Live, for One Night Only
When a novice midlife musician makes her festival stage debut on a homemade washtub bass, she learns a little about old-time music. And more about embracing imperfection.
Listen to this story: 18:01 min | read by the author
Tennessee poet Kory Wells | old-time music essay | embracing imperfection
In the shelter of the performers’ tent, the night is golden as a pound cake fresh from the oven, and just as hot. Above us, a trio of yellow light bulbs, supposedly less alluring to stoneflies and June beetles, bathes everything in a surreal, buttery glow.
A few persistent moths flit near the tent ceiling like shadow puppets. In the heavy air I catch a whiff of sweat and rosin, then funnel cakes, then Tennessee whiskey. In the aftermath of downpour and lightning, the air is supercharged with ions—and anticipation. Forty or more musicians shift and sigh. Our body heat and breath swirls above the straw-covered ground, a simmering that feels like someone’s lifted the lid on a boiling pot of beans. Every few minutes I remove my glasses and wipe away steam with the hem of my T-shirt—an all-cotton V-neck, my armor of choice against July in Tennessee. We’ve packed ourselves and our instruments so tightly I can barely lift my arm without bumping someone or something.
Under the tent, I don’t know where to look, whether to make eye contact, or whether it’s rude to gawk at another musician’s fretboard or headstock. What’s the protocol for an old-time string band competition under a rain delay? I keep stealing glances—at musicians, at instruments, at their road-worn cases covered in stickers. I want to remember it all. But when someone catches me looking, I offer a weak grimace—all I can manage because I’m damp and grimy and nervous as hell.
Tennessee poet Kory Wells | old-time music essay | embracing imperfection
Surveys show that almost seventy-five percent of all people fear public speaking. I am not one of them.
When I was only three, the story goes, my mother gave me one end of a knotted jump rope and told me it was a microphone. Rope in hand, I walked around our house trailer pretending to be a TV reporter, a radio announcer, a country singer like Dolly or Jeannie C. Riley or Skeeter Davis. I grew up to be none of those things, but in an odd combination of careers involving software development, teaching, poetry, and storytelling, I’ve engaged with auditoriums full of folks: engineers, senior refugees, Rotary clubs, risk managers, church ladies. Ask me to read a poem aloud or talk to a crowd about workers’ compensation insurance. I’ll gladly take the mic.
You may even have trouble getting it back.
I’d arrived at this roots music festival in early morning sunshine with a cooler of drinks and snacks. After setting up a shade tent with the help of my adult daughter and one of her friends, I wandered the grounds: a city park bordered by a walking path alongside a burbling creek. On the other side of the creek, a pioneer village cobbled together from log and clapboard buildings to represent—with questionable accuracy but good intent—the town’s beginning. Across all this space, a bustling, nostalgic scene: food trucks, craft booths, giveaways of popsicles and old-fashioned hand fans advertising churches and banks. A periphery of lush trees, sycamore and cedar. Such familiar images, I’ve known since childhood. I was in my comfort zone. But a mix of excitement and unease stirred in my gut when I saw what stood in the clearing: a large stage, the small performers’ tent right next to it, and in front, an enormous tent. Hundreds of folding chairs and their short-sleeved, visored occupants sat under and around it, all clapping, toe-tapping fans of the genres being celebrated: old-time, bluegrass, blues. Buck dancers in tap-soled shoes, some in frilly shirts or skirts, some in overalls, carrying buckboards. Musicians with cases and instruments in hand: guitars, fiddles, banjos, mandolins.
Contests throughout the day would determine the best, award prize money, plaques, a coveted new guitar or banjo. But most of the musicians were here for fun. They accumulated like clouds as the day went on, jamming in pairs, in small groups, in occasional clusters of hot, fast playing that grew two, three, four people deep, a devoted mix of instrumentalists and vocalists and fans. A few were famous—some locally, some internationally. Many more were shade-tree pickers—talented folks who make their living in fields more stable than music.
And then there was me, a five-foot-five, middle-aged white lady, relatively fit but remarkably pink-faced and perspiring as I lugged around an awkward sixteen-pound conversation piece almost as tall as me—a homemade four-string washtub bass with hand-planed cherry fretboard and strings repurposed from a junked cello.
I found the players generous and encouraging. I found, over time, I envied them. I wanted for myself the pure joy of being able to sit down with strangers and make music.
