The lights went down in the small recording studio and the singer/songwriting couple from Virginia took the stage. He strapped his guitar around his neck and began tuning - she reached for the stand up bass, taller than she was herself,
and they began making music together.
Her voice was clear and pure and remarkable. Her fingers plucked at the bass with skill and affection and she smiled often with a Virginia genuineness that immediately won over every member of the audience. He watched her with love shining in his eyes and a quiet, low key pride. They played and sang easily together as two people in love will often do, giving and taking at all the right moments, harmonizing perfectly and sounding as one - original songs of family and small town life, of the adventures of traveling and living on the road, of people they'd met along the way, of performances gone good and bad. He told stories of his grandfather and how certain songs came to be, sad stories and funny ones, all from the heart and related with a gentle smile. They sang bluegrass with a country quickness and authenticity, love songs with heartbreaking lyrics, and old time country and western, peppery with lost love and death on a lonely back road. And at the end they did a cover song or two and when I closed my eyes, I heard Patsy Kline - not so much her voice, but her essence, her spirit, her being. The lyrics to "Crazy" floated throughout the studio and I watched the audience being carried away by the sheer beauty of the sound. At the end there was tremendous applause and the first of three standing ovations.
These two gentle people from a small town in Virginia rang the rafters with a joyous noise.
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