A man with an old, gravelly voice picked up on the fourth ring, and when I said Holliss name, he was quiet for so long I thought the line had dropped. Then he said, I have been trying to find that man for fifty-seven years. Where is he, honey. Where is Hollis.
I had to tell him Hollis passed in 2023. I heard him set the phone down and come back. When he spoke again his voice was thick.
His name was Earl Toomey. In 1968 he was a nobody with a guitar, and so was Hollis with his fiddle, and the two of them wrote a song together one winter in Nashville. A love song. They signed a contract with a little record company, both their names on it, the one I found under the velvet lining of the old fiddle case.
Then life split them. The record company folded. Earl thought the song died with it. He went on to become the kind of name you have heard even if you do not follow the music, and he recorded that song decades later, and it became one of the most covered standards in country music. It has been in movies. It gets played at half the weddings in America.
And all that time, Earl told me, he had tried to find the fiddle player who wrote half of it, to give him his half. Hollis never came looking. Hollis never said a word to me about any of it. He just kept playing his little stage on Saturday nights for forty people, and let a young man he believed in have the glory.
My husband gave away a fortune and a famous song, and kept the only thing he ever really wanted, which was that stage and the folks who came to hear him play.
Earl had been putting Holliss half of the royalties into a trust for fifty-seven years, waiting for a man who never came to collect. It had grown into a number I cannot write here without my hands shaking.
He flew to Branson the next week, eighty years old, with a cane and that same old guitar. He stood on Holliss stage, on the benches Hollis built by hand, and he played their song in the Ozark Fiddle Barn for the first time in the place it should have been played all along. Four hundred people came. Word travels.
The amusement park vice president, the one with the cartoon mascot on his lanyard who told me old-time fiddle music does not draw the way it used to, learned real quick that it draws just fine when the man who wrote an American standard is playing it where his partner lived and died.
With Holliss royalties, I did not sell. I put the Ozark Fiddle Barn into a trust of its own, protected forever, a permanent home for old-time music, with Earls name and Holliss on the deed together, the way it was on that 1968 contract. The lazy river will have to go around it.
We still have a show every Saturday night. Holliss old bandmates play, and now and then, when his health allows, an old man with a cane flies in from Nashville to sit in. He always plays their song last.
Hollis said that case was for later. He was right. He just did not know later would come without him. But it came, and the stage he built by hand is still standing, and the music he gave away came home.