| WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE OF OLD TIME FIDDLER DICK BARRETT |
| Please take a few minutes to browse the photos and stories posted in this site. If you like old-time fiddling, you may enjoy them. |
| DICK BARRETT PO BOX 72 RAPELJE. MT 59067 1-406-663-2140 Order line for cd's and tapes 1-800-463-0576 |
One of a handful of depression era Texas Fiddlers
still living, Dick Barrett is blessed with abundant
energy and health at the age of 87 in 2005, and is still
actively playing the style of music that eventually
became known as Texas Fiddling, and the Western
Swing Fiddling that has thrived in the Lone Star State.
He was born in Maysville, OK, though their home was
across the river at Quail, TX. He had the good
fortune to be born into a family that loved music and
fostered it's growth in their children. His father Sam,
as well as his grandfather, George, played the fiddle.
Sam was a player of pretty waltzes, and wanted his
son, who was capable as a small child of producing a
pleasant sound on a fiddle, to follow in his footsteps.
However, young Dick had other ideas about how he
wanted to spend his time. Following is a transcript of
an interview of Dick Barrett about his history as a
fiddler. As a folklorist and longtime fan of his, I
requested this lengthy interview, and he graciously
spent hours talking to me one day and night when he
was unusually talkative. Dick is known for not
wanting to say much about the thirties, but I thought I
would try again to get him to talk, and I asked if he
could place the fiddle in the context of everyday life.
The interview has been edited to remove
unnecessary ums, ahs, laughter and so forth. He also
gave me permission to finish the intent of his answer
when his words trailed off. When someone is
recollecting things that happened long ago, they are
often so lost in the memory that they actually do not
finish all the words in a sentence that they start.
Thanks again to Dick for his time, and to Lisa for her
first class hospitality and asking me if this interview
could be used in Dick's site.
still living, Dick Barrett is blessed with abundant
energy and health at the age of 87 in 2005, and is still
actively playing the style of music that eventually
became known as Texas Fiddling, and the Western
Swing Fiddling that has thrived in the Lone Star State.
He was born in Maysville, OK, though their home was
across the river at Quail, TX. He had the good
fortune to be born into a family that loved music and
fostered it's growth in their children. His father Sam,
as well as his grandfather, George, played the fiddle.
Sam was a player of pretty waltzes, and wanted his
son, who was capable as a small child of producing a
pleasant sound on a fiddle, to follow in his footsteps.
However, young Dick had other ideas about how he
wanted to spend his time. Following is a transcript of
an interview of Dick Barrett about his history as a
fiddler. As a folklorist and longtime fan of his, I
requested this lengthy interview, and he graciously
spent hours talking to me one day and night when he
was unusually talkative. Dick is known for not
wanting to say much about the thirties, but I thought I
would try again to get him to talk, and I asked if he
could place the fiddle in the context of everyday life.
The interview has been edited to remove
unnecessary ums, ahs, laughter and so forth. He also
gave me permission to finish the intent of his answer
when his words trailed off. When someone is
recollecting things that happened long ago, they are
often so lost in the memory that they actually do not
finish all the words in a sentence that they start.
Thanks again to Dick for his time, and to Lisa for her
first class hospitality and asking me if this interview
could be used in Dick's site.
INTERVIEW
My earliest memories pick up at about 1922
or so. My family lived in Quail, TX at this
time and my father farmed and had a job
carrying the mail from the railroad depot to
the post office. I came to be known as "DICK"
instead of my given name of "LLOYD" around
this time. My Dad had an old horse named
Dick that he used to pull the mail wagon with. He would get home after the morning mail
run, unhitch Dick and I would go lay down on him after the horse rolled and laid down. I
spent so much time laying with that horse, that finally the family just began to call me
Dick.
My older brothers helped my Dad with his business on the farm, and they played music
with him for dances, weddings, funerals or maybe just around home at night. When I was
about six, my Dad started encouraging me to play the fiddle. The first tune that I
remember learning was "Cindy", and then "Home Brew Rag" or maybe "Gotta See Your
Mama Every Night". I liked this little bit of attention that I got from playing these tunes,
but like most kids, I didn't wanna work at playing the fiddle. I was a whole lot more
interested in playing baseball. In a family with nine kids, there was always
encouragement and torment in equal doses when you were trying to learn something.
