VOLUME II: Salem, Missouri

At 7:30 a.m. a key turns in the door of the barber shop at 115 Fourth Street as it has every working day since 1926. Nolan Sutton, who has called this place his for twenty years now, begins the quiet business of preparing for another day. He changes into his crisp pale-blue barber shirt and natty dress slacks, sweeps up some stray clippings from the linoleum, and tries to make order of the narrow cluttered shelves that line the mirror facing his twin 1953 barber chairs. The shop waits. A well-worn issue of Western Horseman magazine sits on a rack alongside copies of Motor Home, Country Weekly, and Bluegrass Now. Overhead a round "Gruen Watch Time" clock glows next to one advertising "Marx Made Clothes." They hang side by side like clocks in airports denoting time in London, Tokyo, Delhi, though these two show the same hour as if to say that local time is all that matters inside these four old walls. Leaning against the walls and lying under the row of six wooden chairs for customers and loafers are the instruments of Sutton's second trade. There are two dobros (the 1920s-era precursor to the electric guitar), a steel-pedal guitar, and two violins - one a recent acquisition that was made in Europe in 1614 and, like the ancestors of many people in this tiny Ozark town, found its way to Missouri in the intervening centuries.

Listen to Nolan Sutton play his recently acquired fiddle in the barber shop:

By about 8 a.m. people start to arrive. First a shy high-school boy, then a friendly barrelmaker come in for cuts. Sutton's old friend Eudell, who plays with him in the "Ozark Echoes" bluegrass band at pie suppers and senior-center dances, stops by to show off a top-of-the-line Martin guitar. A retired schoolteacher from nearby Eminence drops in to strum and sing a few on his way to a meeting in town. And a local timber manager sings in a high, airy voice, eyes closed and hands tapping lightly in time, to the accompaniment of a friend who came for a trim and could not resist staying to play a couple of tunes on the fiddle. Sutton presides over this daily, ad-hoc serenade with the presence of a man who knows just exactly what is going to happen next. When he isn't cutting hair he's playing along to "Hound Dog Ramble," "Starlight Waltz," "I'll Be All Smiles Tonight" or any number of other tunes in a combined repertoire of hundreds. At 3:30 it's time to go. The paper sign in the front window is turned to "closed" and the venetian blinds on the door, their cloth stained from years of sun to a dusty tea brown, sway slightly as it pulls shut.