Ronnie Dee--Christmas In Boonville

Christmas In Boonville

Ronnie Dee

(c) Copyright 2025 by Ronnie Dee

Photo by Amel Uzunovic at Pexels.

I once played in a folk music group called The Riverfront Ramblers. It was formed by my good friend Ed Adams, and I was asked to join in the fall of 1978. For a while we numbered anywhere from four to thirteen performers. Thirteen was the number when we played at an all day festival in New Albany, Indiana in October of '78.

We played appropriately on the Ohio Riverfront before 8,000 music fans spread out on blankets and chairs on a floodwall. It was our apex as the group pretty well splintered until there were often only three of us: Ed, his sister Jane, and me.

I loved playing music with Jane. She was very good and we sang beautifully together. When she announced that she was moving to West Virginia, it looked like our group might be at an end. But I suggested to Ed that we invite another good friend, Jim Cowles, to join the group and he agreed. Everything worked out and we three became the core of the Riverfront Ramblers for the next twenty years. Jim and Ed played guitar and I plunked around on the five-string banjo and we all sang. We would often have a bassist or a fiddler or penny whistler accompany us. We became pretty good and our last concert was one of our best.

We had an invite to audition for the Louisville Irish Festival at Bellarmine University in 1997. We performed there on a Sunday afternoon and were well received and invited back to play the next year, and do two sets. We were quite pleased, but it never happened. Ed inexplicably committed suicide three days later and that did in the Ramblers.

Long before that tragic end to our group, Jim had been invited by a work friend to spend the weekend at his parents place in North Carolina. He came back all excited about it. They had a big party with lots of music and he told me that they would love for me to come next year, so I did.

It was 1989, and I was looking forward to this new adventure. But horror of horrors, it began snowing on the friday morning of our departure and it didn't look good. Jim showed up that morning and he was a little reluctant, but we decided to give it a go. He usually went out I-64 and down I-77, through the mountains to Boonville, but because of the snow, we went south from Louisville to I-40 in Tennessee, through Asheville and Hickory and up I-77 to Boonville.

We got lucky. There were no accidents, but the roads were getting treacherous. I-77 was about as icy as it could get, but Jim did a good job driving and we made it. A little late, but safe.

I was immediately impressed. The old farmhouse sat in the woods a few miles out of town amid the snowy scene with the windows glowing, the Christmas tree being decorated, and the kitchen so warm and delicious. We dined at a big, sturdy wooden table and feasted on everything you would expect at a country home with gingham curtains.

Our genial host Gramps, the eighty plus father of Tony, Jim's friend, couldn't have been more welcoming and the same went for Muggins, Gramps' wife. We ate and talked and laughed and sang some songs, and at about eleven o'clock, we made our way down to Gramps' cabin.

It seems that Gramps and Muggins were estranged, with her living in the main house and Gramps residing in a legit two story log cabin he built. It was a beautiful night. The snow had stopped but was heavy on the ground. The moon was full and beaming on the snow. We didn't require any artificial light as we trudged our way down the quarter mile walk to the cabin, lugging our baggage and instruments. I, being a little clumsy, took my time and was accompanied by Starr, Gramps' big, sweet collie. He had accepted us as friends also.

The cabin in the snow and the warmth inside provided by a huge fireplace was overly inviting. We broke out the instruments and the beer and played and sang until three a.m. Tony's wife, Kate and their two sons were there and we had a rollicking good time.

The next morning came early, but we roused ourselves out of bed and headed for the house for breakfast. Nobody wanted to miss that. I think we had everything you could possibly have for breakfast and we tried to eat it all. It was so-o-o good. The rest of the day was for whatever, but we usually headed for town to the overcrowded hardware store to slither around the mountains of inventory for a while, then head for the winery and lastly to the Rockford General Store, where the proprietor Annie, would drawl,"Is that toni-i-te," when Tony would apprise her of the party.

That was a great source of humor among us, because she would say that every year. And she would never come. I went to Boonville for maybe nine years and she finally came to what turned out to be the last one. Tony secretly recorded her one year and when we returned to the house he kept playing it back throughout the day, one time in slo-mo and she would drawl out "is that toni-i-i-te" in a basso profundo and then speed it up where it sounded like a chipmunk, and we would howl with laughter.

There would be no big dinner party that night. Muggins and Kate would whip up a huge bowl of soup for the guests and we would have hors d'oeuvres and soup. People would come from the town and Jim and I would get the party rolling and often some more musicians would show up and join in. Halfway through, the church people, most of whom could play piano, would get the carols started and we would sing and have a good time until eleven or so when the house party would break up.

Then, once again we would trudge back to the welcoming fireplace of the cabin and go to 3:00 or so. Everybody had their special songs to do. Jim had "The Baptism Song," a long and complicated number. It was always a big hit. Gramps had "Frankie and Johnnie" which drew raves. Tony sang "Wildwood Weed,"and his son Steve crooned the parody, "Libyan On A Jet Plane" and I had either "The Corvette Song" or "I've Been Everywhere," until several years down the road I happened to sing "Waltzing With Bears." That became my new signature song.

We were heralded in the Boonville Daily News society column one time as "Jim and Lonnie Dee from Louisville."

The first weekend of December was always a very busy time at the Courier-Journal, but I was always able to get off that Friday to go to North Carolina. I was most grateful to my boss for that, so I always made sure that I brought him a big piece of homemade sweet potato pie.

I hated to leave Sunday but we had to get back. We went over there seven or eight more times and it was always great fun, but the magic of that first time with the snow and all the wonder of it still stands out. They wanted us to get Ed to come, but he never made it because he had a yearly meeting with the Indiana state legislature every year at the same time.

After a few years, Jim's wife Teresa started going and my wife, Donna finally got to meet everybody at Gramps' 89th birthday party.

It's just another one of those things that you hope will last forever, but you know it can't. So you appreciate it for what it was and treasure it. And maybe write a story about it someday.