ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996 TAG: 9602150097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
DANIEL WOMACK WAS PARTIALLY blind since birth and totally blind since he was 14, but there wasn't much he couldn't - or didn't - do.
Daniel Womack picked tobacco on a farm in his native Pittsylvania County. He cut corn and lumber there, too. He did everything but plow.
He washed thousands, perhaps millions, of dishes in the kitchen at Hotel Roanoke.
He liked to guess your age just from holding your hand, or how fast a car was moving by holding his hand out the window, and rarely missed by much.
But more than anything else, he loved to sing for the Lord. He called himself a "gospel jubilee singer." He sang in a high, warbling falsetto. Sang gospel songs and old favorites. He wrapped his big hands around his Gibson guitar and picked out spirituals in a bluesy style. He played the piano, the harmonica, the kazoo.
"That's my gift," he once said. "Man didn't give it to me. Female didn't give it to me. I know in my heart who give me that."
He played up and down First Street and Loudon Avenue in Roanoke. He played Carnegie Hall and at folk music festivals all over the United States and a few in Canada.
He played so much the Virginia General Assembly recently passed Joint Resolution 126 honoring him as "a rare musical treasure."
Roddy Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute, which featured Womack each year at its festival, was holding the framed resolution in his hand when he heard of Womack's death on Tuesday.
"We were going to get it to him this week," Moore said.
Womack, 91, was visiting friends in York, Pa., for Christmas when he fell ill, according to his nephew, John Womack Sr. After some time in a hospital, Daniel Womack was checked into a nursing home. The first week of January, doctors predicted he wouldn't last another day, but Womack fought off death until his heart gave out while he slept in the Pilgrim Nursing Home in Peabody, Mass., where John Womack had moved him eight days earlier.
Womack remained strong-willed and independent until his death, friends and relatives say. He lived alone in a spotless apartment most of his adult life. A social worker helped him get around town, but he often rode the bus, too.
Born on Christmas Eve in 1904, the ninth of 13 children, Womack worked on his family farm until he was 24, when he began his schooling.
He left a school for the blind in Richmond when he was 53 and took a job as a dishwasher at Hotel Roanoke making 45 cents an hour. He retired 17 years later making $1.25 an hour. His only retirement benefit was free meals. He ate lunch and dinner at the hotel about every day until it closed in 1989. After that, friends and neighbors took him to eat each day.
The first instrument he played was harmonica. He didn't take up guitar until 1930.
At the outset, Womack was a blues singer. But then he found God.
"I began a new life," he recalled in 1977. "I devote myself to the work of the church now. Church people do not believe in the blues."
He played the organ at Mount Zion Glorious Church of God in Roanoke, where he also served as deacon.
He played his music almost until the end. He had a standing performance the second Wednesday of every month at the Roanoke Nursing Home, an appointment he kept until leaving for Pennsylvania that last time.
The residents gave him money for playing, but he always just passed it on to his church.
Vickie Briggs, recreational therapist and volunteer supervisor at the nursing home, said Womack called her his "adopted daughter." Whenever she cooked spaghetti, she always made some extra for Womack.
"You don't know how to cook small, do you?" he would kid her.
The entire staff at the nursing home adored him, according to Briggs. He would take them by the hand and guess, with stunning accuracy, their ages, even hair color and skin tone.
"He never, never let me know his secret," Briggs said.
Moore recalls Womack as always warm and jovial, even flirtatious. "He sometimes would take your hand and say, 'You've put on a few pounds.'''
Moore said Womack could stick his hand out the window of a moving car and invariably guess its speed within 5 mph.
Briggs said Wednesday that Womack is already missed around the nursing home.
"Today would have been his program," she said.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. Daniel Womack performed as usual atby CNBthe Ferrum Folklife Festival last October. Music, he said, was "my
gift. Man didn't give it to me. Female didn't give it to me. I know
in my heart who give me that." color.