Stories On A Sunday Afternoon/Retracing Familiar Steps

Do you believe in foreshadowing?

All of us as children step into stories already in progress. Looking back, it can feel at times like we waded into a river and felt the tug of the current around our feet. Some of us had to learn to swim upstream, make a new start, find a new place that felt like home. But even as we try now to write a story we can call our own, the past is full of flowing clues as to what we will embrace, resist, expand on, reinvent.

How have the stories you stepped into shaped you?

As for me, sometimes I think it begins with a barn…

As a young Amish boy, my father, John Detweiler, would sketch faces on the whitewashed walls of the barn on the family farm. His brothers and sisters and even the occasional neighbor would gather and look at the pictures he drew, and recognize themselves.

Musical instruments weren’t allowed in the home because of the church rules. My father’s brother, Rudy, hid an acoustic guitar in the barn. John and Rudy would sneak out after dark and strum a few clandestine chords, hum a few lines.

Forbidden music.

After the hushed practice they would bury the guitar beneath the loose hay in the haymow, until one early morning at dawn, one of the other brothers, not knowing it was buried there, accidentally ran a pitchfork through it. That was the end of the guitar.

Shortly before he died, I asked my Uncle Rudy about this story again, and he confirmed it was true. But for the first time he told me about their backup plan: they had also hid an accordion under the horses’ manger.

An accordion??

This raises a practical question: How does one secretly practice the accordion?

When my father turned 21, my grandfather offered him the family farm in Delaware if he would stay and farm it. Those 200 pristine acres would have made him wealthy. My father said the only thing he knew for sure when he was 21 was that he wasn’t a farmer. He gracefully bowed out and began exploring. I don’t think he ever stopped, always curious about what lay over the horizon. Eventually, he met my Mother, and six of us children arrived on the scene over the years.

When it was obvious that I was interested in music as a young child, my father opened the classified ads in the local paper in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and circled all the used pianos for sale. We drove around, pulling into various driveways, knocking on doors. I played all the pianos until we found the right one. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think I was looking for a piano with a broken heart. I wanted to feel something on my skin…

My father paid $10 for the piano I picked, and the neighbor men helped carry it into the house.

The piano became a safe place for me as a child to figure out stuff that I didn’t have words for.

When no better plan emerged over the years, we decided maybe I should study music in college. My father found a little Quaker liberal arts college for me in Canton, Ohio, called Malone College. Our rivals, the Catholics across town at Walsh, would sometimes steal the M and we would be alone College.

Malone had (and has) a beautiful restored barn on campus (well worth a visit if you’re in Canton, we’ve included a few pictures). The barn functioned as the student center but also had performance space upstairs where we music majors performed all our recitals.

It was there on the first floor of the barn that I first saw Karin across a room. I thought, Now there’s a lovely face. I should introduce myself.

Karin has no memory of that first meeting. And I had no idea that I was introducing myself to my future life partner, my better half. At the time, we went our separate ways, didn’t think much about it.

But a few years later we made music together upstairs in the barn for the first time. That’s not a euphemism. I accompanied Karin at the piano. She sang a few art songs, an aria, about 30 minutes of music. The room was low lit, and quite full – Karin’s family and various friends had driven in from the Barnesville area. After the recital, Marlin Miller, a fellow student who would go on to a career as an opera singer, came up to me and said, Linford, what was that? Did you feel that? It was like the room changed.

I never forgot that word of affirmation. I guess when you put certain musicians together there is sometimes a chemistry that people can feel on their skin.

After I graduated (I’ll save much of the story for a different day, a different book) I began to get serious about songwriting. I had relocated to the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati. I was still doing a little piano teaching at Malone, and I heard that Karin was singing with a mutual friend and former fellow student, Nathalina, in that same upstairs room in the barn.

I decided to stop by and listen in. After the recital, I took Karin aside and said, Hey, we’re thinking about starting a band, would you be interested –

Yes, she said.

And she likes to say she’s been finishing my sentences ever since.

She packed her bags and moved from Barnesville to Cincinnati.

Now for the miraculous part: we’ve been making music together – writing, performing and touring – for 25 years.

We have been asking ourselves, How do we sustain a music career in 2015? We’re not kids anymore. We can’t just repeat the last 25 years.

Well, the universe had an answer for us.

Build a barn.

Really?

Yes.

My father – sketching faces on the whitewashed canvas of the walls of his family’s barn. Musical instruments hidden in the hay in a barn…

What if the story that we stepped into was meant to take a new bend in the river: Let The Music Be Heard. And what if the inside walls of the barn were warmly lit and became a gallery space where artists could share their work?

Karin and I met in a beautifully restored barn. We first made music together in a restored barn. I asked her to join a band 25 years ago standing upstairs in a restored barn.

Maybe it was all foreshadowing.

Our friends who know us use a different word when we process this aloud over a bottle of good red wine. The word they use is inevitable.

People are consuming music differently in 2015 than they were 25 years ago. Everything has changed. We’ve run this idea by various folks in the music industry for the last several years – booking agents, managers, fellow artists. They all seem to love it and think it’s a great step for us. (Not to mention the inspiration of Levon Helm hosting those Saturday night rambles in the barn on his property.)

We’ve decided to go for it.

We are gathering our extended musical family together to write this new chapter of a shared story. We are celebrating 25 years of music making as Over the Rhine. If the music has meant something to you, if by some miracle this music flowed into the river of your own life, come celebrate with us this Memorial Day Weekend, May 23 & 24 as we host “Barn Raising” concerts on Nowhere Farm/Nowhere Else (45 miles East of Cincinnati, Ohio). We’ll record the concerts for a live album. We’ll write the names of all who contribute in the barn as a way of saying, We built this. We were here. We let the music be heard.

We hope to see you.

Check out our website ~ overtherhine.com ~ for more details. And stay tuned in a few weeks for pictures of the progress already made. (Pictures included here are of the barn at Malone College (now University). Yes. We’ll call it foreshadowing.

If you want to share your own bit of foreshadowing, write to us at otrhine@aol.com or leave a comment.

And please share the above with select family, friends, loved ones.

See you in the Spring on the farm for a barn raising.

Peace like a river, love like an ocean,

Linford and Karin