My family loved laughter and games, so around this time, I spent most of my time playing
ball, mumbley-peg and other games, and not being terribly interested in fiddle playing.
One morning my older brother Jude came running down the road from town, (town
being Shamrock, Tx), to where my Dad and I sat on the porch. He was out of breath and
excited, and said, "Papa, Papa, there's this fiddler in town that you just gotta hear. You
ain't never heard the like of him. His name is Major Franklin, and I played with him all
night last night." Well my Dad didn't seem terribly excited to go back to town with Jude,
and didn't. Late that evening, Jude came back to the house with Major in tow, and for
the first time something was to really light up in my head about fiddling. They spent the
night playing until the wee hours. Major played breakdowns instead of the pretty
melodies that I was used to hearing at home, and he played them with a sound like no
other breakdown fiddler I had ever heard. He was young then, (though he somehow
seemed old to me), and his intonation was spot on, and the fiddle really sang like a
voice. This made a lifelong impression on me. Also, his rhythm was incredible. To this
day, I do not believe that I have ever heard a fiddler with finer rhythm, and I still don't
really care for fiddling that doesn't have any real singing tone. You can make noise by
rubbing two rocks together, or scraping a bow across a fiddle, but neither one sounds
very musical. The few tapes that exist of him today were recorded on bad equipment,
so it's hard for people now to understand just what a good tone he produced.
Major stayed around for several days playing with Jude, and my Dad got the bright idea
that he should pay Major to teach me a few lessons. Although he wasn't a teacher, he
was game for this, as he didn't have a job. You have to understand that I was a little kid
of nine years old, and I was so in awe of the sound that he could get out of a fiddle, that I
just sat there with my mouth open, unable to think about really watching, and he was not
a teacher that knew to tell me to watch the bow. After two or three lessons, he told my
Dad I was unteachable. He didn't realize that I was just awed into a stupor. It's pretty
funny to me now to think about being that little boy, and I have been frequently reminded
of it as an adult when I have had kids burst into tears while teaching them. I've missed
the signs, the same as he did. He went on to a cotton picking job somewhere and I
would not see him again for some time, but that sound stayed in the back of my mind.
My Dad eventually started a Ford Agency and a wrecking yard in Maysville, OK. During
the 20's the country was feeling an inflated sense of it's own prosperity, and for the first
time credit was available to most anyone who was responsible and worked. Most
Americans worked hard then, including my father.
During this time my father began to sell Ford cars to people on credit that he knew were
responsible folk. In the mid to late twenties, there were some signs that all was not well
with the economy, but folks did not heed the warning signs because they didn't know
how to recognize them. Most of the country did not understand that agriculture
suffered all through the twenties. When the crash came abruptly in 29', my father, like
most other business people, went broke when his customers could not pay what they
owed him. It's hard for people now to imagine how devastating this time was for families
and communities. NO ONE was operating from a position of strength. My family, like
most others in that part of the country, lost everything and took to the road to pick
cotton in order to stay alive. My father was never the same man after this time. I will
never forget leaving town on the back of a flatbed truck that he managed to save, with all
of the kids and everything that we owned on that truck, not having any idea how we
were going to make it. My mother was a great lady, made of steel. Slight built, and full of
guts and passion, she could outwork us all, and did. Her strength was probably what
saved us during this time while my father tried to recover from his sense of defeat. My
father leaned on her and his religious faith, and became a very philosophical man.
Music was to become far more important around this time than I could ever have
imagined. Prior to this, it was just something that my family did, and I did not pay a
whole lot of attention to it. After I found out what it was like to pull a cotton sack up and
down a row all day, music was like a warm healing balm to the soul. For everyone.
All thoughts of any kind of luxury, like going to school, or new clothes, or candy, came to
a screeching halt. Whole families took to the fields, as it took every member earning to
make just enough to eat. My Dad was good with mules and trained them to make extra
money, and my brothers brought home whatever money they could make from music. I
helped my Mom in the garden and sold produce in town, and swept out the school to
make an extra 25 cents. Some days I made more than our Dad. I didn't even get to go to
the school that I swept, and that was always a disappointment to me that my education
stopped after the crash.
The crash became the great equalizer of men. Before that in the rural south, there was
an invisible line where race was concerned, although my own parents were not racist.
