April 20, 2009

90-year-old pianist still going strong

By Roy Mitchell

An ethereal harmony of choir and piano echoes through the remote country church: Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O, what a foretaste of glory divine.

Though such spiritual sounds fill numerous sanctuaries on Sunday mornings, the resonance saturating the aisles at Ebenezer United Methodist on County Road 22 in eastern Cherokee County seems, well, everlasting. Ebenezer parishioners have seen the same gentle, but enduring, figure seated at the piano since the days of Bing Crosby, Abbott and Costello, and 78-rpm records. To the best of her recollection, Emma C. Barnes, 90, began caressing Ebenezer's ivory keys in the mid-1940s.

Named after her two grandmothers, Emma and Clara, most everyone knows her as “Emma C.” The combination rolls past a Southerner's tongue as smoothly as Emma C.'s fingers wisp over the keyboard during Sunday services.

Emma C. grew up a city girl. She was born during World War I and raised in the roaring 1920s. Though her father Jim Jones owned farmland in Cherokee County, his government job led the family to Huntsville, then Montgomery, and later Birmingham during her childhood. When Emma C. was 14, the family finally returned to the farm to stay.

Having taken violin lessons in Birmingham, Emma C. used her knowledge of one instrument to help her learn to play another.

“I learned to tune my violin by playing the notes on the piano,” she says. “I never did take any piano lessons. I taught myself.”

Life in the country brought stability that would lead to important milestones for Emma C. By the age of 18, she had graduated from Cherokee County High School. During those four years, she also played piano at her home church, Calcedonia Baptist, and married Hobart Barnes, an Alexis community farmer.

Before World War II began, she had given birth to a child, Billy. Though she filled a few days with a substitute teaching job and played piano at some old Alexis Elementary School functions, Emma C. mostly stayed close to the farm.

“I've just always been a farmer's wife,” she says.

This is my story. This is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.

Emma C. and Hobart attended Ebenezer from the start, but she recalls that she did not start playing the church piano until a few years into the marriage. At some point, she and Selma McKinley alternated the church piano-playing duties.

“After awhile I played it all,” she says.

Billy Godfrey, former Ebenezer choir director, recalls revivals where several pianists would gather in the congregation, and each song leader would pick out one to play the song they would lead.

“She'd pick out anything they wanted,” Godfrey says. “They always said she had great timing. She could really make that piano talk.”

Emma C. has performed on only two pianos during her tenure at the church. She can't even begin to recall how many preachers have shared Ebenezer's stage with her, much less offer an estimate on the number of songs she has shared with the congregation.

“I've played just about every song in the hymnal,” she says.

Emma C. has played at numerous weddings, and she and Godfrey led the singing at Calcedonia Baptist's decoration and revival for well over 30 years. Of the multitude of fond church memories she carries, some have come in front of an empty congregation.

“For years I'd help children in the church who wanted to sing,” she says. “I'd go over and play while they sang.”

Emma C. still loves to play her piano, but she has started feeling the effects of time.
“I have arthritis, but I'm still playing,” she says. “I've mentioned quitting before, but they all say, 'no, no.'”

While she has convinced another church member, Marilyn Williams, to play during the Sunday school songs, Emma C. still performs during the service.

“I'd be lost if I wasn't playing,” she says.

Though Emma C. says that she doesn't play as much at home as she should, she tells of a custom she and her husband have performed many times. At her piano stool and with Hobart, 94, nearby, they play and sing praises in a duet combining 185 years of living.

“Hobart sure can sing up a storm,” Emma C. says with a ring in her voice.

Perfect submission, all is at rest; I in my Savior am happy and blessed.