Books: Music on the Muscatatuck

THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION — Jessamyn West—Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

Somewhere on the banks of the Muscatatuck River, in the mid-19th Century, lived Jess Birdwell, Quaker and nurseryman. Jess thought he had everything life could give, except a chance to listen to music. His wife, Eliza, was a minister—”good-looking, as female preachers are apt to be.” But like most of the local Quakers, Eliza believed that music was “a popish dido, a sop to the senses, a hurdle waiting to trip man in his upward struggle.” She had to give Jess a pretty stern nudge in the ribs every seventh month, fourth day (Fourth of July), when Amanda Prentis hurdled the high notes of The Star Spangled Banner.

Author Jessamyn West, who is of Indiana Quaker stock herself, has collected 14 of her pleasant, nostalgic short stories in one volume. All the yarns, based on material which echoed through the author’s own childhood, are about the Birdwell family—who have the Devil’s own time reconciling the ways of William Penn with the general cussedness of human nature.

One day, on his way to market, Jess Birdwell met a gentleman whose card was inscribed: “Professor Waldo Quigley, Traveling Representative, Payson and Clarke. The World’s Finest Organs. Also Sheet Music and Song Books.” “How many reeds in a Payson and Clarke [organ]?” Jess asked him. “Forty-eight, Brother Birdwell,” replied Professor Quigley, “not counting the tuba mirabilis. . . . Those reeds duplicate the human throat. They got timbre,” he added (“landing on the French word the way a hen lands on the water”). “How many stops?” asked Jess. “Eight,” said the professor. “And that vox humana! . . . You can hear the voice of your lost child in it. Did you ever lose a child, Brother Birdwell?” “No,” said Jess. “[Then] you can hear the voice of your old mother calling to you from the further shore,” said the professor. “Ma lives in Germantown,” said Jess. “Wet your whistle,” cried the professor, taking a long swig from a flask, “and we’ll sing it [The Old Musician and His Harp] through together. . . :

“Bring to me my harp again,

Let me hear its gentle strain;

Let me hear its chords once more

Ere I pass to yon bright shore.”

Jess bought the organ. When Eliza saw him dragging it from the station on a sled, she said: “Thee can have thy wife or thee can have that instrument.”

Soon local Quakers sensed something strange in the air—almost as if they heard an organ playing. They also felt somehow “that Friend Birdwell wasn’t standing as squarely in the light as he’d done at one time.” So one night the Ministry and Oversight Committee paid the Birdwells a friendly call. “But before they could even ease into their questions with some remark upon the weather or how the corn was shaping up—Jess heard it—the faint kind of leathery sigh the organ made when the foot first touched the bellows.” Jess knew that his daughter Mattie was settling down to a musical session in the attic. Just as she launched into The Old Musician and His Harp, Jess cried aloud: “Friends, let us lift our hearts to God in prayer!”

No one had ever heard Brother Birdwell pray so loudly. He prayed in the name of all the sinners in the Old Testament—in the name of Adam, of Moses, of David, of Solomon, of Abraham, of Jephthah. When Mattie struck up The Old Musician for the fifth time, Jess swept into the New Testament. When Mattie pulled out the fortissimo stop, Jess’s resonant pleading fairly shook the studding. “Friend,” said Amos Pease, when at last the agony was over, “thee’s been an instrument of the Lord this night. . . . Thy prayer carried us so near to heaven’s gates that now and again I thought I could hear . . . the sound of heavenly harps.” “Amen, Brother. Amen to that!” cried the rest of the committee, tottering exhausted through the door.

All the stories in The Friendly Persuasion are written in much the same amiable, gently humorous vein. Give it to your Ma in Germantown, before she takes off for the further shore.