Bramble Hollow isn't much of a place, and the Diddles will be the first to tell you so. It's a crossroads in the hills of Dufferin County, a feed store, a church, a bend in the river, and about forty souls, plus the Kellermans. It is exactly the kind of place a band like ours comes from, which is to say a place with long winters and not much to do in them.
Our father, Wendell (everyone calls him Pop) spent thirty-one years as foreman of the grain elevator. He is a quiet man who says that music is "just talking, only slower, and with more feeling." When our mother, Marigold, passed, the house went very quiet indeed. That first winter, Pop took down the family ukulele from the hook by the stove. It was a battered little soprano that has been in the Diddle family for four generations, and which he has always called Old Gladys. And he began, in the evenings, to play.
He wasn't good at it. He'll tell you that himself. But Opal started humming along, because Opal remembered the tunes Mother used to hum while she worked. Then Junie found the spoons in the drawer. And then Winnie, who never says much, came downstairs one night with a spiral notebook and some words she'd written, and she asked if we might try singing them. We did. And that was the first time the house felt full again.
Sunday dinner after rehearsal, the field behind the Legion, last August.
We played our first show at the Bramble Hollow Fall Fair, in the pie tent, in September of 2019. There were maybe nine people, and four of them were Kellermans. We sang three songs and ended on a hum, the way Mother always did. A woman near the front cried, and afterward she bought a jar of Junie's crabapple jelly and told us we ought to keep going. So we kept going.
Since then we've played fall fairs and spring socials, church basements and seniors' residences, a corn-maze opening, and the Dufferin County Talent Social, which we have now won "Most Heartfelt" at three years running. We travel in a 1994 Dodge van we call The Buttercup, which passes safety most years. Aunt Deele sews the dresses. Pop wears the same denim his own father wore.
About Winnie's songs
We should say a word about the music, because people do ask. Winnie writes all of it, in her notebook, and she won't let a soul read the words until rehearsal. Her songs are unconventional, we know that. They are about farm life, and about forgiveness, and about the hard, plain business of being a living thing on a piece of land. Some folks at the library board have raised an eyebrow at a title or two. We understand. We only ask that you listen to the whole song before you decide. We think they are the most honest things we've ever sung, and we sing them the only way we know how: straight through, in four parts, and up to Marigold.
Thank you for listening. ♡