Every family has rules. Some are written on the refrigerator, where they compete with grocery lists and invitations to events nobody intends to attend. The rest live in the walls. You learn those by watching faces change when certain subjects walk into the room. I became something of a scholar of faces. It was the only subject in which I excelled without trying.
In our house, respect mattered. So did hard work, a firm handshake, and the understanding that whatever you did outside would eventually find its way home. Alabama is a place where news travels faster than the people involved, especially when the news is embarrassing. I would later test the speed of that system personally. It holds up.
I learned early that a name could open doors. I also learned it could make the doorway feel narrow. A man’s name meant something. His handshake meant something. His conduct reflected on people who were not present when he made his decisions. I absorbed all of this before I understood that reputation and character are related but not twins. Reputation can survive a bad afternoon. Character needs daily maintenance, like a lawn, or a Volkswagen.
My mother had her own authority. She could detect trouble in the silence before anyone confessed to causing it. She knew a boy could say he was fine while carrying an entire thunderstorm behind his eyes. I did not appreciate her questions at the time. I appreciate them now, which is the standard schedule for appreciating mothers.
At church, authority wore its Sunday clothes. Men prayed aloud. Women sang with conviction. Children sat still, or performed an imitation of stillness convincing enough to escape notice. I heard sermons about obedience and forgiveness and the prodigal son. The prodigal interested me. He got to leave, make terrible decisions, blow the whole inheritance, and still find somebody waiting on the porch with a robe and a barbecue. It seemed like a good deal. I wondered about the older brother who stayed home and did his chores. Nobody threw him a party. I filed that away for later.
It was not rebellion, exactly. I wanted approval, probably too much. But somewhere in me was a small, stubborn insistence that a person ought to find his own reasons for believing things. Repeating the right answer never felt like understanding it. That habit made me inconvenient, which I would go on to make something of a career.
At school, teachers asked questions with the answers printed in the back of the book. I preferred questions that would not stay put. Why did people say one thing and do another? Why did a song make grown men cry in the car? Why could two people remember the same afternoon so differently, and why were they both so sure? Nobody assigned those for homework. I did them anyway, and still managed to fall behind.
Meanwhile, some boys collected baseball cards. I collected sounds.
Not on purpose, at first. A screen door had a rhythm. Rain on a tin roof could hold a note longer than anybody in the choir. The refrigerator clicked before it hummed, and the neighborhood dogs held their evening arguments in several incompatible keys. I began to suspect the world was a band that had never rehearsed. I would confirm this in every band I ever joined.
The radio made better sense. Turn the dial and somebody, somewhere, had organized all that noise into something worth hearing. A voice came through the speaker, then a guitar, and an ordinary afternoon became a place I wanted to live. I knew nothing about record contracts or the rare talent required to get five musicians into one van on time. I only knew a song could change the temperature of a room without touching the thermostat.
I started noticing guitars everywhere. Their shapes struck me as improbable, wood and wire arranged so a human heart would answer back. Some were polished and expensive. Others looked as if they had survived a house fire and were considering another. I wanted to touch every one of them. Wanting, however, is not playing.
Playing begins with the humiliating discovery that your fingers have opinions of their own. A chord looks simple in the book. Then you try to hold it. One string buzzes, another refuses to ring at all, and your hand starts to resemble a small animal caught in a trap. Your fingertips go sore, then numb, then hard. Your family goes through roughly the same stages.
I loved it anyway. A guitar did not care about anybody’s last name or whether the neighbors considered me promising. It answered only what I actually did. Press the string badly and the note suffered. Adjust, listen, try again, and something improved. I wish every relationship in my life had offered such immediate feedback. Several did, eventually, though usually much later and in writing.
Music was disciplined and unruly at the same time. It obeyed the beat while refusing to march. I recognized myself in that, minus the discipline. If somebody told me to turn left, right suddenly took on enormous philosophical appeal. I was not always defending a principle. Sometimes I was just enjoying the act of choosing. There is a difference. It took me about forty years and a few county facilities to learn it.
Songs could also carry sorrow without collapsing under it. Some sounded joyful until you listened to the words. Others sang about heartbreak so cheerfully that people danced. Human beings could feel two things at once, and music did not make them pick. Neither did the Psalms, though I had not noticed yet. David could sing about green pastures in one breath and ask God where He went in the next. Maybe faith was not the absence of hard questions. Maybe it was the nerve to keep singing them.
I would not have put it that way as a boy. I would have asked somebody to turn up the radio, and then asked again, louder.
So there I was, behind a closed door with a record running, certain the world outside was waiting for me. It was not. It was busy. But I had two ears, sore fingers, and a growing suspicion that my life would be measured in music. For once, I was right. Joyful noise, at least, was the part I had down.
“Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.”
Psalm 100:1 (KJV)
— JC
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