My Virgin Heart in St. Louis: 1954 to 1957 (Part 3)

John Harford, or, The Question, 1957

(The first two parts of “My Virgin Heart in St. Louis” can be found on my website: minervasoho.com)

It wasn't really a date. Did I want to hear some Bluegrass tapes he had at home, a few blocks away from the art school where we were students? I was a sophomore and he was a junior, a new student having just transferred from a fancy East Coast school. His car was in the school parking lot and he promised to drive me home later. In 1957 everyone in St. Louis who had a car drove everywhere, even when they were only going around the corner.

At his parents' house we sat next to each other on a large couch in the living room and listened to hard-picked mandolins and banjos, and hard-driven song verses. I can still feel the size of that room and visualize our relative positions on the couch and recall his gestures as he stood up every now and then walking across the room to deal with the sound system.

Was it just his slenderness or was there something in his nature that triggered a heightened sense of space in me? The first time I saw him he was sitting in a large window bay in one of the drawing classrooms with a banjo on his knee. Barbara, my best friend, had just met him and wanted me to get to know the guy who played banjo. Folk music was the rage among many college students then.

His lean body was all the way over to one side of the window bay, leaving a significant emptiness next to him. The space was not uninviting, yet it seemed he was surrounded by a vast loneliness. I considered, and then rejected, the idea of sitting next to him. I didn't want to intrude.

During lunch breaks he often picked his banjo, always sitting in one of the window bays and filling the room with music. It was practice for him, but entertainment for almost everyone else, because he was a superb musician.

His father, a doctor, loved country music, he said, and the family drove to the Ozarks many weekends. He grew up crawling around at square dances under the feet of musicians. Much later, when he became famous, he no longer spoke like an educated city boy, but with a perfect country accent, shot through with humility. He wore a fine country hat and casual clothes made elegant by a dark vest. His high cheekbones and the rugged bone structure of his face gave his small eyes and thin upper lip an expressive advantage, but for the most part his music was delivered with restraint, suggesting the deadpan attitude of a tough mountain man.

He didn't credit his father anymore. Fair enough. He had reinvented his urban self and had become the real thing, respected and loved by every country musician that he respected and loved, and accepted by all of them as one of them.

That day, so many years ago, he drove me home as he had promised that he would. We sat in the front seats of his car making small talk, heading west on Big Bend Boulevard. Just as he turned the car to the right to enter Northmoor Drive where I lived, he asked:

“Do you believe in free love, Minerva?”

I froze, unable answer him.

The question hung in the air in the nearly palpable space between us while I tried to find an answer. What did he mean by “free love?” I asked myself. Was he referring to the anarchists' idea that sexual relations freely entered into should not be regulated by law, or to the idea that it is OK to have indiscriminate and irresponsible sexual relations with anyone at all no matter what? Was free love a euphemism for “promiscuous,” I asked myself.

Or, I wondered, was he asking me if I would have sex with him?

Having grown up in an all-female household, I feared males. Their toes were too big; their jokes weren't funny; I didn't like it when they roughhoused; they were way too strong, an unequal match, impossible to play tennis with; and even if I had a crush on one of them and secretly desired him, as, perhaps, I secretly desired John, I didn't consciously want to touch any of them.

He must have felt my confusion and didn't push me to give a clear answer. What I didn't know at the time, but found out many, many years later, was that John Harford and David Durham, also an art student, had talked at lunch earlier that very day about which girls on campus might be sexually available. My name had come up. By the rules of fair play both men were free to attempt a conquest. John had been the first to act.

John having been discouraged, David pursued me with enough persistence that one day, as we walked slowly hand in hand lost in conversation along the road that led to the back entrance of school, we didn't notice that there was a car behind us that had slowed down and that the woman behind the wheel was waiting patiently for us to move at our own pace.

I remember John coming up to me in the hall at school. He established a distance between our bodies that was friendly but formal. He clearly had something on his mind. He said, “Minerva, my mother saw you and David the other day walking hand in hand by the back entrance. You had no idea that she was in a car right behind you. She said to me, 'Those two must be in love.'”

So the patient driver was John Harford's mother. And, oh, she thought like a poet, and she shared her poetic thoughts with her son, who also thought like a poet.

Clearly, John was admitting defeat and was letting me know that he was putting to rest forever any claim to establish intimacy with me.

But I like to think that he held on to his mother's poetic perception and that he used it a few years later when he wrote one of the lines for his famous song “Gentle On My Mind.”

[It's not] . . . something that somebody said
because they thought we fit together walkin . . .
That keeps you in the back roads, by the rivers of my mem'ry,
that keeps you ever gentle on my mind.

Indeed, now, so many years later, you guessed it, it is HE who is in the rivers of MY memory, ever gentle on my mind.

On YouTube

Listen to John Hartford sing 'Gentle On My Mind&' with fiddle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn35akH09Z8

An early 1977 bluegrass version with banjo and foot tapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQPpTXBGi7A

Afterword

Browsing YouTube a few years ago I found by chance a stunning and surprising performance given by John Hartford before he died of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Even in a weakened state Hartford was a poet in the deepest and oldest sense of the word, employing a traditional genre, fusing language, rhythm and rhyme into a construction that allowed for many layers of interpretation. His beat was insistent, confident and virile. Anglo-Saxon versification was made modern.

copyright © 2017 Minerva Durham