Archive of Our Own

To My Dear Friends,

If you are reading this, I’ve taken my final bow. The lights have come up, the cables are being coiled, and somebody is sweeping the floor. But don’t let that make you too sad. Life, after all, is just one big song, and I’ve been lucky enough to play more than my fair share of verses.

Over the years, I’ve played a lot of “sets.” Some were in places you’d recognize by name—Eddie’s little tavern with the sticky floor and the good coffee, union halls that smelled like sweat and paper, school gyms with bad acoustics and brave teenagers, church basements where the folding chairs wobbled, children’s concerts where half the audience was on the floor, and, later on, those long evenings at the House of Song. Every now and then there was a bigger stage, bright and polished, but the truth is I always felt most at home where you could see the back wall and hear someone’s baby fussing in the second row. Those rooms, and the people in them, were the verses. I was just the guitar trying to hold the tune.

Think of this letter as one last encore—the quiet kind, after the clapping has settled down and the band has put away the loud tricks. This is the part of the night where everybody sits on stools, takes a breath, and just talks for a little while. No fancy lights, no surprises. Just me, speaking to you the way I would if we were sitting across a kitchen table with the kettle on.

By the time this finds you, I’ll be ninety-seven years old and already gone. I’ve had the rare privilege of getting old in this world—properly old. I’ve outlived most of the folks who started out with me, and many of the ones who helped me along the way. In the later years, “performing” didn’t always mean standing under a spotlight. Sometimes it meant humming a scrap of melody to a grand-niece in the back yard, or telling a story at the House of Song while somebody younger did the actual singing. But it was all part of the same music, as far as I was concerned.

I don’t want this to feel like a eulogy, and it certainly isn’t a résumé. This isn’t a list of accomplishments, or a case I’m making for myself. It’s a thank-you note. It’s not the whole story of my life—not even close. It’s just the part of the story that belongs to us, to the space between my guitar and your listening, to all the nights and afternoons and early mornings when our lives happened to overlap for a song or two.

First, I want to say thank you.

Thank you to those of you who built your whole lives around music, and thank you just as much to the ones who only ever brushed up against my songs the way you brush past someone on a busy sidewalk. You were all the other half of the conversation. A song is only ever half-finished when it leaves a singer’s mouth. It doesn’t really become itself until it lands in another person’s day.

Some of you only heard me once, on a hot, dusty afternoon at a county fair somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania. Maybe you were mostly there for the rides or the pie contest, and I was just the woman on the side stage keeping the air moving between announcements. I remember those shows: kids running in and out of the shade, somebody’s uncle snoring in a lawn chair, the sound system protesting every time the wind shifted. If you only caught one verse while you were walking past with a paper plate in your hand, and something in it made you slow down or smile, that was enough. I’m grateful you were there, even if you never learned my name and couldn’t hum the tune now if you tried.

Some of you made a habit of it. There were people who drove hours, year after year, to catch the Easter shows or the autumn gatherings, even when the weather was uncooperative and their cars weren’t sure they’d make it back up the hill. I remember faces more than names: the couple who started out as teenagers leaning against the back wall and, twenty years later, were sneaking out quietly because their own kids had to be up early; the woman who always sat in the same seat at the House of Song, knitting through half the set and crying through the other half. You all thought you were coming to see me, but really we were coming to see each other. Those traditions—those annual check-ins—kept me honest about what mattered.

Some of you grew up with my songs without ever choosing them. Maybe a parent or grandparent put a tape on while they cooked, or sang one of my choruses putting you to bed, or played my records on days when they were trying not to cry in front of you. I’ve been told my voice has washed dishes in a lot of kitchens I never set foot in. If you were one of those children, listening from the hallway or the back seat of a car, and one of those melodies stuck in your bones and came back years later when you needed it, thank you for making room for me in your private world. You didn’t pick me out of a lineup. I arrived as part of your family’s background noise, and you let me stay.

Then there were the workers who came straight from the job—boots still dusty from the plant, hands smelling like soap from the hospital, shirts wrinkled from a long day in a classroom, name tags half-peeled off from the store. I knew you were out there. I saw you come in with your shoulders still holding the weight of the shift, sometimes nodding off in the warm parts of the set because you’d been awake since before dawn. You don’t know how much you shaped what I sang and how I sang it. I learned early on that if I looked out and saw those faces—the ones etched with worry and fatigue—it wasn’t the night for cleverness or showing off. It was the night for plain truths, for songs you could hum on the drive home, for choruses that reminded you that your labor and your life meant something.

There were nurses who told me later that they’d hum my songs under their breath while checking on patients at three in the morning. There were factory workers who said they kept a radio in the break room tuned to whatever station might occasionally play one of my live recordings. There were teachers who used a line or two from some old union song in their civics classes and dared the administration to object. You were not my “audience” in the fancy sense. You were my co-workers in this business of trying to keep people’s spirits from giving out.

I want to say a special thank you to the one-song listeners and the completists alike. Some of you clung to a single piece—one lullaby, one protest song, one little tune about a tree—and never cared much for the rest. Others collected everything, hunted down scratchy bootlegs from taverns long since demolished, argued about set lists, and knew the dates of obscure benefit shows better than I did. Both ways of loving are valid. If you wore one song out playing it over and over until the tape squealed, I’m honored. If you kept a whole catalog close to your heart, I’m honored. I never measured anyone’s devotion in ticket stubs or merchandise. I measured it in the way you showed up—for me, yes, but more importantly for each other.

