Subdeacon Joe
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Posts posted by Subdeacon Joe
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Interesting design.
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You have one Farm. On it you are farming corn on one part, sorghum on another. Like as not you'd talk about the corn farm and the sorghum farm.
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It was amazing how fast that became a tradition.
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Fancy Moustach
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From FB
𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐚 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞'𝐬 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐭 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐔𝐧𝐮𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐚𝐦𝐞 — 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐊𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐈𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞
The photo is a page from Dirt Thrower’s Confederate service record. He served in Company B of Watie’s 1st Cherokee Mounted Volunteers.
According to contributor Guy Nixon, he was Cherokee. As a teenager working on his family’s farm during the early part of the war, three Kansas Redlegs rode up and debated how to kill him. One of the Redlegs picked up an axe from the woodpile, intending to use it on the boy. At that moment, the teenager fell to the ground, grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it into the Redleg’s face.
The man staggered, blinded by the dirt, and dropped his musket. The Cherokee youth seized the weapon and shot one of the other Redlegs from his horse. He then took the fallen man’s revolver, killed the remaining mounted Redleg, and finally shot the one who had been blinded by the dirt.
From that day forward, it is said he rarely used his long Cherokee name (which contained many letter “o”s) and instead went by the name “Dirt Thrower” — as in Mr. Dirt Thrower.
Nixon notes that Mr. Dirt Thrower was a close friend of both of his great-great-grandfathers, who also served in Stand Watie’s brigade and fought at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek in Indian Territory.
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘎𝘶𝘺 𝘕𝘪𝘹𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺.
𝗘𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗲: If your ancestor fought in the Civil War in Indian Territory and you have a photo of him or his service record, please let us know at civilwarren@yahoo.com. We might highlight him in a future post.
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In 1931, a fifteen-year-old girl in the Arkansas backwoods told her father she wanted to make a fiddle.
He pointed to his tools and a pile of wood. "There's what you need. Help yourself."
Violet Brumley picked up a knife and started whittling.
Her father, George Washington Brumley, had made his first fiddle in 1888 when he was fourteen years old—back when homesteaders built everything themselves because buying wasn't an option. He'd traded fiddles for wagons, shotguns, milk cows. A fiddle was worth a dollar, maybe, if you sold it for cash.
Violet watched him work, learning which woods sang and which stayed silent. She memorized the curve of the neck, the arch of the top, the precise placement of the sound post. No blueprints. No instruction manual. Just memory and feel.
It took her months to finish that first fiddle. When she drew the bow across the strings, the sound was perfect.
She was hooked.
But life had other plans.
At eighteen, Violet married Adren Hensley. The babies started coming—nine children in all, born while the family scraped by on subsistence farming. They were so poor, Violet later joked, that "if the flies had anything to eat, they'd bring their own food."
Between 1932 and 1934, she made three more fiddles. Then fiddle number four.
Then nothing. For twenty-seven years.
Nine children don't raise themselves. Fields don't plow themselves. There was no time for five-gallon buckets of wood shavings and 250-hour crafting projects when you were trying to keep your family fed.
The fiddles gathered dust. The music stayed quiet.
The family moved to Oregon to pick fruit—strawberries, potatoes, prunes. Migrant work. Survival. In 1959, they heard about cheap land near Yellville, Arkansas—forty acres for $250. They moved back, bought the land, started over.
Violet was in her forties. Her children were growing up. And slowly, quietly, she picked up her knife again.
In 1961, she made fiddle number five.
The break was over. She was a fiddle maker again.
By 1962, at age forty-six, someone convinced her to enter the local Turkey Trot Talent Show in Yellville. She came in second. At the show, she met Jimmy Driftwood, a folk musician who invited her to play at his theater in Mountain View.
That led to the War Eagle Craft Fair.
Which led to Silver Dollar City discovering her in 1967.
The theme park in Branson, Missouri, originally wanted her as a woodcarver. But when they heard her play the fiddles she'd made with her own hands—heard her unique style, her Ozark rhythms, her refusal to play like anyone else—they changed their minds.
They wanted her to fiddle.
