Will the Circle

"I am glad that Buck Owens is still alive." It was my Dad talking and we were watching Hee Haw. I stared at him through my very long hair that drove him nuts. Looking at me he explained, "Because as long as Buck Owens is living we're not the ugliest people alive." Then he resumed watching Hee Haw. That was my Dad. Later, watching the Ed Sullivan Show and The Beatles, I was flipping out. The entire universe was changing with them shaking their mop tops, smiling through "All My Loving". "Elvis is better," Dad said. "All he's got to do is shake his little finger to get girls to do that." I looked at him absolutely convinced that he'd lost his mind. "But I see how you like them," he continued. "You all need a hair cut." But he loved music and passed it on to his children. He was a Country Music person and introduced me at an early age. I can still see him singing along with Hank Locklin ... "Please help me I'm faaaalllliiinnngg ... in love with you." He loved that song. He loved anything Patsy Cline did, adored the Staler Brothers and played me Louis Wainwright III's classic "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road," which remains one of the best protest songs ever written! He thought Johnny Cash was the coolest person ever born and when Folsom Prison Blues came out, Dad suddenly cared that so many people were in jail. Something about it just wasn't right. He also forced me to listen to "The Ballet of the Green Beret" which was a protest to the protests of the American Anti-War movement. Dad had been a Marine through, a former Prisoner-of-war, and had been shot. He had the right to make me listen to it. What was funny though is that he hated the war with everything in him. He also liked Barry McGuire's "Can't you see we're on the eve of Destruction". But when Willie Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger" came out, Dad had his own Beatle experience. I can still see him and my Uncle Bobby sitting on the carport, listening to it over and over. Their eyes crying in the rain. "Hey Dad," I said. "He needs a haircut." | Dad laughed. Uncle Bobby eyed me suspiciously. At the end, when he was in a hospital room, I wandered in as my brother David was trying to feed him. Dad wanted nothing to do with it. "You've got to eat," David said said repeatedly. "I can't do what ten people tell me to do," Dad angrily fired back with his eyes closed and a hand on his forehead. "Dad," I asked, "did you just quote Otis Redding?" And he had. Music was with him as he was dying. At the very end, David stayed up with him throughout the night singing Amazing Grace in his ear over and over. So there are all of these songs now that are ... forever tied to my Dad. Sometimes they make me cry when I hear them. Most of the time though, they bring me great joy. Rick Hudson and I were in a band back then and we always sang ,Will the Circle be Unbroken? the Mother Maybell Carter Classic rocked into a new universe by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Dad loved it and had us sing it at most every family function, standing there holding hands, coming as close to praying as I ever saw him. All these years later, I can answer the question. No. It won't.