In an article accredited to my pen, in the December number of this magazine, the types had me telling a curious tale of the singing of a whippoorwill, on a certain joyous night in the blessed Christmas of the sweet long ago, and the question is raised by certain ornithological experts whether that doleful bird does its warblings in the winter. It is best to copy what the Washington Herald says under the heading:
“Sweet Bells Out of Tune.”
Senator-elect Robert Love Taylor in one of his famous lectures describes Christmas in the mountains of his native state, and says:
“When I was a young man in my teens and twenties, the Christmas season was the brightest of the year. I used to take my fiddle under my arm at evening, when the whippoorwill began to sing and the stars began to twinkle, and hie me away to the merrymakings in the mountains.”
To this statement the Nashville American takes exception, and declares that no one ever heard a whippoorwill singing in the mountains of Tennessee during the latter part of December. The American hints that Mr. Taylor has tuned his instrument to an unheard-of pitch, and that the music he makes is discordant and badly out of gear.
This treason right at the future Senator’s very front door is hard for outsiders to understand. It is very much to be feared that the American has failed to measure fully up to the opportunities offered for intimate personal relations with the foremost fiddler of the age. Perhaps the American never heard a whippoorwill singing in December, but that does not prove that “Bob” Taylor hasn’t. Where “Bob” Taylor is, there, also, are the whippoorwills, the mockingbirds, the catbirds, and all the sweet and soulful singers known to Dixieland. It matters not the season, nor the hour, we take it. Song birds hover ever in his wake, and music hangs upon the lightest trembling of his bow. Flowers have their hours to fade, and the sun has its time to set, but for “Bob” Taylor’s fiddle, all hours and times are the same.
But even were it possible to believe that whippoorwills came not to the melodious pleadings of his bow, as a matter of cold and prosaic fact, nevertheless, by reason of the license granted all poets, this music master of the hills and dales of Tennessee would still have the right to claim their presence. Why should the American be captious about a little thing like that; especially when the sentimental nature of the state’s favorite son is so inevitably interwoven with the warp and woof of the argument? A prophet may be without honor save in his own country, but a fiddler of “Bob” Taylor’s fame deserves loyalty and cordial praise from all.
Let the American cease from troubling, and concede that the Senator-to-be has “rings on his fingers and bells on his toes, and that he shall have music wherever he goes!”
It must be remembered, at the very outset of this discussion, that the incident happened in the days of my callow youth, when all sorts of melodies and things were buzzing in my head, and life itself was one sweet song of tuneful melody; that I was in love and had a fiddle under my arm, alone in a moonlit mountain cove on my way to a dance, with a heart throbbing in happy expectancy. It was just at this excruciatingly delightful junction that the twittering occurred which constitutes the bone of this contention (if a twitter can be called a bone) and to that I deem it important to add some observations by way of explanation, refutation, and extenuation.
Observe, no man has ever heard me say that it was in the nature of a whippoorwill to sing at any season, but if one lone bird upon a frozen limb away up the mountain gorge in the dead silence of a moonlit winter’s night, should choose to violate its nature and change its graveyard croakings into purling song in harmony with the melodies so sweetly and vociferously vibrating in the heart of its lone, love-lorn auditor, where is the harm? My critics limit their denial to the time of year, and I call my biographers’ attention to the implied admission that the whippoorwill does sing at some other season. I leave them suspended upon the horns of this dilemma of their own brewing (horns are sometimes brewed) and bid them extricate themselves if they can, for I shall not lend a hand, while I pass on to graver meditations.