After that time, white, black, red and yellow men all scratched alike to live. We were
working a field one time with a family of blacks, and there was an elderly black
gentleman who sang in the field. His name was Amen, and every day I would try to get
the row next to him, so I could enjoy his singing. He never stopped singing or picking,
except when he would see me fall behind, and then he would reach over on my row and
pick a little, and say "Boy, you sure are a good picker Dickie Boy. You gonna be a big
man someday. Aamen!!" Through his singing I began to understand the power of prayer
to get you through the unbearable, and also what a blessing compassion could be. God
bless him, wherever his spirit is. After that time, I never stopped loving the sound of
field singing, or the blues. You have to have lived then and there to understand that
everybody had the blues, because what you saw all around you was hopelessness.
There was no rain and the country dried up, and soon there were no fields of cotton to
pick. When they call it the
dustbowl, you better believe it was true.
I began to see that you could make a little money
playing music, as people would always pay a few
cents to have their misery relieved with music,
even if only for a few minutes. I kept learning a
little on the fiddle, and the guitar, and I played a
few school house dances with Ernest Tubb back
then before he moved on. The door charge was 10
cents, and sometimes, folks would pay a nickel if
the band would play a special song for them. At the
end of the dance, I would get anywhere from 50
cents to a dollar for the job, depending on how many dancers
there were. My family and I would play house dances and make about a buck apiece.
You never knew what your circumstances were going to be as you moved from one
farmer's cotton fields to the next.
Around this time my oldest brother, Quavo, stepped into the role of family protector, and
teacher of the younger ones. Folks would exploit child labor something terrible then,
and then try to weasel out from under their promise to pay the kid. He made darn sure
that no one ever took advantage of us kids. I scooped oats for an old farmer and his wife
from sunup until dark for two weeks, and she wouldn't feed me anything but cornbread
and milk for lunch and supper, and two eggs for breakfast. Then when I got done he
didn't want to pay me, said I'd been paid by their feeding me, and I was skin and bones.
My brother was so mad when he saw me. You can believe that when my brother got
done with him, he gladly paid me. I was so happy to get back home for some of my
mother's cookin'. Quavo was devil may care handsome, and a good singer and guitar
player. Since we did not have a radio, or any other way to learn tunes, he would always
send words home for us other kids to learn so that we could play with him when he
came home. Tired of the poverty of West Texas, he went to work in the oilfields in
Wyoming. He still wrote and sent songs home to us from there. He died there in 1936,
and we couldn't bring him home to bury him, or go there. All the years that I roamed
around the West playing music, I always avoided that corner of Wyoming until about
1978. My sister found his grave in 1970 in Rawlins, WY. I still have never been able to
bring myself to go visit it.
* I've heard some stories about some of your interactions with
major when you were a kid. would you share a few of them?
Sometime in the early 30's Major came by to get my brother to play guitar for him in a
fiddle contest in Atoka, OK. My brother had gotten married and moved away from home,
so he took me instead. I'll always remember that trip in a Model T car, with no
windshield and no seats. I sat on the gas tank, and I can't remember what he sat on.
That was one hell of a long trip and I can still feel how bad my butt hurt.. I must have
been about fourteen. I'll tell you the rest of this story, but I don't mean for it to embarrass
his family. Times were so hard then, that people would do most anything if it would help
provide. This contest was sponsored by the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman, and paid
three hundred dollars and a medallion for first place. You were supposed to be a
resident of Oklahoma to play in it, but Major lived across the line in Texas, so he gave
them his sister's address in Sawyer, OK. You could buy a farm for that much
money then, so by the time we got there, I was a nervous
wreck thinking about the responsibility of helping him to win
this thing, and the lecture that he gave me about not telling
anybody that he really lived across the line in Texas. Anyway,
he played Billy in the Lowground and Gray Eagle. I didn't
know Billy in the Lowground and he told me, "If you get mixed
up Lloyd, you just play A minor or C, and whatever you do,
don't ever stop hittin' that thang. You got good time, so keep
it." Anyway, he won first place and went home happy and I
think he gave me a few bucks. I heard later that the Oklahoma
Farmer-Stockman found out that he wasn't really an Oklahoma
resident and asked him to return the money, but of course he
did not have it to return, and that was the end of that.
* have you got any more stories that you would share with us
about your contact with him during your childhood?
