerland and which scientists predict will reveal the secrets of the universe.
Down Yonder is a fine expression, a lyrical and very southern way to describe where someone or something can be found. It reminds me of the parade of unwieldy musical instruments my father hauled home and coaxed into song. They were a bother, too large to fit well in any room, a pain to keep clean, nearly impossible to move, but I now recognize their presence for what it was: magical, necessary, a gateway to a soul’s expression of itself.
I’ve owned a piano for 46 years, but try as I might, I have never been able to play “Down Yonder” quite as well as him.
Not long after marrying my mother in 1938, he purchased his first piano: a used upright, hauled it home and began to play. He played by ear, but as his right hand quickly tugged a melody from the ivory keys, his left hand moved enthusiastically across the lower notes, keeping time with the pedal-pumping work boot with little connection melodically to the tune being played. The result was unique, strangely appealing, like the compositions by modern composers I would hear at concert halls later in life.
The desire to play struck him at odd moments: when he returned from a day of plowing crops on his Farmall tractor, hoeing the garden; sawing and hammering in his workshop. When the first notes echoed through the house, we children rushed to the piano and watched fascinated. He played Hank Williams mostly, some Glenn Miller, but always ended his impromptu recitals with “Down Yonder”. The song’s fast tempo excited the old upright: it fairly bounced on the floor.
My father never went to college, and making a living for a wife and ten children severely limited his options. He farmed, then worked at the uranium plant: quit when he realized it was a dangerous place to work. He started his own business hauling sand up a nearly perpendicular hill to the barn where he washed it in a machine he had invented. He delivered the sand to golf courses for sand traps and to contractors for building projects. Handicapped by the lack of demand for pristine silica sand in rural Kentucky, he closed the business, and worked in maintenance at the local hospital until he retired. He later served four years as county judge.
Projects flourished on the perimeter of his working life. The family farm straddled the New Madrid fault. He studied firsthand accounts of the devastating earthquakes of 1811-1812 that told of oil spewing skyward from cracks that opened in the churning landscape. He studied the farm's geology, deciding where lakes of oil might be hiding, organized a company, sold shares and drilled (unsuccessfully) for oil. He was convinced that a correctly designed magnet motor could revolutionize the world, but died – from cancer that may or may not have been triggered by his days in the uranium plant - before construction began on the Hadron Collider: a network of superconducting magnets that stretches 17 miles underground near Geneva, Switzerland and which scientists predict will reveal the secrets of the universe.
Down Yonder is a fine expression, a lyrical and very southern way to describe where someone or something can be found. It reminds me of the parade of unwieldy musical instruments my father hauled home and coaxed into song. They were a bother, too large to fit well in any room, a pain to keep clean, nearly impossible to move, but I now recognize their presence for what it was: magical, necessary, a gateway to a soul’s expression of itself.
I’ve owned a piano for 46 years, but try as I might, I have never been able to play “Down Yonder” quite as well as him.
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