The loaner guitar became a matter of a good bit of fun and verbal high jinks between us as I tried to persuade Chris to return it and he fielded all manner of reasons (always hilarious—he kept me laughing) why he needed to keep it. The instrument sounded fabulous in his hands. And of course, the guitar did more good for me when he was playing and recording with it than when it was at my shop. Eventually, he ordered a guitar, a different carved-top model, the Muscle Shoals Deluxe. His determination to play my instruments was one of the greatest compliments I ever received for my guitar-building efforts.

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During 1995 and 1996, The Fiddleworms built a large following in the Shoals. Johnny Sandlin once remarked years later he thought they had it all at the time: a group of young, good-looking, energetic guys with great songs and who were all great players. Lead singer Russell Mefford’s songs were like rock poetry (listen to “Attitude” or “Guardian Angel” from Yellowhammer, the band’s first album); Scott Kennedy drummed with the authority of a law giver; Jay Wilson’s piano playing was fluid and eloquent; Matt locked the groove down with Scott like a bank vault; and Chris added exquisite sonic colors to the mix with great guitar and backup vocal work. Fans at the shows were enthusiastic and major-label interest was developing. By Memorial Day weekend 1996, they pulled a very large crowd to an outdoor show on Court Street in downtown Florence. The band asked me to introduce them from the stage. The invitation was an honor. I gladly accepted.

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Sandlin’s observations about the ‘Worms were exactly right. In addition to having all the things Johnny noted, there was an effervescent spirit about the group, a flow of energy often dubbed “chemistry” when writers lack sufficient powers of analysis to describe a unique dynamic. But analysis will never adequately capture what should be rendered in poetics. Walt Whitman, America’s self-styled “poet of comrades,” might have been equal to the task. His blend of exuberance and profundity comes to mind as possessing the right celebratory feel for capturing a mid-90s Fiddleworms show. “I sing the body electric,” the Bard wrote. And the scene building around the band seemed charged with electricity by the spring of 1996.

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A “scene,” per U2 Producer Daniel Lanois, is a creative ferment with a focal point. (Lanois consciously fostered such scenes around unique and funky studios in New Orleans, for example, or Oxnard, California.) Chris Quillen’s gift for music became a strong focal point for a homegrown, grassroots music scene centered in downtown Florence. The Fiddleworms were Chris’s primary musical commitment. But, when he wasn’t playing with them, Chris sat in with other bands, even gracing the stage occasionally with my blues group Barrelhouse.

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And he performed regularly for a time with Patterson Hood. One night I stopped by a Florence dive called The Bridge to pick up a PA system I had loaned Patterson. Barrelhouse was playing the next night and Patterson and I had coordinated a PA tag-team arrangement after the show. He and Chris were finishing their final set when I arrived and the crowd was so raucous and appreciative of the music and on-stage antics it was hard to imagine such a vibrant scenario ever ending. But it did. Patterson has written about this time period being a prolific one for songwriting, but an unhappy one for him personally. (See resources.) He left for Georgia, moving to Athens, where he would soon start the Drive-By Truckers. Chris stayed in the Shoals and continued playing with the ‘Worms.

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Saturday night, 25 May 1996, a large crowd converged on downtown Florence to hear The Fiddleworms play a Holiday weekend show. Informal estimates by local authorities put the crowd at somewhere just under 10,000. Many luminaries from the Muscle Shoals music scene were there. I even have a photograph that shows seventeen-year-old Jason Isbell standing by the stage as the opening act, The Ethiopians, played. Another photograph captures the ‘Worms clowning with me and one of my guitar cases just before I introduced them. Once I had the crowd revved up, I motioned them onto the stage, a flatbed trailer set up to block off the north end of Court. And as they hammered down on their set, I grabbed my camera and snapped photos. Everything that night felt like a major breakthrough was in the offing for The Fiddleworms.

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The next morning, the Shoals area woke to the stunning news that Chris had been involved in a one-car accident in the early hours of Sunday morning and was gone in an instant. There are no words to describe the emotional fog that descended on everyone close to Chris and The Fiddleworms. He inspired so much joy; it was inconceivable to think he was gone. Patterson has written eloquently about why the loss seemed so senseless.

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Just two days before, on Friday, Chris had come to my shop to have me spot dress a couple of frets that were buzzing when he bore down hard on a note. We had a great time getting his axe fine-tuned just right, excited about the prospects for the band, and listening to R.L. Burnside’s album Too Bad Jim. Chris was laughing and singing along with one of R.L.’s songs as he headed out the door with his guitar. It was the last time we got to be together, just hanging out as buddies sharing our mutual love of all things musical.

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The next guitarist to come through my shop door was a heavy-hearted Rob Malone. Carol Quillen, Chris’s dad and a fine songwriter and musician himself, called me after the accident and asked if I would participate in the memorial with some words about Chris and by playing a few songs with Rob. There was no question; I would do anything to honor Chris’s memory. Playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” with Rob was the easy part. Rob is such an incredible guitar player; I knew his gift would carry us through the songs with ease. Rob would later play with The Fiddleworms and, eventually, with Patterson’s band the DBT.

