wrote the most famous song ever to come out of Coldwater, Texas, and never received one penny or one word of credit for it,” the dealer finished. His name was Tom Gilley, and his hands shook as he slid the photographs across the counter of his shop in Waxahachie. I could hardly breathe. The song was “Bluebonnet Lullaby,” and every Texan over fifty could hum it. For sixty years it had belonged to a singer named Del Ray Cobb. “Those letters are in the handwriting of your grandmother,” Tom said. “And several of them are signed by Del Ray himself.”
I asked him where the piano was now. Tom looked at the floor. “Your uncle Russell knew she guarded that piano like a bank vault,” he said. “He thought it must hide cash. When I opened the compartment and found only paper, I felt sick, because I recognized a name in the first letter. I called the one person who would understand. Her name is Sloane Cobb. She is the granddaughter of Del Ray, and she paid 40 thousand dollars that same afternoon to be sure nobody ever hid those pages again.”
I drove four hours to Granbury that evening with cold hands on the wheel. I expected a lawyer and a fight. Instead a silver haired woman opened her door before I knocked and said, “You have her eyes.” The piano sat in her front room with the lid raised and the small door beneath the keys standing open. “I have read every page,” she said. “I did not buy it to hide anything. I bought it because I feared your uncle would sell it twice. Please sit down, and have some tea. The sealed envelope is untouched. It belongs to you, and I think you should read it here, with someone beside you.”
A grandmother wrote a famous song that was credited to someone else, and the letters hidden in her piano finally gave her name back to her family.
The paper inside had gone soft as cloth. “My dear Nora,” it began. Grandmother Mabel Haskett wrote that in 1961 she was a church pianist and a young mother with no money, and that she wrote a lullaby for my mother when she was a baby. She played it for a traveling singer named Del Ray Cobb, who promised her half of everything and her name on the record. The record sold millions. Her name never appeared. “I stopped playing because every key reminded me,” she wrote, “but I could not let the proof be thrown away. Keep the letters, honey. Not for money. For your mother, and for you.”
Sloane was crying quietly by then, one hand over her mouth. “My grandfather told us all his life that he wrote that song alone,” she said. “But in his last letter to your grandmother, he called himself a coward and said he meant to set it right. I found a savings book in his things with her name on it. He put money aside for her for thirty years and never sent a cent.” She slid a check across the table. It was not payment, she said. It was only the first piece of what was owed, and she wanted me to know she would never stop trying.
When I got home to Coldwater, Uncle Russell was sitting alone on the porch in the dark. I did not shout. I told him everything, and I watched the anger drain out of his face. He had been 22 thousand dollars behind on his farm loan, and he had hoped the piano would save him. “I never looked inside it,” he whispered. “I never once asked Mama why she cared.” I did not call him foolish, because he already knew. I told him his mother had left a letter for him too, tucked behind mine. He held it a long time before he opened it.
Sloane did what her grandfather never could. In March she stood beside me in front of 300 people at the Coldwater Opry Hall and read a statement giving Mabel Ruth Haskett full credit as the writer of “Bluebonnet Lullaby.” A music lawyer in Austin had confirmed that every letter was real. Royalties that had gone to one family for sixty years would now be shared with ours. Many of the older women in that room cried openly, because they had sung that song to their own children and never knew whose heart it came from.
Uncle Russell paid Tom Gilley back the 600 dollars out of his own pocket, even though the piano was never his to sell, and then he surprised me. He used his share to clear the farm loan and spent the rest on a piano tuner. The piano came home to the front room of my mother that same week. When the tuner packed up his tools, my uncle stood beside the bench with his hat in his hands. “Nora,” he said, “would you play it? I would like to hear what she wrote.”
I had not touched a keyboard in years, and my fingers felt stiff. But the first notes came as if they had been waiting for me. The tune was simple and slow, and I realized I had heard it all my life, hummed over my crib by a woman who never told me she had written it. My mother came to the doorway and covered her face. Russell lowered himself onto the floor beside the bench like a boy. For three minutes, nobody in that house said a word, and nothing at all was missing from that quiet, golden room.
Now the song plays on the radio again, and this time the announcer says her name. Mabel Haskett would have laughed at the fuss and gone back to her tomato plants. But on the night of the concert, I sat at her piano on the stage of the Opry Hall, the sealed letters safe in my coat, and I whispered the promise back to her. My grandmother asked me only to keep a piano. Instead she gave me her name to carry, and it is the finest thing anyone ever left me.