Every so often you run into some pretty strange combinations of instruments. I hear that some modern composer with maybe too much time on his hands even wrote a piece for saxophone and harp. But the combinations I've been involved with just happened spontaneously out of the blue. One of them was a duet that was played, but yet it wasn't.
I had just come up to Ithaca again, where I was born, from Florida after a long time and I found a little church on a side street and started to go to it, and this little church, with a congregation of maybe fifty or so, was hard up for music.
Well, in those days the only thing I played was steel guitar, and I had mine with me, such as it was, sort of simple and basic, with an amplifier that looked like a little Zenith radio, and I had got it cheap because the volume control had somehow stopped working when it was dead on full volume. I was sorta used to playing it at full volume, but since I just played for my own enjoyment and didn't care how it looked I used to wrap a horse blanket around it to cut the sound.
I was pretty good, but nobody ever told me you could make money playing one of those things and I just played it for fun, or whenever I wanted to get even with a neighbor in a rooming house I would plan to take the blanket off the amplifier, but I never actually had the heart to do it. (I learned the steel in Lincoln, Nebraska from a Mrs. Wagner who ran the Honolulu Conservatory of Music, because my mom thought I should have some culture.)
So anyway I had this clunker of a steel guitar, and as soon as I started going to that church I met and sorta had a crush on a girl named Ruthie, the only other musician in the church, and she played accordion. Ruthie and I would sometimes trade instruments. I learned to play one tune on the accordion and Ruthie didn't learn anything on the steel guitar, probably to this day. But of course we had to play together in church at least once. That was just what you did.
I remember we played "Sweet Hour of Prayer" because it has easy harmony. We decided to play it once through in unison and then I would play the harmony the second time. And of course, in church looks mattered in those days and so I had to take the horse blanket off of the amplifier.
And that was about the most noise that had ever been in that little church; I can still hear the echo in my mind. But the truth is that Ruthie didn't play loud enough; in fact, they could see her fingers moving, and they could see the bellows going in and out, but that was about it. Afterwards a lady from Syracuse tried to get me to give her son lessons; probably it was the only music she had heard since she left Syracuse. Ruthie was not too pleased when even the lady from Syracuse, who was pretty clearly paying attention, asked her why she hadn't been playing.
Well, I guess there weren't any talent scouts in that church that day, but I didn't hear any complaints, except from Ruthie. Ruthie said next time she just wouldn't bother practicing; and she said there was a limit on how loud you could play the accordion, and that no matter how hard you squeezed, after a certain point it didn't get any louder, and that it really wasn't fair that only one of us was plugged in, and that she was against electrified instruments from then on.
You know if you tape a steel guitar and play it backwards, it sounds like an accordion. I've always wondered if that works in reverse. I mentioned that to Ruthie, but she didn't seem too interested in it.