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What to say about the life of a man so young and gifted and loved was the challenge. Always a light sleeper, I could not sleep at all, day or night, until after the service. While I pondered the meaning of Chris’s life during the sleepless hours, Patterson, Rob, and Mike Cooley, Patterson’s longtime music partner, all had a remarkably similar dream.

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In “The Dirt Underneath,” a chapter of Barr Weissman’s documentary on the Drive-By Truckers titled The Secret to a Happy Ending, Patterson describes his last phone call to Chris and the subsequent shock of losing his friend. Then, he explained that part of the impetus for the DBT came from a dream he, Rob and Mike had around the time of the funeral: “I always felt like what our band sort of did was sort of tied to that dream.” He says emphatically that he really never believed in tales of ghosts or the supernatural, but the dream was “vivid.” “It was like he [Chris] took a light and he shined it down a path . . . and all I had to do was follow it.”

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It seemed the entire music community of the Shoals gathered at Spry-Williams to remember Chris. A lady who had worked there for several years told me afterward it was the largest crowd she had ever seen at a service. Folding chairs for guests backed up into the vestibule of the building. And then there was standing room only. It was not just a memorial; it was clearly the community’s tribute.

 

When it was time for me to speak, I eulogized Chris for two characteristics that stood out as remarkable attributes of his life: the quick, friendly sense of humor he brought to bear on every situation and his faith in other people. The best way to honor Chris and his memory, I concluded, was to maintain a sense of friendly humor in the midst of life’s trials and tribulations and to have more faith in each other. My hours of sleepless agony were validated after the service when Matt told me I had helped him see Chris in a way he had never seen him before, and asked if he could have the notes I spoke from for the eulogy.

 

Chris emerged from Madison Square Mall on our 25 January 1995 trip to hear Gov’t Mule and approached the truck with a small sack and a big grin. He got in and handed me the Record Bar bag. “Here man. I wanted you to have a copy of this album.” In the bag was a cassette copy of the Allman Brothers Band album Back Where It All Begins. We had been talking about the record earlier in our trip. Chris had heard it and loved Warren’s song “Soulshine.” This spontaneous gesture of generosity was so characteristic of Chris. Today I keep the tape in a case with the prototype guitar I loaned him.

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Patterson and I have never discussed the dream path he described seeing in The Secret. But my thematic reading of Weissman’s documentary suggests the following: A “happy ending” is assured by giving everything you’ve got to what you are doing. Anyone who has tried to sustain themselves by making art knows the difficulty of that chosen path. Great artists have lived and died in obscurity and poverty. Think of bluesman Robert Johnson, the poet William Blake, or the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. But what matters is not so much “making it,” as the expression goes, but rather the living and working through it. The Secret details the band’s persistence through near-desperate situations. Such persistence is its own reward because, in the end, even if you never realize the success of a sustainable path, there is still the satisfaction of knowing you gave it everything you had. Patterson was already on that path when he met Chris. But Chris’s commitment to music is bound to have inspired Patterson, Mike and Rob to stay the course.

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Music writer Geoffrey Himes appears in the documentary to make a comparison between the work of William Faulkner and the Drive-By Truckers. Himes notes how Faulkner drew his art out of a narrowly circumscribed world, “that little patch of Mississippi around Oxford.” Faulkner, Himes says, “was working from the assumption that everything you need to know about human experience can be found in that little area of the earth.” The story-telling that characterizes so much DBT material (what I call narrative knowledge) draws on the hardscrabble lives of the people of northwest Alabama, an area that has been undergoing a process of economic marginalization since the 1970s. Chris Quillen lived and drew his sustenance and his art out of a “little patch” of Alabama, the Shoals. Although not a songwriter or storyteller like Hood or Cooley or Isbell, Chris created a story out of his own life, demonstrating that he could get everything he needed from an area of the South many have sought to escape. These were his people and this was his time. And he dignified the area and everyone he met in it by a focused commitment to living completely in the moment when he was with them.

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The strange and delicate brew of place, time, love, genetics, consciousness and vision we call “life” occasionally yields a remarkable set of circumstances and remarkable people. Chris Quillen’s monster talent and the community that gathered to support him and the music he made is noteworthy for many reasons. I have only hinted at a few of them here. Those of us who knew him need to keep his memory alive. Even though he did not achieve the recognition some of his peers and friends have attained, the path he traversed and the manner in which he traversed it—with humor, faith in people, generosity, focus, commitment—makes him the living embodiment of what Warren called “Soulshine.” As the personal economy of the average American is under ever greater pressure and the post-World War II equilibrium unravels in parts of the world, Chris’s courageous manner of life serves to inspire. I think of him often and am grateful for the memory.