Strange, I just saw some documentary footage on him today, and just read about the fife-and-drum bands in The Land Where the Blues Began 2 days ago. He was shown making the fifes from cane and talking about how he got started, and shown glad that his granddaughter had become a fifer.

I was straining to remember the exact words he used to talk about how he would make a fife for a youngster for no charge as long as they would try to play it, as was done for him many decades before. Something about 'the only things that get done, get done by try-ers'. Anybody with a better memory for those words to live by?