According to his grandsons, the Aelder E.E. Forbes used to say, "Musical instruments are made to be sold, not played."Considering that Forbes himself never learned to play the pianos and organs that made E.E. Forbes and Sons Piano Company an institution in Birmingham, his philosophy might have smacked of commercialism. But Ernest Erastus Forbes never fit the image of a hardnosed entrepreneur, and he contributed far more to Alabama musicians than the instruments he sold.
E.E. Forbes played out his life without improvisation, faithfully following a score he believed God had written especially for him. "Grandpoppa thought music was the salvation of mankind," grandson Nelson Forbes remembers. "He was a deeply religious man, and he believed exposing young people to music brought intellectual and spiritual discipline to their lives-kept them off the street and out of trouble. As part of his witnessing work, he often visited prisons, and he noted that few prisoners could play a musical instrument." " From that observation, Forbes drew a correlation upon which he later based many of his newspaper ads-"Music prevents crime."

Forbes struggled to maintain harmony between the economic and altruistic parts of his business, sometimes suffering financial disaster as a result. "He never made a lot of money," his grandsons say. "He'd sooner see a child have a piano than make a profit." Responsibility for his own growing household drove Forbes to make the business work, however. With a wife, five children, a grandmother, and an aunt ensconced in the rambling Forbes home on St. Charles Street, he disciplined himself both mentally and physically to stay on course.
"He worked at the store every day," his daughter Jeannetta Forbes Miree remembers. "He opened the store in the mornings and closed it at night. We always ate supper late so Poppa could get home and we all could sit down together."
Forbes approached each day with single-minded discipline. "All of the Forbes are pack rats," Nelson Forbes laughs. "Grandpoppa always had a desk stacked with papers, but if you went in and asked him for a particular document, he would carefully reach into the stack with two fingers and extricate the very paper you needed." When lunch time intruded upon his day, Forbes strode down to Britlings Cafeteria and ordered his standard lunch-a hamburger steak, spinach, a roll and some water. "Lunch was exactly the same every day," says Nelson Forbes. "He strictly ate to live. His priorities were elsewhere."
The main priority was his religious faith. A lifelong Presbyterian, Forbes devoted much of his time to charity work, including the Jimmie Hale Mission and the Gideon Society. "Even at his weekly staff meetings in the store, he'd read the Bible," Miree remembers. "He was always giving gospel tracts to people, and I can remember being so embarrassed by that until I grew up and came to appreciate what he was doing."

Forbes acquired both his religion and his work ethic early in life. His father, a farmer in Oxford, Alabama, helped build Oxford's First Presbyterian Church, which still stands today on the city's main street. Young Forbes went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, and learned to chop and haul firewood (at a $1 per load) to earn spending money.
One Christmas Eve, Forbes delivered a load of wood to the local minister, a Reverend Boggs. As he paid Forbes with a shiny silver dollar, the minister asked what Forbes intended to do with the money. Forbes planned to buy some fireworks and toys for Christmas, he said, and have some fun with the other boys. "Are you going to stick your hand in the fire because the others do it?" the minister asked. Forbes later wrote, "I drove home with the silver dollar in my pocket and thus learned a lesson in economy and saving."
He also learned some valuable sales skills. In his teens, Forbes worked for a New Hampshire-based firm that enlarged photographs. He spent his free time and Saturdays searching the countryside around Oxford for prospects, and his weekly commissions grew to as much as $10. Impressed, the New Hampshire company asked Forbes to set up shop in Birmingham.

Forbes first arrived in Birmingham in 1886, at the age of 19, and quickly discovered he couldn't afford a business license. "I looked for a job everywhere except in drug stores, banks and saloons," Forbes wrote later, "but nobody seemed to need me." Finally he met the manager of Caldwell Ice and Coal Company, who was paying one man $7 per week to cut ice and another man $5 to deliver it. Forbes offered to do both jobs for $10 per week, and got the position.
Three weeks later a local music dealer named Gilbert Carter offered Forbes $15 per month plus board, with the understanding that the salary would be increased to $30 if Forbes sold one organ per month. Forbes accepted the job, hitched up a heavy-duty wagon loaded with organs, and set out to sell them. The first month he sold five organs. His commissions multiplied, and soon Carter made Forbes a junior partner.
Forbes and Carter soon began to disagree about management, however, particularly when F learned the company was heavily in debt. After meditating about the situation all day one Sunday, Forbes walked in the next morning and sold out his partnership to Carter for $2,000 worth of Chicago Cottage Organs. He moved back to Anniston and persuaded Trudy to help him open up a music business of his own there. While Trudy kept the books and waited on customers, Forbes traveled the countryside with a wagon load of organs. He was so skillful a salesman that he soon was able to open branch stores in Rome, Georgia, and Huntsville, Alabama.
According to his grandsons, few pianos or organs were sold at the stores in those days. "Grandpoppa would ride from house'to house with his wagon," Nelson says, "and sometimes he'd find a way just to leave a piano or organ with a family for a few days-maybe while he was getting his wagon fixed or something. Invariably the family would fall in love with the instrument and wouldn't want him to take it back, and they'd end up buying it. Music was great entertainment in those days, especially when a family didn't have a lot of money to travel often."