Well, there are more that I could tell you, but I am reluctant to share some of them, as I
still question how they would be interpreted by some folks. I realize that most listeners
or readers wouldn't have any idea how to put themselves in that time and place. You
have to understand that when you live through that kind of times, the sense of shame
that you felt at being so poor can come back to haunt you at any given time. Understand
that I know my family had nothing to be ashamed of, because they were very hard
workers, but there were things that happened that I don't want to discuss because I
would not want anyone else to be embarrassed.
* the rest of us would like to hear these stories dick, so that we
can learn from them. we all wish that you would share more of
them with us. will you consider it?
Maybe sometime. I'll have to think about it a little more.
* it's my understanding that you have said you would think about it
for many years now. i know that other people have tried to talk to
you about these stories. we really hope that you will be more
forthcoming in the future. if you don't want to go
any farther right now with that train of thought
we won't. what else can you tell us about the part
that music played in your daily lives?
Well, there's not a whole lot more to say except that we played
whenever we could, as that relieved everyone's misery to
some degree. Shorty Loder was a good fiddler who played with
Major and my brother Jude a lot, and I got to know him, and
also the Burkhalter family that lived in the Panhandle. They
were a family of good musicians. I met Bill King around
that time too. I would grow to really love he and his wife
Frankie later on in my life when I spent more
time around them. I remember meeting Lewis
Franklin at Major's house in about 1936 or 37. He is
Major's nephew, and a fiddler that I have
an enormous amount of respect for. We must
have been about 16 and 17. We didn't know
each other yet, and I don't remember us talking
about music at all. Just talking as boys talk. I had a
childhood friend named L.C. Boyd, and his Dad was the
damnedest square dance caller that I've ever heard or seen.
He sang all the calls that he improvised on the spot, and
buck danced all the while he was doing it. He must have lost
five pounds every night he called. I've never again seen a caller that worked so
hard and was so entertaining. I'd like to see a caller like that again before I die. I just
shake my head today when I hear people spouting off about not being able to dance to
Texas Style fiddling. I wonder what the hell they think we were doing back then.
I was growing more and more interested in Western Swing as we began to hear more of
it. Most of my efforts on the fiddle as a young man were focused on this style of music
and I didn't try very much to play breakdowns. I became fairly proficient at this style, and
still enjoy playing it. Someone gave me a tape of me playing with a band that was taped
in the late 40's a couple of years ago, and it was hard for me to believe it was me,
because I don't ever remember playing that way. I didn't really believe him that it was me
until I started singing, then I knew it was. It's funny how your playing will change and
evolve so slowly over a lifetime that you don't even know that it's happening.
When the United States went to war, I was about to get one of the biggest shocks of my
life. I was a farm kid from a kind and affectionate family who was taught to offer respect
and kindness for everyone. Imagine being drafted into the military and being given a
gun and told you are supposed to shoot anyone wearing a certain uniform. I could only
think to myself, "but he hasn't done anything to me." Oh God. I was an excellent shot
from having hunted game all of my life, so they put me in the role of sniper for the
Combat Engineers. The Combat Engineers always go in first and don't have any
protection much, so after the first couple of shots in my direction, I was launched out of
my state of shock about being expected to shoot others. I finally learned to shoot back,
but it isn't an experience that I think anyone should ever have. You wouldn't think that
much could shock your system after living through the 30's in the rural south, but that
war sure did.
My earliest memories pick up at about 1922
or so. My family lived in Quail, TX at this
time and my father farmed and had a job
carrying the mail from the railroad depot to
the post office. I came to be known as "DICK"
instead of my given name of "LLOYD" around
this time. My Dad had an old horse named
Dick that he used to pull the mail wagon with. He would get home after the morning mail
run, unhitch Dick and I would go lay down on him after the horse rolled and laid down. I
spent so much time laying with that horse, that finally the family just began to call me
Dick.
My older brothers helped my Dad with his business on the farm, and they played music
with him for dances, weddings, funerals or maybe just around home at night. When I was
about six, my Dad started encouraging me to play the fiddle. The first tune that I
remember learning was "Cindy", and then "Home Brew Rag" or maybe "Gotta See Your
Mama Every Night". I liked this little bit of attention that I got from playing these tunes,
but like most kids, I didn't wanna work at playing the fiddle. I was a whole lot more
interested in playing baseball. In a family with nine kids, there was always
encouragement and torment in equal doses when you were trying to learn something.
My family loved laughter and games, so around this time, I spent most of my time playing
ball, mumbley-peg and other games, and not being terribly interested in fiddle playing.
