Love in the Minor Key

This is the story of how a broken banjo helped fix a broken heart.

Words by Elizabeth Johnson | Photo by Bates Littlehales

There’s a music jam that happens most Thursday nights at an old store called The Chair Place in Craddockville, Virginia. You’d never happen upon The Chair Place, as it’s many miles and turns off U.S. Route 13, the main road that runs straight up Virginia’s Eastern Shore. And you’d never happen upon the Eastern Shore, either, as you have to cross over the 17-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel just to set foot there. 

Before things even get going at The Chair Place on Thursdays, there’s a smaller gathering of three banjo players at a home a few miles down the road. And if you ever find yourself at either, I think you’d be welcomed. Just as I was. Just as I continue to be.

A few years ago, I restored an 1890s Buckbee banjo as a way to get my mind off a breakup. I know that other people run marathons or go backpacking, but I found a broken banjo in the back of a barn, and it just seemed like it might be my way through it. 

It was my first real heartbreak, and I felt totally lost in its fog. So even though the banjo had been sitting for decades, unstrung, ripped, and missing parts, the thought that I could repair something, that there could be steps to making something whole, felt instructive, if not hopeful. 

At the time, I didn’t know anything about banjos, or building instruments, but living in southeastern Virginia, it didn’t take much time or effort to find folks who did. Before long, tutored by new friends and old issues of Foxfire magazine, I’d be soaking goat skin in my sink, ordering tuning pegs, and measuring bridge placement. Before long, I’d be a woman with a working banjo, working on a still-broken heart.

A month after I finished the banjo, I was driving home from a camping trip with friends on the Eastern Shore when I tried to find this old store someone had told me about, stopping in gas stations and taking long detours past fields of tomato farms. The Chair Place sits an uncomfortable driving distance from the main road, and I felt my courage waning as I drove deeper into the landscape.

As I stepped out of my car that afternoon, a man opened a window in the apartment above the closed store. He was in his early 60s, and he smiled as I called up from the street, “Is this where you play music on Thursday nights?” He said it was.

“I just fixed up a banjo. Could you teach me how to play it?” His name was Bill Aeschliman, and he said to come back on Thursday. I sang the whole way home.

The Chair Place was once a storefront for Bill's chairmaking business, but even after he stopped making chairs, he kept welcoming musicians.  When I arrived at The Chair Place the next Thursday evening, there were cars lining the narrow road and people carried instruments inside or stood on the porch smoking and laughing in the night air. The Chair Place glows warmly from the outside, and once inside, a dim yellow light illuminates the makeshift stage, which is crowded with a potbellied wood stove, musicians, and beer bottles. The old wooden shelving, empty of the goods it once housed, climbs all the way to the ceiling. People sing from wooden chairs, and everyone glistens on swampy summer evenings.

That night, Bill sat outside and taught me three chords. When we went inside, I watched different musicians start songs that others joined in, walking to and from the front of the store to grab a beer or lounge against an open window. Sometimes audience members moved up front to sing or dance, and I just sat there, smiling.

As I left that night, Bill stood with me on the porch and told me that he built banjos, too. He also knew someone who could tell me everything about the banjo I had restored. “He’s 90 years old and lives 15 minutes up the road,” Bill said. “Meet me this weekend, and I’ll drive you over there.”

On the other side of the bridge, I felt lonely most of the time. While I’d known love, it hadn’t lasted. My social life felt like a long series of engagement parties and baby showers. So while it felt potentially unwise to meet a stranger and drive to an unknown location, it also felt, more than anything, like adventure.

The next Saturday afternoon, after taking all responsible precautions, I followed Bill’s old pickup, twisting down a dirt road through the trees until it opened up to Bates and Jody Littlehales’ home. As we climbed the porch, Bill turned to me. “Are you ready to meet the coolest people you’ll ever know?”

Bates and Jody’s home in the woods is a large A-frame structure, filled with beautiful artwork and, incredibly, around 30 open-back banjos. Everything about them and their home is warm and happy. 

“I hear you want to learn some clawhammer banjo?” Bates asked. I said I did. “Lessons are free,” he said, “but you have to stay for wine hour.”

All our lessons would follow a similar pattern. After a quick greeting, we would sit down in front of the fireplace, tune our banjos, and Bates would play the song he’d chosen in its entirety. Then he’d walk me through it, note by note, brush stroke by brush stroke. It would be years before I’d ever see a song written out in tablature. Everything I learned, I learned this way.

I was learning old-time music, and most old-time songs have two parts: a call and response. If I concentrated, I could get Bates to teach me both parts in one lesson. But most of the time I had barely mastered the call before we would break for wine hour.

Back on my side of the bridge, I’d find myself whistling “Whiskey Before Breakfast” or “Angeline the Baker” as I walked the halls of the school where I taught. Before long, all this old-time music started to put my heartbreak into perspective. Sometimes these songs were for dancing or celebrating, but just as often, they were songs about hard times, loves lost, and the horrors of the past. I had so much to learn about love.

Through our wine hours, mostly from Bill’s prompting, I would also learn that Bates had spent his entire career as a photographer, mostly at National Geographic. He’d pioneered underwater photography with Jacques Cousteau, spent an afternoon in France with Marc Chagall, and had cocktails with Tennessee Williams. Once, in between lessons, Bates sent me a picture he took of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier on their yacht. A story for next week, the email said.

Sometimes I’d leave our lessons and follow Bill to the fun at The Chair Place, but just as often I’d head back toward Norfolk, Virginia, driving through the empty landscape in my Jeep, listening to the CDs Bates would let me borrow. I’d pull over into the scenic overlook before I crossed the bridge, and on the warmer evenings, I’d sit there with the hatchback open, looking out over the expanse of the Chesapeake Bay.

I still felt lonely, but this loneliness was starting to feel more like my call. And this music, and Bill’s kindness, and Bates’ stories, they rushed in as the response.

Of course, taking banjo lessons from a 90-year-old wasn’t without complications. Bates would sometimes forget he’d already taught me the song he picked for our lesson, or he’d forget the rest of a song as he was teaching it, or, most distressing to me, was that he was always changing the endings to songs. If I ever called him on that last one, he’d just smile and say that endings were up for grabs. 

A few months into our lessons, Bates and Bill played and sang “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” the American standard by the Mississippi Sheiks that hints at optimism hiding in the blues of heartbreak. I cried as they played it, because that song seemed to pull at everything I was feeling — both the sadness of my own heartbreak and the loneliness I’d known that year. But those tears were also happy, because ever so slowly, I felt like I was letting those things go. 

That same day Bates asked to take my photograph. He pushed the chair I always sat in against a white wall in his living room. I felt ridiculous as he clicked away behind his camera, but a little giddy, too. I’d shared a photographer with Grace Kelly. Maybe endings really were up for grabs.

The coronavirus pandemic has paused our lessons, but as soon as it’s safe, I’ll drive over the bridge and up that rural highway to play banjos with Bill and Bates, who will be 94 in June. I hope that Jody will sing while we play, and that the end of the song will sound messy, because we all play it a different way. My favorite part of the night will be when we crowd around the kitchen table for wine hour, for Bates’ stories, and for the old-time music that brought us all together.

I picked up the banjo to forget about love, only to find it, in the minor key.