The Southern Colonels Dance Band
(The Blind Led the Seeing)
Screen 1 of 5Bill Bushong was a remarkable young man. Though totally blind since early childhood as the result of a rare disease, his abilities and accomplishments as an adult were far greater than those of most of his "normal" college friends, including me. Highly intelligent and quite talented in a variety of ways, Bill was also cheerful and modest; and he was always enthusiastic about whatever he undertook. His broad and contagious smile framed by naturally curly brown locks always made it difficult for even his close friends to believe his clouded eyes were really not seeing anything around him.
I once asked him if he had any remembrance of how something actually looked--something he had seen before he became blind at the age of two. "Yes, I do," he answered without hesitation. "Just one thing. I have a clear picture in my mind of a yellow rose bush in our back yard at Tompkinsville. That's all I can remember ever seeing." Every time I saw Bill after that conversation, I thought about the mental image of a yellow rose bush he was carrying through life and wondered each time whether he was remembering what he had really seen or whether he was just recalling how some member of his family had described that rose bush to him. In any case, I could never quite comprehend what such a single, solitary visual image might mean to him. I used to close my eyes and try to imagine what his private world was actually like but never succeeded. It was too easy to open my eyes and return to my world.
I first met this unusual person when we both became members of Leon Spillman's dance band, Bill playing the saxophone and clarinet, and I the trumpet. This group, known in Bowling Green and throughout western Kentucky as the Southern Colonels, carried the name of Spillman, but all its members freely acknowledged that Bill Bushong was its real mainstay and most valuable player.
Organized in 1929, the Southern Colonels were referred to as a "faking band," a term which meant the group did not use any written music. Its players just improvised or memorized by rote what they played. Even though some of us in the band could read music and had played with bands and orchestras that did, others in the group had never learned to play from a music score, and of course reading music was impossible for Bill who could see nothing at all. So by necessity we learned to play together in a different way--thanks to the unique talents of this sightless person. This is how we did it.
Bill would listen at night to a new piece of popular music being broadcast over the radio. (Home television was unknown in 1929.) He would then commit the number to memory by playing it over several times on his old piano. The next afternoon when our band met at Neal's Dance Hall to rehearse, he would sit down at the piano, smile at us elfishly as he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and then play this new tune for us. His ability to remember and play not only the melody of a strange piece of music but also its sometimes very intricate supporting harmony, after listening to it only once or twice on the radio, was extraordinary, and we never ceased to marvel at how he could do it. But always modest, he would brush aside our admiration and compliments by saying quietly with a faint smile that any of us could do the same thing if we would but put our minds to it.
After he had played the entire number for us two or three times, he would then patiently dictate by rote each of our parts--both the melody and the several harmony parts. All this dictation was done four measures at a time, with Bill playing each part with one finger on the piano, followed by a player repeating and memorizing little by little what he had heard dictated.
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