Music Circles

When visiting my maternal half-sister this past spring, I started a recipe project using her mother-in-law's old handwritten recipes. While there, my sister showed me a large black case and said she believed it was my paternal grandfather's. When I opened it, I discovered an accordion.While my grandfather played the fiddle all his life and at least one of his uncles played the banjo for local dances in Western Kentucky, I did not think an accordion had anything to do with the musical influence on that side of my family. 

I have always correlated accordions with polka music and late-nineteenth or twentieth-century immigrants which does not fit with my paternal family's history whose roots go back to the 1700s in Virginia. I suggested instead that the accordion might have belonged to her husband's family instead as they immigrated much later from Poland. He did not recall it being part of his family either, though. I left the accordion there when I headed back home and put it out of my mind.

Over the next several weeks, my thoughts were preoccupied with the recipe project. Awakening early one morning, I wrote down several ideas about it and afterwards went back to sleep for another hour. Just before I woke up the second time, the words “a receipt for salve” bubbled up in my head. I pondered further and remembered I had found this old salve “receipt” (another word for recipe) my second great-grandmother, Martha Sizemore Hardy, had written. It was over twenty-five years ago that I originally found it in a cabinet at my grandfather's house in Kentucky and now have tucked away. While looking for that, I also found something that led me slightly off-kilter from my recipe project.

This something was in the form of song ballads written down by my great-grandmother, Alice Lovelace Hardy, and other family members during the time period of 1898 or so. Alice would have been a teen, just shy of 18 at the time. She was my paternal grandmother's mother who died in 1903 when my grandmother was ten months old. 

From left to right: Ruby Hardy Vaughn, Martha Sizemore Hardy, William Lewis Hardy,
Alice Lovelace Hardy (died April 1903), Amy Hardy Watts (born June 1902).

Having more curating experience than I did twenty-five years ago, I unfolded each page to place in separate page protectors instead of all folded together in one page protector as I had before. Yellow and brittle with age, some were just in pieces. I had kept each scrap because I learned early on that every little clue can be valuable when delving into history. After reassembling those old slips of writing, I discovered that at least two of them had the word “accordion” written at the top near the title of the song. Perhaps that accordion really might be something from my grandfather's.

Synchronicity is finding meaning in coincidences. What are the odds that these things would come together in just the right manner for me to make such a connection?

I looked online and found the website Accordion Americana. An article there entitled “A History of the Accordian in Americana Music” explains the accordion was invented in 1829 and came to North America early on. The article includes a photo of Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters with one of them playing an accordion. Also included in the article are early tintype photos from the 1860s and 1870s showing young girls posing with their accordions.

Wikipedia indicates that Maybelle Carter was originally part of the folk music group called The Carter Family who recorded music between 1927 and 1956 including the classic “Can The Circle Be Unbroken?” originally written in 1908. That's only ten years after my great-grandmother was writing down song ballads. The Carters originally hailed from Scott County in southwestern Virginia not too far from where my paternal family came from (in fact some kin settled there many years ago while my line branched over to western Kentucky). Wikipedia states the music from the Carter family had a profound effect on bluegrass, country, southern gospel, pop and rock musicians over the years. This was something I had also learned from a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio on the way back from visiting my sister (yet another coincidence). 

I thought about how the music from that era impacted the music I heard growing up. I pulled up the song “Jolene” by Dolly Parton on Youtube to listen to again. It is a hauntingly beautiful song reminiscent of these forlorn love ballads I now have in my possession transcribed by women in my family so many years ago. “Blown Away” by Carrie Underwood released in 2012 is another more recent one that comes to mind.

Compare those 120-year-old love ballads to my old notebook of song titles I tape recorded as a teen along with the lyrics to some of them neatly typed up. I imagine I was influenced by my father's early reel-to-reel tapes he had and the notebooks he similarly compiled. “Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast” was one song I remember my father listening to on those tapes. Daniel Boone recorded that in 1971.

Photo of a display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
(my brother's image can be seen reflected in the glass)

With that early influence, no wonder I was enamored of the music group Mumford and Sons when my daughters started listening to them when their debut album was released in 2009. Their genre is labeled under folk rock, indie rock and bluegrass. I recall hearing one of their songs for the first time when my middle teen daughter had it playing loudly one day while she was in the shower.

I can also juxtapose those song ballads with the song quotes written on pieces of paper and taped up all over the walls of my youngest daughter's bedroom during her teen years. And she was born one hundred years after some of these old song ballads were written down...

My youngest daughter and I, 2015