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His are instruments of peace

Music can keep young people on the right path, says one guitarist whose mission is to share.

By MARY JANE PARK
Published July 16, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG -- Every Sunday, Grove Haynes sits out in his yard, waiting for services to end at Central Christian Church. He's surrounded by several of his vintage guitars, tuned to an E-minor seventh chord, colored tape stretched along a couple of the frets.

Haynes breaks out a Michael Miller lamentation:

Havin' blues at midnight

It won't be long 'fore day

I wish the good Lord above

come and blow my blues away.

He hopes his music will lure a couple of youngsters over from the church or elsewhere in the neighborhood. The instruments are prepped so that all a rookie has to do is pick one up, press a few fingers against the tape and strum.

The way Haynes sees it, music can keep youngsters from becoming drug dealers. Or terrorists, like those young men arrested in a Miami warehouse a few weeks back, accused of plotting to bomb the FBI building there and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Or shot dead, like Michael Smith, Forbes Swisher and Antonio Roberts, the three young men whose mothers walked Childs Park last month, pleading with other young men to give up their guns. It's Haynes' neighborhood, too.

Haynes' given name is Grover, but everybody calls him Grove. He started his Sunday concerts in January. Sometimes as many as eight youngsters have stopped by, he says, sometimes none.

If his is a quixotic pursuit, it is not his first.

Forty-some years ago, he played in the Hollywood Hootenanny, a group of musicians who took their act to towns throughout the Deep South. Their aim was "integrating love and joy and health," according to a newspaper clipping he saved from October 1963.

The Hoots - Gypsy Boots, Tumbleweed Tom and Haynes, a.k.a. Rovin Grove, a trio that performed regularly on television's Steve Allen Show - were largely a country-western act.

"We put a beat to it so people could dance," Haynes says.

They played to mixed-race audiences in Birmingham and Selma, Ala., hot spots in the civil rights crucible, where activists encouraged black Americans to register to vote.

"We were getting a message across," Haynes says. "We hoped, with our silly songs, to maybe cut down on the animosity."

On Nov. 21, 1963, the Hoots had a gig in Huntsville, Texas. In their bus on the way to Dallas the next day, they learned from the radio that an assassin had shot President John F. Kennedy.

Haynes says he learned a life-changing lesson then: "You've got to be there early," he says. "You never know what's going to happen."

Haynes, 75, recounts those times one recent morning inside the cottage where he and his wife, Pearl, moved to be close to his late mother, Nell Horner, and her husband, Daniel. A car hit Daniel as he walked in the neighborhood. His injuries were severe, so the Hayneses left San Francisco and came to St. Petersburg in 1990 to help out.

Out in front of the main house on First Avenue S, they are trying to sell some stuff: glass decanters, an aluminum cake cover, a vintage vanity set and a bunch of Haynes' old guitars. He has about 50, he estimates, all American-made, none in pristine condition.

"I used them on the road," he says. "Wherever the road would take me, I would go there. They're my old-age pension."

Pearl Yamane Haynes, 58, tends to the merchandise; her husband takes a couple of veteran garage-salers inside the tiny guest house in the back to show them photocopies of old newspaper clippings and faded programs from Eckerd College's Academy for Senior Professionals, where the Hayneses led a guitar orchestra.

In those days, they lived in a gated community near Eckerd. They moved to Childs Park because they felt isolated and ineffectual, he says. They give money to Central Christian Church, and he goes over on Wednesday nights as a volunteer security escort helping choir members get safely to their cars.

He cares little for the spotlight now. He plays occasionally for parties and weddings, in restaurants, art galleries and other small venues. Steel strings hurt his older fingers, so he sticks with classical guitar. Nimbly, he picks through chords of a Bach cantata and the Spanish standard, Malaguena.

"I can play the sweet stuff or rock," he says.

What he wants most is to teach youngsters to play guitar, steer them away from violent video games and movies and encourage them to vent through music.

"I'm really worried about some of the ways people express themselves," he says. "Music can make a difference. It can."

Haynes was a medic in the U.S. Army Reserve for six years, helping soldiers returning home from Korea.

During the American Civil War, he says, musicians were stretcher-bearers for the wounded and helped with amputations and other surgeries.

"Civil War musicians had to go out there without a gun to protect them," he says. "They are my real heroes."

He slips a cracked leather covering off an 1861 cavalryman's guitar. Nearly a lifetime ago, his father found it at an estate sale and brought it home to his musical boy.

"I sort of have some qualms about selling it," Haynes says. "I've been having some fun showing it to people."

Then again, he estimates he can make enough from selling one of his old instruments to outfit several budding players.

"Right now, I need to get some inexpensive guitars," he says. He'll pay about $50 apiece. "Some of them are pretty good," he says of the instruments.

He'd like to organize a group of volunteers to help supervise his musical operation, which begins a little after noon on Sundays.

Haynes readies the guitars, and lyrics are copied onto a piece of poster board:

Good mornin' God

God how do you do

Good mornin' God

I really got the blues

Good mornin' God

Are you feelin' okay

Good mornin' God

I hope you got good news.

Haynes can help with the improvisation. All a rookie has to do is pick up a guitar, press a few fingers against the tape and strum.

[Last modified July 15, 2006, 23:33:48]