From “A Day at Mt. Lebanon”:

A Mr. Keeton, bald and trim, got up to lead during the morning session. “He spent all day looking for this singing one time and never found it!” D.T. White announced. “I didn’t find it today, either,” Mr. Keeton answered back, almost proudly. “Somebody found it fer me.”

At noon, we took our recess. The men’s and women’s restrooms, back to back, were in a small building about 15 feet behind the church. I found the door to the men’s restroom closed. Young voices on the inside sounded out: “You want to talk to them little girls or go play?” “Talk to them girls” was the reply. The door swung open, and three youngsters grinned and looked up, the sun splashing in their faces. They disappeared among the crowd, now gathering round the tables.

Mr. A.A. (’Lonzo) Malone thrust a large thumb, blue-black just under the nail, at one of his buddies, Mr. Arnold Moon (the two of them surely in their 80s). “Them blue-hull peas you said’d never make . . . I shelled a bunch this morning.” The other reached for the thumb and shook it, chiding his cohort with a grin. “Six days shalt thou labor, and on the seventh shalt thou rest.”

There was an explosion around the big oak where the table for drinks was stationed. Someone had opened a grape drink and in doing so sent lilac fizz in a radius of six or seven feet, showering a dozen or so of all ages. A squeal and the circle suddenly widened. The culprit was singled out. “It wasn’t me,” he said, tightening the cap and then loosening it again.

Larry Ballinger, as we ate, pointed out a large tree a hundred feet back in the grove. “Had five squirrels runnin’ around in that oak one time. . . .”

After lunch, a member of one of the area singing families came in late and took a seat halfway back in the tenor. I noticed that when he didn’t seem to know a song, he would just sit and listen. When he knew the song, though, he sang along – and did so with his eyes shut tight. Like a mockingbird on its roost at dusk that sings itself to sleep – or like a rooster crowing. (“You know why the rooster shuts his eyes when he crows?” my grandfather asked me when I was a boy. “’Cause he’s got it up by heart.”) On the last chord of the song he would open his eyes again.

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From “Azilee Adams”:

In the years when the [National] convention met in Homewood, Azilee’s place was not far off my route. When it moved just over into Shelby County – the opposite direction from her home – I had to go out of my way a considerable distance to pick her up. But having her in conversation more than made up for the inconvenience. Aside from the stories she told, her lingo was always so appealing.

Azilee’s house was hidden away in a fairly crowded, circularly plotted suburb that I found difficult to navigate. Each year when I would call to confirm the directions, she would refer me past a couple of “little grassy spots. . . .” The grassy spots turned out to be small neighborhood parks. Then, when we were in the car, she would direct me through a series of back-roads – “pig trails,” she called them – that took us out of the main traffic flow and saved us time.

Once when the two of us had touched on a conspicuous absence at a singing convention, following an awkward change in leadership, Azilee had summed up her view of the matter in typically pithy style: “Some folks, if they can’t be the big dog, won’t be no dog at all.”

And speaking of dogs: a sight I frequently noticed in the neighborhood when I picked her up each morning for the 2008 convention was young women walking or running on the sidewalks, often in athletic attire, and just as often with a dog on a leash. It was noticeable enough to remark on it, and I almost did. But Azilee beat me to it when we passed yet another young woman with her dog.

“Look there,” she said and pointed. “I told my daughter, ‘If I get to where all I’ve got to do is walk a dog, just get out the old shotgun and shoot me. . . . I mean it, just go ahead and shoot me.’”

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Human Nature? Freeman’s Good Story . . .

Freeman Wootten and I sat together at many a singing and during the breaks shared many a chuckle. He was once as tickled as could be, the laughter just chugging up out of him, as he recalled a man at a country church who had gotten caught up in the spirit of the moment and started testifying, in a vision, unfortunately, collapsible under its own weight. Speaking excitedly, this fellow had asked everybody present to pray that he would live a better life in the coming year than the one he was now living – but then abruptly: “’Course, I don’t have no idee that I will. . . .”

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From “Hopewell Hospitality”:

Further down the tables, I was talking to Eloise Avery, who grew up in the Hopewell community. She said that Virgil and Alma’s mother used to make a cobbler in a big washtub on one day of the singing and chicken-and-dumplings in it the other day. “She always had a white cloth that she would put around that tub when she put it on the table, and then she would tie it.” And when the event was over, Eloise said, Mrs. Phillips would wash and dry the cloth and clean out and scald the tub. She then would fold the cloth, put it in the tub, and put the tub inside a big cloth sack. She only used the cloth and the tub for those big occasions. Is that not country cleanliness at its essence and a beautiful ritual besides?

Hospitality there is more than a ritual, though, and sometimes it beggars imagination. Eloise told me she had once asked Virgil about the largest number of guests his parents had put up at their place for a singing or church meeting. His answer was 72.

They had a big porch around the house when Virgil was growing up, Eloise said, and at times bales of cotton were stacked up on it. On the weekends of those big community events, guests slept inside on the floor, on a quilt if they were lucky enough to get one, and all around the porch on laid-up cotton, in the (cotton) seed house and in the barn loft. They laid children across a bed, one right next to the other. “Get off-a me!” she said you would sometimes hear in a child’s voice well into the night.

Virgil once told her about a preacher in a blue serge suit who stayed there on one of those occasions. In those days and in those circumstances, as she said, a serge suit made a statement; it was an “I have arrived” sort of look. On this particular morning after, the preacher, who had slept out on the porch or in the seed house or loft, appeared around the corner of the house – with cotton wisps, like a fine white powder, all over that blue serge. He had indeed arrived.

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From the chapter on Ruth Denson Edwards:

I’ve represented that her steps were deliberate, purposeful. There was one exception I observed, a pattern a little comical in retrospect but, in the moment, frightening. In our 1970 summer trip to D.C., we frequently came upon escalators in the Smithsonian buildings. In those instances, the one or more of us accompanying Miss Ruth found ourselves challenged. She had encountered escalators before – surely in Birmingham’s major department stores of that era, Pizitz and Loveman’s (which in the ’20s proclaimed itself “The largest store south of the Ohio”). And she regarded them the way a hiker would a rattlesnake. It was a simple mechanical principle she had failed to grasp, and she would not be instructed in it. Confronted with the steel-toothed gap opening before her, she would try – despite our best efforts – to step over it all. What any passerby then saw in silhouetted motion was a dangerously splayed figure – and one or more desperate hangers-on.