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The Right Chords: Folk-music group gathers to play on a warm evening
Journal photo by David Rolfe
Members of a folk-music group play in a jam session. Those pictured include Connie Harmon, Bud Harmon, Chris Nelson, Phil McVay, Rich Sterenczak, Debbie Gulden-Alvarez, Susie Pollack and David Hatcher.
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Published: September 22, 2009
Updated: 09/22/2009 12:20 am
One by one, the musicians drifted to the white gazebo at the center of the shady park, took seats on the wooden bench and opened their cases, lifting out guitars and violins. Pages rustled as new songs were passed around, and chords tentatively floated on the thick summer air.
The musicians' welcoming voices and gentle laughter, muffled in the humid stillness of the day's end, were suggestive of many evenings spent together sharing the easy companionship of music.
Bud Harmon, blue sweatband circling close-cropped white hair, began strumming an old Kingston Trio folk song about an unfortunate rider trapped on the Boston subway. Chris Nelson and Phil McVay's heads bobbed in time with the music. They recognized the song and began to play along.
David Hatcher, a lean man sporting a carefully trimmed beard and short white hair, loped up onto the gazebo and removed his fiddle and a handful of harmonicas.
Hatcher started the group a couple of years ago, putting an ad in the paper inviting people of any skill level to meet at a local library branch and play folk music and bluegrass.
The group was slow in getting off the ground, but now has a core of five to six members who never miss a session. They meet every two weeks for a couple of hours, alternating between Grace Court Park in Winston-Salem, a band shell at Central Park in King and the Reynolda branch of the Forsyth County Public Library.
Although the overall trend of the songs offered up for the group to play is folk music, the tunes wander into bluegrass, country/western, ragtime, pop, soft rock and the Beatles. A short classical number sometimes slips in as well.
"I thought I'd play a Willie Nelson song tonight," Harmon said, as the folk song died away.
"What's that -- Billie Nelson?" someone asked, pretending not to hear.
"Willie. Willie Nelson. He wrote it, and I'm gonna destroy it." The others laughed, and Harmon began growling, "Mama, Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys."
The group listened closely and began to join in one at a time, like children watching a chance to hop onto a revolving carousel. Resonant guitar chords swelled as the long strains of a fiddle began to unlimber, peppered with haunting notes of a harmonica.
Strollers paused nearby to listen. Benches began to fill as colorfully suited bicyclists ghosted noiselessly around the edges of the park, then circled around for another pass.
The lingering heat of the day seemed to settle into the bowl of the park like a thick, warm soup. The muffled sounds of the city dissolved with the warmth of guitar and violin as the daylight faded in the gloaming.
drolfe@wsjournal.com
727-7249
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