OLD TIME FIDDLER
DICK BARRETT
in this site. If you like old-time fiddling, you may enjoy them.
PO BOX 72
RAPELJE. MT 59067
1-406-663-2140
Order line for cd's and tapes
1-800-463-0576
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.
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.
