Dear folks,

Leaving aside the impossibility of answering any question intended to exemplify the "best" of anything, and just attempting to address the question of favourites, I suppose I'm still fond of the singers whose recordings I heard as a child. I remember liking the songs of Woody and Pete, but for voice, I was much taken with the butterscotch sound of Burl Ives. I know he went commercial, but that was beyond the ken of a child, and I just loved to hear his voice. That, and the fact that I could usually make out the words when he sang, so I could learn "behind" him -- a big plus in any singer's book -- put him high on my list.

But my honest-to-goodness favourite would have to be my grandfather, Ben Moomaw, Jr., who was president, for ages, of the Virginia Folklore Society. At meetings, "Mr. Ben" was regularly called on to perform some of the hundreds of songs he had learned from a life well spent in The Blue Ridge Mountains.

He would stand, usually without accompaniment, but with perfect pitch, nonetheless, -- in later years, leaning slightly on his hickory-wood cane -- and sing from memory the endless verses of song after song, telling the "pedigree" of each one between numbers. His voice was clear as springwater, and startlingly strong right to the end, long after frailty had become apparant in his limbs. He never faltered or forgot a line, ( I've been told by those who had a right to say), and his vocal timbre was so rich and beautiful, you could gain weight on it.

And while others had to pay dues and show up for meetings, I had the exquisite pleasure of listening to his songs at leisure, sitting in my little rocker, right next to his big one, on the long front porch of the house he had built with his own hands many years past, for his bride, my grandmother. I lived for summer, when we would leave the killing tidewater humidity of Richmond for the cooler air of the hills, where I could follow him through the pastures and the orchards and even the truck garden, drinking in the music that seemed to flow from him as speech flows from the rest of us.

In the evening after supper, as the sun set, we would all sit out on the porch in the rockers, with cold fresh mint drinks -- iced tea or lemonade for the ladies and young folk, bourbon for my Gampop and any other gentlemen -- and pass the time "waiting for the house to cool down" by counting the cars passing on the ribbon of road far down in the valley below us, listening to Great-Uncle Roy tell his home-made tales of "the Great B'ar" and the other constellations, or leg-pullers drawn from local lore.

And then my Gampop would sing until those selfsame skittish stars were lured from their shadowed lairs to populate the night sky. I could hear him summon up even the moon, with the sweetness of his voice. I asked him once, when he would run out of songs to sing, and he replied that that would happen "'bout the same time the creek runs out of fish, or the grass runs out of fireflies, or the sky runs out of stars."

It was in this way that I learned that the songs would always be there, just waiting for him to tease them out of hiding like the shy chatoyant creatures that crept further and further up the yard as the night bloomed, as if to hear him sing all the better. If there is "work" in The World to Come, the rest of us will all find new "careers." But they will have to let my Gampop go on singing just as always, for there could be no higher purpose to which he might be put, nor any greater pleasure for the rest of us than to be permitted, once again, to hear him sing.

Fondly,

Shula