The live-room of the studio feels lived in. By this point in the session, the floor is barely there, snaked with cables and cases and mics. Miller Lite cans, potato chips, the tracklist for Bernie Yodelin’ Hall’s debut scratched and carved through. Dad’s watching from a Lazy Boy in the corner of the room, silver hair pulled into a ponytail, eyes closed, fingers resting on his plump gut above the scar from his surgery, nodding and tapping his foot in and out of time as the four of us play “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” My fingers hurt, worn from days of playing. They bleed a little when I pluck my guitar intro, thumb and middle finger thumping between the bass and treble. Then Sean’s banjo drives the tune forward.
We play the song in D, Dad’s favorite key since a vocal operation limited his range. A polyp surgery left him silent for almost a year; his full range never returned. And yet, even at 72, Dad can belt when the key and time of day line up. A lonesome wail that tears time. But now he slouches deeper into the cushion, hands still on his belly, eyes still closed, vibrations swirling through the soundproofed room.
We hit the final downbeat and the room is haunted quiet. We breathe shallow, the anxious breath musicians draw to not mess up the recording after a take, no sound save the accidental whispers and whinnies of nostrils.
“Y’all are sounding mighty fine, boys, mighty fine,” Dad breaks in, recrossing his legs and dabbing forehead sweat with the bandana he keeps in his back pocket because the AC can’t run in the studio while we track. We collectively sigh in relief from a successful take. “My ass’s been asleep for an hour so let’s get movin’,” laughing to hide his worry.
“Don’t you fret, Paw. Just stay sharp over there and we’ll stack ‘em high for you to knock ‘em down,” I respond with a familiar phrase I learnt from him, something to soothe his jitters.
Dad smiles and pulls out his pipe. Without a word, just a slight raise of his brow, he asks the group for a smoke break. We happily oblige. The door opens. The sun blinds us. Then the sky turns blue again, clouds float upward and we huddle like wood ducks on a pond. The world glows and Dad places his hand on my back.
✦✦✦
I threw my clothes in a sack and left within 20 minutes of returning Mom’s call. As the ambulance pulled up the driveway of my childhood home in Botetourt County, she asked if I wanted to talk to him, asked if I wanted to say I love you. I said I’d tell him in person when I got there, hung up, and drove straight from Richmond. Dad was dead before I hit the parkway.
And now I’ve been in Botetourt for four days. Dad has been dead for four days. I haven’t slept in four days. At Rader Funeral Home, I am still thinking about what I should have said on the phone. I unlatch a case surrounded by the same friends who recorded Dad’s record. Sean drove his minivan up from Ashville. Chris and Ærn carpooled from Richmond. And even though he wasn’t on the album, Brady rode in on his Harley, something Dad would have appreciated. I didn’t have to ask them, they just showed up with instruments in hand. We tune fiddle, banjo, guitar, and mandolin in the side room of the funeral parlor, shuffling between cases, sharing a tuner. Dressed in pearl snap shirts tucked into denim, overly snug suit jackets, we look out of place. The funeral parlor slowly fills. Dad’s estranged brothers hiss condolences to Mom.
As Mom moves between friends and family, I imagine a part of her is ripped open by those ambulance doors shutting, after the paramedics told her she couldn’t get in the ambulance, told her to meet them at Roanoke Memorial. Before they sealed the doors, Dad’s last words were, “I love you!” She rushed inside and called me again, pleading over the phone, “Why are they idling? Why aren’t they rushing to the hospital?” She didn’t know he was in cardiac arrest. She didn’t know he was dying out there on the mountaintop he loved most. Not far from where he told me he’d flipped a 5 gallon bucket in 1996, sat down, cracked open a 6 pack of Bud Ice and called this plot of land home. But he died with the ambulance doors closed, the ridgeline out of view.
Through the doorway, I can see people entering, exiting, entering, exiting. Fidgeting with ties or smoothing unwrinkled dresses. Mom walks into view, wearing a simple black dress, a pack of Kleenex clenched in her fist. She stares through the open parlor.
I leave my buddies to check on her. “Hey, Maw,” trying not to startle her.
She looks at me with a long slow turn. “Hey there, honey,” her eyes tear swollen, enough to purple through the make-up. She dabs her face with a balled-up tissue. “This doesn’t feel real.”
Dying is always a distant thought until it isn’t. Friends and family mill around us, people shuffle aimlessly. Where is grief? I say, “It might not feel real, but it is.” My voice, a ventriloquist, foreign and saturated. It speaks and I speak. “We’ll get through it though.”
I reconnect to my body and Mom nods, lifts onto her tiptoes, kissing me on the forehead. We hug, but neither squeezes to avoid shattering like heat on a frozen mason jar. “You go on back with your friends and practice for the service. I’ll be okay.” I want to believe her. Moments like these, I wish I had a sibling, someone to carry this with, to help me believe we will be okay.
