EDDINGTON – What is loved and lost is sometimes found and made new again. When the gift of music is in you, it’s there for good, no matter what. Ask Joyce Stevens – she’ll tell you.

Country music of the 1940s and 1950s, the kind that contained the lonesome sounds of the Western plains and the plaintive wail of the Appalachian Mountains, wound itself around Stevens’ heart when she was still a girl growing up in Hermon in that era.

It was a natural happenstance because her family sang and played music to entertain themselves.

“I remember [as a little girl] sitting on my grandfather’s knee, him whistling and playing the harmonica,” said Stevens, who now lives in Eddington and works at the Brewer Credit Union. Other members of her family played violin, piano and guitar.

In addition, Maine country music star Dick Curless lived in Stevens’ neighborhood. And when she was about 10 years old, “my mother made me a cowgirl costume with white fringe on the skirt, and I used to stand beside the road and wait for Dick Curless to go by so I could wave to him,” she recalled. But he never knew that she sang.

Sometimes family members took Stevens to Auto Rest Park in Carmel where she saw Grand Ole Opry star Hawkshaw Hawkins and 1930s WWVA radio star Doc Williams. She also watched a performance of country music legend Curley O’Brien at the park.

But music wasn’t why Stevens wanted to go to Auto Rest Park. She wanted to roller skate. She also liked to look at the animals in the menagerie, to play on the swing sets, hang out in the arcade and eat strawberry ice cream sundaes.

“I used to live in the roller rink,” she said. “There was always a big crowd and we skated to organ music played on records. Sometimes I talked my uncles into giving me a ride to the park.” Or she would walk more than five miles to get there when she was 11 or 12 years old.

“If you started walking, someone usually offered you a ride,” she said. “We never worried about who we were riding with. We knew everyone. And we walked everywhere.” As a teenager she once walked all the way to Bangor in high heels to go to a dance.

Several times at Auto Rest Park, Stevens and her aunt, Doris Cronkite, sang in the Curley O’Brien talent show and won a box of candy. That was enough to fuel Stevens’ dreams for a guitar of her own.

But money wasn’t easy to come by for a farming family. Her mother and grandmother supplemented the family income by working at Freese’s department store in Bangor.

“We were poor materially, but we were rich in other ways,” Stevens said.

One day in 1948 a man carrying a guitar came into Freese’s, and made his way to an area where Stevens’ grandmother, Lena Overlock, worked at the notions counter. The man asked if anyone wanted to buy a guitar for $5. Overlock borrowed the money from Jerry Noyes, a coworker, and the guitar became a Christmas gift to Stevens when she was 12.

“The angels were watching,” Stevens said.

She spent the next few months teaching herself to play with the aid of an instruction booklet. Her father, Roger Stevens, whom Stevens described as someone who could “do anything with mechanics and electricity,” built her a radio from spare parts and vacuum tubes, complete with an antenna, so she could listen to WWVA radio, the country music capital of the time.

With a lot of encouragement from her family, Stevens began to find places to play publicly, including the Bangor Opera House, and to find people to play music with, like the Bailey Brothers. For the opera house gig she wore a dark blue skirt with kick pleats in the front and cowboy boots, she said.

The high point of her time with the Bailey Brothers came in the mid-1950s when they opened a live WABI-TV Channel 5 program that featured country singers Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, who were in the area to promote their TV show.

“At that time [when she was 17 or 18] I wanted to be a big star,” Stevens said. “But then I got married.” It was common in the 1950s for young women to abandon their dreams and put their energy into caring for a home and a husband and to raise a family. She sold her guitar and the stack of sheet music she had collected.

That should have been the end of that, but it wasn’t. Eventually her family was grown, her marriage was a thing of the past, and Stevens began to feel the pull of music again. By the 1990s she decided to let a friend, Joyce Somers, teach her to line dance.

When Somers learned that Stevens used to sing and play guitar, she loaned Stevens a guitar. To her amazement, Stevens rediscovered and reclaimed a talent she thought was gone forever. She went to Northern Kingdom Music in Bangor and bought for herself a Gibson “Dove” guitar.

Gradually, she began to play and sing at private jam sessions and events where she met Kenny Wentworth, who has a recording studio in Bangor. In 2004 he made a CD, “Traditional Country,” of Stevens singing and playing.

“I did it as a joke,” Stevens said. “It still amazes me that people want to hear me sing.” Her voice is in a low range, alto to baritone, unusual for a woman, and she most often sings in the key of D.

Much of the singing Stevens does now is still in private jam sessions, but she also has played for residents of area nursing homes and the Maine Veterans Home. Last summer, she played at the Bucksport River Fest. She has even been a guest singer in the band led by Jackie King, Curley O’Brien’s widow.

Over the years, Stevens has put together a large album of memorabilia and photographs of Maine country singers and musicians – among them, fiddler Harold Carter, Jimmy Pierson, Gene Bennett, Curley O’Brien and Dick Curless.

“I just want to keep singing,” Stevens said. “It’s a continuing education. I learn so much from the people I play with. It’s wonderful they like me and want me along [to sing with them]. Music is in my soul.”

Joyce Stevens’ CD, “Traditional Country,” is available by calling 843-5465.

Joyce Stevens plays her Gibson “Dove” guitar as she sings “Don’t Touch Me” in her living room in Eddington. (Ardeana Hamlin/The Weekly)