Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

18. Scotty

? K < < E Scotty Every time anyone in the family is asked about Scott, it’s just like an awful flashback, like a Vietnam flashback. It was so sad. He was so talented. Lots of people say he was one of the greatest fiddlers ever—he just had a genius for it. I remember a time when he was a teenager. He had been out to watch some fiddle players in Washington, and he came back, and he was practicing those rolls on the fiddle bow. Momma said,”Lord God, Scott, where’ve you been? I was worried to death!” And Scott said, “I’ve been downtown, Ma. You don’t know what I’ve learned . . . that sound. But I can get it even better. I can double note it.” The learning just went on all the time. I heard something about this from a guy who was a Secret Service man. But at the time he was talking about he was a policeman. He said that Scott used to go out every night in the alleys when we finished playing in Washington. He would be going after bootleg whiskey. And he would play all night for the people who Scotty 124 / pressing on couldn’t afford to come into the club, mainly black people. My opinion, it was an equal thing. Because I bet it wasn’t only the whiskey Scott was after. Music professors are always talking about how important the African beats and rhythms are in country music, and I bet Scott was learning from those people. And playing for an audience like that, well it really draws the art out of you. The policeman said he and his partner would go there, not to arrest them or anything but just to listen to the music. From early on I knew that Scott had started drinking. He would vomit violently whenever he drank. One night, when he was young, he came home from playing some joint, and he had been drinking. The moon was out, full bright, and Momma was downstairs sleeping—after praying for hours for Scott to get home safe. I heard Scott out in the yard and I went out and helped him up to this old tree. He threw up for about an hour. I held his head, and then we got him quietly into the house to hide it from Momma. That’s how he died. He died in his own vomit. Some people thought Scott killed himself. That’s not so. Scott wanted to live too much. What happened was that he had been at Central State Hospital, the alcoholic ward. I remember me and Mommy had gone to see him and we took him some candy bars. Afew days after that, Scott got out of the hospital. But they had filled him up with Antabuse. Antabuse makes you very sick if you drink any alcoholic beverage. So Scott was staying at Donna’s house, and, well, he got ahold of some alcohol, and he got sick from the Antabuse. Patsy, who lived across the street, found him in a pool of vomit. He was unconscious . They took him to the hospital. They called me, but I wasn’t that upset because I had seen Scott sick before. I thought, Well I can go visit him later. So I left to go play a show. I stopped at a place on the road to call the hospital. And the person I reached said, “Scotty Stoneman? He’s DOA.” I said, “DOA? Is he all right?” And I knew what DOA meant, but I was just so shocked, it didn’t register. There was a silence. Then, “No.” But I could not get it into my head. And I went on, and I played half the show, thinking, Well, he’s DOA, but he’s gonna be okay. I just couldn’t imagine he could die. Not my Scott. My mother buried her son at forty years old. I looked over at her pressing on / 125 when she took that clump of clay and sprinkled it on Scott’s coffin. She kept saying, “‘Now go on, Scott, go on, just go away, go on, just go on.’ That’s the last words I ever said to my son.” She had said those words the day before he died. He had come over to the house and he was aggravating Momma like we all did, and she had said, “Now you just go on, go on.” A preacher came to Scott’s funeral and told us a strange story. He said that he was in the church the night before Scott died. He was working late in the office, and the church had been left open, which was very rare. He said he saw this young man come down the aisle and go to the altar and get down and pray for God in Jesus’ name to forgive him for all of his sins. It was Scott and he apparently almost went into a convulsion . The preacher said he’d never seen anything like it. He said, “Your brother Scott knew Christ before he died.” Scott carried a Bible for about two years. He had quit playing the fiddle, thinking it was his fiddle that was making him drink. He decided it was putting him in the wrong environment. So he stopped performing and started doing roofing. A friend was going to teach him. Scott said, “Aunt Roni, I got my hammer, I got all my tools, and I’m ready to go work today. I’m gonna really work hard, and