Uncle Arnold and Mel Bay

It was two weeks before Christmas - the first Christmas in the new house. I was in the fourth grade, but the only relevance to that is to say that I had just turned ten years old. Approaching the house on the walk home from school, I spotted a familiar truck in the driveway. Uncle Arnold was here. As I entered through the kitchen door, he turned to me and through the thick cloud of cigarette smoke and over the coffee cup that was half way to or from his mouth he said, “Hi boy.”

I don’t remember the first time he addressed me by my given name, but it was long after that. “Hi,” I said back. Normally I would have said, “Hi Uncle Arnold,” but he wasn't really my uncle even though he was my Dad’s brother. There was no one else in the house except him and Mom so I left off the formalities.

Mom filled his coffee cup again and we moved into the living room. As was often the case Uncle Arnold asked for and received my older sister’s jumbo Kay guitar. After tuning it up, between long drags on his cigarette and sips of coffee he played and sang for half an hour or so. The songs he played were very familiar to me. Since my earliest memories he played and sang the very same songs. Still, I was spellbound as he played “Guitar Boogie,” Hank Williams’ “I Saw The Light” and two or three love songs finishing up with “The Army Song.”

“Oh the coffee in the army, they say it’s mighty fine,
It’s good for cuts and bruises and it tastes like iodine.
Oh you can see why I want to go home.
Gee Mom, I want to go, hey Mom, I want to go,
Gee Mom, I want to go home.

The women in the army, they say they're mighty fine,
They're either over eighty or else they're under nine.
Oh you can see...”

Somehow there was always a verse in there that I hadn’t heard before.

Uncle Arnold wasn't really in to showing me how to play guitar or teaching me anything. He just played and sang, and while he did, I sat spellbound. I’d think, ‘Someday, I’ll play and sing like that.’ As I listened and watched him play his hand would sometimes form a chord on the neck of the guitar that I recognized from an old tattered Mel Bay guitar book that had somehow appeared one day.

“Well... I guess I'd better get going.” He checked his watch, crushed his cigarette out in the nearest ashtray, leaned the guitar against the sofa and stood to his feet. He left his coffee cup about two thirds empty on the end table and started for the front door. Dad, his older brother, would be home from work soon, but as was most often the case he would not wait around to see him.

By the time Uncle Arnold had reached the front door and lit another cigarette, I had located the Mel Bay guitar book and was attempting to reference the chords that he had played. 'Oh ... that was a G.' That book was great. On the first couple of pages there were pictures showing each part of the guitar referenced: frets, bridge, nut, neck, and so on. On the next few pages the strings were listed from the bottom up: E, B, G, D, A, E. There were pictures of the left hand with the fingers listed: thumb, 1, 2, 3 and 4. There were pictures for everything from how to properly hold a pick to showing how to hold your hand and form every chord listed in the book.

On Christmas morning there was an elongated triangular shaped cardboard box under the tree. There was no wrapping paper as I recall, and no name on the box, but we all knew what was in the box and whose present it was. Mom said, “When Arnold was here the other day he tuned it for you.”

I opened the box and lifted out a blond three-quarter size flat top guitar with a tail piece and a floating bridge. During the first half hour that I owned it, it was reasonably ‘in’ tune, but I don't remember it ever being ‘in’ tune after that. In my 10 year old wisdom, I moved the bridge and there were no markings to show where it belonged.

A few years later, my folks bought me a Teisco EP for Christmas. Thank goodness it did not have a floating bridge!

Mel Bay died May 14, 1997. During his life time he enhanced the lives of millions of guitar pickers, not unlike myself, who were much improved by his ability to make learning the guitar inviting instead of daunting. His lesson books are still available at www.melbay.com.

Uncle Arnold died March 19, 2004 leaving my brother Wade and me with a profound love for the guitar and the solace that comes from sitting on the sofa after dinner and picking and singing some old gospel songs and maybe ending up with “The Army Song.”

...Gee, Mom, I want to go home...