At first I did not take the story seriously; imagining it to be a fabrication like the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. But I heard the same story with the same details, over and over. People would hum strange melodies to me and others would recognize the music. I became convinced someone actually lived in the hills with a National guitar wandering hundreds of miles across Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas and even into Kentucky and West Virginia.
The wild man became a sort of obsession for me. Nobody had ever recorded this elusive guitar man. Many authoriies didn’t believe he existed. I finally tracked him down in Western Arkansas, in a town called Van Buren on the north bank of the Arkansas River. He was in a boarding house. He was sick, it seemed it might have been pneumonia.
I found out his name was Vernon McAlister and he was from East Tennessee. He’d been injured in a sawmill years back, left his family to save them the pain and embarrassment of supporting him and gone on the road with a National Duolian he taught himself how to play.
He said there were songs in the guitar and he found them and turned them loose. Songs belong to everybody, he said. “People keep the songs locked up in their hearts,” he explained.
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