“Evermore”

The painting is finished! The story is filled with half-truths from an female accordion player from Canada who was born on August 8, 1938 in Wadena, Saskatchewan. She actually did not visit the US, but she did performed with the Smilin’ Johnnie (John Lucky) playing her accordion and bass fiddle. The band’s most significant achievement was becoming the first entertainers to tour north of the Arctic Circle in 1963, traveling by plane and boat to communities where no musicians had performed before. My painting story is fictional and has her taking a respite before her Arctic trip. I submitted the painting to the National Accordion Association Conference coming up in March in Forney, Texas.

“Evermore”, 30″x24″, Golden Open Acrylics.

Eleanor Dahl pedals through the Texas dawn on her custom penny farthing, eyes closed, finally free from the accordion that has defined her twenty-two years. She’d slipped away from Smilin’ Johnnie and his Prairie Pals for a few weeks in the fall of 1962, craving silence and empty roads before rejoining the band for their planned Arctic Circle tour the following year, but the raven had other plans—appearing on her handlebars that first morning, cawing out melodies she’d never heard before, strange and beautiful tunes that seemed to rise from the land itself. The armadillo shuffles through the roadside brush as Eleanor hums along with the bird’s compositions, her mind already arranging harmonies, imagining how these wild Texas songs might sound through her bellows and reeds. She’d meant this trip as an escape, a chance to remember who she was before the music claimed her, but as the golden light spills across the hills and the raven taps out another rhythm, she understands the truth: music isn’t something you leave behind, it’s something that finds you again and again, calling you back to what you were always meant to do, evermore.