Sutton's Catfish Farm

I must have been 14 the time I accompanied my older brother to the catfish farm where he occasionally worked to pick up a few bucks. Since I spent most of my youth dissociating, I remember only two moments from the visit: 1) the keen disgust that prompted me to walk away, as my brother nailed a freshly-caught catfish to a tree and began using pliers to yank the unyielding skin off the animal and 2) the perplexed joy I felt a little while later, when a cheery and sophisticated waltz sprang up spontaneously inside my brain, as I wandered the grounds. I was excited and also worried that I would not remember the complex, binary tune long enough to get home and transcribe it—my first composition—on staff paper. So, I hummed and whistled it over and over and over. I don’t remember how that episode of the story played out, except that I’m rather certain that I did not later notate my waltz. Perhaps another grisly brush with catfish displaced cheer and sophistication altogether, so that I could no longer generate or retrieve music.

The next episode of the story went down days, weeks, or months later and requires the following context.

I grew up in rural North Louisiana. My father introduced me to opera when I was 9 years old (a story I tell at Shreveport > Civic Theatre). Since actually attending a live operatic performance was a rare occurrence, I had to content myself with tuning in for radio broadcasts of live performances from the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays during their broadcast season and with listening for hours on end to my father’s vast collection of 78 rpm’s, his few LP’s, and the numerous LP’s I bought over time.

The story of my brief career as composer concludes simply at some point “days, weeks, or months later,” when I was listening to a recording or a broadcast of Charles Gounod’s Faust. As the chorus streamed onstage dancing in Act Two, I was startled to hear them singing, well, my waltz from the catfish farm: “cheery and sophisticated”—and supercentenarian—as only a waltz from the pen of Gounod can be.

I’ve since wondered if the great composer wasn’t himself dissociating from some gruesome event at the moment when the waltz spontaneously sprang up in his brain. Such a shame that he beat me to it.