And suddenly, after fifty years of obscurity, Violet Hensley became famous.
Not movie-star famous. Folk-legend famous. The kind where Charles Kuralt shows up to interview you for CBS News. Where National Geographic features you in 1970. Where producers from Captain Kangaroo and The Beverly Hillbillies call asking if you'll appear on their shows.
She traveled to promote Silver Dollar City, appearing on The Art Linkletter Show in 1970, walking around eating ice cream with "Granny" when The Beverly Hillbillies filmed episodes at the park. In 1977, she danced with Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo. In 1992, she was on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.
Through it all, she kept making fiddles. Seventy-four in total, each one taking about 260 hours of work. She used native Ozark woods—buckeye, sassafras, pine, spruce, basswood, cherry, curly maple, bird's eye maple, quilted maple. She'd cut down the trees herself with a handsaw.
"Someone asked me a long time ago what my secret was of putting the tone into a fiddle," she said. "The tone just comes in with the wood as best as I can figure."
Her fiddles became treasures. Collectors paid thousands. Museums displayed them. But Violet kept a few she wouldn't sell for any price.
She also learned to clog at age sixty-nine—doctor's orders, after they told her to stop breaking horses and bareback riding. Her signature move became playing the fiddle on top of her head while clogging, her face beaming with pure joy.
For decades, she demonstrated at Silver Dollar City's festivals. She released three albums with her family—daughters Sandra and Lewonna, husband Adren, son Calvin. The old-time tunes her father had taught her, songs that weren't widely circulated, preserved through her hands and voice.
In 2004, the Arkansas Arts Council designated her an Arkansas Living Treasure.
But Violet had one dream left.
She'd grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a battery-powered radio when she was nine years old, just after the show debuted in 1925. For ninety years, she'd listened to that program, playing along in her Arkansas cabin, imagining what it would be like to stand on that stage.
It seemed impossible. She was too old, too unknown, too far from Nashville's spotlight.
Then fiddler Tim Crouch read her autobiography and found mention of her dream. He contacted Opry star Mike Snider.
And on August 6, 2016, at ninety-nine years old, Violet Hensley walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage.
She wore a purple dress hand-sewn by her daughter Sandra. She carried fiddle number four, the one she'd made when she was seventeen years old.
The audience of 4,400 people rose to their feet before she even played a note.
Snider warned them: "This little lady plays her way."
Violet launched into "Angelina Baker," and the band scrambled to keep up with her rapid-fire fiddling. Her unique style—developed in isolation, learned from her father and the old-time fiddlers of the Ozarks—was unlike anything Nashville had heard.
When she finished, the applause was thunderous.
She returned in 2017 for her 100th birthday. Then again in 2018. Three times on the Opry stage, each time leaving audiences with their jaws on the floor.
In 2018, at age 101, she was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame.
And she kept going.
At 105, she contracted COVID-19. Her symptoms were mild. She recovered.
Today, at 109 years old, Violet Hensley is still alive in Yellville, Arkansas.
Her vision is too poor to make complete fiddles now, but she can still whittle by feel. She still demonstrates her craft. She still plays—fifty-eight years performing at Silver Dollar City and counting.
Her daughters say that while her muscles and words may fail her sometimes, the music never does. "For 109, she probably remembers more than we know, but just can't say it. She feels it."
The girl who made her first fiddle in poverty, who spent decades raising children in obscurity, who didn't become famous until she was in her fifties, who finally achieved her lifelong dream at ninety-nine—she's still here.
A living bridge to an Ozarks that barely exists anymore. A testament to craft, to patience, to the long game. A reminder that dreams don't have expiration dates.
Her story started with a father telling his daughter to help herself to his tools. It continues with a 109-year-old woman whose handmade fiddles are museum pieces, whose music has inspired generations, whose life proves that fame delayed isn't fame denied.
Violet Hensley didn't become a legend by starting early or burning bright and fast.
She became a legend by never stopping. By making seventy-four fiddles one knife stroke at a time. By playing the music she loved for a century, whether anyone was listening or not.
