Rosemary Brown's Pentecostal Songs in Indiana!

My Father would get up about five a.m. every morning . If it was winter time the first thing he did was to build a fire in the heating stove in the front room. These days it is known as the living room, so that by the time my brothers and I got up the front room would be nice and warm.

Then he would take the milk buckets to the barn and bring the cows in from the pasture and do the milking. We usually had three cows, but they did not belong to us they belonged to the Land Lord. ( The fellow who owned the farm and the house where we lived. ) He would pour the milk through a strainer to get any dirt out that might have fallen in the milk. Then he would set the can out beside the road for the Milk man to pick up when he came by.

Then he would come back to the house for breakfast which mother would have ready by that time. He then went to the neighbors house which was in walking distance where he was gainfully employed with what ever Mr. Tom Raisor had for him to do until five o’clock that evening. He loved corn planting time, and he took great pride in his corn rows . There were straight from any angle that you looked at it. He would get down to where I was and put his arms around me and say “Look Rose , the rows are strait anyway you want to look at it. Then he would explain to me how he liked his corn rows to be pretty and straight. The purpose of that was each stalk had to have plenty of good soil so they were able to grow bigger . I’ve notice since the days of fertilizer came in to being they just sort of sow the corn now and it is much thicker.

We kind of moved in a circle and came right back where we started on the hill beside Grandma . But everywhere we lived he had a musical instrument which he would play after supper while Mother washed the dishes. When we first lived by Grandma Reeves he had a violin . And that when we had several square dances and that’s when they would say “Ikey we can’t have a square dance without you . You’re our fiddle player”. Then we moved closer to Mt Summit and I don’t know where the Violin was but over there he had a banjo. Then when we had moved to the east side of blue River and then back to the “hill.” he ordered a guitar from Spiegel’s Which he hung with a string around the neck on a nail on the wall. And he said “You kids are not to touch this , do you hear me ?. Leave this guitar alone .” So just as soon as he got out of sight, June got the guitar down and started strumming the cords that Pop had already showed him and then he would teach Noah and I the cords.

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