Pawpaw used to tell stories when we were "feeding the fish" down at the pond. When I was knee-high, he'd reward me with penny candy to keep me focused. Later, when I grew a little bigger, he'd "accidentally" drop his pouch of Red Man knowing I'd sneak a chew. One day like that, when my eyes were watering a little from the punch of the tobacco in my veins, he told me about the parties at the old house.

When he was a boy, his father and momma'd throw big yard dances underneath the live oaks. Folks from far away as Natalbany rode out for the festivities. Food on tables circled the yard. A band with fiddles, banjo and guitars playd for the young couples courting. And a contest of sorts, who could tell the biggest fish stories, meaning lies, about fishing and other such exploits. And homebrew, and Prince Albert handrolled cigarettes, and out back a dice game -- beyond earshot of the preacher, of course.

We caught enough brim to clean that day, and Nan fried up dinner and kept warning me to watch for bones.

A few years later, I was riding along with Momma on her insurance route. We stopped out on Chickenfarm Road at the house of a withered old man and his bride of fifty-odd years. We were only inside a minute or two, when I noticed an ancient fiddle hanging on a nail in her living room. I said that I played a little guitar, and she professed that she had too. She looked off a minute or two at the ceiling, then recollected how her daddy, who'd played fiddle, had taught her all the old dance tunes and how she'd met her husband of these many years playing a house party out on Shiloh Road.

When I asked her if it was at the Bond place, she laughed  "Yep" and mustered up a blush. "They always kept a lively merriment at them Bond parties," she answered. "Mother said to watch out for them Bond boys, for they was reckless. But I walked out with one once when my daddy was distracting himself with the menfolk."

After his release from a Union prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the Civil War, Rick's great-great-grandfather Theodore Constantine Bond homesteaded in St. Helena Parish, Louisiana, just north of Pine Grove along the east bank of a creek called Hog Branch which fed a few miles further down into the Tickfaw River.

Rick's great-grandfather Theodore Marshall Bond built the house where five generations of his family lived and worked. He married a part-Choctaw woman a head taller than him.

Rick's grandfather Newman Leon Bond taught him how to track game out past the old hickory nut tree, skin catfish reeled in from the pond, and haul hay and salt blocks to the cows, and to say the prayer before the collection at church. Rick learned a lot things the old-fashioned way from the old men: how to tune up a car, whittle a rabbit trap, hoe a long row of field peas, hunt squirrels and coons, jitterbug, catch a football, keep his word, and to clean his plate at dinnertime.

But Rick learned to play bass by following his momma Carolyn Rose Bond’s mighty left hand as it pumped out boogie-tinged gospel on the upright Baldwin piano at Shiloh Church. She rocked the heavy Baptist quarter-notes and swung the equally-inspired spiritual eighths with a force that transcended motherhood and mortality.

After piano lessons at six and guitar lessons at seven, Rick bought his first bass, a Cortley Precision copy made in Japan in 1976, with the money from his summer job. By high school, Rick was anchoring "Kasino," a Skynyrd- inspired rock band that was playing honky-tonks and festivals throughout the South. His best friend since grade school, Chris Raymond (who later became his brother-in-law) sang in the band.

Music and religion and family and fishing and football and alcohol and friends. As with Hog Branch, everything just flowed lazily downhill from there.