The Eighth of January

“The Eighth of January” is an old fiddle tune. It’s the first substantial tune of any kind I ever picked out by ear. I was 14 and had been playing the banjo a few months. I stumbled upon the first 5 notes or so purely by accident, happened to recognize the melody, and was off to the races. “The Eighth of January” is the tune “The Battle of New Orleans” is set to. (I’m not sure, but I think the original tune, “Eighth of January”, actually commemorates the battle.) The fiddle tune is just played much faster.

Looking back on it, the banjo was another of the strange twists my life has taken. It was an odd choice for a city boy whose first 15 years were spent in a house almost devoid of music. (Sadly, this was true both literally and figuratively.) My absentee father had long since exposed me to music and I was fooling around with playing by the time I was 10. Playing music, though, wasn’t “just something we did” in my mother’s household. The banjo-blame lies squarely with Dad’s younger brother, who was an accomplished banjoist and took the time to point me in the right direction. Dad was also a culprit. He bought me a banjo. Additionally, I’d been to my first Bluegrass festival that summer and seen the great Bill Monroe on one his “on” occasions. I’d been to a few rock concerts prior to that, but rock-n-roll is largely devoid of the virtuosity and power that is commonplace in Bluegrass. Monroe’s show had a profound affect on me and still ranks among the very best I’ve ever seen in any musical genre.

Digging deeper, I believe a desire to please my father was instrumental in my taking up the banjo. He didn’t push me that way, but I knew it would meet with his approval, and approval was something I was desperate for at 14. Additionally, it provided me the opportunity to become “good at something”, and I was desperate for that too. I frequently practiced as much as eight hours a day the first couple of years I was learning to play. That was when my obsessive-compulsive tendency first reared its head. It’s also when I realized the secret to most anything worth doing in life is putting in the time to become good at it. A desire to excel at music was one of the things I used to justify my leaving my mother’s house and moving 400 miles away to live with my father when I was 15. The banjo shaped my future in both dramatic and subtle ways.

Hank Williams and Uncle Homer

The summer of 1976 found me preparing to enter high school and the ninth grade. Actually, I wasn’t preparing for it. It was just inevitable. I was probably nervous but I really don’t remember.

About the time my Babe Ruth baseball season ended my paternal grandmother’s Aunt Marion died. I didn’t know Aunt Marion. I lived in Mobile and she, like most of my father’s people, lived in Butler County, Alabama. My father came down from Memphis to take my grandmother to the funeral and I ended up going along.

There’s only one way to describe Butler County, and that’s rural. I’d been through there a few times over my 14 years, but never enough to forge anything remotely resembling a relationship. I wouldn’t have recognized any of my relatives from up there had I passed them on the street. Still wouldn’t. Such is the world I live in.

Only a couple of things stand out from that visit over 30 years ago. After the funeral, we went to visit “Uncle Homer”. He was one of my recently-departed grandfather’s older brothers and the physical resemblance to Granddaddy was striking. His wife let us in and chatted with Dad and Grandmama for a time. The old man never so much as acknowledged our presence. “Uncle Homer” was engrossed in a professional wrestling match he was watching on a portable black and white television. He spit tobacco juice in a coffee can. Part of me thinks he was playing a fiddle, but I’m not certain about that. From time-to-time he would roar with laughter at the antics of the fake wrestlers. He never looked at me. It was surreal. It may also have been alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, or dementia, but I hadn’t been introduced to those yet.

Later we went over to visit one of Dad’s cousins. He had a modern house and a bunch of hotrods all over the yard. While Dad and Grandmama visited with the adults, I adjourned to the bedroom of one of the kids who was about my age. We were both interested in music and swapped a few licks on his acoustic guitar. Peter Frampton was all the rage that summer, but my cousin had never heard of him! He’d never heard of any of the bands I was into. It’s entirely possible he’d never heard of rock-n-roll. For him, Hank Williams was still the one and only, even though he’d been dead since 1953!

You’d have had to have been there I guess.