I could talk the talk about my instrument because my husband and I built it. But when the time came to play it, I was—and still am—a wannabe.
Tennessee poet Kory Wells | old-time music essay | embracing imperfection
My experience as a performing musician was as thin as a page from an old hymnal. It started decades before, when I was seven and my family moved from our trailer to an actual house, a new three-bedroom ranch. My parents bought an old, out-of-tune upright piano and put it in our un-air-conditioned, unheated, single-car garage, right next to the cat’s litter box. Mama insisted we had no place for the piano in the house itself. Though I took lessons for a few years, I didn’t have enough musical passion to sustain an adequate practice regimen. Mama sold the piano on the local radio station’s “Swap and Shop” show.
Twenty-five years later, I resurrected my musical career with the purchase of a Casio and a spiral-bound Christmas sing-along book. I coerced my young children to gather round the electronic keyboard and patiently sustain notes as I fumbled for the right chords. I like to think this is why they became musicians and singers themselves—they knew they could do better than I could.
A few years later, my then-teenage daughter discovered stringed instruments, and before long I was toting my fiddle-playing girl to jamborees and competitions all around Tennessee. Smithville, Granville, Holladay, Murfreesboro, Franklin, Chattanooga. At first, I was wary for her—these festivals were mostly the domain of white guys, with occasional nods to the likes of Deford Bailey and Maybelle Carter. But I found the players generous and encouraging. I found, over time, I envied them. I wanted for myself the pure joy of being able to sit down with strangers and make music.
Even if some of the older men called me and my daughter “little lady.”
Occasionally, I’d see a washtub bass at festivals—a contraption made from a broomstick, a washtub, and one string—and I kept thinking to myself, Surely I could play that. At one event, I finally worked up my courage to ask for an impromptu lesson from a stranger and soon found myself happily jamming on the porch of a log cabin on the Wilson County fairgrounds.
I was not, it must be noted, proficiently jamming. But my enthusiasm made up for my technique, and I came home with the idea that my very handy fella could build me a washtub bass of my own. With the help of Google, I found an upgrade: a four-string washtub bass. With DIY plans. We already had a seventeen-gallon galvanized tub that we’d retired from a short stint as a dog bath. It could serve as the body. Soon we were dangerously tossing around terms like sound post, bass bar, bridge. We even measured the cargo space of our Nissan Rogue, to be sure I could take my show on the road.
It would fit in the back seat. But only just.
Before long I was practicing the bass at home, playing along to YouTube versions of “Shady Grove” or “Cluck Old Hen.” In those moments, I would think my skills were passable.
No one reads music from the page at these festivals. Instead, people play by ear from a loose canon of standard tunes and variations, of regional and micro-local favorites, of lesser-known songs that one person is eager to share and another is eager to learn. Picture me that day on the periphery of jam session after jam session, trying to jump into the action yet avoid attention; in my Bermuda shorts and hiking sandals, leaning over my homemade bass, listening and watching the lead guitar player for all I'm worth, applying every bit of my sweet-tea-powered brain to the task: Is this tune repeating G C G C? Now a bridge to F, maybe an A?
I’ve always thought the upright bass is sexy. The way the player and the instrument lean their entire bodies into each other, as if in a slow dance. The way those low notes resonate like my love’s low voice in my ear.
So many tunes are easy once you develop your ear. And your fingering technique. And your muscle memory. And a solid sense of rhythm. I had none of these things, but beginners are always welcome. So I tried to keep up, sweating in the heat, under my self-imposed pressure, my index finger quickly rubbing a blister.
You might ask, why not a smaller, more portable instrument? A guitar, banjo, mandolin. But my logic wasn’t based on size. It was based on simplicity. With all due respect to bass players, the bass has only four strings. Surely, I thought, four strings would be easier than five or more. Plus, I’ve always thought the upright bass is sexy. The way the player and the instrument lean their entire bodies into each other, as if in a slow dance. The way those low notes resonate like my love’s low voice in my ear.
Did my daughter and her musically accomplished friends realize how much I loved being in their circle that day? Or were they just in the mood to hang out and take a chance on winning a bit of money? I’m still not sure. But by late afternoon, the heat still high, imagine the glint of aspiration in my eyes when they decided that yes, they'd stick around into the evening and enter the old-time string-band competition. That yes, they needed a bassist.
