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they hit the beach. Okel had a buddy who caught a bullet. He ran to get him out of harm’s way, and he got killed trying to save him. His bravery earned him a Purple Heart. He was twenty years old.
    Dad was devastated. He’d lost his best friend. I don’t think he ever got over it. He made a vow to himself that if he ever had a son who showed any musical ability, he was going to get him a mandolin and teach him how to play it and sing tenor with him. Then they could play all the old songs he loved to sing with Okel.
    Though my dad lost his singing partner when Okel died, he didn’t let his grief kill his love for music, and he played whenever he could. Around about 1947, Dad was working for a while at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant down in Kingsport, a town in east Tennessee. He found out Bill Monroe was coming through Kingsport with a new outfit that had just about tore the roof off the Opry. There were a couple of new Blue Grass Boys: Lester Flatt, who sang lead, and Earl Scruggs, who played a banjo that sounded like a tommy gun.
    Well, Dad paid a quarter to get in, and he later said it was the most incredible show he’d ever seen in his whole life, before or since. For years afterward, whenever he talked about that night, his eyes would light up. I’d give anything to have been there with him. What my dad got to see was the classic lineup of the Blue Grass Boys. Once they got to playing, they turned the stage into a battlefield. It was a competition between Bill and Earl, trying to outdo each other on their instruments. With Bill and Lester nailing those great duets, I’m sure Dad was wishing his brother Okel could have been there to hear it. I asked Dad one time if he’d gotten his money’s worth at that show. He said, “Son, I’d a-paid a dollar to a-seen them!”
    Let me tell you about a bunch of young bucks in their prime. They had a one-microphone setup. They didn’t need nothing else. The whole band worked around the mic as smooth as silk. They stepped in and out to take solos and hit the harmonies and never broke stride or missed a note. And then Chubby Wise would wedge his two hundred fifty pounds through the scrum to play a fiddle breakdown, with Bill behind him chopping his mandolin, Howard Watts in back slapping on that big bass, and Lester and Earl blazing away, making the impossible seem easy as pie.
    I knew another guy who saw the Blue Grass Boys that same year. He was a farm boy in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, and his name was Levon Helm. When I saw him at a festival a few years before he passed away, Levon told me the show had changed his life. He got as excited as a kid just talking about that night, same way my dad used to get. “Monroe had put together the dream band, and they really tattooed my brain for good,” he said. “I loved the mandolin and the fiddle and the bass and Earl’s banjo—I loved everything about that show. When I got home, I knew right then I wanted to play music for the rest of my life.”
    Levon meant it, too. He died in 2012, playing his music right up till the end, same way that I hope to do. In his late sixties, he went back to his roots and cut bluegrass and traditional country albums full of Stanley Brothers songs and old-time hymns. It was a few years after he’d whipped cancer, and he had a resurgence of popularity, bringing a new generation of fans into the fold with his singing and drumming and mandolin picking. I believe certain things happen for a reason, and the last time I saw Levon I told him the Lord wasn’t done with him yet. He busted out in a big grin and said, “Son, I believe you’re right!”
    After his stint at the ammunition factory, Dad left Kingsport and came back to Brushy Creek. There wasn’t much work around, but he found jobs welding, which is what his uncles Calvin and Homer did. Lawrence County has never been a major coal-mining region, but the area has huge