Story by Kevin Howell
Pandemics are not fun, but they can be useful to get reacquainted with an old friend. For nearly 50 years, I’ve been in a love/lazy relationship with a good friend of mine, a guitar my father bought me for Christmas back in 1973.
When I’m in lazy mode and my guitar, an old Hohner Contessa six-string acoustic, sits in its stand in our little music/library room, it sings to me.
Sooner or later when the song it sings seeps into my brain, I remember that I love playing my old guitar and snap out of lazy mode, walk in the room, throw the strap over my shoulder and play along. Between the two of us, my guitar is the one that consistently sings in key.
I’ve had long spells of not playing at all, but through the years I’ve had spurts when I play on a regular basis and manage to develop nice callouses on my fingertips. Any serious guitar player knows that if you don’t keep your callouses it’s a pain to rebuild them.
Prior to the pandemic, after a long hiatus of not playing, I heard my guitar singing to me and picked it back up. My sessions were slow at first. I played occasionally, once a week … maybe.
Then the pandemic arrived. The playing picked up and the callouses re-emerged.
I also became reacquainted with the music of John Prine, an artist I heard and loved in the mid ’70s. His songs were a favorite: poignant, folksy, humorous, sardonic and slightly sarcastic, with a feel for human emotion. My kind of artist.
I’ve known a lot of musicians over the years and have played with them in small, informal gatherings. The songs we played were mostly folk, rock and country from the ’60s and ’70s. Many were written by Prine, something I didn’t realize back then.
In the fall of 2019, after my callouses re-emerged and I felt a little more confident in my playing, I bought my wife a ukulele so we could play together. Then the pandemic hit. As we isolated, the uke proved to be a useful purchase to pass the time.
About then, John Prine re-emerged from his own long hiatus, so to speak, and multiple battles with cancer. We heard and watched him on video perform “In Spite of Ourselves”. My favorite version is a duet with Iris Dement.
The song is about a couple who know each other well and stick together, despite their foibles. Except for a couple of the more colorful quips, it pretty much fits us.
John Prine passed from the virus, unfortunately, but he left us that song. We learned it well enough that, despite my inconsistent ability to hold a tune, we managed to pull it off.
One evening during the early days of the pandemic and after a few craft brews, we got up the nerve to make a YouTube video to share with our sons, who were lying low back in Indiana.
They loved it, these two gray-haired old people croaking away on video.
After another brew or two, we shared it publicly there and on Facebook. The video is still online, somewhere in YouTube land.
Reacquainting with my old friend and playing that song with my wife of so many years have been two of the highlights of this pandemic.
As for my wife and I, after almost a year of staying in and tolerating each other’s quirks, “In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow/Because, Honey, we’re the big door prize”.
Though my playing has slackened a bit again, my guitar still sings to me … and I’m listening.
