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360 The Kentucky Anthology Billy C. Clark “The Fiddle and the Fruit Jar” Billy C. Clark was born in 1928 into a mostly illiterate family of eight children near the junction of the Big Sandy and the Ohio Rivers at Catlettsburg. As he once wrote, “In nineteen years of growing up in the valley, hunger was my most vivid memory and an education my greatest desire.” In A Long Row to Hoe (1960) he tells his growing-up story through high school. Despite the straitened circumstances of his boyhood, his memories of struggle and survival are warm and gratifying. It was a boyhood that he would not have swapped with anyone. After high school, he spent four years in the military during the Korean War; he then enrolled at the University of Kentucky, where his writing teacher, Hollis Summers, told him, “You are the first natural-born writer I’ve ever met,” and cautioned him against being influenced by the class. Fortunately, Clark kept his vision and his style and continued to write such books as Song of the River (1957) and Sourwood Tales (1968), which depict the life and lore of the Big Sandy region of northeastern Kentucky.This story from SourwoodTales is about family love and his father’s battered old fiddle. h Pa’s fiddle hung in its case from a rusted nail on the wall of the bedroom. This had been its resting place since the day he and Ma had first gone to housekeeping in the valley of the Big Sandy. And through the years it had remained the only competition that my mother ever had. I say competition because it was often declared here by the hill folk that a fiddle player had a wanderer’s foot. You could not change the ways of a fiddle player. Ma knew this. And so as a young bride she allowed the fiddle to become a part of their marriage. In all of Pa’s travels over the valley the sweet music of his fiddle would be loved the most at home. Ma presented him with eight children, more than a good set for a square dance, and in all the years of our growing up I’m sure that the fiddle never caused her a jealous moment. After Pa came home from work at his small cobbler’s shop we used to gather in the center of the floor and wait for the music of his lonesome fiddle. We learned early that there was a story in each of his ballads. We couldn’t afford books, but we learned to read each pull of his bow as if it were a printed page. Each night ended the same way, with the eight of us quarreling for Pa to play a different ballad. And always Ma would scold and threaten to have Pa 360 Billy C. Clark 361 put the fiddle back in the battered case. Afraid he might, we quieted as Pa pat-patted his foot and struck up an old familiar song . . . Ma’s favorite. He was sure to play this song as soon as a frown touched Ma’s face, grinning and bringing a smile back to her face. The song was a ballad of love, so bold that it made my older brothers and sisters blush. I was too young to understand love. I liked to hear Pa play it simply because it brought such smiles to Ma’s face, and gave me courage to argue again for my favorite song. By the time I was old enough to really know my father he had fiddled his hair white to match the white pine rosin dust that his bow had left under the strings. The fiddle had traveled with him over every foot of the Big Sandy country; to square dances where feet flew into the air like brown leaves in an autumn wind; to funerals where his fiddle hummed of death; to holy baptizings in the waters of the Big Sandy River. There had been ballads for all occasions. Pa had gained the reputation of being the greatest of the “oldtime fiddlers” among the hills of Kentucky. But now white-haired Pa was farther away from his fiddle than he had ever been. Only his dreams could touch it as it hung inside the battered case on the wall. He was bedfast from a stroke, the third within a year. He lay quarreling over the doctor bills coming, saying Ma needed the...

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