Richard Pearman, elder statesman of the Kansas Old-time Pickers, Fiddlers and Singers, was feted Sunday for his 93rd birthday.
Although the regular monthly gathering was canceled due to inclement weather, the party, attended by over a dozen friends and family members, went on in Pearman’s living room.
True to fashion, Pearman did most of the entertaining for his party, playing on the fiddle and harmonica. Matthew Cunningham followed with some classical pieces.
Pearman has been fiddling since he was 10 and repairing such instruments since he was 12.
He comes from a family of musicians, though he never learned from his father, Ernest Lee, who died of lung cancer at 46, when Pearman was 9.
Eventually Pearman got his hands on his dad’s fiddle, which by then was in sorry shape.
“My mom gave (the fiddle) to my oldest brother,” Pearman said. “He had four or five children and they’d taken it apart. The back was off, the neck was off — I took it home and fixed it.” Then he taught himself to play.
Pearman said his father “hid his fiddle in a hollow log in the woods. That’d be about 150 years ago by now.” Ernest Lee’s parents had objected to his playing, Pearman said. “They said the devil was in the fiddle.”
Pearman picked up the art through his siblings.
“My older sister played piano and one brother played banjo and another played guitar, so me and Otis,” — at a year and a half older, Pearman’s closest sibling — “just sort of picked it up. We’d go to a party and hear a tune and went home and tried to play it. Maybe we got it right and maybe we didn’t; anyway, I played my version of it.”
Pearman never learned to read music, he said. But he became an expert at repairing instruments and restringing bows.
“I fixed fiddles for people all over Kansas and also in Arkansas. I haired bows for people all over the country,” he said.
Last year, Pearman gave his father’s fiddle to his nephew, Mark Pearman, of Branson, Mo.
Mark, a musician who has played with Roy Clark, will pass the fiddle on to his son, who is 14, Pearman said. Pearman has no children of his own. The fiddle will “stay in the family.”
AFTER HIS father died, “I didn’t get much schooling. When I was on the farm and the weather was good, I worked,” Pearman said.
“We owned about 200 acres” south and east of Gas, Pearman said. “We raised flax, corn and calfer corn — it’s called milo now,” he said.
The family also had a big garden and the usual array of chickens, geese and ducks common of the time.
“The first years” after his dad died, “we weren’t getting the crops in” Pearman noted. His older siblings were gone, and just he, Otis and 3-year-old Marie were left to help their mother, Geneva.
His oldest sister, Julie McGee, her husband, and neighbors came to help.
“We’d go to school and my mom shucked corn all day. Then we’d come home and take it to market. We’d sell it for 10 cents a bushel,” Pearman said.
As an adult, Pearman held two main jobs.
Pearman met and married Agnes McIntyre in 1938, and the couple “hauled milk the first 14 years,” Pearman said. “Then I was a drywall and painting contractor.” Agnes worked with him.
Agnes was as good a worker as any man, Pearman said, maybe better.
The couple retired “when I was 63,” he said. Agnes was 62.
Instrument repair was always his hobby, he said. But playing music, his life source. “I don’t know that I would have lived without it,” Pearman said.
For 27 years, he served as president of the Blue Mound Old-time Fiddlers, Pickers and Singers. When that group disbanded in 2008, he joined Fort Scott’s group, then last year, Iola’s organization.
Pearman has played with a number of bands, including Harvey Orcutt’s Moonlight Ramblers. They played regionally at dances that had standing room only crowds.
Pearman noted one venue that seated 300; the crowds were out the door, he said.
Agnes never played music with Pearman. “She played piano, but she didn’t play our kind of music,” he jibed. “We were swinging.”
Pearman still has a set list of about 40 songs that he uses for performances, including those at nursing homes “where I play for the old people.” The residents appreciate his music “because I play the songs they grew up with,” he said.
The past 30 years, Pearman has kept busy as an avid volunteer. A box overflowing with volunteer appreciation pins and a wall of thank you plaques attest to his average of 300 hours a year.
But “I crushed a vertebra in my back about a year ago,” Pearman said, “and I had to cut back. I only did about 160 hours last year.”
The secret to his recovery, Pearman said, was Agnes. “She took care of me,” he said. Also he said, “I had a stroke in 2000. I thought that was the end.” With her help, he kept on.
Pearman believes in staying busy.
“I don’t think hard work will hurt you,” he observed. “It’s the worry and the stress. When you’re having fun, you don’t worry.”
And as long as he has Agnes, and music, he’ll keep on having fun, he said.