I move back into the room and reach into the pocket of my shirt for the Xanax my aunt gave me earlier in the day. I slip my second pill of the hour. I’d take a swig of tequila if I could. I don’t have time to feel. The band asks what key we’re playing the tune in. Without needing to think, I say, “D.”
✦✦✦
Subflora Studios is windblown despite being sealed off from the world. The studio space sits on the back lot of Scott’s house in Forest Hill, the closed doors quiet the barking dogs and birdsong of Southside. With all of the instrumentals laid down and overdubs cut, we need to record 6 vocal tracks in 3 hours. The rest of the band already packed up and gone, leftover lyric sheets, chord charts, all scattered. Dad misses his vocal queue for the fifth time and I watch the clock spiral closer and closer to the end of our session. ⠀⠀
Dad mutters, almost to himself, “Can’t hear my damn self,” adjusting and readjusting his headphones. This is only Dad’s second time in a recording studio, the first being a one-off for my solo record a few years back where we had hours to record a single song. Dad sang his whole life, but not professionally, always in the tradition. At fiddler’s conventions, dive bars, jamborees. He gave up honky-tonking to raise a family. He’d waited his whole life to record an album of his own.
The night before the session, we threw the arrangements together and Dad didn’t miss a beat as we practiced in my living room. But this is different. Instead of recording live, we decided to track the instruments before the vocals so Dad could do as many takes as he needed. But I underestimated how hard recording like this would be for him. Dad isn’t a session musician and singing to a backing track is nothing like singing to a live band where he feels the music in his bones. Dad is thrown off by the gear, struggles with the voice echoing in his headset like a tin can on a string.
Scott, the sound engineer, sits alone in the control room. The studio is a simple two-room layout, the live room and control room separated by a massive window pane. I turn from Dad to look through the glass. What used to be my guitar, a rare early 90s Yamaha archtop hangs on the wall behind Scott, a horse-trade for our studio time. I lose myself for a moment in the gloss reflection on the archtop’s quilted maple.
“Got damned it. Got damn it all to hell. I sat on my ass too long and need to get right.” Dad’s voice tremors with a weakness that betrays his baritone. “I can do it, man, I can do it. Shew.” He says to himself and tugs on his ponytail, almost like threading rope. “Shew.”
Doubt spreads across his face. I can tell he doesn’t think he can do this. To disrupt his spiraling mind, something I inherited, I say, “It’s alright. Hmm. Okay, let’s try something.” Instead of watching Dad sing from across the room, I stand in front of him, shielding Scott from his view. I open my wingspan, hands become a maestro’s wand, swinging to keep time. “We’re gonna dance.”
✦✦✦
I take a pause from the sermon and step away from the pulpit mic, my voice returns to a whisper. I am still swollen from my last vocal surgery, my vocal cords rejecting the gore tex implants. The past few months of Dad’s life, I was mostly mute. Speaking through a text-to-speech app, phone calls dwindled, his rambling pep talks reduced to misspellings and run on sentences, typo ridden text messages. He’d spend hours drafting in the lazy-boy, using two fingers to peck out multiple pages.
Dad said he didn’t need a middleman with God and I couldn’t bear the thought of a stranger preaching an empty sermon. I stayed up all night, wrote the service at Dad’s favorite spot in the house–a long farmhouse dinner table he used as a workbench, surrounded by handwritten invoices and warehouse receipts, surrounded by windows, surrounded by Tinker Ridge, McAfee Knob, Dragon’s Tooth, Purgatory Mountain. I meander through psalms and prayers, meditations and stories. I try to believe in God.
Around the pulpit, where a casket usually sits, Dad’s guitar shines in an open case. His Gibson dreadnought J160e was the first guitar I ever saw. In the late 60s, he traded an electric guitar, a bright red SG, sides curling up and inward like devil horns, for this simple sunburst acoustic. He traded in rock and roll for country music, something decades later I’d repeat as I gave up hardcore for bluegrass and old-time. Most folks know the J160e as the guitar John Lennon played, but Dad always said Ernest Tubb got Gibson to build this model for the honky-tonks. It was one of the first-ever acoustic guitars with a pickup installed, a single coil p-90 just above the soundhole. A volume and tone knob sit on the bottom corner of the flattop, black delineated plastic with a silver tooth. J160e’s are known to sound thin, the bracing and construction can’t support a booming sound. The lows don’t bark, the highs don’t chime. The top and sides laminated to reduce stage feedback.
