Joe Thompson has quitting on his mind.
All the times he’s tried to put down the fiddle run like a movie through his head. There was the time he got married and became determined to set up house and make a life for himself. But the music just wouldn’t leave.
And when his mother passed away when Thompson was in his 50s, he thought, yes, perhaps it was time to put down the instrument, the one he says bounces with life when the bow meets the strings. Now, he’s 91, an age he says boys rarely reach. He’s tired. But quitting is still an elusive goal.
"I want to quit and lay around and do what I want to do,” he says, leaning his slight frame forward on the couch in his Mebane home. “I’ve been at it long enough.”
His friend Larry Vellani, a guitar player from Mebane, is among those who won’t let Thompson’s music die. Who knows? It might just be the secret to his long life.
The success of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the group Thompson mentored that recently was signed by the major record label Nonesuch, keeps him fiddling as well. Writers and aspiring old-time string musicians who hear about Thompson through the Drops visit his house, eager to hear the songs he learned as a boy in the fields his father farmed near Mebane.
The Drops have acknowledged that Thompson’s tunes helped pave the way for them to make their living from old-time music, the genre characterized by rollicking string band tunes fit for a dance or a country social. Thompson, who lives with his wife Pauline, earned his living in his working years as a heavy equipment operator at the now-closed White Furniture Company. Music was the fabric that knit together family members and friends.
In the same breath that he says he wants to quit, he admits the real truth. “I can’t quit. I can’t get away from it.”
Deep roots
The ties that bind Thompson and his family to music are stronger than the beams that held up their homes. When a fiddle string broke, Thompson would strip a string off a screen door to replace it.
He was a toddler when he first grabbed his father’s fiddle. Thompson’s dad was among those sought by neighbors, black and white, to play for square dances more than a century ago. Thompson carried on that tradition, playing at dances, parties and corn-shuckings, known as frolics, through the ’20s and the ’30s.
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