When I said Holliss name into the phone, the man with the old gravelly voice was quiet a moment, and then he said, maam, your husband wrote one of the biggest songs of my career, and nobody is tearing down his stage while I am still breathing.
The amusement parks vice president looked around the Ozark Fiddle Barn and told me their water resort was going in, that my barn was where the lazy river went, that old-time fiddle music does not draw the way it used to.
He did not know what was under the velvet of Holliss oldest fiddle case.
In 1968 my husband co-wrote a song with a man who became a country music legend, and the contract in that fiddle case, with Holliss signature and the legends signature under it, means my husband held a share of the rights to a song still played today, and that legend, still living, was not about to let Holliss barn be bulldozed for a lazy river.
Hollis played that little stage every Saturday for forty years and built every bench by hand, and he never bragged that back in 1968 he wrote a hit with a man whose name everyone knows. He kept the contract in the case he called for later, and later had finally come.
The legend made calls I could never make. With his backing, the Ozark Fiddle Barn is being recognized as a piece of the regions music history, the kind of landmark an amusement park cannot simply pave for a water slide, and the song royalties Hollis was owed are coming to me besides.
When the vice president came back, I did not argue. I told him whose signature was under Holliss on a 1968 contract, and that the man himself was helping save the barn, and I said, Hollis always played for the ones who did not get it. Youre one of those. That stage is staying, and it is going to have that legends name on a plaque by the door.
The water resort found another side of the highway. We still do the Saturday show with Holliss old bandmates, and now folks come from more than three states, because word got out about the barn where a legend once played.
Old-time fiddle music doesnt draw the way it used to, he told me. It drew a country legend to my telephone. Hollis kept that secret in a fiddle case for later, and later saved the barn he built with his own two hands.