Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 10, 1995 TAG: 9508100089
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEWART MACINNIS SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Song books - country and western, gospel. But more than that. Some were songs meticulously copied by hand into notebooks and composition books and onto odd scraps of paper. Some of the songs were carefully clipped from newspapers and magazines. Songs were everywhere.
"I have fond memories of her singing hymns while doing the housework," says J.E. "Eddie" Trail of his late mother. "I'd like to hear it again."
After a moment he continues, his voice thickening, "But I had no idea music was this big a part of her life."
It was a discovery Trail didn't make until this spring, after months of grieving over Ruby Trail's death. It was a discovery that surprised Trail, who lived his entire life with his mother, except for four years he spent in the military. She died the day before Thanksgiving, just a week and a half before she would have been 86.
The small white frame house on a rise above Ohio Avenue in Salem, not far from the Valleydale Foods Inc. plant, was Ruby Trail's home for 52 years. It's the only home Eddie Trail remembers, having moved into it when he was about 5. He was born in a house on Carolina Avenue, the next street over from the family home that he still occupies.
His late father, Jim Trail, worked in construction and built the house in 1942.
"They were just working people," Trail says. "I miss them so much. I'm an orphan now. I don't have any brothers or sisters, and I never got married. I'm all alone."
Trail's eyes mist over as he talks of his mother.
"Every time I talk to someone, they have bigger problems than I've got," he says. "People don't know your grief. We've all got problems."
At the time they moved into the Ohio Avenue house, Ruby Trail worked at the old Roanoke Mills cotton mill in Salem. She held that job for 17 years, giving it up to tend to her family.
"She continued to do sewing on the side when she was at home," Trail says. "She would custom-make garments for all kinds of folks."
And she made quilts, too.
"This one," he says as he hugs a neatly folded quilt to his chest, "she made right here on this floor. She didn't have a quilting frame. She got right down on the floor and made it complete and gave it to me for Christmas in 1984. I'm awfully proud of it."
Trail himself dabbled in aviation for a while, then went to work as a draftsman, retiring from Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern Inc.
He describes his parents and himself as working-class people, working to make ends meet.
But, he says, "we always were a music-loving family. Not a music-playing family, but a music-loving family."
There is the stately pump organ that came from Trail's great-grandmother. It occupies a spot of honor in the living room. And there is the taterbug mandolin, with its round bug-like sound box. It belonged to Trail's grandfather.
In fact, the mandolin was sold by his grandfather before his death in 1939. The instrument played on Trail's mind through the years, and in the 1950s, when he was still a teen-ager, he tracked down the man who had purchased it and bought it back.
Trail, who was 2 when his grandfather died in his native Floyd County, doesn't remember him. But he remembers stories of the mandolin and of the music that surrounded the family.
"They tell me that when he was on his deathbed, he egged me on to dance for him," Trail recalls. "I danced a jig for him. Of course I don't remember it, but they tell me his face kind of lighted up."
And then there were the family trips to see country and western and gospel singers. They caught nearly all the acts appearing locally. And they'd go to places like Renfro Valley, Ky., to watch top-name talents.
Even Ruby Trail's personal Bible, given to her by her sister in 1928 when she joined Central United Methodist Church, is filled with newspaper clippings, many of them songs.
"Music was more important to her than I realized," Trail says as he carefully refolds a piece of notebook paper with a song transcribed in neat handwriting. "It's funny. I didn't even know the stuff was here until I got this box down and started going through it."
After a moment he adds, "And that wasn't until after she died."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***