A Musical Family.

My Dad and his Accordion. Also some other musicians in the family.

            We are a musical family so I would like to tell you about the earlier generations.   Daddy had a button accordion as long as I can remember.   It was a complicated instrument which was played like a concertina and when you pulled it out the notes would be different to when you pushed it back.   So you had to know when to pull and when to push.   I was told that his sister, Aunty May and Grandpa could also play it and it was Grandpa who

taught his children.   Daddy could play all the old English and Irish sing-a-long songs, but in addition he could also play Boeremusiek.   He often played at farm dances and had a coloured man, “Jan Kitaar”, accompany him on the guitar playing the rhythm.   I can remember lying under my Dad’s chair, covered by a blanket, watching the antics of the farmers and their wives or girlfriends on the dance floor.   I still love ‘Boeremusiek’ with ‘Die Kalfie Wals’ as a favourite.   Uncle Arthur Whittal could play the concertina and his daughter, Gracie, who lives here in Port Elizabeth, still has his instrument to this day.   I can remember Daddy saying that Uncle Arthur used to accompany him on a guitar when they also lived on “Maizefield”.

            Uncle Willy Foxcroft could play the Violin and we would ask him to do so just to see his little dog go quite frantic trying to outdo him.   He would start howling as soon as he saw the instrument which he detested.

            The Vermaak family were very musical and our Uncle Piet could play the piano and concertina, as well as the guitar.   Some of our Vermaak cousins could also play those instruments.   Piet Vermaak was married to my dad’s youngest sister, Ivy and she in turn could also play the concertina.

            Oupa Dave Randall’s piano stood in our house on which my mother played hymns from an old red Baptist Hymnbook.   She was not musical but had taken piano lessons on her Uncle George Hodgman’s farm where she went to school with her cousins.   She would play and sing some of those old Hymns for us.   Some of them still have a lot of meaning to me.

            We were all taught to dance from an early age and we all loved it.   My little brother, Johnny, was the most musical and even played in a band many years later.   I will tell you more later when I write about my dad’s grandchildren.

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