Old-time doesn't mean old to this fiddler

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.
A chocolale-on-chocolate cake, bedecked with icing garland and roses, was enjoyed after a performance by Pearman on fiddle and “French harp” (harmonica), followed by a few classical violin pieces performed by Matthew Cunningham, one of the many Iolans for whom Pearman rehaired bows or fixed instruments over the years.
Pearman has been fiddling since he was 10 years old, and repairing such instruments since he was 12, after reclaiming his father’s fiddle from his older brother’s house.
When his father, Ernest Lee, died of lung cancer at 46, “My mom gave (the fiddle) to my oldest brother,” Pearman said. Pearman was just 9 at the time.
“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.
As the youngest boy, and second youngest child, of eight siblings “spread out over 20 years,” Pearman never received lessons from his father, who had had to fight to keep his fiddle.
Ernest Lee — “that’d be bout 150 years ago now,” Pearman said — “hid his fiddle in a hollow log in the woods.” Ernest Lee’s parents had objected to his playing, Pearman said. “They said the devil was in the fiddle.”
Pearman was luckier. Although his mom, Geneva, couldn’t help him learn, “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 in Branson, Mo. Mark, a musician who 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.
In addition the family had a big garden and the usual array of chickens, geese and ducks common at that 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.
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. Then, “we hauled milk the first 14 years,” Pearman said. “Then I was a drywall and painting contractor.” Agnes worked with him.
“She was the banjo taper on the sheet rock. We hired two more guys and worked for several carpenters.”
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 — ”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.
Before KOFPS formed, Pearman 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, he said, that he uses for nursing homes “where I play for the old people” and KOFPS performances.
The past 30 years, Pearman has kept busy putting in an average of 300 hours per year as a volunteer, predominantly playing music at nursing homes. The residents appreciate his music “because I play the songs they grew up with,” he said. A box overflowing with volunteer appreciation pins on a table and a wall of similar plaques attest to that truth.
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.


note: This article was written March 22, 2010. Agnes Pearman later died, in July 2010. Richard is hanging in there.