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Mandolin Dog days, flat heat, the sky tight as a Holiness tambourine. I am walking the road gouged out to make way for Saddle Ridge Acres and mourning the slaughter of timber, but someone down the bulldozed slope is striking true notes like fireflies in the August air. For troubadours of the courtly age this sound was a lute, a pear-shaped, four-stringed gourd to set the mood for chivalry and wit, but it picked up a set of shadow strings and outlived vaudeville irony, the sweet tremolo of parlor play, and ragtime just jaunty enough for cakewalks, till what I hear is the amplified flatback Orville Gibson gave it, an ebony bridge with bronze strings too taut to jump the nut, and this musician playing somewhere, I’m guessing, down by Buckle Creek, near the narrows where water rills quick and clear, is tuning to the seven-year insects resuming their shivaree in the evergreens, 87 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 87 not quite the holy call and response, but something secular and just as desperate. It’s a miniature instrument for delicate fingers strong enough to shiver a fret, and in this heat I drink it in like water from a mint spring as I remember how young Ricky Skaggs, already a picking prodigy and keen to blend gospel with his old-time riffs, asked Bill Monroe the secret to becoming a great player of the bluegrass mandolin, and the master looked hard into the sky’s mystery and back at the plectrum of tortoiseshell shaped like a deer tick in his fingers before he answered the boy: “Son,” he said,“you got to whip it like a mule.” And that is the fiery melody I hear over the cicadas’ amber serenade of breakdown, blues licks, and frantic reel. Even on this worksite the county fathers call progress, I bow to the enduring thirst for melody and thank a lonesome picker, as the full moon round as a cat-skin banjo sails over the remnant saw-toothed pines. For hopeful good measure and the ghost of harmony, I cut a shuffle step, kick my heels, and twirl in the rusted dust on the margin of this sleeping, mongrel world. 88 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 88 ...

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