When Hirsher Brothers music merchants in Montgomery declared bankruptcy, Forbes acquired their store. In the process he met his first wife, Mary Mallory, with whom he had four sons and a daughter-Ernest Jr., J. Mallory, Kenneth, French (named for friend and fellow music merchant Jesse French), and Jeannetta. His business continued to grow, and Forbes opened stores in Birmingham, Mobile and Jackson, Mississippi.
When his Birmingham store manager defected to the competing Jesse French Piano Company, Forbes moved his family to the Magic City and ran the store himself. The Birmingham store became headquarters for the Forbes enterprises, and E.E. Forbes' name was well on its way to becoming synonymous with music in the minds of Alabamians.

As Forbes Piano Company moved into the 20th century, the horse-drawn wagons gave way to big trucks emblazoned with the distinctive gothic Forbes logo and packed with upright pianos. "People who were interested in a piano would stop the driver on the street and give him directions to their house," Nelson Forbes says. "it was unusual for an individual to buy anything but an upright, even though in 1935, you could buy a Monarch Grand Piano for as little as $275."
Despite his overall success, E.E. Forbes suffered the entrepreneur's inevitable financial setbacks. Predictably, one of the worst came with the Great Depression, when people considered musical instruments too much of a luxury. The other setback might have been avoided had Forbes been less trusting. When he needed to make an extended trip out West, Forbes left his business in the hands of a trusted associate and when he returned he found himself shut out of the business he'd started, his grandsons say.
As it turned out, fortune smiled on Forbes. "Poppa used to say losing that business was the best thing that ever happened to him," daughter Jeannetta Miree recalls. "He had to build the business back from scratch, and that's when my brothers got involved. They'd come in before school and sweep out the store and then come back after school to deliver pianos. For the first time, Forbes Piano Company truly became a family enterprise." Did he encourage Jeannetta to come into the business as well? "Oh, no," she laughs. "in those days we didn't think it appropriate for the women in the family to get too involved with the business."
Nevertheless, other women became increasingly important to Forbes' success. He came to know piano and organ teachers throughout the state, who both bought his instruments and sheet music and referred their young students to him. Forbes installed a "concert hall" of sorts in his downtown Birmingham store and encouraged teachers to hold their recitals there. He concentrated on stocking only the highest-quality instruments, taking on the local Steinway franchise and adding the exclusive handmade Bosendorfer pianos and Martin guitars to his line. When he became concerned about the lack of music in education in the public hools, Forbes successfully lobbied to make music part of the state curriculum.

At one time Forbes sponsored an accordion band made up of young musicians. He was so proud of the accomplishments of this unique group that he paid their fare and board in Chicago so that they could perform for the National Music Merchants' Association convention.
E.E. Forbes died in 1958, but one hundred years after he opened his first music store, the business remains a close-knit family operation. Grandson French Forbes Jr. serves as president and chief executive officer. Bill Forbes is vice president and chief operating officer, Nelson Forbes is chief financial officer, and French Forbes, III, is general manager.
The Forbes brothers have watched a progression of piano styles develop over the years, from the square box and butterfly grand pianos to the electronic clavinovas and laptop keyboards of today. The sales people in their stores in Hoover, and Montgomery are becoming increasingly sophisticated in computer generated music and electronics. The trend extends beyond pianos to affect all the instruments Forbes sells, including guitars, banjos, organs and band instruments.
"One hundred years later, the music business is changing," French Forbes says, "but if Grandpoppa were here, I think he'd support our keeping up with the times. We fully expect to be here in 2089, too. There'll always be people who love music, and we'll always have products to enrich their lives."