Anybody Shining by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Author:Frances O'Roark Dowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

“Idy, I won’t have you singing for them folks. They have come up here trying to change our ways to their liking, and I won’t put up with it.”

“They say they’re trying to preserve our ways,” Mama’s voice come in reply. “That’s why they want me to sing for them Baltimore people, so that they can truly know what mountain singing is.”

“Oh, they’re fine with our ways from a hundred years ago. It’s our ways of today they don’t like so much. It’s like we’re supposed to be froze in time. Don’t ever turn on the radio, they say, don’t ever read you a newspaper that someone brung over from Asheville. You might get corrupted.”

“Miss Pittman said you could play your fiddle, Zeke. Wouldn’t you like to play your fiddle for a crowd?”

“Not that crowd,” Daddy said. “They don’t know enough about fiddle-playing to appreciate it. Besides, I’m tired of playing them old songs.”

“Yes, Zeke, but the songs you like so much are ones you learned off the radio. They ain’t our songs.”

“I make ’em mine by playing ’em,” Daddy argued. “They’re mine soon as they go in my ears and come out my fingers.”

“But you play the old tunes real pretty, Zeke. I bet folks at the songcatchers’ school surely would like to hear that. And maybe you could make some kind of trade with Miss Keller and Miss Pittman. Maybe you could play some new tunes after you got done playing the old.”

There was a stretch of silence after that, like Daddy was pondering. Me and James looked at each other. We was dying for Mama to sing, and it would make us proud to hear Daddy play in front of them Baltimore folks. Maybe if all went well, Daddy would let us go to the settlement school now and again after we got done with our chores.

“Idy, I will tell you what,” Daddy said finally, and by this time, even old Lucille was up and leaning her ear against the door. “I will make a trade. You can sing at the songcatchers’ school if them two ladies will come to a barn dance of a Saturday night.”

“Consider it done, Zeke Sparks!” Mama exclaimed, sounding livelier than I have heard her sound in some time.

I don’t know that the songcatcher ladies will be as enthusiastic about this trade as Mama seems to think. I can’t quite figure them out when it comes to things changing and things staying the same. At the settlement school, they teach folks new ways of cooking and farming and cleaning up a home and tending to the sick. So they favor some new ways of doing things, and don’t mind changing us mountainfolk in those regards.

But I heard Miss Keller once say she wished the Sears and Roebuck catalog had never made its way to the mountains, because people were abandoning the homemade and traditional for store-bought.

I don’t know why this bothers Miss Keller so. Daddy ordered Harlan Boyd a guitar from the

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