Read Online Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell - Free Book Online
Authors: Rodney Crowell
Ads: Link
songs than anyone I’ve ever met. His repertoire numbered literally in the hundreds, songs by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Gid Tanner, the Louvin Brothers, Jim Reeves, Ernest Tubb, Johnny Horton, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, Harlan Howard, Dock Boggs, Bashful Brother Oswald, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family, Grandpa Jones, Little Jimmy Dickens, Buck Owens, Woody Guthrie, Appalachian dead-baby songs, folk songs, cowboy ballads, Negro blues, gospel songs, talkin’ songs, train songs, songs about cocaine and murder, jailhouses, froggies that went a-courtin’, rosewood caskets, holes in the bottom of the sea, and love letters in the sand.
The Saturday night Grand Ole Opry on a neighbor’s dry-cell radio, local barn dances, his own father’s front-porch performances—that was the extent of his access to popular music. But lack of exposure to the outside world did nothing to hamper his ability to accrue words and music. He possessed an ability to absorb songs from the atmosphere. If he heard a song once, he knew it forever. Such was his gift.
My parents met at a Roy Acuff concert held in the Buchanan High School gymnasium in the fall of 1941. According to my mother, some ill-mannered farm boy had placed a grimy paw in the vicinity of no-man’s-land. Worse yet, his slobbering advances were ruining her concentration on the show. In perhaps his first act of chivalry ever, my father came to Cauzette’s rescue, challenging the boy to a wrestling match after the show.
With a showdown looming in his near future, the offender of my mother’s virtue turned his attention to a consideration more important than the harassment of innocent girls: liquid courage. A challenge to his manhood warranted some serious drinking in order to ensure a victory come wrestling time, so the boy disappeared into the woods with a quart jar of homemade liquor.
Free to enjoy the show, my mother was faced with an even bigger distraction. “It was like nothin’ else was in the world but your daddy,” she told me. “I knew it right then and there he was the boy I was gonna marry. I went home and told Momma I was. I loved Roy Acuff, but I couldn’t hear a word he was singin’ after your daddy showed up. Your daddy was good-lookin’, and he stood right up to that other boy. Turned out he didn’t have to go wrassle after all. That other boy got so sot-drunk he was off pukin’ in the woods when it come time to face the music. I got walked home that night by the sweetest boy in the world, and I ain’t even thought about another man since.”
Cauzette
I n 1924, Buchanan, Tennessee, was little more than a primitive Christian outpost in the heart of west Tennessee farmland. Owing its lifeblood to a red-dirt crossroads a mile south of the Kentucky border, this sharecrop populace boasted the Shady Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery, a one-room schoolhouse, and a country store. But for a single gas pump in front of the latter, there was little to suggest that the twentieth century was nearing the end of its first quarter. My mother was born in June, the seventh of Solomon Taylor and Katie Lee Willoughby’s eight children. Addie Cauzette arrived with the right side of her body partially paralyzed, the result—according to an old country doctor who didn’t examine her until she was three—of a stroke suffered in her mother’s womb. So from before birth, a pattern was set by which polio, acute dyslexia, epilepsy, the sudden death of an infant son, and a subsequent case of whacked-out nerves would join the lengthy list of maladies assaulting young Cauzette well before her twentieth birthday. In the seventy-four years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called “this crooked old Earth,” my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn’t fair for this awkwardly glib yet deeply religious woman would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival. Thanks to this primal urge to thrive, she
The Saturday night Grand Ole Opry on a neighbor’s dry-cell radio, local barn dances, his own father’s front-porch performances—that was the extent of his access to popular music. But lack of exposure to the outside world did nothing to hamper his ability to accrue words and music. He possessed an ability to absorb songs from the atmosphere. If he heard a song once, he knew it forever. Such was his gift.
My parents met at a Roy Acuff concert held in the Buchanan High School gymnasium in the fall of 1941. According to my mother, some ill-mannered farm boy had placed a grimy paw in the vicinity of no-man’s-land. Worse yet, his slobbering advances were ruining her concentration on the show. In perhaps his first act of chivalry ever, my father came to Cauzette’s rescue, challenging the boy to a wrestling match after the show.
With a showdown looming in his near future, the offender of my mother’s virtue turned his attention to a consideration more important than the harassment of innocent girls: liquid courage. A challenge to his manhood warranted some serious drinking in order to ensure a victory come wrestling time, so the boy disappeared into the woods with a quart jar of homemade liquor.
Free to enjoy the show, my mother was faced with an even bigger distraction. “It was like nothin’ else was in the world but your daddy,” she told me. “I knew it right then and there he was the boy I was gonna marry. I went home and told Momma I was. I loved Roy Acuff, but I couldn’t hear a word he was singin’ after your daddy showed up. Your daddy was good-lookin’, and he stood right up to that other boy. Turned out he didn’t have to go wrassle after all. That other boy got so sot-drunk he was off pukin’ in the woods when it come time to face the music. I got walked home that night by the sweetest boy in the world, and I ain’t even thought about another man since.”
Cauzette
I n 1924, Buchanan, Tennessee, was little more than a primitive Christian outpost in the heart of west Tennessee farmland. Owing its lifeblood to a red-dirt crossroads a mile south of the Kentucky border, this sharecrop populace boasted the Shady Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery, a one-room schoolhouse, and a country store. But for a single gas pump in front of the latter, there was little to suggest that the twentieth century was nearing the end of its first quarter. My mother was born in June, the seventh of Solomon Taylor and Katie Lee Willoughby’s eight children. Addie Cauzette arrived with the right side of her body partially paralyzed, the result—according to an old country doctor who didn’t examine her until she was three—of a stroke suffered in her mother’s womb. So from before birth, a pattern was set by which polio, acute dyslexia, epilepsy, the sudden death of an infant son, and a subsequent case of whacked-out nerves would join the lengthy list of maladies assaulting young Cauzette well before her twentieth birthday. In the seventy-four years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called “this crooked old Earth,” my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn’t fair for this awkwardly glib yet deeply religious woman would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival. Thanks to this primal urge to thrive, she
Similar Books
