Long before he was the tenor singer for the Statler Brothers and writer of such hits as "More Than a Name on a Wall," Jimmy Fortune was a Nelson County boy.

"I was a blessed person to grow up where I did," Fortune told The Daily Progress. "There were nine of us kids. We weren't very well off, but we didn't know it. We thought we were rich because we had each other."

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From the time Fortune was 6 until he was 12, the family lived in Nellysford, in what is now the Meander Inn. He found a tiny guitar with two strings in a nearby dump, never realizing how far the instrument would take him someday. Then the Fortunes moved to what the singer calls "the home place" 2 miles north of Lovingston.

"I used to go

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