By John W. Forssen

Kennebunk Resident

If you were to see Bob Milne on the street, there would be little about him to suggest anything extraordinary. However, had you seen him this past weekend, performing ragtime in his shirt sleeves at the Ocean Park Temple, stamping out the rhythm as if the soles of his shoes were on fire, you might have found yourself believing in magic again – wondering where such music could come from.

A self-taught piano player, Milne came out of college some 40 years ago with a degree in music and a determination, he says, to find a job that required no work. At least, he didn’t want it to feel like work. Thus, he gave up his primary instrument, the French horn, and took up with the piano, playing in smoke-filled bars and small clubs where he pursued the emerging love of his life, the soul stirring music that began seeping out of New Orleans even before the ashes of the Civil War had thoroughly cooled.

He has so much music stored in his fingers that he is able to play and talk at the same time, giving little clinics on technique, explaining how ragtime was old on the guitar before it was new on the piano – and how, during a span approaching 100 years, ragtime became the foundation upon which rock ‘n roll was established.

He talks off the cuff. He has a brilliant smile that seems to leap from a weary face; and, as he talks, it feels like he’s rummaging about, gathering scraps to sew into a wonderful piece of whole cloth.

For nearly two hours he played and he played – never missing a note or a beat in the complex rhythms and never using a single sheet of music: flying totally solo, you might say, no instruments, no net beyond the music he knows so well.

“That music’s not in his head any longer,” one spectator remarked. “It’s in his blood.”

And so it seems. Asked during intermission if he had considered playing “St. James Infirmary Blues,” he replied, “No, but, as long as you’re here, I’ll put it in the program.”

He made it sound as if he knew you were coming and had kept a spot open.

A few minutes later, having explained that St. James Infirmary was really a church in the heart of New Orleans’ red light district where nuns once cared for the sick and down-and-out, he played and he sang, bringing such thunder to this sad tale of grief that it might have been his own.

Despite his success, Milne insists that he is still a “saloon piano player,” and he credits his early days in those steamy places for teaching him “how to read his audience and move them with [this] richly varied music, tailored [on the spot] to the mood of the moment.” And, he adds with a smile, he and his kind have survived the years because the first rule in those old saloons and barrel bars, where whiskey flowed and violence was routine, was: Don’t shoot the piano player.

In 2004, according to his bio, he was designated a National Treasure by the Librarian of Congress, and the concert that he performed there is now part of the National Record of American Music. Three years later, he was in Kennebunkport performing for President Bush, Sr. In addition to his sparkling performances of established songs which he has lifted from the long history of ragtime, he has composed more than 40 piano rags of his own, a trumpet concerto, flute and violin suites, and classical art songs to the poetry of Robert Frost and Michigan poet Stillman Elwell.

And, there are his books: a collection of short stories based on his life as a saloon piano player and several books. Among his titles are “The Journeyman Piano Player,” “Turtle Lake: Portrait of an Extortionist,” “Father Davenport, Con Man in the Pulpit” and “The Dissection of Adam Probst,” a true crime story based on the massacre of a Philadelphia family in 1866.

Bob Milne in shirt-sleeves is the best way to describe him and perhaps the best way to remember him, as well – because, even before the music starts, you know you’re going to like him. And when it’s over, you can’t help but think the Pied Piper of Hamlin might have been more than a fairy tale.