Hettie Ann Monk
I would watch, amazed, as her fingers twisted, lifting up off the banjo’s fretboard and moving to different positions. The fingers on the right hand would curl and pluck the strings with precision as a melody was formed. The thumb and finger picks dialed the song in. Many times we would sit together while I watched her play. Indeed, those times when I was her only audience are still fresh in my memory. She would lean back in her seat and close her eyes in reverie as she played her tune….
Who was this woman? She could can a mess of tomatoes with as much get-to-it as playing an old mountain tune. On just about any instrument save for a fiddle. She had me mesmerized alright, transfixed on her hands and the look of patient determination on her face.
With music, I was under a spell of a different order. Absolutely mesmerized when it came to the acoustic sound of a guitar, banjo, or mandolin. My grandmother showed me it was the soul, the fire, the passion of the player behind the stringed instruments. That gave it life. She made the sound human, one you could touch.
Hettie Ann Monk was born in 1911 in Wytheville, Virginia. It was a small, rural town situated at the base of the Allegheny Mountains that run through Virginia. With a few thousand feet in elevation, Wytheville was dubbed the crossroads of the Blue Ridge. Farther south, the town of Galax lay claim as the gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Those majestic mountains rolled further on south through the Carolina’s, Tennessee, and Georgia. Wytheville, Galax, and Lebanon all formed a loose triangle where my grandmother’s family and relatives came from. This is where the Monks lived on hard times and strong ties before they migrated northward to Maryland.
no doubt, your sojourn south lit a fire in your ass to be brief, tell the tale and keep it real…a prize of a family heirloom…well done, good read, puts us right beside you on the journey….a great bio
Pat that is the best story I have ever read.