Pittsburgh
City Paper
lived
with his mother, father and two older siblings, Ernie began messing around
with a banjo and mandolin, eager to replicate some of the country music
standards that Pete had shown him. Music was becoming a sanctuary for Ernie,
a friend with whom endless hours could be spent in simple, tolerable communion.
Without a musical instrument in his hands, however, Ernie was still awkward
and ill at ease in social situations. Slowly and uneventfully, the days
of his youth lumbered by without a truly memorable hitch until a few years
later, when Ernie finally crossed paths with nothing less than his earthly
salvation. "I remember I borrowed a classical guitar from a friend," he
says smiling, clearly at ease with the recollection. "I really didn't know
much about guitars and I really remember it vividly, just sitting with this
thing on my lap, looking at it and playing the strings. It sounds really
weird, but I saw the whole world. I saw everything you can do on it.There
was something really magical about it. I don't know how to say it but I
could see the whole world." There is an unmistakable sense of lingering
wonder in Ernie's voice as he recalls this rapturous first encounter with
a basic 6-string guitar. He had never felt that way about the banjo or mandolin,
fine instruments though they both were. A guitar, however, was obviously
a sublime piece of human ingenuity, a deceptively simple, wonderfully tangible
testament to all that was good and right with the human species. Even after
all these years, he still seems genuinely surprised, even awestricken, that
there was anything in this world that could possibly deliver him from all
the tedium and deep blue pain that typified his life up until that auspicious
day some 35 years ago when he borrowed his buddy's guitar. "It was such
a refuge for me," he says, finally arriving at the sad, secret heart of
this particular tale. "It was something I could do, maybe somebody I could
be or something I could be or something like that, instead of just being
this total confused dark." With a guitar, Ernie was like "a duck to water".
Shunning formal lessons, he practiced incessantly, figuring songs out on
his own. Queer progressions? No problem. Odd tunings? Didn't matter. "It
all came pretty easy," he says modestly but matter-of-factly. "I just got
totally absorbed. It was my raison d'etre." He began prowling around the
sweet, dark underbelly of the local music scene. Evening would fall, some
new acquaintance would call, and the good times proceeded to roll. "See,
one of the things that was cool for me," he explains, "was that when I was
in high school I had friends who were college students at CMU and Pitt who
were really into bluegrass. So I was spending a lot of time with those guys.
We'd play a lot of country music, hymns and stuff like that. They would
come and get me and say, "It's okay, Mrs. Hawkins, we'll take care of Ernie.
Don't worry about it." We'd go to Walsh's Bar in East Liberty where one
of the greatest bluegrass bands in the whole country, Mac Martin and the
Dixie Travelers, played every Friday and Saturday night. We'd hang out and,
ya know, everybody would be slipping me IDs. And we'd stay at Walsh's 'til
2, then we'd go to Corny Mann's Bar in McKees Rocks and play until 6 in
the morning." Here, finally, was an education that a bright, unusual boy
like Ernie might be able to utilize. So what if he was struggling in vain
with the standardized curriculum and homogenized, stratified social structure
at Allderdice? Where was all that mendacious and superfluous nonsense going
to get him anyhow? Surely not where he increasingly felt he needed to go.
On his own time, much to his delight, he had discovered that there were
small, secluded places in the world for people like him.