One morning my older brother Jude came running down the road from town, (town
being Shamrock, Tx), to where my Dad and I sat on the porch. He was out of breath and
excited, and said, "Papa, Papa, there's this fiddler in town that you just gotta hear. You
ain't never heard the like of him. His name is Major Franklin, and I played with him all
night last night." Well my Dad didn't seem terribly excited to go back to town with Jude,
and didn't. Late that evening, Jude came back to the house with Major in tow, and for
the first time something was to really light up in my head about fiddling. They spent the
night playing until the wee hours. Major played breakdowns instead of the pretty
melodies that I was used to hearing at home, and he played them with a sound like no
other breakdown fiddler I had ever heard. He was young then, (though he somehow
seemed old to me), and his intonation was spot on, and the fiddle really sang like a
voice. This made a lifelong impression on me. Also, his rhythm was incredible. To this
day, I do not believe that I have ever heard a fiddler with finer rhythm, and I still don't
really care for fiddling that doesn't have any real singing tone. You can make noise by
rubbing two rocks together, or scraping a bow across a fiddle, but neither one sounds
very musical. The few tapes that exist of him today were recorded on bad equipment,
so it's hard for people now to understand just what a good tone he produced.
Major stayed around for several days playing with Jude, and my Dad got the bright idea
that he should pay Major to teach me a few lessons. Although he wasn't a teacher, he
was game for this, as he didn't have a job. You have to understand that I was a little kid
of nine years old, and I was so in awe of the sound that he could get out of a fiddle, that I
just sat there with my mouth open, unable to think about really watching, and he was not
a teacher that knew to tell me to watch the bow. After two or three lessons, he told my
Dad I was unteachable. He didn't realize that I was just awed into a stupor. It's pretty
funny to me now to think about being that little boy, and I have been frequently reminded
of it as an adult when I have had kids burst into tears while teaching them. I've missed
the signs, the same as he did. He went on to a cotton picking job somewhere and I
would not see him again for some time, but that sound stayed in the back of my mind.
My Dad eventually started a Ford Agency and a wrecking yard in Maysville, OK. During
the 20's the country was feeling an inflated sense of it's own prosperity, and for the first
time credit was available to most anyone who was responsible and worked. Most
Americans worked hard then, including my father.
During this time my father began to sell Ford cars to people on credit that he knew were
responsible folk. In the mid to late twenties, there were some signs that all was not well
with the economy, but folks did not heed the warning signs because they didn't know
how to recognize them. Most of the country did not understand that agriculture
suffered all through the twenties. When the crash came abruptly in 29', my father, like
most other business people, went broke when his customers could not pay what they
owed him. It's hard for people now to imagine how devastating this time was for families
and communities. NO ONE was operating from a position of strength. My family, like
most others in that part of the country, lost everything and took to the road to pick
cotton in order to stay alive. My father was never the same man after this time. I will
never forget leaving town on the back of a flatbed truck that he managed to save, with all
of the kids and everything that we owned on that truck, not having any idea how we
were going to make it. My mother was a great lady, made of steel. Slight built, and full of
guts and passion, she could outwork us all, and did. Her strength was probably what
saved us during this time while my father tried to recover from his sense of defeat. My
father leaned on her and his religious faith, and became a very philosophical man.
Music was to become far more important around this time than I could ever have
imagined. Prior to this, it was just something that my family did, and I did not pay a
whole lot of attention to it. After I found out what it was like to pull a cotton sack up and
down a row all day, music was like a warm healing balm to the soul. For everyone.
All thoughts of any kind of luxury, like going to school, or new clothes, or candy, came to
a screeching halt. Whole families took to the fields, as it took every member earning to
make just enough to eat. My Dad was good with mules and trained them to make extra
money, and my brothers brought home whatever money they could make from music. I
helped my Mom in the garden and sold produce in town, and swept out the school to
make an extra 25 cents. Some days I made more than our Dad. I didn't even get to go to
the school that I swept, and that was always a disappointment to me that my education
stopped after the crash.
The crash became the great equalizer of men. Before that in the rural south, there was
an invisible line where race was concerned, although my own parents were not racist.
