“Sir, you are my god,” she told me. That’s always nice to hear, and she shouldn’t have spoiled it by adding, “Except of course for Earl Scruggs. And that nice tall Allen Shelton, who used to fill in on banjo with the Virginia Boys; oh, he was cute! Now, have you heard those new sides the McReynoldses have cut down in Jacksonville, with this boy called Bobby Thompson? He is the future! He has this whole new style—you can hear the melody! ‘Hard Hearted.’ ‘Dixie Hoedown.’ Oh, my!”

“Young lady, you know I’m not exactly bluegrass,” I told her politely. “Earl, well, he’s beginning to miss notes, but you can’t get away from him, he’s a giant, all right, and Don Reno likewise. Nevertheless, my above-all admiration is Pete Seeger, if you must know. He’s the one, him and the Weavers, brought back the five-string after the war, after the dance bands had all but turned the banjo into a ukulele.”

“He is folksy and pokey and phony, if you’re asking me,” she said, with that hurried overemphasis I was beginning to get used to, while her warm black eyes darted back and forth around my face like stirred-up horseflies. “And a traitor to his country besides.”

“Well,” I admitted, “you won’t find him on Grand Ole Opry real soon, but the college kids eat him up, and he does sheer, sincere picking—none of that show-biz flash that sometimes bothers me about old Earl. Young lady, you should calm yourself and sit down and listen sometime to those albums Pete cut with Woody and the Almanacs before the war.”

“I did,” she said eagerly. “I did, I did. Talking Union. Sod Buster Ballads. Wonderful true-blue lefty stuff. The West Coast Commies must have loved it. Mr. Chester, did you ever in your life listen to a program called Jamboree out of Wheeling?”

“Did I? I got my first airtime on it, on good old WWVA. Me and Jim Buchanan on fiddle, before he got big. ‘Are You Lost in Sin?’ and ‘Don’t Say Good-bye If You Love Me,’ with a little ‘Somebody Loves You, Darlin’ ’ for a rideout. Did I catch your name, may I ask?”

“You’ll laugh. It’s a silly name.”

“I bet, now, it isn’t. You got to love the name the good Lord gave you.”

“It wasn’t the good Lord, it was my hateful mother,” she said and, taking a deep breath that rounded out her cheeks like a trumpet player’s, came out with “Imogene.” Then she exhaled in a blubbery rush and asked me, “Imogene Frye. Isn’t it silly like I said?”