Son Seeing World From Behind Guitar

by Dot Harrison

A few are different. Like my first-born, Lance.
But then he’s always been different, a truth to which every teacher he ever had would likely attest.

When he was six, his first-grade teacher remarked, “It’s amazing how much he can do standing on his head.”
And he was always the one who popped out of line. Maybe he thought it created a more interesting design.
When three of us ... Harry Nelson and Sam Causey with their guitars, and I with my baritone ukulele ... began to play and sing mostly at school and church socials, we’d hear Lance, in bed for the night, chuckling, as we rehearsed some of the folk and Hootenanny songs of the day.

His piano teacher begged his father and I to let him quit after nine months of lessons, during which he refused to practice his assignments, preferring to play his own versions of whatever music was running through his head. Looking back, after that it seems he didn’t touch the piano for a year or so. But when he sat down at the piano again, it seems he didn’t stop playing until he picked up a guitar.

One afternoon, he came home from Oakland High School with a borrowed flute. He retreated with the flute to the solitude of the bathroom. When he reappeared an hour or so later, he was playing, rather flawlessly, the Jethro Tull piece I’d heard for weeks on the record player.

I was not a witness, but I’ve heard tales of his crowning moment at an Oakland talent show when, in his version of top hat and tails, he ran from one side of the stage, slid across the grand piano, landed on the bench and launched into his latest composition at the keyboard.

And so it was not a startling surprise when some years later, after some classes in MTSU’s College of Mass Communication and a job as a computer systems manager and graphic artist at a prominent Nashville advertising and PR firm, that he chucked it all to travel, first south of the border: Mexico and Guatemala.
It was practice for the next adventure: twenty-two countries across Europe and Asia in the last six years.

And, of course, music. American Blues is very big in Europe, especially France, Lance and his partner, Donna Howley, report. So they sing for their supper ... and then some.

Some three or four years ago, they were tooling along in the south of France in their vintage Mercedes van when the bottom fell out. More precisely, the motor.
They had hoped to see and hear some of the world’s most renowned blues musicians at the Cognac Blues Passion Festival. But more urgently, they hitch-hiked to Cognac seeking funds to repair the van.

They picked a busy street, Lance opened his guitar case, and began to play and sing. A passerby stopped. “Wouldn’t they like to play at the festival?” He was a concert stage manager who not only got them into the festival, he put them on-stage. They were playing with their big-time idols: Louisiana Red, Little Milton, Bob Brozman, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, and more! And suddenly they were the “sweethearts” of the festival-- “two American favorites,” a reviewer noted following their third annual appearance last year. Now they play some five bookings a week throughout the region. Home last week, they played Sebastian’s and MTSU’s KUC Theater. Thursday they’ll be at The Magic Bean in Cookeville. Then it’s back to the south of France, the van that’s still getting them around ... and the blues.

Would that all dreams could come true in such spectacular fashion. And in such a spectacular setting!