We’d pick a tune I knew, a strategic decision that limited us to three songs. One of them registered us for the contest, arbitrarily giving us a name, which, if not poetic, would certainly suit my memory of the day: the Uncle Dave Macon Happy Times Crew. (Macon was the banjo player, singer, and early Grand Ole Opry star for whom this festival was named.) We practiced a few times—almost exclusively for my benefit, I realized—and then the clouds thickened and blackened. Rain pounded and lightning struck.
And all the contestants sweltered under the tent, waiting, even when the rain was over and the competition resumed.
The internet says there’s a magical zone between comfort and panic. I’ve hosted poetry open mics and storytelling events for over eight years, and I’ve seen people in every zone there is. Sure, stage fright is sometimes worse for first timers, but I’ve also watched accomplished actors quake as they share their own writing for the first time. The internet says twenty-five percent of musicians and many veteran actors report problematic stage fright. But there are ways to limit performance anxiety. Practice, practice, practice, one source says. Winging it doesn’t usually work, says another. But what if winging it is the whole point?
By the time the Uncle Dave Macon Happy Times Crew is finally called to the stage, I’m so overcome by nerves that the four steps up to the platform might as well be Mount LeConte. I can barely heft myself up, let alone my bass.
Somehow, I struggle onstage and to the closest microphone. My throat is clasped, my breathing so shallow I think I might pass out. I will be mortified if that happens, I think, but at least I’ll be breathing again. One of the band members announces the song, and the four of them—Kelsey on guitar, Ian on fiddle, Tara on banjo, Heather on washboard—break into a fury of bowing and plucking and strumming and scratching. Meanwhile, stage left, I’m dealing with at least a moderate case of tunnel vision and lecturing myself: G C G C G C now F C G C and repeat. The humidity has, impossibly, increased, and is as relentless as the beat. My glasses slip to the very tip of my nose, threatening to drop to the stage floor, and the Band-Aid I’ve wrapped around my index finger, the finger I need to keep thumping the bass, has unwrapped itself so that my raw skin rubs the steel strings. My entire body trembles, and when I open my mouth to join the chorus, no sound comes out. But my pride’s still intact, so I mouth some words, possibly help me, help me, Lord help me. But I don’t have to pray. My bandmates have this.
My entire body trembles, and when I open my mouth to join the chorus, no sound comes out. But my pride’s still intact, so I mouth some words, possibly help me, help me, Lord help me.
At the end of our exuberant song about a bulldog, the crowd cheers, and I feel breath, precious breath, re-inhabiting my body. Before I leave the stage, I even manage a wave to my new fans.
Tennessee poet Kory Wells | old-time music essay | embracing imperfection
Later, my daughter will buy me music lessons from another of her talented friends. Of course, I have plenty to learn, and he has many helpful tips, but I shock myself by realizing I don’t care a lot about my progress. It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing; it’s not that I don’t want to learn; I just don’t want to strive. All my life I’ve tried to be a good, even exceptional: daughter, student, wife, mother, programmer, friend, poet, leader, organizer, caregiver, volunteer.
Eventually, I tell him, “Music is the one place in my life where I can be imperfect, and be really happy with that.”
Ours was not the judges’ favorite performance of the evening, but as far as I was concerned, I took home the grand prize. I’d been part of the first and only performance of the Uncle Dave Macon Happy Times Crew. I had bandmates. I was in the band. I’d survived my first lesson in being joyfully mediocre. And though a part of me would like to tell you that my skills on the bass have improved and my performance anxiety has dropped, I can report only that I’ve taken up a much more practical four-string instrument for going on the road—the ukulele. Maybe I’ll play your town soon.
Kory Wells nurtures community through writing, storytelling, and arts initiatives in and beyond the American South. Her most recent book is Sugar Fix, a collection of poetry from Terrapin Books. Her writing has been featured on The Slowdown from American Public Media, won the Flash Creative Nonfiction Contest at Blue Earth Review, and appears in Christian Science Monitor, The Strategic Poet, the Tennessee edition of The Southern Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. A seventh generation Tennessean and former poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she works with Middle Tennessee State University’s from-home creative writing program: MTSU Write.
I love everything about this funny & heartwarming & uplifting story. Kory Wells’s writing is the bomb. Thank you, SALVATION SOUTH, for making me laugh out loud. And I hope Ms. Wells keeps thumping and shocking herself by insisting on, above anything else, enjoying the moment of it all.