I don’t know that Dad ever wanted to be famous.
We never talked about it.
But looking back, he sure did love an audience.
And maybe those two things aren’t the same.
If there was a microphone nearby, Dad had a way of finding it.
And if there wasn’t, he’d usually volunteer us to fix that.
The Headliner
For years, Dad, my daughter Abby, and I traveled around singing on the local opry circuit.
Houston. Alvin. Brenham.
And every little town in between that had a stage, a sound system, and a folding-chair audience.
If we weren’t playing an opry, Dad volunteered us anywhere people gathered.
Senior centers.
Community festivals.
Chili cook-offs.
National Night Out.
If someone needed entertainment, Dad assumed we were available.
Back when he was doing this, I was still working.
He’d call and say,
“Hey Boy, we’re singing at the senior center Wednesday morning.”
“Dad, I have a job.
And it’s Monday.”
“Oh bullshit,” he said.
“That’s what sick leave’s for.”
He even gave us a name.
Family Tradition.
We always kicked things off with Hank Williams Jr.’s song of the same name. The intro would start, and over the music Dad would step up to the mic and introduce us.
He liked to joke that names weren’t really necessary.
He’d point to Abby and say,
“This is Abby.”
Then he’d gesture to me.
“And I’m Abby’s dad.”
Then himself.
“And I’m Abby’s grandpa.”
Those, apparently, were our full legal names.
Abby was the star.
Dad and I were just along for the ride, guest stars in the Abby show, and we knew our place.
Dad loved the spotlight, but once Abby was in it, he became very particular about who was allowed near it.
Brenham
One night we played a little opry in Brenham, Texas.
After the show, Dad walked up to the host, not as the bandleader, not as a fellow performer, but as Abby’s biggest fan, and asked what he thought of her performance.
The guy said,
“Well… I think she should sing more age-appropriate material.”
Abby had sung Somebody Somewhere by Loretta Lynn.
A song she loved. By her favorite singer.
I watched Dad’s body change.
His nostrils flared.
His ears laid back.
And his finger came up like it had been waiting for this moment its entire life.
“What the hell do you mean age appropriate?”
“She didn’t sing it to you, she sang it because she loves it.”
Dad said, jabbing the air in front of the guy’s chest.
“Do you mean like Tanya Tucker? She was thirteen when she sang Delta Dawn, a song about a woman who got screwed, out of wedlock, so hard she wandered around town with a suitcase waiting for him to come back.”
The man began backing away.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.
“Age appropriate my ass,” Dad said.
“She sang a song she loves by her favorite singer. You’re the one trying to read stupid shit into it.”
By the end of it, the host was apologizing.
Dad walked back over to us, completely calm.
“She did great,” he said.
The First Band
This wasn’t the first time Dad had pulled his family into the spotlight.
When I was eight years old, he had a friend named Horace Bradley who owned a music store. Dad told Horace he wanted to have a band and do some gigs.
Horace said, “You could make a band with you and your kids.”
Dad asked, “You can teach them to play that fast?”
Horace said, “I can teach them the set list.”
That was apparently all the assurance Dad needed.
I was informed I would be playing bass.
My brother would play lead guitar.
My sister would play drums.
No auditions were held.
Horace taught us exactly what we needed to know, not how to play music, but how to play those songs.
We played grand openings.
VFW halls.
Anywhere that would have us.
When Horace died, the band quietly fell apart. We never tried to put it back together.
It would be another twenty-five years before we started doing the oprys.
Years later, after Abby had her own band and was playing a dance hall, the whole family came out to see her.
At one point my mom hunted me down.
“Derrick,” she said, “I think you need to go check on your dad. I’m afraid he’s about to fight Roy.”
Roy was a guitar player Abby had fired. He was standing off to the side, bad-mouthing her and her new band.
I looked over and saw Dad had Roy backed up, that same finger out, doing its job, calmly explaining why this was a bad idea, if you used Dad’s definition of calm.
I told my mom, “I think it’s Roy you ought to be afraid for. But I’ll keep an eye on it.”
Dad had it handled.
What I didn’t realize then was that Dad was always doing the same thing.
Dad loved putting us on stage.
But once we were there, he took it personally.
Grandeur
Later, during the worst of Dad’s Lewy body dementia, when the hallucinations grew vivid and the line between reality and imagination softened, something familiar kept showing up.
Grandeur.
One day he called excitedly and said,
“Hey Boy, are you watching the news?”
“No, Dad. What’s going on?”
“There are reporters and cameras all out in front of the house,” he said.
“I’m bigger than Elvis. That song of mine is the biggest song ever.”
Then he added,
“You need to come over, but come in through the back. You won’t get in through the front.”
Another time I was visiting, and Dad was sitting in Mom’s rollator. He turned to me and said,
“Hey Boy, did you see me on TV last night?”
“No, Dad. I didn’t.”
“They were interviewing me,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”
I apologized.
He wheeled the chair closer. Stopped it so his face was inches from mine, like Dr. Evil about to scold Scott.
“I’m so ashamed of you,” he said.
“I can’t believe you didn’t watch.”
His disappointment was palpable.
And I can’t tell you how genuinely bad I felt, for missing a television appearance that never happened.
What He Really Wanted
I don’t think the dementia created that fantasy.
I think it reached back and grabbed something that had always been there.
Dad didn’t want fame for the attention.
He wanted it for the sharing.
He loved entertaining.
He loved performing.
But more than that, he loved taking the people he cared about, putting them under a light, any light, and letting the world see what he already knew.
Author’s Note
Looking back, I don’t think Dad ever put together a band just to play music.
Both times he did it, once when I was eight and again decades later with Abby, it was about family.
There were no auditions.
You played because you belonged.
Even the name he gave us said it out loud: Family Tradition.
That night in Brenham wasn’t really about a song choice or age-appropriate lyrics.
It was about someone questioning his family.
Dad could take criticism.
He just couldn’t take it aimed at his people.
So when dementia blurred the lines and turned every day into a performance, I don’t think the desire that kept resurfacing was fame.
I think… who am I kidding.
The bastard said he was bigger than Elvis.
