Talking America

Finger pickin' good

• Jon Kelly
• 12 Oct 08, 05:10 PM GMT

My colleague Steve Evans has just alerted me to a rather amazing story. Back in Nashville he met Eddie Alcock, one of the pillars of bluegrass music, whose career looked threatened when he developed a tremor in his banjo-plucking hand.

Surgeons at Nashville's Vanderbilt Medical Center told Eddie they could help him. But they needed his musical assistance.

The doctors hoped to halt the shaking through a process called deep brain stimulation - sending an electrical charge to his brain via wires pushed through a hole in Eddie's skull.

But the only way they could tell when they had hit the 'sweet spot' was to ask Eddie himself. So before he was put under local anaesthetic, he took his banjo into the operating theatre.

As the surgeons adjusted the electrodes, a fully-conscious Eddie began picking at his banjo strings. As the current moved closer, his playing improved. It was, according to Peter Hedera, one of the medical team, 'the ultimate Nashville experience'.

It was left to Eddie to judge when the stimulation was working. As Dr Hedera told Steve: "My ear is not that great, so it was his assessment".

You can watch footage of the incredible procedure here:

A month later, he illustrated the effect for Steve by playing - clumsily and barely discernibly - with the device turned off.

Then he put a remote control to his chest and turned the current on, and his playing suddenly improved - not quite as fluent as it had been, due to lack of practice, but getting there.

'My life has re-entered my body," Eddie said. "I felt like I was dead when I felt like I couldn't play any more'.

Eddie had played with bluegrass legend Bill Monroe before setting up his own bands. Martha, his wife and musical partner, told Steve what a huge difference the surgeons had made.

'You can imagine that it was just a gift to us," she said. "One does what one must do. If there's a mountain to climb, one climbs it or goes around the side or tunnels through. I would do it for him and he does it for me. We're partners in life.'