[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell images courtesy: Bill Rogers”][/title]
Rudy, Arkansas musician Bill Rogers feels a kinship with porches. As a kid growing up in the Crawford County community of Oak Grove, he spent hours on his own front porch, in part because his house had no air conditioning. He remembers spending time on the porch practicing the guitar, or just daydreaming, or waiting in bad weather for the school bus to come. “About six years ago,” Bill says, “I wrote a song called ‘The Front Porch,’ about my memories growing up. My first exposure to music was my mama singing to me on our front porch. I remember it like it happened yesterday.”
As he’s telling the story, he takes his ball cap off and runs his fingers through his hair. Today, he says, it’s not the same. Kids spend too much time online, playing electronic games, watching TVs filled with shows that do nothing to improve their minds or their outlooks.
To Bill, that image of the front porch brings back everything that is good in life. He can close his eyes and see his brother and sister as they were when they were kids. They were a happy family, though his father did have to leave for stretches of time, driving big rigs across the country to make a living. When he came home, he brought his paychecks with him, and it was a celebration: a new supply of money, the family reunited, the house alive with the sound of his father’s steady voice.
Two things happened that caused Bill to look at his past and reevaluate his future. His brother died. His sister died, and he, nearing fifty, felt the kind of crippling sorrow bluegrass songs are famous for. He thought about his parents, both alive and well, his father still driving trucks for a living, and he realized that the people who knew him as a small boy, who remembered him studying the country TV variety show Hee Haw to learn how to play the guitar, for example, were so few they couldn’t fill a pew at church.
There are still days when the loss of his brother and sister overwhelms him. He doesn’t let it stop him though. Bill has an innate sense of how to make things better. He’s incredibly positive, and a doer by nature, finding hard work and new projects the best kind of therapy. So, when the renters of a building his wife owns in Alma (less than ten miles from his Rudy home) decided to move on, Bill stepped inside and all the cogs and gears in his brain started turning.
The easiest thing would have been to hang a ‘For Rent’ sign on the door and wait for a call. But standing there inside the metal building in October, Bill kept thinking about front porches and live music. For a while he’d been fiddling with the idea of opening a place where musicians could perform, without any alcohol around, someplace you’d like to take your family. “First thing I thought was, no drinking, cussing, spitting, smoking or fighting,” Bill says. “I wanted a clean sound, simple, and I wanted folks to feel like they were at an old-fashioned family gathering, with people picking and singing.”
As he stood in the dim light, it all started to come together. At the far end of the big room there was more than enough space to build a stage. And not just any stage; he’d make this one look like a front porch, with a screen door, a light burning, an old rocker. Bill scanned the rest of the room. There was space enough for tables and booths and a concession area, all facing the stage. He was fairly handy with a saw and hammer, and he wasn’t trying to build the Taj Mahal, so he felt he’d be fine. Yes, he thought, this could definitely work.
When he began talking about the place, he found a long list of musicians wanting to play. His own band, Crooked and Steep, that combines bluegrass, gospel and a little Southern rock, would most certainly perform, and because he’d been in the music scene for so long – he’s a former member of the bluegrass band, The Frog Bayou Boys – he believed others would want to take the stage as well.
The sticking point could have been his wife Sherri, but she didn’t hesitate. She’s used to Bill and his ideas, and they’ve been married long enough for her to know that when Bill sets his mind to something he makes it happen.
Bill’s first job was naming the place. That was easy. He called it The Front Porch Theater. As soon as that was done, he started working on the stage. He and his son walked the land they own and found two young cedar trees whose trunks were fairly straight. They chopped them down and left the bark in place. Those became the pillars on the porch. He installed a green room behind the porch, so bands would have a place to get ready. A woman he knew had a storage building filled with commercial dining tables and chairs and she gave them all to him. The next step was recovering the chairs, which he and Sherri painstakingly completed.
All the construction was done in odd hours after Bill got off work from his regular job working with disabled adults, or on weekends when he wasn’t playing music. In the midst of it all, he was also juggling his duties as mayor of Rudy (population sixty-one). Although he found the pace exhausting, he realized something wonderful was happening. Sherri was finding her own joy in The Front Porch Theater, helping Bill as much as she could, talking about what to serve in the concession area.
Already, the possibility of this small place – it holds approximately eighty people and had its first show in mid-November – is growing. Bill thinks it’s because the music played here is acoustic. No amps, no plug-ins, just an overhead sound system that allows everyone to hear.
Bill smiles as he looks around this hulk of a building. It started out years ago as Dean’s Produce. Locals still remember it by that name. He likes the idea of filling it with his kind of music, as sure as a sunrise, as rugged as the Arkansas River that rolls by not so far away. He thinks something might be happening in Alma, some small local music revolution that began when the nearby Warren’s Rec Room recently opened, another live music venue that’s gaining speed. Bill thinks there’s plenty of talent in the area to keep both places hopping, and he thinks that’s good for the small town that’s known mostly for the discount retailer A-Z, and the widely popular water park.
Bill’s plan is to open for weekend shows, to rent out the space for special events, and he might even work in a few comedy shows (yes, he’s a comedian, too) as time allows.
What he wants is for folks to have a chance to hear great music, up close and personal, in a place where they’ll know the entertainment is wholesome. He was originally drawn to bluegrass because it’s the music from the heart: good times, bad times, the ache of lost love. It’s all there, and Bill leaned on it as he faced his own losses. It’s made him a fine songwriter, and what he pens he calls “testifying songs,” tales of trouble and woe that all the major sins carry. When times got hard, when he lost his brother and sister, he picked up his guitar, got by himself and played until he could make sense of a sometimes senseless world.
This place has caused something new to blossom inside him. Life, he most surely knows, lasts no longer than the time it takes for a few drops of rain to fall quickly into a rumbling river. What you do with those moments, though, go on for eternity, passing from you to those you love and those you helped along the way. “I want to leave something behind,” Bill says. “I want people to know I cared, and that they mattered. I don’t have any other hobbies. I don’t spend my money on boats or guns or big trips. I have a guitar that cost too much, maybe, but that’s about it. Everything I want, I already have. My wife, my family, my music, and now The Front Porch. It’s more than enough.”
Bill points to the stage, where the porch light is burning. He talks again about cutting down the cedar trees with his son, of his wife Sherri by his side. He talks about his niece who plays music with him. There is sorrow enough, for sure, he says, but also joy. And he’s had plenty of that as well.
