Saturday, June 21, 2025
Memorial of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Bluegrass
O taste and see, that the Lord is good.
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Perhaps because he didn’t push his point of view, and certainly because he voiced his thoughts through songs rather than sentences, gradually I began to see the world differently. I reveled in ideas and passages from the Bible. Dad sat under a lamp in his rocking easy chair after spending most of the day outside, a green or red checked flannel shirt buttoned up to his neck, reading, rocking, reading, rocking. When he looked up and saw me watching him, he smiled and went on reading. In the next room a tape player waited for him to choose a bluegrass band he’d like to listen to. Mom put it there so she didn’t have to hear that music quite so often.
I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or drink,
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Bill Monroe, a son of central Kentucky born not far from Horse Branch and Spring Lick, named his band the Bluegrass Boys, and the name stuck. In 2000 Dad and I got away on one of our annual trips to a bluegrass festival in Indiana, where we sat in the sun on folding chairs set up in the grass. “O Brother, Where Art Thou” had blown the bluegrass culture doors wide open, and we were ready. Dad didn’t hop or skip, didn’t play the banjo or mandolin, but he clapped and clapped, keeping the time, sometimes getting carried away and stomping his feet. But like the musicians themselves, most of what went on was happening inside his soul.
Look at the birds in the sky;
they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns,
yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are not you more important than they?
Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?
Why are you anxious about clothes?
Learn from the way the wild flowers grow.
They do not work or spin.
But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor
was clothed like one of them.
If God so clothes the grass of the field,
which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow,
will he not much more provide for you,
O you of little faith?
Dad came by his bluegrass honestly; for many years he and Mom went to square dances on Wednesday nights, where the dance caller was usually the Logan County Farm Adviser. Before she met me, Margaret met Mom and Dad at those dances, and the relationship blossomed when Dad asked Margaret to help him walk beans and cut out weeds. She said yes, not knowing what she’d gotten herself into.
But she stuck with it for a couple of sweaty weeks, until the work was done. They got to the fields by 6 and walked half- mile rows in the sun, wielding a machete or sharpened hoe, joined by high school boys from town who, often as not, had been drinking the night before. They threw up, Margaret sighed, and Dad just kept on walking, cutting out the weeds of four rows at a time. They all walked faster on the way back, to where the water was.
Bluegrass was better. Sitting in the sun with long pants and sporty short sleeved shirt, Dad usually wore a nice, brimmed straw hat and never complained about the heat. The music swept him away. His mom, our Grandma Dora played her piano by ear whenever the family got together. Did Dad learn some piano when he was a kid? He had a violin, I remember, that he didn’t play, at least when I was around.
Your heavenly Father knows what you need.
So seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be given you besides.
Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.
What kind of music did he listen to in the Philippines, at the height of World War II? His ear for bluegrass and gospel, alongside the renewal of his faith through Kogudus retreats, led Mom and Dad to a couple of Charismatic Christian Conferences in Kansas City and St. Louis, as they grew a little older and had more time.
And we both loved that bluegrass festival in southern Indiana, the time we took a few days to go together.
(2 Corinthians 12, Psalm 34, 2 Corinthians 8, Matthew 6)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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