On a recent spring evening in Fayetteville, Andrew Adkins pulled up a stool at the Cathedral Café. It had been a productive day, by anyone's standards, but Andrew wears many hats.
He handcrafts most any stringed instrument, builds furniture, carves, makes knives and belt buckles, all from his garage. This evening, Andrew is the focus of a community arts gathering, and his topic is creating.
Holding one of his favorite pieces, a guitar he built from a 1949 harvest table, Andrew speaks about his first creative love - songwriting.
"I started as a kid, growing up in Nicholas County. After writing my first song, I was hooked," Adkins said. "Not to just writing but to creating something from nothing."
The early desire instilled by that process has led Andrew to success with a music label, a band (Wild Rumpus) and a solo career as a singer/songwriter. He treats tonight's audience to one of his songs, first explaining the story behind it.
"I asked my grandmother, who is 91, why did she not let us kids swim the waters around Curtin Bridge," near his Nicholas County home.
"She said, 'That's where all the Polyester Preachers would take people to cast away their sins.' So I guess she thought there were just too many sins floating around for us kids to manage," Adkins said. "Granny wrote the song; I just made it rhyme."