I dropped the needle of my sister’s record player onto the spinning vinyl.
There was a crackle, maybe two, then it was the ringing banjo of Earl Scruggs and I was officially and forever hooked.
I was 14 that summer and had saved my lawn-mowing money to buy my first LP - fittingly, a bluegrass album: Flatt & Scruggs Greatest Hits.
Sounds a bit corny, but that was one of the defining times of my life.
I used to listen to the Grand Ol’ Opry on Saturday nights and heard Lester and Earl and liked their sound. The banjo, the earthiness of the guitar, the songs of loss and separation and the hope of reunion, the harmony, the moaning dobro.
Music was always in our house when I was growing up. My mother and sister played the piano and sang in a gospel trio. Dad played the guitar and often sang with Mom and Marilyn.
I liked the gospel music ok, especially the upbeat ones when they threw in some rag-timey Pentecostal licks, but this bluegrass music was something else. A totally different creature.
The piano was an old upright and lived across the wall from my bed. I couldn’t hope to count the times that I was bounced out of a sound sleep by Mom pounding out the Gloryland Way.
So it was perhaps payback that she had to listen to Earl’s Breakdown and The Good Things Outweigh the Bad 50 times a day.
It wasn’t long before I wanted to make music like Lester and Earl, so I hit my parents up about the idea.
Dad’s guitar was broken at that time, so I couldn’t play it, but Grandpa Blansett offered to loan me his taterbug mandolin.
Grandpa had been a good old-timey country musician and singer in his day, but his hands had worn out and all he had left was the mandolin that had been on the shelf in the closet for years.
The only problem was that it was so old and dry that the neck had come loose, so when you tightened the strings it would give under the tension and there would be half an inch or more between the strings and the fretboard.
I gave it my best shot and can still remember feeling like the strings were made of barbed wire. Finally, I gave it up.
Then my uncle, Luther Solomon, generously offered to loan me his five-string banjo as a learner.
Sadly, though, he’d had it refinished and the guy who had done the work had sanded the tuning pegs and they would no longer hold pitch.
I gave it my best shot, again, but figured that Fate was not interested in hearing me play music.
By that time, I was 16 and old enough to work in the hayfields, so I put the notions of playing music pretty far back in my mind.
I might not be able to play a guitar, but I could play a radio and a tape deck with the best of them, so Lester and Earl were never far away.
Then one day, years later, I thought: I’d still like to play music, and I’d better do it now if I’m ever going to.
So, at 38, I went to the music store and bought an inexpensive mandolin.
Every day at lunch, I would take my sandwich and mandolin to my pickup and spend an hour trying to channel my inner Bill Monroe.
It was slow learning, especially without a teacher, but finally I was able to chunk some chords and play a few fiddle tunes.
Finally, a quarter of a century later, I was able to play a little bit of what I had wanted to when I was a kid.
Learning music, even rudimentary music, was immensely satisfying and I can’t imagine what the last 30 years would have been like without it.
So, if you have wanted to play music but have never gotten around to it, plan a New Year’s Resolution to do it and then make it happen.
You won’t regret it.