This is Emily, one of my most dedicated little riders and perhaps my best singer among those riders. We are playing at the Victorian Station Tea Room in Hampton in this picture. Yesterday was a big day for her brother Austin. It was his first day of learning to ride. He learned how to work a rope halter, saddle up, mount up, and he learned the set of cues that we teach our horses. Austin is taciturn but has a quick easy smile.
It is refreshing sometimes to find a kid that does not say anything when he has nothing to say.
Tonight will be a big night for Austin. It will be his first time on stage as he joins his sister, his brother Colton, Kayla, my bodhrun player, me, and Gerald on the fiddle at Bethany Church for a Relay for Life Event. Austin has just started playing an autoharp. He has impeccable timing and, who knows, in a few months I might even find out if he can sing.
I like seeing the sense of satisfaction and achievement that he gets from playing. He comes from a wonderful, supportive family. We get together over at their house on Monday nights and work up songs along with Daddy, my niece and a handful of other kids.
I love the sound of an autoharp, whether in Sara Carter's simple strumming or Maybelle's complex lead picking. I can hear in my head what Austin will sound like in a few years and it sounds very good. With his sister on dulcimer and his brother on every other stringed instrument within his reach they will have the simple, front porch sound that rests somewhere just inside my right ear, a sound that became softer when A.P. Carter died, but a sound that can never go out completely.
As a caveat, sometimes we do kids a great disservice by giving them too few instructions and too many decisions to make, decisions that have consequences that they can not be expected to understand. Had I asked Austin if he would like to learn to perform like his brother and sister and told him that if he would like to do so, I could teach him to play an autoharp and if it was what he really wanted to do, I could help him learn to play on stage. I suspect that the prospect might have seemed too daunting and he likely would have declined. Maybe he would have taken me up on it. But I thought it much better for him if I showed him what was possible first and then let him decide.
My invitation to learn to play was much simpler. "Boy, can you count to four? Can you learn that when your brother holds his hand a certain way you press down the D chord and when it changes to something else you are going to be either moving to A7 or G, to start with?"
He said that he thought that he maybe could. I set him where he could see Colton's hands. We played "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" and moved on over to "Hobo's Lullaby"?
His timing was perfect.
And if I might say so, so was mine.
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