And when the world finally noticed, she was ready. She'd been practicing for ninety years.
Would you have had the patience to spend decades perfecting a craft in obscurity, knowing your moment might never come?
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7 hours ago, Alpo said:
My mother used to say Christ on a crutch. Which also never made much sense. Although at least since they both started with a CR sound you had alliteration. Maybe it's a western thing - she was from Nebraska. Another one she used a lot was Hells bells. Never knew whether she meant the things that ring or girls. But it rhymed so I guess it didn't matter which one.
Many colloquialisms and idioms don't make any sense. Kick the bucket, pulling someone's leg, jumpin' Jehosephat, etc. Just phrases that caught one.
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4 hours ago, Lawdog Dago Dom said:
That is one beautiful prayer.
Thanks, but I can't take any credit, except for passing on something ancient.
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5 hours ago, Dirty Dog Doug said:
on whale watching trip in montery CA 3 orcas where eating a gray whale
the people on watching yelled for orcas to stop
guess they did not know to yell in whale
It's always amusing when nature lovers know nothing about nature, other than what they have learned from Disney movies.
Like a woman at a bird food store one time saying, "I wish people could get along as well as birds do!"
I guess she never really watched them.
6 hours ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:
they grab the liver
That's impressive.
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6 hours ago, watab kid said:
my connent has no reflection on the bridhe - it looks great and as you pointed out serves well , i was wondering where the water is ?
The dam was never built back in the 1970s. And water from the American River Watershed would not, could not, have been used on the Palisades Fire.
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O Lord Almighty, healer of our souls and bodies, Who putteth down and raiseth up, Who chastiseth and healeth also; now, in Thy great mercy, visit our brother who is sick. Stretch forth Thy hand that is full of healing and health, and raise him up, and cure him of his illness. Put away from him the spirit of disease and of every malady, pain and fever to which he is bound. And if he has l sins and transgressions, grant to him remission and forgiveness, for Thou lovest humankind. Yea, O Lord my God, have pity on Thy creation, through the compassions of Thine only-begotten Son, together with Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, with whom Thou art blessed, both now and ever, and to ages of ages.
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5 hours ago, Alpo said:
That anything like Christ on a bicycle?
I've never really understood that phrase, although I have heard it occasionally. Yours was a new one to me but it seems like it should be the same kind of thing.
I've usually heard it, and used it, as "Christ on a crutch." and I'm trying to break myself of that. To aid in that I'm resorting to the panthea of various cultures,mostly from antiquity, and obscure modes of transportation.
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29 minutes ago, Dirty Dog Doug said:
gavin turned a nice ship in to garbage dump
Demeter on a skimboard! Give it a freakin' rest! Can't you rein in your HATE for two minutes and NOT drag it into a thread honoring people whose actions merited the Medal of Honor?
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I thought it was the LSO that was the Grinch.
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My skin usually tends towards oily. My forehead and upper chest especially. So I use either a scrubber or exfoliating soap every day. Aggressively.
I'll occasionally need to use a lotion on my hands or feet, but not often.
Your skin is the largest organ in your body. It's designed to keep your innards in, help regulate your body temperature, and keep nasty stuff out of your body. Need to take care of it.
I don't worry about grey hair, or my rapidly expanding forehead. Or wrinkles. All those are the hashmarks of life.
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2 hours ago, watab kid said:
yup - and the fires burned with no water to protect - just how does newsome think that was OK and he is a good governor ?
Um....Newsom was born in 1967, bridge was opened in '73.
I'm pretty sure that he had absolutely nothing to do with this project. Nor did Jerry Brown.
And, as J.D. pointed out, it is quite useful, even though it only serves a sparsely populated area, it cuts driving time drastically. Also, it gives easier access to recreational areas in Gold Country.
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17 minutes ago, Alpo said:
What, the canned cow?
And the spilled sugar.
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Look at the table.
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15 hours ago, Crooked River Pete, SASS 43485 said:
Burma Shave!
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Palm Pistol and Other Oddities
in SASS Wire Saloon
Posted · Edited by Subdeacon Joe