H.K. Silvey is 2022 Hootin an Hollarin parade marshal


H.K. Silvey

This year’s Hootin an Hollarin parade marshal, H.K. Silvey, 89, is recognized far and wide as an amazingly gifted fiddle player who, in addition to winning contests and performing all around the U.S., also played for the nightly Hootin an Hollarin square dancing for 18 years. 

But growing up in Longrun, he wasn’t supposed to play the fiddle at all.

Although he learned to play the guitar at age 11, the thing he really wanted to do was play his Uncle Jesse Silvey’s fiddle. But it was a forbidden temptation. 

“They didn’t want me to touch the fiddle. They said it was too fragile,” H.K. recalled in a 2011 Times story. But his Uncle Jesse’s wife, Beulah, risked letting him play the fiddle “whenever Uncle Jesse was gone.” He experimented and practiced alone with the off-limits fiddle whenever possible, thinking he was teaching himself in secret. Almost magically, as he learned to play, H. K. unwrapped his extraordinary gift. 

After three years of this undercover practicing, H.K. was at a music party somewhere when the gift was revealed. His uncle was playing the fiddle at the party. When he and the other musicians took a break, Jesse Silvey surprised H.K. by handing him the fiddle and saying, “You play while I’m gone.” 

He was 14, and “from that time on, whenever there was a music party somewhere, I got to take a turn on someone’s fiddle,” he said. When his mother, Dortha Brewer Silvey, got over her shock at how well her son played, she saved up her egg money to buy H.K. a fiddle for his 18th birthday. 

“It probably cost $75,” he said. “No telling how many eggs she had to sell to pay for it.”

After graduating from Gainesville High School in 1952, H.K. went to work for Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, continuing to play the fiddle whenever he had the chance. In 1955, he married Judy Ford, a girl from Oklahoma who worked for the telephone company with four girls from Ozark County. The couple raised four children, Sheryl (now Lawson), Elaine (now Burnett), Bryan and Douglas, while living wherever H.K.’s work with Boeing, and later with Martin-Marietta, took them: Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, South Dakota, Washington, Arkansas and Louisiana. 

In 1959, he traded the fiddle his mother had bought him for a guitar and amp, thinking he change directions with his music. “But then these boys who could play like Chet Atkins come along, and that wasn’t for me,” he said. “I took the guitar to a music store and traded it for another fiddle.” The price for the Gustav August Ficker Model 195 fiddle was “$395 or something like that,” H.K. said. He still owns the fiddle, now worth several thousand dollars.

With Martin-Marietta, he worked on the Saturn rockets that powered the Apollo 11 project in 1969, when American astronauts left behind a tiny marker engraved with the names of Martin-Marietta employees who worked on the project. H.K. likes to say, “If you ever get to the moon, my name’s there.” 

He left Martin-Marietta in July 1973 and moved his family back to Ozark County, eventually starting a dairy farm in Longrun. In 1981, he built a new Grade A dairy barn that he shared with his daughter and son-in-law, Sheryl and Roger Lawson. “They would milk 40 head and be done by six o’clock [in the morning]; then I would milk 50 head and be done by eight,” he said. “Then I would go run the road-grader for the county for eight hours and come back home and milk again.” 

He worked for the Ozark County Road and Bridge Department for eight years and also served as western district commissioner for one term in the 1980s. H.K. also finished out presiding commissioner Glen Gardner’s term when Gardner died in office in 1986. 

From 1973 through 1991, H.K. played fiddle for all three nights of each year’s Hootin and Hollarin square dancing, joining Junie Smith, J. D. Morrison, Curt Duncan, Bobby Joe Sullivan, Ray Wallace and other musicians. “All the ones I played with are dead now,” he said sadly. 

Some nights, he played for the square dancers from 9 p.m. until midnight “and then went home to Longrun to milk,” he said.

H.K. played music for contests, performances, square dances, radio shows, and state and national festivals in a wide range of settings ranging from the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol to the foot of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. He can’t read music and is entirely self-taught, but he has earned more honors and acclaim, and won more contests, than can be listed in this limited space. After listening to a song a time or two, he could play it.

He notes that fiddle-playing is a skill that depends on one’s musical hearing. “A fiddle neck doesn’t have frets like a guitar does, those little ridges to help you feel where to put your fingers,” he said. “You have to be able to hear whether you’re flat or sharp to know where to put your fingers. If your hearing isn’t sharp enough, you can’t play,” he said. 

He’s been a fiddle teacher with the National Endowment for the Arts, and he taught a weeklong fiddle camp in Branson for nine years. Among his successful students is Brett Dudenhoeffer, who now plays with the Finley River Boys bluegrass band and told the Times that H.K. “has been an amazing teacher and influence on my life.”   

Another successful student is Casey Ritchie Overturf, who took lessons from H.K. during her last three years at Gainesville High School, going to his house every week, and “sitting with him for three or four hours at his kitchen table,” she said. She and H.K. were named as the No. 1 Missouri master-and-apprentice pair by the Council of the Arts. Casey earned a bachelor’s degree in instrumental music education from Missouri State University (her studies paid for by full music and educational scholarships) and is now a certified K-12 music teacher, continuing on to earn a master’s degree. 

Casey will perform with Come What Mae, this year’s Hootin an Hollarin house band, while her husband, Sam Overturf, serves as festival emcee. Asked about H.K.’s influence, Casey said simply, “I love that man. He’s amazing.”

H.K. survived a heart attack in 1991 and colon cancer in 1992. After that, he quit milking. These days, the legendary fiddler no longer plays his fiddle. Three years ago, when H.K. went to the weekly music jam in McClurg, “I might have had a little stroke,” he said. “I got out my fiddle to play, and boy! I couldn’t play. I come back home and tried it again two or three times. I was uncoordinated somehow and just couldn’t do it.”

The end to his fiddle playing came just a few years after the Silveys’ son, Bryan, was killed in a 2001 car crash and Judy Silvey died in 2013. Now confined to a wheelchair by debilitating diabetes, H.K. lives in Theodosia and enjoys reading books – more than 100 so far this year, he said.

It’s a fitting pastime for someone whose life has been quite a story. 

Ozark County Times

504 Third Steet
PO Box 188
Gainesville, MO 65655

Phone: (417) 679-4641
Fax: (417) 679-3423