My Dad and His Guitar

Photo by Alasdair Elmes on Unsplash

He once played guitar for Tex Ritter.

Ever since he was a child, my dad played guitar. He told me the stories of how his family didn't have a TV, and of how they would entertain the neighborhood by sitting on the front porch, playing and singing music well into the night. This tradition would carry on for years. Whenever his family would gather together, they would breakout the guitars and play all night long (this was a large family. He was the youngest boy in a family with seven children, and most everyone could either play an instrument or sing.) He taught me how to play bass, so I would join along with them. My favorite part was when we would start playing old swing music like Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree and the songs from the fifties like Johnny B Good.
When my dad was still in high school (or just left high school), he played with Tex Ritter at one of his concerts. That was before my time, but I do remember him playing his old 57 Gibson in a large country band that was part of a traveling western show. I got to see these shows whenever they were in town (or the next town over), all week long, so I got to know a lot of the people that were in the show (although I can't remember their names. I even got to meet the legendary Tex Ritter and got his autograph picture as well as some other people that appeared on HEE HAW and other shows. I was too young to understand the celebrity status of a lot of these people, they were just ordinary people to me. To this day, I couldn't tell you who the man was or where the house was that we use to go to. He may have been famous or a rising star or he could have been nobody special, but to me, they were stars, and they were just ordinary people,
who enjoyed playing and singing music.
Sometime in the mid seventies, my dad decided to fully dedicate his life to God (although he had been a preacher for years) and quit playing country music and to only play gospel. He said "I knew more country songs than I did gospel so I told God I would dedicate my life even more to him."  But before that happened, at an even earlier time, he gave up traveling with the bands, to dedicate his life to his family.
I've already told you about him teaching me the bass and how we traveled in a previous post. If you want to know about the family band, you will find it in my previous post about my mom. Oh, and another thing he told me on more than one occasion was that he wrote a gospel song back in the early sixties while he was going to college. He said it was a flop here but actually got radio play in Africa. I never got to hear the song and it is probably one of those things that you will never be able to hear, but it is nice to know.