Anybody Shining by Frances O'Roark Dowell Read Free Book Online

religious leader, the way Pastor Campbell is the religious leader here for the Baptists, only on a much smaller scale.”
    I took this all in with some interest. Pastor Campbell is a Baptist preacher, and he is as nice as he can be, but he says that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll go to hell, no two ways about it. But in Miss Sary’s World Book Encyclopedia , there are pictures of children in India who follow a different way of thinking. They are called Hindu, and from how I readthings they hardly give Jesus a second thought. I don’t care to think of them burning in the fires of hell, and for my money I don’t believe Jesus would care to think of it either.
    â€œSo if you go to Catholic church, you don’t mind folks dancing and playing the fiddle?”
    â€œNo, I don’t believe that Catholics mind music and dance at all.”
    I glanced up at Mama and saw she had that thinking look in her eyes. I bet she was wondering if she turned Catholic, maybe Daddy’s barn dances wouldn’t be a sin. Daddy was a Baptist, but he had fairly freewheeling notions of what made something a sinful activity, and dancing fell low on that list.
    To my way of thinking, a barn dance is the best thing in the world. How they got started here is that last spring Daddy and Larry Peacock put their money together and bought a radio out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and then on Saturday nights they took it to Truman Taylor’s barn and tuned it to the National Barn Dance on WLS radio out of Chicago, Illinois.
    Most folks look forward to Daddy and Mr. Peacock’s barn dances all week. You’ll be in the middle of some boring old chore like beating out the rugs on the porch rail and all the sudden you remember that Saturday’s a-coming. Your toe will start tapping its ownself when you think about all the good radio music you’ll hear in Truman Taylor’s barn. At the barn dances, folks jig and cut up and have themselves a good time. When the radio show is over, Daddy and Mr. Peacock get out their fiddles and play, and folks dance some more. The very thought of the good times ahead will pull you all the way through the week.
    There are them who are against the barn dances. Pastor Campbell has made his stand clear on dancing, which is that it will lead to sin. Most Baptists other than Daddy believe this, but more than one will show up to a barn dance, because they been playing music in their families longer than they been Baptist.
    It surprised a lot of folks when Miss Keller and Miss Pittman come out against the barndances. For them, it’s mostly because of the radio. Miss Keller told Daddy that the songs on the radio lack the nobility of our mountain ballads. “They are tawdry and full of cheap sentiment,” she said.
    â€œBut folks like to dance to ’em,” Daddy said. “You against dancing?”
    â€œNo, I am not,” Miss Keller informed him. “But I am against throwing out the good and bringing in the bad. You have a tremendous tradition of music in these mountains. You should work to preserve it, not dilute it with silly songs about lovers’ quarrels.”
    â€œThem ballads you like so much, what are they about other than lovers’ quarrels?” Daddy asked. “You just like ’em ’cause they’re old. Ain’t nothing special about old. The songs we listen to on the radio, they’ll be old someday too, and folks will jump up and down about how precious they are.”
    Now Mama, she loves the old songs just like Miss Keller and Miss Pittman, and like Pastor Campbell, she believes dancing leads to sin.The problem is, ain’t nobody on this mountain loves to dance better than Mama.
    Mama didn’t turn Baptist until she was fifteen years old, when she went to a tent revival and the spirit of the Lord entered into her and wiped her soul clean. Before that, her family read the Bible on Sundays and wouldn’t