Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [18]
The right place in this case being the funeral of Mrs. Lillian Sprott, who was Ruby’s oldest sister. Ruby and her husband, John, had traveled to Franklin, Tennessee, for the occasion. Beatrice Woods, who was Lillian’s niece by marriage, had been asked to sing at the funeral. At the time Beatrice and her father lived on a small farm outside of town.
Blind from birth, Beatrice had passed all nineteen years of her life so far pretty much limited to the house. Her little Philco radio was her only window to the world. Except for church on Sundays or a rare outing, she spent most of her days alone listening and had learned to sing just about every song she heard.
From the moment she sang her first song in church, her reputation quickly started to spread around the county. People came from miles around to hear the blind girl who sang like an angel. One Sunday, a visiting preacher, moved to tears by the beautiful sound of her high, lilting, almost ethereal voice, said it was as pure and clear as a songbird at dawn. From then on she was known as the Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.
On the day of Lillian Sprott’s funeral, when the preacher signaled it was time, Beatrice’s father led the girl in a white dress up the aisle and put her in a chair and placed her zither in her lap. She sang the old hymn “Someone’s Waiting for Me Up There” and ended the service with “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley.”
After she finished there was not a dry eye in the house. One woman who had not particularly cared for the dear departed remarked that old Lillian had most certainly been sung into heaven that day, whether she deserved to be or not. John Robinson told Ruby they should get Beatrice to sing on The Neighbor Dorothy Show. Dorothy was always looking for talent. That afternoon her father asked Beatrice if she wanted to go. She immediately said yes and two days later she went on the radio and sang “Always.” A guest artist on The Neighbor Dorothy Show was certainly not an unusual occurrence. Throughout the years Dorothy had featured many singers. Only the week before, twelve-year-old Ian Barnard, billed as Windsor’s Wonder Boy of Song and Dance, had come all the way from Canada and had caused quite a stir singing and tapping to the tune “If You Knew Susie.” But never before had there been such an overwhelming response to a single performance as there was to Beatrice Woods’s first appearance. Calls and letters came pouring in, everyone wanting to hear more from the “Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.” And on the next appearance, when Beatrice sang “Old Shep,” a song about a dog, everyone who had ever had a dog that died, or even one that might, broke down and sobbed, including Neighbor Dorothy, who had to leave the room and when she came back was barely able to sign off the air. Down at the hardware store, fifteen-year-old Macky Warren, who was helping his daddy, heard it and cried so hard over his dog Tess he made himself sick and had to go home. She was such a hit that Neighbor Dorothy asked her to appear on the show every week and the Golden Flake Lite-as-a-Feather Flour company agreed to pay her room and board if she would. Her father drove her back over to Elmwood Springs, this time with her clothes and her radio. As it turned out, Beatrice knew the words to hundreds of songs and could sing anything—hymns, popular songs, gospel, country, you name it. Pretty soon she received so many requests she was appearing on the show every day. Since she was now living in Missouri she