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Bagpiping is a sound for all seasons

John Jones of East Troy squeezes the pipes. He’s been playing the bagpipes for 14 years. Terry Mayer/staff.

EAST TROY -- My maternal grandmother was a frugal, no-nonsense woman. She rarely bought new what was available second-hand. Saving bacon grease for later use was her favorite sacrament.

Raised in the hills of southern Missouri, she migrated to California during the Dust Bowl. For most of her life, she lived just slightly above the poverty line. But what she lacked in material luxuries, she made up for with a succinct ability to tell you exactly what she wanted from you and why.

When she died, two of her last three requests made perfect sense to me.

First, she wanted to be buried in a simple pine box, with no engravings of any sort, no frilly fabrics inside. She also wanted to be rolled onto her left side before her casket was closed, as that was the position she always slept in and made her breathing, labored from years of smoking, easier.

Her third request however floored me.

She wanted a bagpipe player to play “Amazing Grace” at the cemetery. I never had the chance to ask her why.

While we have a trace of Scottish ancestry on my mother’s side, it was nothing we ever celebrated, advertised or even discussed at any length.

But Virginia Carpenter was not a woman you said no to, in life or in death. So as she was lowered into California’s Central Valley, a bagpipe player sent her off just as she had asked.

Thirteen years later, I am sitting across from John Jones of East Troy, a 14-year bagpipe player, asking him what may have motivated my grandmother’s last request.

“Hillbillies are clannish,” he said seated across from me at Elkhorn’s Deakin Isle. “They’re very quiet people, they’re often Scottish and clannish. A lot of the music from that region sounds very Celtic.”

So the bagpipes sounded like home to her?

“Maybe,” said Jones, an operations manager for Medplast in Elkhorn.

Bagpipes as a metaphor for home is what draws many people to their mournful sound because, no matter what your heritage, there’s probably a bagpipe in it.

“There’s something about them that’s primal,” he said. “When I play the pipes, I get that feeling. It’s like some people, when they hear ‘Amazing Grace,’ they cry. I don’t cry because I’ve played it so many times. But it’s that same feeling. There are some tunes, when I play them, the hair will stand up on the back of my neck.”

Read the full story in the March 11, 2010 e-edition of Weekender PAGE 8.