Clan Cornelius just spent three days at the FairWell Festival just down the road in Redmond, Oregon. It’s a mega-festival held at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds and featured epic performances by Jason Isbell, Colter Wall, Billy Strings, Ryan Bingham, Sierra Hull, The Red Clay Strays and others.
It’s a big undertaking, especially on a Saturday that hit 100 degrees, but live music is so fundamental to our lives that a little extra effort ain’t even a consideration. We chased Turnpike Troubadours and Cody Jinks to Idaho this spring because timing didn’t work for us when they were two hours away…
Point being, for some folks, music is as vital as food, water and shelter. Even in the most dire circumstances — especially in the most dire circumstances — music is sustenance for the soul.
Which brings me to the Journeay Violin.
This artifact is a tribute to the human spirit.
For the Tales of the Rangers Big Foot Wallace podcast, I am delving into the disastrous Mier Expedition of 1842, in which a force of Texas militia invaded Mexico, and was captured and imprisoned. It was a terrible ordeal. A bunch of them escaped and were recaptured — and sentenced to be decimated. Literally. One-in-10 to be shot, selected by drawing from a jar full of beans. A white bean meant life; a black bean death.
One of the survivors of this harrowing ordeal was Henry Journeay. And he made a fiddle to play music for his imprisoned comrades.
According to the Texas State Library:
Henry Journeay was a survivor of the “Black Bean Episode.” He was a 27-year old skilled wood worker who had immigrated to Texas from Staten Island, New York. Journeay is said to have crafted this violin from wood scraps left over from a chair made for Santa Anna, using glass and a razor as his tools. According to legend, Journeay played the fiddle to entertain the Texan prisoners.
After his release from the Mexican prison, Journeay returned to Texas and operated a successful wood mill in Galveston. He died in 1870 from injuries received in a street car accident.
The violin was donated by the Journeay family to the Texas State Library in 1931. Some restoration work was done in 1932. In 2012, National Geographic filmed the violin for an episode of “America’s Lost Treasures.”
As the song says, if you’re gonna play in Texas (or Perote Prison), you gotta have a fiddle in the band.
Matthew says
My relationship to music is…odd. I grew up in a very unmusical family so I sort of discovered music in my late teens. (When I was fourteen someone asked me what type of music I like and I could not answer.) What I developed is a very Catholic in terms of genre but very particular in terms of individual songs taste in music. I mean I listen to music in a variety of genres but have not become really settled on a single genre.