Dad’s guitar sounds beautiful to my ears. A simple woody tone that is dry, sustain just enough to leave you wanting more, a simple midrange that pairs with a twang, quiet enough for even my soft voice to sing over on my good days. It is worn and blemished, the neck faded. Dad’s palm sweat eroding finish over the years like a current lapping a riverbank. An acoustic is more than metal strings wound atop hollow wood, a guitar can be resurrected, cracks cleated, frets dressed.
Growing up, he’d strum cowboy chords with an oversized triangle pick and sing me to sleep. The sunburst wood has chips and dings from when I knocked into it as a kid. As I grew older, he taught me the progressions to his favorite Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Carter Family songs.
I stare down at Dad’s guitar and know it’s mine now. I strum the opening chord to “I’ll Fly Away,” the last song the band plays for the funeral service. We hit the downbeat and Mom weeps in the front pew. Ninny reaches for her hand, holds it tight, and pats atop their clenched fists in time with the song.
✦✦✦
In the live-room, Dad and I are both wearing oversized studio headphones and the vocal mic sits between us. With the song playing in our headsets, I reach around the mic and take his hands. Leaning to the left, and then to the right, and back again, I sway Dad in time with the backing track playing through our headphones. He closes his eyes and dips into each beat, shoulders moving with the bumping upright bass, hips swiveling between the mandolin chops. The measure where the vocals start sneaks up on us. But Dad belts, “I was standing by the window / On a cold and cloudy day / When I saw that hearse come rolling / For to carry my mother away,” perfectly in time, as if singing straight to his long-gone folks.
Keeping pace, Dad lays right into the chorus. Between phrases, he flashes a smile. As Sean’s banjo takes the opening break, we hold each other and twist as if I am a toddler again on a dirt dancefloor at a fiddler’s convention. But this time, I lead.
Time slows. We ebb and flow, left and right, studio headphones crown our heads. Leaning back, right on queue, Dad jumps into the second verse with newfound confidence. He never opens his eyes but grips my hands until my fingers numb.
✦✦✦
The last overtones of our instruments slowly fade. We put the instruments down. I walk back to the pulpit and start the last section of the service. I shake as I read toward what feels final. My voice breaks, scar tissue and strained muscle. I say the final words and my voice gives out completely. And in that silence, the speakers play the final version of our recording. A melody lilts a finger-picked cadence. With his ashes in a cherry wood urn, Dad’s voice sings to the crowd, “Will the circle be unbroken, / by and by, Lord, by and by. / There’s a better home, / a-waiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky.” The entire audience sings along, their voices ocean. This funeral, in its own way, is a premature album release party. Dad missed the official release of the album by a week and a half. I can’t feel my sweat-drenched knees. I close my eyes, breathe in deeply. I grasp the podium and drift through each dance move, try to sway from left to right hoping no one notices, try to feel Dad’s firm grip.
✦✦✦
Subflora Studios is hotter by the minute. Dad finishes the chorus and the music winds into what will be a pedal steel solo. Stephen will remotely record pedal steel overdubs in his home studio, so for now, the empty space feels like possibility itself. Dad starts to move with his entire body, knees arching and feet shimmying on the carpet. He almost crashes into the vocal mic, but I let go of his hands and we spin–twirling autumn leaves.
“Yeah, Boy! Get it!” Dad proclaims between his dance moves. I laugh from my belly and slide across the rug. “Come on now, get it!” With eyes still closed, he claps his hands and brings them over his head in praise.
The last verse waits just round the bend. “Alright, Dad! Lemme hearya sing it!” I preach without a pulpit. Dad plants his feet firmly into the carpet and coils the headphone cables around his palms. He lifts his hands as if holding an invisible mic, the way he’d done with a hairbrush his whole life, miming performances into the bristles like he was on the Grand Ole Opry stage rather than a bathroom in Botetourt County or a recording studio in Richmond.
But right now, he holds that invisible mic for dear life. The band drops out with an open, sustained strum and Dad bellows, “I went back home, / that home was lonesome. / Since my mother, she was gone.” His timing perfectly aligned with the beat, he leans back so that his gut full of cheap beer pushes closer to the vocal mic and throws his head toward the sky hidden above the soundproofed ceiling. When he twists his body just right, his white hair sways across his back and flickers up, floating embers of a fire. After the last verse, like all things, the music ends. Song-spent and dizzy, Dad almost loses his balance and I reach out to catch him.
Trey Burnart Hall is a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he serves as the lead podcast editor for Blackbird. His creative writing has been published in The Cold Mountain Review and The Oregon Hill Review. Trey was recently awarded the Claudia Emerson Scholarship. His production work/musical collaborations have been nominated for the Folk Alliance International Album of the Year, shortlisted for the Newlin Music Prize, and featured in NPR Live Sessions, Bandcamp Daily, and more. He works as the VCU Writing Center Assistant Director and lives in the Southside of Richmond with his partner, Gray, and pup, Waylon.