By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
This fiddle’s origin may never be known.
Long did Grandad’s fiddle hang on my mother’s living room wall. I could never walk by it without wondering . . . “What’s its story?”
Best I recall, my mother didn’t know its provenance, that fancy word for something’s origin. My mother, in a pleasant sense, lived in the past. She talked often of her family and upbringing in a remote part of Georgia. Well, remote back in the 1930s before men dammed rivers and paved roads and sliced up the land and the world came calling to buy lots.
One thing I recall is her memory of music. Someone in the Beulah Community of Lincoln County, Georgia, played the dulcimore. How I’d love to hear someone play that classic, “Wildwood Flower” on a dulcimore. The mountain folks, you know, harbor a deep love in their hearts for that stringed instrument some call the mountain dulcimer, the dulci-more as James Dickey pronounced it, the Appalachian dulcimer, the lap dulcimer, and in a burst of colorful vernacular, the hog fiddle, and that brings me back to the old fiddle that long hung on the wall.
Granddad’s fiddle has long interested me more than any musical instrument I’ve considered, including the brassy beautiful trumpet I played for eight years. Yes, I can read music, something Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and countless other music legends cannot do. Just goes to show that “learning” only goes so far. Talent, however, knows no limits.
If you know anything about the 1920s and 1930s you know that social occasions almost always featured local music. No records, no tapes, no discs, no streaming, just the music streaming live from fiddles, dulcimores, banjoes, and harmonicas. Sure sounds nice doesn’t it. So, could Granddad read music? I don’t think so, but he could play the fiddle. He was a tall man and in my eye I see him with that fiddle tucked beneath his chin as the bow goes crazy, and he hops around like that raging Cajun, Doug Kershaw, who could fiddle up a storm. Against a backdrop of hay in a barn and folks sitting around on crates and bales of hay I see Grandad prancing now as the “Orange Blossom Special” flies from his fingers or mayhaps it’s “Louisiana Man” or “Diggy Diggy Lo.”
But granddad’s fiddle, surely it wasn’t a Stradivarius? It has old F-holes burnt into its body, but it also has a homemade bridge. And the bow is bald, nary a horsehair, black or white, on it. Worn away at some point and never replaced.
My sister inherited Granddad’s fiddle, and she has plans for it. I have a grandson whose name is Benjamin Thomas. Thomas comes from me, and Benjamin? That was part of Granddad’s name. Cleborn Benjamin was his name. We call my grandson Ben, and Ben plays the violin in the Charlotte Civic Orchestra. We’re giving Ben Granddad’s fiddle, and I look forward to seeing it restored by a luthier who gives the bow fine-dressed black and white horsehair—black for lower string notes and white for upper string high notes.
I’ve seen Ben play and he is good. Very good. He plays a mighty mean “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and lustrous symphonic music, too.
It comforts me to know the fiddle will remain in the family, but it brings up a shortcoming most families suffer. We fail to ask our elders questions about their lives because we are too caught up in ours. How I wish I could talk to my mother, dad, and grandparents one more time. I’d have a 1,000 questions for each and questions about that old fiddle. Other than that, I just have one troubling thought. Please don’t tell me that modern times have replaced horsehair with some kind of artificial strings.
God forbid they’re plastic.
