According to his obituary, Joe Wood was a life-long Floridian, educator, musician, loving father, and friend. The article supplied the usual  information—date and place of birth,  names  of surviving family members, employment history, and church affiliation—but it didn’t say anything else about his musical endeavors. I wondered what he would have thought about that. He might have been surprised to see musician there at all, let alone in the first line. He had no formal musical training, and only played and sang at family gatherings or social events. But from the time I was a little girl, my daddy rarely went anywhere without taking along his fiddle, guitar, or mandolin. My paternal grandfather told me Daddy’s interest in music was apparent from the time he was a small boy. “He’d sidle as close as he could get whenever my daddy played his fiddle,” Granddaddy said. It must have taken a lot of nerve for a quiet, shy little fellow to do that. Funny thing, when I asked Daddy about it years later, he had no recollection of ever hearing my great-grandfather play.          

But those were the days of the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast across the airwaves from Ryman Hall in Nashville, Tennessee. For most folks in rural North Florida, life consisted of back-breaking labor in cotton or tobacco fields, with little in the way of amusements. Music, like food, was homegrown and provided temporary escape from a careworn existence. Daddy’s elder sister, an able pianist who married a rancher and spent her adult life on a remote farm, once remarked, “I would’ve gone crazy if it hadn’t been for my piano.” 

Both my aunt Clarice and her elder brother Halbert took piano lessons when they were young, although my uncle didn’t keep up with them. Clarice picked up guitar along the way, and Halbert played bass on an instrument made from a washtub. Their younger brother Gerald said, “I could always tell how Clarice was feeling by the music she was playing on her guitar. I learned to lay low if it was a mournful tune.”

For Daddy, though, making music was pure fun. “He was about twelve years old when he bought his first fiddle from the Sears Roebuck Company for five dollars,” said Aunt Clarice. “And then, during the war, I taught school for a few years, even though I didn’t have any college training, because there was a teacher shortage. I was barely older than my students. By that time, Joe was sixteen or seventeen and had worn out his five-dollar fiddle, so he started badgering me to buy him a new one. I took fifty dollars out of my first paycheck and ordered him a new one.”        

Daddy was a self-taught fiddler, aided by the instructional book that came with his first fiddle. He kept the book all his life and it belongs to my brother now. My brother, sister, and I used to joke about Daddy’s philosophy of teaching music—“Read the book.” That never worked very well for us and truth be told, it wasn’t the sole source of Daddy’s music education. Although he taught himself to read music from the very beginning, Daddy picked up many tunes by ear. He learned by playing with more experienced musicians, watching what they did, and asking for pointers along the way.

Uncle Gerald told me that when Daddy was about eighteen years old, he passed up an opportunity to go to the Grand Ole Opry and play fiddle professionally with Chubby Wise. Wise, also from Lake City, was one of the greatest fiddlers in country music. He, along with a number of other folks, claimed authorship of the tune “Orange Blossom Special.” Considered one of the best-known fiddle tunes of the twentieth century, it is sometimes referred to as the “fiddle player’s national anthem.” It was one of Daddy’s favorite pieces, and he played it often. I especially liked the ending, which incorporated fiddle techniques that produced sounds reminiscent of a train’s bell and whistle, the chug-chug-chug of its wheels on the tracks, and the final lingering squeal of its brakes as it ground to a stop.        

“I reckon Joe didn’t take the job because Mama didn’t want him to,” my Uncle Gerald said. “She knew it’d be a hard life, living on the road, a lot of drinking and bad influences. She asked him not to go and he abided by her wishes.”

I don’t think Daddy ever regretted that. He said he always wanted to be a teacher, although when he passed up Wise’s offer, he didn’t think he’d have the opportunity to go to college. But he did, and that’s another story.

During his college years, the slim country boy picked up pocket money playing for square dances. He played for hire occasionally until after the birth of his first child. “I played at a dance on New Year’s Eve. The next Sunday, the preacher made a disparaging reference to all the carousing—booze and dancing—associated with the holiday. I took that as my cue to give it up.”

But he didn’t give up music, no sirree. Daddy did well as a teacher, quickly moving into school administration. Within a few years, he was principal of a small kindergarten through twelfth grade public school in Alachua County. All three of us children started our formal education there. I loved being the principal’s daughter, partly because Daddy was popular with students and well-known around town. School assemblies often started with Daddy rendering a few guitar numbers, or accompanying the student body while we sang along. 

Daddy stored his pick inside the hollow body of the instrument. In order to retrieve it, he had to turn the guitar upside-down and shake vigorously. He apparently saw no reason to do this before he took the stage, and his pick-retrieving gyrations quickly became a school favorite.

When we children were old enough, our parents saw to it that we had music lessons. Mother had taken piano lessons from childhood through college, so my sister and I started lessons with her and progressed to studying with other private teachers. Later, when Daddy was principal of an elementary school in Gainesville, he met Mrs. Sonnhild Frey Kitts, a German immigrant and accomplished violinist whose children attended school there. When she learned that Daddy was a fiddler, she introduced him to her father, a violinmaker who spoke very little English. Although they didn’t speak the same language, they became friends, communicating through music. Eventually, Mrs. Kitts persuaded Daddy to send my brother Joseph and me to her for lessons. By that time, I was twelve years old and she suggested I study viola, which is slightly larger than a violin and has a lower range.

We both learned to play, and of course, played music with Daddy. Every now and then, we’d be called upon to perform at church or some other gathering. Music did not come as naturally to me as it did to others in my family, and I learned a technique of playing that was very different from my daddy’s fiddling style. Needless to say, we didn’t see eye-to-eye, and our musical collaborations were not ideal. However, Joseph inherited Daddy’s natural talent, and they played together many times over the years.

Right before Daddy died, he gave all his musical instruments to Joseph. By then he’d accumulated quite a collection, including a Martin guitar, several violins, a viola, and a couple of mandolins. The fifty-dollar fiddle was still in playing condition, and it is now one of my brother’s most prized possessions. Joseph graciously shared four of the instruments from Daddy’s collection with me. They are stashed, in their cases, under my bed. They are calling to me, and someday I’ll tune one, rosin up a bow, and play. But not yet—not yet, but soon.

Though Daddy’s fiddle now is silent and his bow has long been still, Daddy’s music continues to cast an ethereal glow, illuminating the dark corners of my heart, like the light from a far-off train. “Look a-yonder comin’, comin’ down that railroad track….It’s the Orange Blossom Special, Bringin’ my baby back.”

[Mary Wood Bridgman, a lawyer and native Floridian, lives in Jacksonville. Her work has been published in national and local publications. She received two first place prizes in the 2009 Royal Palm Literary Awards competition. Mary regularly reads her essays and short stories on In Context, a program of WJCT 89.9 FM.]

Above photo: Jim Wood as a teenager (right) with his mother Leila Wood and his younger brother Gerald, at the family homestead in Lulu, Florida, c. early 1940s. The fiddle Joe is holding is probably the $50 model his sister bought him from Sears Roebuck.