After that time, white, black, red and yellow men all scratched alike to live. We were
working a field one time with a family of blacks, and there was an elderly black
gentleman who sang in the field. His name was Amen, and every day I would try to get
the row next to him, so I could enjoy his singing. He never stopped singing or picking,
except when he would see me fall behind, and then he would reach over on my row and
pick a little, and say "Boy, you sure are a good picker Dickie Boy. You gonna be a big
man someday. Aamen!!" Through his singing I began to understand the power of prayer
to get you through the unbearable, and also what a blessing compassion could be. God
bless him, wherever his spirit is. After that time, I never stopped loving the sound of
field singing, or the blues. You have to have lived then and there to understand that
everybody had the blues, because what you saw all around you was hopelessness.
There was no rain and the country dried up, and soon there were no fields of cotton to
pick. When they call it the
dustbowl, you better believe it was true.
I began to see that you could make a little money
playing music, as people would always pay a few
cents to have their misery relieved with music,
even if only for a few minutes. I kept learning a
little on the fiddle, and the guitar, and I played a
few school house dances with Ernest Tubb back
then before he moved on. The door charge was 10
cents, and sometimes, folks would pay a nickel if
the band would play a special song for them. At the
end of the dance, I would get anywhere from 50
cents to a dollar for the job, depending on how many dancers
there were. My family and I would play house dances and make about a buck apiece.
You never knew what your circumstances were going to be as you moved from one
farmer's cotton fields to the next.
Around this time my oldest brother, Quavo, stepped into the role of family protector, and
teacher of the younger ones. Folks would exploit child labor something terrible then,
and then try to weasel out from under their promise to pay the kid. He made darn sure
that no one ever took advantage of us kids. I scooped oats for an old farmer and his wife
from sunup until dark for two weeks, and she wouldn't feed me anything but cornbread
and milk for lunch and supper, and two eggs for breakfast. Then when I got done he
didn't want to pay me, said I'd been paid by their feeding me, and I was skin and bones.
My brother was so mad when he saw me. You can believe that when my brother got
done with him, he gladly paid me. I was so happy to get back home for some of my
mother's cookin'. Quavo was devil may care handsome, and a good singer and guitar
player. Since we did not have a radio, or any other way to learn tunes, he would always
send words home for us other kids to learn so that we could play with him when he
came home. Tired of the poverty of West Texas, he went to work in the oilfields in
Wyoming. He still wrote and sent songs home to us from there. He died there in 1936,
and we couldn't bring him home to bury him, or go there. All the years that I roamed
around the West playing music, I always avoided that corner of Wyoming until about
1978. My sister found his grave in 1970 in Rawlins, WY. I still have never been able to
bring myself to go visit it.
* I've heard some stories about some of your interactions with
major when you were a kid. would you share a few of them?
Sometime in the early 30's Major came by to get my brother to play guitar for him in a
fiddle contest in Atoka, OK. My brother had gotten married and moved away from home,
so he took me instead. I'll always remember that trip in a Model T car, with no
windshield and no seats. I sat on the gas tank, and I can't remember what he sat on.
That was one hell of a long trip and I can still feel how bad my butt hurt.. I must have
been about fourteen. I'll tell you the rest of this story, but I don't mean for it to embarrass
his family. Times were so hard then, that people would do most anything if it would help
provide. This contest was sponsored by the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman, and paid
three hundred dollars and a medallion for first place. You were supposed to be a
resident of Oklahoma to play in it, but Major lived across the line in Texas, so he gave
them his sister's address in Sawyer, OK. You could buy a farm for that much
money then, so by the time we got there, I was a nervous
wreck thinking about the responsibility of helping him to win
this thing, and the lecture that he gave me about not telling
anybody that he really lived across the line in Texas. Anyway,
he played Billy in the Lowground and Gray Eagle. I didn't
know Billy in the Lowground and he told me, "If you get mixed
up Lloyd, you just play A minor or C, and whatever you do,
don't ever stop hittin' that thang. You got good time, so keep
it." Anyway, he won first place and went home happy and I
think he gave me a few bucks. I heard later that the Oklahoma
Farmer-Stockman found out that he wasn't really an Oklahoma
resident and asked him to return the money, but of course he
did not have it to return, and that was the end of that.
* have you got any more stories that you would share with us
about your contact with him during your childhood?
Well, there are more that I could tell you, but I am reluctant to share some of them, as I
still question how they would be interpreted by some folks. I realize that most listeners
or readers wouldn't have any idea how to put themselves in that time and place. You
have to understand that when you live through that kind of times, the sense of shame
that you felt at being so poor can come back to haunt you at any given time. Understand
that I know my family had nothing to be ashamed of, because they were very hard
workers, but there were things that happened that I don't want to discuss because I
would not want anyone else to be embarrassed.
