My father’s legacy to me was complex. It didn’t include land and investments or stocks and vehicles. He was a skilled craftsman with wood and iron but there was almost no material evidence of his life passed on to me. A story his older brother, my Uncle Hattler, told me more than 50 years ago helped me to understand his endowment to me of a love of music and a proclivity for all-consuming embarrassment.
In the little Bosque County, Texas, schoolhouse he and my father attended, the new school teacher introduced herself and concluded with the news that she would be offering violin lessons in her home. I don’t think they were very expensive or Henry Norris could not have afforded them. Was it the instrument’s seductive call that stirred his heart or the charms of the lovely young teacher? One evening a group of young people from the school were gathered at the popular new teacher’s home, laughing and talking. The boys were showing off by chinning themselves on a doorjamb. My dad jumped up and grabbed the crosspiece above the door with both hands. He pulled up his body and released a thunderous fart. He dropped to his feet and without looking at anyone walked off into the night. He never returned to his violin lessons.
Although he never learned to play himself, the fiddle was a part of his life. His sister Odela married a fiddler and guitarist who played western swing with skill and flair. Uncle June would bring his music buddies to our home and they would play late into the night on the front porch. Daddy would sit in the dark and contentedly puff his pipe. As he worked around his shop Daddy could listen to Uncle June daily on local radio broadcasts playing with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. I recall the day I saw my dad unwrap a mail order book on violin construction. He read it avidly for days. He mused aloud about the acceptable tone woods. He salvaged maple from an old school desk. A giant fence post yielded clear-grained pear wood. I watched him sketch the form of the violin’s top and back on an opened brown grocery bag with a flat carpenter’s pencil. The construction took months. He held the finished instrument up to the light of his shop window and rotated it; his pipe was a small puffing engine. His excitement was palpable. To this day I associate the smell of tobacco with the fiddle.
It seemed for the first time he realized his instrument needed a bow to vocalize. He was able to create the wooden structure of the bow but he couldn’t find horse hair of appropriate length and quality. He finally accepted defeat and sought out the old fiddlers who congregated down by the willows near the horse traders at the First Monday Trades Day in Weatherford. The men seemed to be cut from the same cloth—tall, slender, dressed in overalls and sweat-stained fedoras with their fiddles tucked under their chins. Daddy purchased a slim bow of polished dark wood with white powdered strings.
Daddy stood in the doorway of his shop and drew the bow across the strings of his violin. The tone was wild and tragic—the cry of a redtail hawk, of a blue norther whistling through the bobwire fence. It was the song of a windmill that needed greasing, a gate in the wind, an inconsolable child. He found notes that struck the ear like drops of water hitting a skillet filled with hot bacon. He made the low strings growl like Old Rowdy guarding his ham bone. It was not musical. It wasn’t pleasant by any stretch.
I couldn’t read Daddy’s face. “I guess it needs tuning,” he said. He wrapped it in a piece of flannel cloth and put it away.
At some point in its history Daddy’s fox terrier chewed half the peg head off the instrument. Today it sits in my studio. What did Daddy feel when his creation would not yield the magic? He who could master anything if it were made of iron or wood? How would his life have been different if he could have played some of his pain and sadness on the fiddle?
I look at the crudely built instrument. Roughly finished by his strong hands. The peg head shows the tooth marks of the dog’s assault and I suspect no one would give it a second glance if they didn’t know its story. And I wonder if it will ever sing again.
Tony Norris will appear at Pickin in the Pines Bluegrass and Acoustic Music Festival this weekend at the Pepsi Amphitheater at Ft. Tuthill County Park. www.pickininthepines.org
