Big Rays daughter, the young man said, looking straight into the camera that four million people had already watched, if you are watching this, I have been trying to find you.
My father played guitar in bars across Texas for thirty years. Never famous. But everyone in Austin knew Big Ray, and his 1959 Gibson, sunburst, cracked on the back, covered in stickers from every honky tonk he ever played, the one my husband Wade sold at a garage sale for forty dollars while I was in Phoenix helping my sister.
Inside the sound hole, in faded black marker, was a signature that belongs to one of the most famous names in country music, and a date, 1961, because before my father ever owned it, that guitar had been played on a number one record.
Wade had sold a guitar worth more than our house for forty dollars to a kid with long hair who paid cash, because, he said, it was just sitting in the closet and I cannot even play.
The kid with long hair turned out to be a young musician with a conscience bigger than his following, and his following, after that video, became very large indeed.
Here is what he did. He did not keep it. He did not sell it to a collector for the price of a house, which he could have, legally, a garage sale being a sale. He took it to an appraiser, confirmed what he suspected, and then he spent two weeks tracking down whose stickers those were, which honky tonks, which Big Ray, until the trail led to me.
And then he made the video, four million views, so the internet itself would hold him to his word, and his word was this. This guitar belongs to Big Rays family. I am giving it back. And I am going to play one of his songs first, so the whole world hears the man who owned it.
He played my fathers song. The one Big Ray wrote and never recorded, that only the regulars at one bar in Austin ever heard. The young man had learned it from an old timer who remembered it, note for note, and he played it into a camera for four million strangers.
Then he drove to Texas and put the guitar back in my hands, in its case that still smells like my fathers cigarettes.
I tried to pay him. He would not take it. He said my father had already paid him, in a song, and that was more than enough. He said the forty dollars was the best investment he ever made, because it bought him the chance to do one completely good thing where everyone could see it.
Wade wanted the guitar back the second he learned what it was worth. We have to get it back, babe, now, he said, grabbing my arm. But it was never his to get back. It was my fathers, left to me, sold out from under me by a man who saw a beat up thing in a closet.
Wade and I are not together. The young musician and I still talk. He plays my fathers song at his shows now, and tells the crowd where it came from, and Big Ray, who was never famous, is heard by more people every night now than ever heard him alive. The guitar hangs on my wall. I still cannot play. But I open the case sometimes and just look at it, and it still smells like him.