Unless you are one of the rare, lucky few born into a family with incredible taste in music, most of us get introduced to music via the radio. Whatever is popular is playing and that becomes our baseline for “good” music. When you are a child you don’t have much of a choice so you become a fan of New Kids On The Block, NSYNC, One Direction, BTS, depending on your generation, or whatever handpicked and carefully crafted boy band or girl group that the music machine pumps over the airwaves incessantly. Somewhere around the beginning of your teenage years a lot of us begin to branch out and carve our own path musically. We get introduced to “cool” music via a cool older cousin or young uncle that creates a new trajectory for our listening life. When you are willing to let your guard down and admit that your parents were once young too, and likely as cool as you think you are, you can open yourself up to the things they listened to during their formative years and find that some of it is actually pretty good. Few realize it in the moment, but what is actually occurring is a foundation is being laid for a yellow brick road whereon you truly learn to appreciate music of all genres, across all eras, and at the end of this journey are endless pots of gold, even if they aren’t gold records. Most of the best music never wins awards, has an accompanying music video or even gets played on the radio. True music lovers usually reach a point where they have grown tired of being told by the industry what they are supposed to like and what is “good” music, so they forge their own way through the maze of music to discover their own hidden treasure.
For me, this journey began when I would hear the bands I’d grown to love on my own, discussing their favorite bands and influences. It could be Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain wearing a t-shirt for the band The Vaselines or covering Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV Unplugged or hearing Eddie Vedder talk about Mother Love Bone and performing “Rockin In The Free World” with Neil Young at the VMA’s, but those moments opened up new doors for musical exploration. This is the place where you typically begin your own auditory archaeology by digging further and further back into the past, listening to the artists who influenced your favorite musicians and the artists who influenced them and on and on as far back as you want to dig.
I experienced a moment like this much later in life while listening to artists like Jason Isbell and Todd Snider talk about their love for John Prine. I’m both saddened and ashamed to admit that I’d not listened to a John Prine song until I was nearly forty years old. If you like a singer songwriter style artist today, there is a near certainty that they are a John Prine fan. Sadly, I never got to see him live, he was one of the early Covid deaths, but before he left this world he left behind a treasure in his final album The Tree of Forgiveness. Tree of Forgiveness is an album I can listen to front to back without skipping a single track. This record is the kind of music that can only be made at the end of your life, when you’ve been through countless experiences of love and loss, joy and sadness, ecstasy and agony, satisfaction and suffering and now are left with this priceless gift of perspective. It’s almost an insult to just call it music when in reality its poetry set to music. There isn’t a single song on the album that is my “favorite” John Prine song (how would you even pick one favorite from his magnificent, decades spanning catalog?) but it is my favorite of his albums and it contains my favorite line from a John Prine song. The song is called “When I Get To Heaven” and it just may capture the theology of redemption and reconciliation better than all of the volumes of books I’ve read over three decades of religious study, and he does it in just three minutes and forty-three seconds. The first line begins,
“When I get to heaven I'm gonna shake God's hand.
Thank Him for more blessings than one man can stand.”
By the second verse he is declaring
“Then as God is my witness I'm getting back into show business I'm gonna open up a nightclub called ‘The Tree of Forgiveness’
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm.”
But it’s this line from the last verse that always get stuck in my throat.
“And them I'm gonna go find my mom and dad And good old brother Doug
Well I bet him and cousin Jackie are still cuttin' up a rug
I wanna see all my mama's sisters
'Cause that's where all the love starts
I miss 'em all like crazy
Bless their little hearts.”
Yesterday I stood in the kitchen at my mama’s house, while the living room was filled with her surviving brothers and sisters, some of their spouses, my wife, children and grandchildren and a cousin while my dad lead a prayer before we ate lunch together. I genuinely can’t remember when I was last in the same room with this many of my mama’s family. For the first twenty years of my life gatherings like this were a near weekly, and on a smaller scale practically daily, occurrence, but with me moving nine hours away for a decade all of that changed. I don’t regret for a moment that decade, but even blessings can sometimes come at a cost. I needed to learn the lessons that I learned in far away places. That time changed me for the better, but there was rarely a day when I didn’t desperately miss moments like this, and I had to miss far too many of them. Funerals, weddings, birthdays, reunions, holidays, just weren’t possible logistically. Standing there listening to daddy expressing gratitude for our family, the words from this John Prine song filled my mind, gratitude filled my heart and tears filled my eyes.
“I wanna see all my mama’s sisters ‘cause that’s where all the love starts. I miss ‘em all like crazy, bless their little hearts.”
I was one of the rare, lucky few born into a family filled with incredible, larger than life characters. The most fascinating, brave, loyal, good, hilarious, interesting and amazing people I’ve ever known are not famous, but they are family. Their circle of influence likely only spans a few hundred people at best. None of them have statues depicting their likeness, buildings adorned with their names, holidays in their honor or movies telling their stories, and yet, these are the people I treasure. Their influence and imprint upon my life, my identity, my personality, my sense of humor, my interests and my nature is indelible. I’ve done my best to memorialize and give them the honor they are due through the stories I write and the stories I tell because they are as interesting as any character in a book or movie or song. Sitting around a deck on a beautiful, though very windy, April day, listening to them take their turns telling stories I’ve heard so many times they’ve grown into memories, I couldn’t help but think there wan’t a better way to have grown up than surrounded by these people. In many ways, my childhood family gatherings were like the ones depicted in movies, where a house is filled to the brim with people, food covers every inch of table and countertop space, and roars of laughter nearly burst your eardrums, and yet, it was somehow peaceful.
Sitting here today, I realized this wasn’t one of those memories, this was the making of a memory, but it was more than that. Today was an exposure to the influences that made my mother who in turn made me. In the eyes of my aunt I see my long departed Big Mama, who we honored by serving her sweet tea and chocolate oatmeal cookies. In the laughter of another aunt I heard my own mama and I saw her face in her brother’s when he cracked one of his endless one liner responses that always brings about belly laughs. To my right was one of those cool older cousins who introduced me to so many things that made my childhood memorable and just across from my cousin sat my own mother, who was the cool aunt to her. I was getting to watch her in her element, surrounded by the older brothers and sisters who were her influences, when I realized that the best parts of me were first the best parts of her, but they were actually bits and pieces of the dozen or so men and women who were her favorite people as she was growing up. Together they become a sum of all their parts and operate as a single unit. One on one they will entertain you, but together they will enchant you.
At one point, when I was supposed to be taking a group picture of them, I switched my phone to video mode and recorded them cutting up while trying to take a good picture. I realized I didn’t just want to look at a photo of this day, I wanted to have even just a minute of it recorded for posterity. I wanted my grandchildren to at least be able to sample a moment of what it’s like when the band gets back together. Whether it’s recipes passed down generation to generation, shared stories told from multiple perspectives, or the sound of them laughing until they blend into an indistinguishable cacophony of joy, each of them is an individual and yet none of them stand alone in my heart. They are best enjoyed as a box set, and yesterday they played their greatest hits.
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