Let us call you sweetheart, Sarabel

If you're on the hunt for a sweetheart this Valentine's week, here's an idea: Visit a local nursing home or senior resident center. Those places are packed with them.

Take Sarabel Hall Key, for instance.

A couple of months past her 97th birthday, Key lives at the Beehive Home in Portales, where I found her holding court at the piano Saturday morning as she often does.

Her good friend Kenny Reed had dropped by with his mandolin. The two of them kept a small, but exceedingly appreciative audience entertained for a solid hour with old favorites like "Has Anybody Seen My Gal," "Arkansas Traveler," "Old Joe Clark," and "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

A Fort Sumner native, Key came into this world in the winter of 1921 on her family's homestead near that community.

"I was born there and I'm going to be buried there," she said, adding that she's already picked out a gravesite, a headstone, and a casket.

"I even have a song," she said with a grin, and sang, "Here comes ol' 97 - she just wants to go to heaven."

I saw no evidence that will happen any time soon.

In fact, it was Reed - Key's junior by several decades - who was the first to suggest they stop playing on Saturday.

"We've about shot all our bullets," he told Key.

"No, we haven't," she countered. "Not by a long shot. Let's play 'Frankie and Johnny.'"

"My mother taught me everything I know," Key said as we visited after the concert. "We didn't have money, but she wanted her kids to have a music education. She ordered a piano from Montgomery Ward and ordered lessons from the U.S. School of Music. She would read through those lessons and she taught every one of us to play."

Key remembers attending one of her first country dances as a girl of 11 or 12 with her cousin Ben.

It was the start of a lifelong love affair with dance music.

With her at the keyboard, and her first husband on fiddle, "The Yeso Ramblers" played all over New Mexico, including at annual conventions for the New Mexico Wool Growers and New Mexico Cattle Growers.

In addition to piano and fiddle, "we'd pick up some cowboy who knew how to play a little and drag him along with us," Key said.

Saturday's impromptu concert didn't involve a single piece of sheet music - just a handwritten list of favorites, and a lifetime's memory of chords.

"All these people here say music is a natural ability," Key said. "It isn't. You have to work at it. Like Ken here - he's a great musician but he works at it every day."

It was clear throughout that Key was having just as much fun playing as we were listening.

When she and Reed finished a lively version of "Red Wing," she sat back on her chair and said, "Mighty good! Mighty good!"

Let me call you sweetheart, Sarabel Hall Key. I'm in love with you.

Betty Williamson loves old dance tunes and the people who play them. Reach her at:

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