I’m gonna keep this job.” But all of Scott’s buddies, people that Scott was trying to teach to play fiddle, they came over there. While he was up on the roof hammering, there was twelve of them, down below, and they were applauding Scott. He looked down, and he said, “What . . .?” And they said, “That’s for Scott Stoneman. We’re here to applaud Scott Stoneman on!” They were Scott’s people. If you saw Scott Stoneman one time perform , you’d be his people. If you saw him perform twenty or twenty-five minutes—even ten minutes, he was that great—you’d be his people. From then on, you would never forget Scott. People come up to me now: “I remember your brother Scott. Booooy, what a musician! What a showman!” Scott sang good too. But he was so brilliant on that fiddle. He would come, 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, knocking on my door: “Aunt Roni, can I come in and play my fiddle?” I’d say, “Well, the kids are asleep, but you can go right in there in the kitchen.” And he would play. It sounded like from outer space, he would get so far out. It sounded like nothing I ever heard before. 126 / pressing on So his “people” were mad at him. There he was hammering and ruining his hands. They were mocking him, trying in that way to get him to go back to the fiddle. Scott came in that evening and he said, “Mom, you know what they did? They ’plauded for me.” Momma said, “Well bless your heart, Scott. Just don’t pay no attention to them.” He said, “They’re embarrassing me, Mom. The boss of the construction said, ‘Why don’t ya just skip a day?’—since I couldn’t do good on the job with them ’plauding. But they told me they’re coming back every day.” And he just laid his head down on the table. So he quit after only working a few months. Now, I was on the road somewhere years later, and Benny Martin, the great fiddler, told me a strange story. “You know what sobered me up?” asked Benny. I shook my head. “Well, Scotty was my friend. We were rivals, but we were also friends. This is how I found out about his death. I had been out drinking a lot, was real drunk, and I went over to Dickerson Road, where this guy had a service station, which was also a bootleg joint. At that time Nashville didn’t have liquor by the drink, and you had to go buy your bottle. I knocked at the door, but nobody answered so I kicked the door open. There was a cot in the back room, and the guy was asleep on it. I kicked him and said, ‘Get up and git me a drink.’ Well, the man shot me in the foot with his gun. It was dark and he didn’t know it was me. I cried, ‘Jesus, you killed my foot,’ and the blood was flying everywhere. So I went into the bathroom, and I stuck my foot in the commode—it was filthy, stinking—and flushed it several times to take the blood away. “Afew days later I started having severe pain. Gangrene was setting in. I was still drunk, reeked of alcohol. But somebody took me down to General Hospital. They put me up on a gurney and the doc came in and looked at my foot. “‘Well, we can fix it, but you’re going to have to stay off it for awhile. What do you do for a living?’ “‘I play fiddle. And I’m damned good!’ “So the doctor says, ‘Well, that’s funny. We just took a guy right off this same gurney straight to the morgue. Was a fiddle player too. Scott Stoneman. You know him?’ pressing on / 127 “‘Scotty Stoneman dead?’ “‘We just got him off this gurney. We just now put some clean paper on it.’” And then Benny said to me, “I sobered up immediately and I wrote a song about it.” But I want to leave you with something sweet about Scott. This incident —I can see it now. I put myself in that one-room house, and it makes me want to cry. Well, Scott came in—he was young, fourth or fifth grade—and he said, “Aunt Roni, guess what? Everybody likes my fiddling .” “Yeah, that’s good, Scott.” Because we were kids. We didn’t pay much attention at that time to how good he was. And he’s sitting there at the table. He said, “I gotta practice my name.” He got a piece of paper, and he started practicing autographing it. He put lots of curlicues on the S.” “How does that look, Mom?” he asked. And then, “Look, Roni, ya see how I did that Y? See that S?” Signing his name. Over and over. And when he got it the way he wanted, it was like a piece of artwork. “Idn’t that good? Idn’t that good, Roni?” “Yeah, that’s good, Scott. That’s real nice.” The irony of it. Because soon all these sophisticated people would be showing up to hear him play. And there he was, working so hard learning to write his name pretty, like an artist, so he’d seem more worthy. I think that everybody ought to know about that, that Scott wasn’t all drink. He had ways about him that were so sweet. And he was lost, bless his heart. ...