20181226.0430

On 20 December 2018, SM Chavey's "70-Year-Old Kerrville Business to Close Its Doors Next Week" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. The article reports on the impending closure of Melody Corner, a music store in Kerrville. The store's history is glossed, including its strangely eminent current and former customer list, which has ranged to Bob Dylan and David Robinson. Owner-operator Stan Morris's lament over the slow death of small-town music stores receives attention, as well, and while the article closes on a laudatory note, quoting approving patrons of the store, the impression cannot be escaped that such praise is too little, too late.
I make such comments from a sense of guilt about the matter. For I have known Stan since I was some four years old, when my late great uncle was playing with him (Stan is a guitarist and sound-man in addition to having run Melody Corner these decades). When I was an adolescent band-nerd, Stan was my go-to source for saxophone and clarinet reeds, and when I returned to the Texas Hill Country and to playing my grandfather's bari this summer, I returned to his shop to buy the reeds I needed to make it start to sing again. But I do not play my horn as much as I should, so I do not go through reeds as quickly as might be expected, and so I did not often find my way back to Melody Corner to trade funds for goods and help Stan stay in business just a little longer.
It is a shame, too, for good things happened at the store that I've rarely seen in other places. For but one example, the last time I went in to get reeds--the Saturday following Thanksgiving--I had my wife and daughter with me. They elected to pop into the store with me, since they'd never done so, and my Mrs. had heard me talk about Stan and his shop any number of times, almost always glowingly. When we went in, we found something of a jam session in progress; Stan and a couple of other people whom I probably ought to have recognized and didn't were sitting on stools in a circle, strumming and singing along. As Ms. 8 looked on, a smile on her face and wonder in her eyes, they sang to her--no clarion call, perhaps, but not the less sweet for being as it was.
Such things were not uncommon at Melody Corner, perhaps not a daily occurrence, but not so infrequent as to be rare. The store and the man who runs--ran--it were very much parts of the musical community of Kerrville and its surrounding area, a musical community that perhaps does not attract much attention to itself as itself, but still boasts some surprising talent. (The keyboard player for the Juantanamos hails from Kerrville, for example, and Robert Earl Keen lives there, among others.) While it may seem a small thing for a small music store in a small town to close after seventy years, to those of us who have been there, who have gone back time and again (though not so much as we ought to have done), it is not of small moment--and its like will likely not come again.