My parents both enjoyed music. Dad was a self-taught, hillbilly, fiddler/singer who, as a teenager had played for many a square dance in Arkansas, took great joy in musically recreating the woes of the Indian girl “Red Wing,” the humorous ballad “Rye Whiskey,” and other old songs. Mother had been raised in a Scotch-Presbyterian home where dancing and other “works of the devil” were not practiced. Her feet never danced, nor did she go to places where such “goings-on” took place. But she enjoyed Dad’s fiddle playing, in the privacy of their home.
Willard S. "Jack" Carriker Fiddling and Don Carriker, "Seconding" on Piano
Somehow, in the depths of "The Depression," Mother found a way to provide piano lessons to her only daughter, Frances. After Frances married Mother decided another of her kids should learn the piano. My older brother Gene was next in line. He made a game attempt but football, girls, and teen-aged pursuits called more loudly to him. I became Mother’s last hope. She signed me up with Caney's piano teacher, Mrs. Erma Gray, to be taught how to strike the right key most of the time. I soon discovered the odds were 88 to one against that happening. (There are 88 keys on a piano keyboard.)
Sitting straight-backed on a piano bench with your fingers hovering over a keyboard is one of the most uncomfortable positions into which the human body can be placed. I balked at the discomfort. Mother, however, whose Arkansas upbringing had deprived her of education past the 6th grade, knew some bedrock principles of behavioral psychology. She cannily allowed me to waste time until after dinner. Then when dishes were to be washed, dried and put away,she’d give me a choice. “Would you rather do the dishes or practice the piano while I do them?” She’d ask silkily. In those pre-automatic-dishwasher days the choice was a “no-brainer.”
After many years, during which time Mother convinced me she was the slowest dishwasher God ever created, I became a passably good pianist. Good enough to play “Malaguena” during my high school Baccalaureate, “Here Comes the Bride” at my brother’s wedding, and to declare myself a “piano major” when I went off to study music in college. During those years, Dad continued to play his fiddle. Occasionally he’d ask if I could "accompany" him on the piano while he played the songs he and Mother loved so much. He called it “seconding.” My music teachers had taught me that such “unlearned” music was decadent. I told Dad I could, if I had the music. I knew I was putting an impossible demand onto him.
Time passed. I became a music teacher, played organ at church, and spent many Saturday nights playing in a four-piece dance “combo” without benefit of written music. I had known all along that “seconding” Dad would be an elementary exercise of my musical ability and as Dad grew older, I grew wiser. One night, while home for a weekend, I asked Dad to get his fiddle out; saying I thought I would be able to “second” him.
From that night on Dad and I played together many times. Being a man not given to emotion he never said it; but the look on his face as we played, told me no one, from Mozart to Liberace, had ever played more beautiful music.