They say you are who you are by the age of three. My grooves were formed to a Martin four-string guitar. I fetched the case, set it down gently and lifted the top without touching the instrument inside. Only my father could pick it up and sling the strap across his shoulders, resting the cherry wood curves on his lap. He curled around the small body and dislodged a pick from the neck. He let me pluck the strings and we chanted “my dog has fleas” as he twisted the knobs to find the right sound. My mother carefully slid a record from the cover, balancing on just her fingertips, a steadying thumb on the paper label. She placed it on the spindle and floated the needle at the edge with sacred gravity. This was our text.

My father picked tunes late into the night, The Weavers Songbook propped open on the floor. His whiskey tenor discovered verse after verse until my mother finally went to bed. I sat awake, listening. The music seeped into the air and clung to my face, my clothing, my way in the world. I absorbed every refrain.

Our family tree was common and hard working, enduring poverty but dependent on no one’s charity. We tended orchards, herded sheep and worked for the railroads. An inherited pride echoed through my parents’ fierce response to authority and privilege. They were tough kids and their music was defiant. They identified with songs about overcoming oppression; themes carried from homelands in Europe and Africa to new relevance in Appalachia and the Deep South. These songs expressed collective sorrow and inspired activism. Together they dreamed of freedom; freedom from fear, from judgment, from the limits of their background. I accepted the weight of this hope as my own, a desire for change so strong that I counted the freight train cars from behind the guardrail, wondering what it would be to ride the rails away from here, to heaven, to the next town.

I learned stories from the songs and I learned the songs for the stories. I knew all their names: John Martin, John Henry, Pretty Boy Floyd, Frankie, Old Blue, Barbry Allen, Willy, Polly, Johnny, Jackaroe. I knew who they loved and who they killed and was never frightened by the violence. These narrators did not talk down to me. They knew that children, living in a world filled with taunts and commands and confusion, were closer to the heart of these stories than tidy, disapproving adults. I gravitated toward the saddest voices raw with pain, foregoing barroom ditties to keen around the campfire with a silver dagger clutched in my imagination. I was young, but I knew light and dark. I knew love and hate. I recognized the ancient drumbeat coda that stirs our passion and clouds our sense. The invoked warnings organized a kind of morality: there, but for the grace of God, go all of us. 

I grew older. My parents grew tamer. I learned the rules to being a good girl, shellacked in appropriate behavior. But under the surface was always the music, wails of pure emotion cradled by banjo or mandolin. I collected songs and singers who preserved the history of wild people; people put down and flawed, aching in love and loss, resolute in the joyful howl of life. These singers once sat at the foot of a chair and stayed awake. Someone said to them: this is yours to tell and you must tell it or it will be forgotten. Verse, refrain, verse. This is our voice, my voice, and it breaks through the shell and is loud and messy and true. I am the witness now. My memory sings of a young man in a white t-shirt, hunched over a small guitar, angry, soothed, sharing a past that will fade for him and root deeply within the child who listens, still.