MUSIC TO THE EARS: THREE MUSICIANS TO BE HONORED AT FESTIVAL

While Vi Keys talks in her music store uphill from the Mississippi, her fingertips graze the strings of her red fiddle. She pauses and picks a scratchy melody that sounds like an engine revving. She plays and remembers her husband.

"I remember he sang like nobody else. He sang sort of blues-like. He was like BB King, only better," said Vida Keys of her late husband, Eddie. "He could sing all styles, from country to Frank Sinatra."

Clarence Eddie Keys, the Choctaw half-blood, the product of a Choctaw Indian school in Oklahoma, whose father would pitch knives at him in an act for the Ringling Brothers Circus, clearly won the devotion of his wife.

He will be honored along with two more of Cape Girardeau's most influential musicians -- Homer Gilbert and the late William Shivelbine -- at 7 p.m. today at the opening ceremony of the fourth annual City of Roses Music Festival downtown. Music scholarships at Southeast Missouri State University are being named for them.

Vi Keys will be there with her musically inclined children and grandchildren to play a tribute to her late husband. Gilbert and members of Shivelbine's family plan to attend as well.

Keys said her husband could sing and play guitar -- never the indirect route to a woman's heart.

After bringing his family to Cape Girardeau originally as a long-term vacation from Kansas City in 1958, Eddie Keys and his wife became favorites of the Hotel Marquette stage.

Union difficulties eventually would lead the Eddie and Vi Duo across the Mississippi into Illinois to play at the Purple Crackle.

Eddie Keys decided to settle in Cape Girardeau, and as the years progressed, he would give hundreds of local students their first lessons in music. Former students went on to play in the bands of musicians such as Faith Hill and Roy Clark.

Keys died at age 54 in 1974 of emphysema.

Longtime band member

Homer Gilbert joined the Cape Girardeau Municipal Band in 1927 at age 14. He would play with the band on and off for 73 years, developing his talent with the trumpet. In 1929, he traveled to Savannah, Ga., to play at the DeSoto Hilton Hotel and played with the likes of the Herb Sudekum Band and the Eddie and Vi Duo. He played with the Rhythm Aces Band while entertaining for Civilian Conservation Corps dances.

In the 1930s, Gilbert was promoted to the presidency of the Cape Girardeau Municipal Band, which continued to be a vehicle for his trumpet skills until his official retirement in 1998.

William Shivelbine's father and a partner purchased a branch of the St. Louis Band Instrument Co. in 1948. The next year, the elder Shivelbine and his son, Leland, bought out the partner's interest in the Cape Girardeau shop, re-opening it as Shivelbine's Music Store. William Shivelbine joined the operation in 1950. Now in business for over half a century, the name Shivelbine has become synonymous with music equipment sales throughout the region.

Last year, band directors from Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, and Kentucky came to Shivelbine's Music Store to pay homage to the shop's 50-year anniversary.

William Shivelbine spent a lifetime as a musician, as an organist at his church, a performer at the Broadway Theater during silent movies, and as director of the Cape Girardeau Municipal Band. He died at age 67 in 1991.

Old-fashioned touch

Vi Keys, her hands light on the ivory of a grand piano in the showroom of her shop, still has the unique style that made the Eddie and Vi Duo.

"My children, they said, 'We can't play like that mother. That's the old style,'" Vi recalls, pausing in mid-song. "Hell, that's the only style I play."

Morning light streams into the shop, Keys' Music on Broadway. On the countertop is the plastic bin Vi brought from the back room. The plastic bin holds her collection of Eddie and Vi Duo recordings. The reel-to-reel magnetic tapes are labeled according to the venue of performance -- Marquette Hotel, Purple Crackle, Kansas City, Oklahoma City.

Music, said Vi, she'll continue to play as long as she can.

"I'll do it 'till the curtain closes," she said.

Eddie would relate.