Clifford
Bearss

Obituary

Clifford Bearss, 81, of Hesperia, died at home on Sunday, August 16, 2026, and for most of the summers of his long life he sat on his front porch in the evening and played the clawhammer banjo his father had carried up from Kentucky, loud enough that drivers on the county road were known to slow down and roll the windows down to hear.

He was born February 27, 1945, in Corbin, Kentucky, and came to Michigan as a boy when his father followed the factory work north, though the family brought the mountains with them in the form of a banjo, a fiddle, and a way of singing in the kitchen. Cliff never took to the factory. He apprenticed instead to a well driller, learned the trade in his bones, and spent fifty years as the man you called in Newaygo and Oceana counties when your water quit — often at night, often in the rain, always for a fair price and usually for a cup of coffee and the promise of one.

He could find water where the geologists shrugged and coax another decade out of a pump everyone else had given up on. He kept a truck that was more toolbox than vehicle and a mental map of every well he had ever touched, which was most of them. He worked past the age most men retire because, he said, the wells did not know he was old and the people still needed water. He finally slowed down at seventy-eight, and only because his knees, not his hands, made the call.

But it was the porch and the banjo people loved him for. He played the old, rolling, slightly lonesome way his father had taught him, and on a still summer night you could hear him from a quarter mile off. Neighbors planned their evening walks to pass his house. He married Darlene Rooker in 1966, and for fifty-nine years she sat in the other porch chair while he played, which she said was the best seat in the county and the loudest.

He asked to be buried plainly, with the banjo passed to whichever grandchild would actually play it. That turned out to be the one nobody expected, a girl of fifteen who has been practicing in the garage where she thinks no one can hear.

He is survived by his wife of fifty-nine years, Darlene; his children, Rick (Sue) Bearss of Hesperia, Tammy (Joe) Vince of Muskegon, and Greg Bearss of Grand Rapids; seven grandchildren; twelve great-grandchildren; his brother, Earl Bearss of Fremont; and a granddaughter learning his songs one slow measure at a time.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Estil and Ruby Bearss; and his sister, Hazel.

Tributes & Memories