* the rest of us would like to hear these stories dick, so that we
can learn from them. we all wish that you would share more of
them with us. will you consider it?
Maybe sometime. I'll have to think about it a little more.
* it's my understanding that you have said you would think about it
for many years now. i know that other people have tried to talk to
you about these stories. we really hope that you will be more
forthcoming in the future. if you don't want to go
any farther right now with that train of thought
we won't. what else can you tell us about the part
that music played in your daily lives?
Well, there's not a whole lot more to say except that we played
whenever we could, as that relieved everyone's misery to
some degree. Shorty Loder was a good fiddler who played with
Major and my brother Jude a lot, and I got to know him, and
also the Burkhalter family that lived in the Panhandle. They
were a family of good musicians. I met Bill King around
that time too. I would grow to really love he and his wife
Frankie later on in my life when I spent more
time around them. I remember meeting Lewis
Franklin at Major's house in about 1936 or 37. He is
Major's nephew, and a fiddler that I have
an enormous amount of respect for. We must
have been about 16 and 17. We didn't know
each other yet, and I don't remember us talking
about music at all. Just talking as boys talk. I had a
childhood friend named L.C. Boyd, and his Dad was the
damnedest square dance caller that I've ever heard or seen.
He sang all the calls that he improvised on the spot, and
buck danced all the while he was doing it. He must have lost
five pounds every night he called. I've never again seen a caller that worked so
hard and was so entertaining. I'd like to see a caller like that again before I die. I just
shake my head today when I hear people spouting off about not being able to dance to
Texas Style fiddling. I wonder what the hell they think we were doing back then.
I was growing more and more interested in Western Swing as we began to hear more of
it. Most of my efforts on the fiddle as a young man were focused on this style of music
and I didn't try very much to play breakdowns. I became fairly proficient at this style, and
still enjoy playing it. Someone gave me a tape of me playing with a band that was taped
in the late 40's a couple of years ago, and it was hard for me to believe it was me,
because I don't ever remember playing that way. I didn't really believe him that it was me
until I started singing, then I knew it was. It's funny how your playing will change and
evolve so slowly over a lifetime that you don't even know that it's happening.
When the United States went to war, I was about to get one of the biggest shocks of my
life. I was a farm kid from a kind and affectionate family who was taught to offer respect
and kindness for everyone. Imagine being drafted into the military and being given a
gun and told you are supposed to shoot anyone wearing a certain uniform. I could only
think to myself, "but he hasn't done anything to me." Oh God. I was an excellent shot
from having hunted game all of my life, so they put me in the role of sniper for the
Combat Engineers. The Combat Engineers always go in first and don't have any
protection much, so after the first couple of shots in my direction, I was launched out of
my state of shock about being expected to shoot others. I finally learned to shoot back,
but it isn't an experience that I think anyone should ever have. You wouldn't think that
much could shock your system after living through the 30's in the rural south, but that
war sure did.
THIS PAGE STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
MORE OF INTERVIEW TO COME, AND
LINKS TO PAGES TO ORDER CD'S AND
TAPES
MORE OF INTERVIEW TO COME, AND
LINKS TO PAGES TO ORDER CD'S AND
TAPES
| * Can you tell us about your early childhood and development as a fiddler Dick? |
| Barrett Family, 1919 Sam, Janie, J.J. (Jude), Quavo, June, Silas, Minnie and baby Dick Barrett |
| Barrett Family, 1930 Dick, Carmen, Quavo, Danny, Janie, Silas, Sam and Minnie |
| Dick, Age 14 |
Janie and Quavo
Barrett 1934
Barrett 1934
Quavo and Jude
Barrett 1935
Barrett 1935
Major Franklin and Doris Vinyard about
1934 in Shamrock, TX. The Vinyards
were a family of music players and lovers.
1934 in Shamrock, TX. The Vinyards
were a family of music players and lovers.
Major and Doris again in about 1936 by
Doris's folks' house. Dick and Lisa
were still going to fiddle parties in that
house in the 1990's. That house heard
a lot of music.
Doris's folks' house. Dick and Lisa
were still going to fiddle parties in that
house in the 1990's. That house heard
a lot of music.
World Series of Fiddling Contest