“…inside the guitar,” the man said, and he laid the instrument across my kitchen table as gently as if it were asleep. “Mrs. Delaney, my name is Tom Wexler. I am a luthier in Knoxville. When your daughter buyer brought it to my shop to be restrung, I took the back off to repair a loose brace. And behind the brace, wrapped in a plastic bag and wedged tight with cork, I found this.” He opened a velvet pouch and set a small cassette tape on the table. On its label, in my husband handwriting, in blue ink that had faded to gray, was written, Blue Mile Road, Ray D., demo, 1983.
I stared at it. I have lived with Ray handwriting for fifty one years. I had seen it on grocery lists, on birthday cards, on the back of Polaroids. I had never seen it on a song. “Ray played guitar every night,” I said slowly, “but he never wrote anything. He said he only liked to play other people songs.” “Mrs. Delaney,” Tom said, “he wrote Blue Mile Road. I am almost certain of it. Everybody knows that song. It is on every classic country station in the South. Credited to a singer named Dale Gentry. He had a number one record with it in 1984. He has been a rich man ever since.”
I put my hand to my chest. I knew the song. Everyone does. A mournful ballad about a man driving toward home through the rain. It was played at the wedding of my niece and at a hundred fish fries. Ray used to hum it, in the shower, in the truck. “He said it just came to him one day,” I whispered. “I thought he meant it was in his head.” Tom put the cassette in a small player he had brought in his bag. The tape hissed. A guitar began, the same guitar, with the same slightly sour G string that had driven me crazy for decades. And over it came a young, rough, gentle voice. My husband.
A fifty dollar sale, a cassette tape sealed inside the wood, and a famous song that belonged to a quiet man on a porch.
The song was twelve measures long, then twelve more. I sat down at the table and let it wash over me. I had not heard Ray sing in nine years. He sang it exactly as Dale Gentry had made it famous, but slower, and less polished, and more human, like a man telling a secret to a stranger on a bus. At the end he laughed softly, and a younger Ray said, “That all I got, Dale, you can fix up the rest.” Then, in the background of the tape, another voice, a smooth confident one, said, “Do not worry, buddy. I will take care of everything. Just sign the paper.” The tape clicked off.
My daughter Karen, who had been standing at the sink with her arms crossed all this time, said, in a very small voice, “Mom, I am so sorry.” I did not look at her. I could not. I had cried for four days, and some part of me had been saving the anger for later. “You sold his guitar for fifty dollars,” I said. “You called it junk.” “I thought it was,” she said. “I did not know.” “No,” I said, “you did not know, because you did not ask, because you thought a man who played on a porch for forty years could not possibly have mattered to anyone.” My voice shook. Karen began to weep.
Tom cleared his throat. “If I may,” he said. “I took the liberty of calling a friend, an attorney in Nashville, who handles music publishing. She says that with the tape, and with Ray handwriting, there may be a claim. Copyright law is complicated, and the songwriting credit has stood for forty years. But a demo with a spoken agreement on it, and a signature, if there was one, can change a great deal.” I nodded numbly. “There was a paper,” I said. “I remember now. He came home from Nashville in 1983 with a check for two hundred dollars. He said he had sold a few songs to a publisher. I thought it was a kindness.”
The attorney name was Constance Beale, and she was in her sixties, with the voice of a woman who had seen everything and enjoyed most of it. She flew to see me the next week. She listened to the tape three times, her eyes closed. Then she said, “Mrs. Delaney, I want to be honest. We may not win. But I believe we have something remarkable, and I believe Mr. Gentry knows it. He has been quietly paying off a man in Texas for years who claimed to have been in the room. I suspect Ray signed a work for hire document, and I suspect the document was not what he thought.”
It took fourteen months. In the end Dale Gentry, then eighty one and tired, settled. He agreed to add my husband name to the songwriting credit, in perpetuity, and to pay a lump sum from forty years of royalties that Constance told me was “not nothing.” It was enough to pay off the farm, set up a college fund for my grandchildren and buy a modest headstone for a man who had never had one. On the stone, at my request, they carved a guitar and the words Blue Mile Road.
Karen came with me to unveil it. We stood side by side in the cemetery in a thin October drizzle, and she held my arm. “Mom,” she said, “I do not know how to make this right.” “You do not make it right,” I said. “You make it different.” She nodded. She had already offered to drive me to Nashville in the spring, to the museum where the song is displayed, and I had said yes. Ray would have liked that. I laid my hand on the cold granite, and under my breath, I hummed the first bar.
The guitar hangs now above the fireplace, with its restored back and its slightly sour G string, which I told Tom not to fix. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, my grandson Danny takes it down and plays it, badly. He is nine. He has learned three chords and one song. It is not the song you think. It is a little tune he has made up himself, all by himself, about a dog. I sit in Ray chair with a cup of tea, and I listen to the music coming out of that old wood, and I think, it was never lost. It was only waiting for someone to come and open it.