Ask Your Father for Five Songs

Call your father this week. Ask him for five songs, and for the story behind each one. That's the whole assignment.

This is commentary, and the opinion is simple. You're probably sitting on the best oral history you'll ever get, and it's stored in a stack of records, a cassette box in the garage, or a playlist he built himself and never mentions.

The diary he never wrote

Most men of his generation didn't keep journals. They kept songs.

Ask a man about his twenties and you'll get a shrug and "it was fine." Put on the song that was playing in his first car and watch what happens. He'll tell you the make of the car. He'll tell you the road, the job he was driving to, the girl who rode in the passenger seat before your mother did. Music is the one thing that gets men talking when nothing else will.

That's why this matters. A song is a date stamp. "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Fortunate Son" don't just sound like different eras. They put him in a particular year, in a particular mood, with particular money in his pocket. When you hear the song with him, you get to stand there too.

You don't have to like it

This is where a lot of sons quit before they start. They figure they have to share his taste, and they don't, so they skip the exercise.

Skip that worry. Taste isn't the point. You can think half his catalog is dated and still learn more from an afternoon with it than from a year of "how's work?" You're not auditioning his music for your own playlist. You're reading him.

And some of it will land anyway. You'll hear a bass line or a steel guitar part you'd never have found yourself, and you'll want to know who played it. That's a nice side effect. It isn't the goal.

How to run the afternoon

Do it in person if you can. Forty minutes is enough. Bring something when you visit, a coffee, a pie, a cheap record you think he'll like. Don't show up empty-handed to ask a man for his memories.

Ask these five questions, one per song:

1. What was playing when you got your first real job?
2. What did you put on when you needed to settle down after a bad day?
3. What's a song from before you were born that your own father played?
4. What's one you loved then and can't stand now?
5. What's a song you'd want me to actually know?

Then be quiet. This is the hard part. When he starts a story, don't finish it for him and don't check your phone. Let a pause sit. The good stuff usually comes right after one.

Play the song while he talks, even the long ones. Skynyrd's "Free Bird" runs nearly nine minutes. Sit through all nine. He'll tell you more in the guitar solo than he will in the verses.

When his songs have a dark side

Some of his songs will be about drinking, running around, or living hard. Don't flinch and don't cheer. Ask the next question: "What did that cost?"

Plenty of fathers have a straight answer. A song that sounds like a good time at the bar can turn into a lesson about a job lost or a year wasted. You don't need him to confess anything. You just need to hear how he looks back on it. That's worth more than the song.

If he doesn't talk much

Some men won't. Don't push.

Start with the music itself and let it do the work. Ask him to show you one chord on the guitar he's had in the closet since 1989. If you've been thinking about picking one up, the first ninety days of learning guitar as a grown man lays out a plan, and learning one of his songs is a solid first target. Playing his song badly in front of him is a conversation all by itself. If you need an instrument, what actually matters when you buy your first acoustic will keep you from wasting money.

Be patient. Some men need the third visit before they open up. Keep showing up.

If your father isn't there to ask

Maybe he's gone. Maybe he was never around, or maybe things between you're too raw for a Sunday afternoon with a turntable. That's a real loss, and nobody should tell you to just get over it.

You're not locked out, though. Ask a grandfather, an uncle, a coach, your father-in-law, the older man at work who always has the radio on in the shop. Ask your mother what he used to play. Plenty of men have found a second father in a stranger's record collection, and plenty of older men are waiting for somebody young to care enough to ask.

And if his music carries pain for you, you don't owe it a hearing. Pick another man's. The practice works the same way.

If you're the father

Flip it. Your kids will get to this late, if they get to it at all, and they'll thank you for making it easy.

Pick five songs. Write the story on an index card for each one, in your own handwriting: the year, the place, why it mattered. Tuck the cards into the sleeves if you've got records, or into an envelope if you don't. If you're building the collection, start a vinyl collection without torching your budget covers how to do it cheaply.

Your handwriting on the sleeve will outlast the stereo. Your son will keep that card in a drawer for forty years.

Why now

Memory goes. Hearing goes. The man who knows why that song matters is only going to be sixty-eight, or seventy-four, or eighty-one for so long. The records will still be there when he isn't. The stories behind them won't be.

So make the call. Ask for the five songs. Then drive over, sit down, and keep your mouth shut while he plays the first one.