LETTERS FROM HOME: A MUSIC FESTIVAL AND ITS COMMUNITY ARE COMING OF AGE TOGETHER

Oct. 7, 1999

Dear Julie,

The City of Roses Music Festival is here this weekend. Seventy-eight performers at 15 venues will play classical, Cajun, country, heavy metal, blues, Christian rock, funk, jazz, pop rock, gospel, folk, straight-ahead rock and lots of variations on those themes.

One New York band called Burlap to Cashmere has to be heard to be believed. And Vince Gill is playing at the university, a kind of bonus because it's Homecoming weekend.

Two years ago, local musicians Bob Camp and Bill Shivelbine breathed the festival into its existence with a few bands and a recognition that it was time for people their age to assume some of the responsibilities of community-building our fathers and mothers are old enough to begin relinquishing. Now the City of Roses Music Festival has become a super-charged engine, one with enough sparks to help ignite others' artistic dreams for the community.

The festival now gets a $6,500 grant from the Missouri Arts Council and is beginning to receive requests from musicians who want to perform here.

I have known one of the organizers, Brad Graham, since the second grade. He is a person music has made all the difference to. In high school he was a good trumpet player and pole vaulter but you could tell the bass was his true love.

Long after high school he made his living as a bass player in locally legendary rock 'n' roll bands -- Rock Bottom and Fletcher.

It was a hard-luck life, to be sure, and the responsibilities of parenthood eventually led him to get off the road, but he's still in the music business. And the firm he works for supports a band the way most companies have softball teams.

He's still playing his bass, still long-haired nearing 50. He has not lost the feeling music inspired in him so many years ago.

Music runs like a fuse through all our lives no matter the kind we prefer. Barber's Adagio for Strings, Jackson Browne's "For Everyman," Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" always make my heart soar. Everyone has memories lodged within melodies.

The music festival is an example of how Cape Girardeau is on the verge of becoming a much different place to live and grow up in. People who have ventured into the world have returned with ideas about the quality of life they want to have in their community, both for themselves and their children. They have learned how to turn their ideas into solid realities.

One of the ways this is done is by recognizing and not taking for granted the talent already among us.

At the awards banquet that precedes the music festival, Brad described being a boy who investigated nook-by-cranny the upright piano in his living room. "It begged to be explored," he said.

It was a player piano his parents had bought for his sister but she didn't want to learn to actually play. She just wanted to pump the pedals.

As he spoke, I remembered that piano and how it fascinated him. There is nothing more important to being fully alive than to pursue our fascinations.

"Do whatever you do with passion," Brad told the banquet audience. "... Don't just sit there and pump the pedals."

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.