I’ve met people who told me, almost apologetically, “I only ever saw you that one time.” As if they needed to earn the right to speak. Let me be clear: you never had to earn anything with me. If our paths crossed for one verse at a county fair, or one rainy evening at the House of Song, or one bootleg tape in a friend’s car, then you are part of this story as surely as the folks who followed every tour and could recite my banter between songs. A conversation doesn’t become more real just because it’s longer. Sometimes a single exchanged sentence, at the right moment, carries a whole lifetime’s worth of meaning.

Because of how I was raised—by working people who counted every dollar and every minute—I never saw myself as standing above you on a stage. Higher up physically, yes; the microphones and the lighting rigs see to that. But in my mind, we were always on level ground. I was never “the star.” I was the person holding the guitar while everyone else’s lives gave the songs their weight. The stories I told came from somewhere: from my grandparents’ kitchen table, from the picket lines and meetings, from conversations with Phoebe and Lucille when we were trying to make sense of whatever the papers were shouting about that week, from things Glenda’s girls said that made me laugh and then think, “There’s a whole song hiding in that sentence.”

If you ever felt, sitting in a folding chair or standing against the back wall, that I was talking down to you, then I owe you an apology. That was never my intention. My hope, always, was that you would feel like we were sitting side by side—maybe on the steps outside, maybe on the curb after the show, maybe at a wobbly table in a noisy bar—sharing something that belonged equally to both of us. When I looked out into a room, I didn’t see “fans.” I saw people with mortgages, with sore knees, with night shifts ahead of them, with kids to get home to, with outstanding medical bills, with regrets, with joys so fragile they didn’t dare say them out loud. I saw my own people.

You might think I was the one doing the giving on those nights, sending songs out into the dark and hoping they landed. But from where I stood, you were giving me just as much. You gave me your evenings when you could have stayed home and watched television. You gave me your attention, which is no small thing in a noisy world. You gave me stories—in the letters you wrote, in the quick conversations by the stage door, in the way you introduced your children and grandchildren and said, a little shyly, “This is the one I told you about.” All of that flowed back into the music. If a line ever sounded wiser than I really am, it’s probably because it was something I overheard from one of you and carried around until it found a place to land in a song.

So when I say you were the other half of the conversation, I mean that literally. My heart was talking, yes, but it was talking to your hearts. Across generations, across distances, across differences in politics and religion and taste, there was a thread running between us. Sometimes it was taut and clear. Sometimes it was faint and frayed. But it was there. You might not have felt it every night. I certainly didn’t always feel it, especially when the sound system failed or my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. But looking back over nearly a century of living and many decades of singing, that thread of connection is what I remember most. Not the applause, not the reviews, not the arguments about where I fit in any particular musical category. Just that feeling of being in a room with other human beings, sharing a melody that was bigger than any one of us.

If my life has meant anything beyond the walls of my own home, it is because you met me halfway. You brought your own lives, your own burdens, your own joys into the circle and let the songs bounce off them. For that, and for so much more, I am endlessly grateful.

Since we’re already talking about what you’ve given me, it’s only fair I tell you a little more about where I came from, and how this whole business of singing got started.

I grew up in a narrow little cottage in Geneva, Ohio. If you’d stood in the front room and stretched your arms out, you could almost touch both walls. The stove did more than its share of the work, heating the place and boiling the coffee and drying mittens in winter. April’s sewing table lived right up against one window, piled high with fabric and mending. Brandon’s chair was pulled in close by the other, with a newspaper folded on the arm and his work boots parked beneath. We didn’t have a music room or a study. We had a kitchen that was also a schoolroom, a library, a meeting hall, and, later on, a rehearsal space.

I was taught at that kitchen table instead of in a classroom with rows of desks. While other children in town were memorizing state capitals from chalkboards, I was copying them out longhand into cheap notebooks while April hemmed skirts and Brandon squinted at the headlines. When I say I was homeschooled, I mean that literally: arithmetic squeezed in between stirring a pot and letting the bread rise, history lessons happening while the radio murmured quietly in the corner, reading time underlining articles in yesterday’s paper because we couldn’t afford fresh books every week. The first map of the world I carried in my head was drawn in pencil on butcher paper that April taped to the wall.

My first music wasn’t the polished kind you hear on records. It was the sound of my grandparents doing their work. April sang under her breath when she sewed, little snatches of melody she’d picked up from her own parents and from the women at church and at the laundry. Brandon had a whole arsenal of songs from the road and from union halls—verses about wages and weather and foremen and trains. He’d come home with his voice hoarse, drop into that chair, and hum while he read, not even aware he was doing it. To me, those low, rough lines about keeping your back straight on the line and your hand steady on the wrench were as much “music” as anything that ever made it onto a chart.

So I learned early that songs were tools. They kept your hands moving when you were tired, and your courage from running out when the boss tried something clever. They weren’t for showing off. They were for getting through.

There was a radio, of course. Some evenings we’d turn it up and listen to whatever the stations in Cleveland could throw our way: big band numbers, crooners, church broadcasts, baseball games. Every once in a while, a song would slip through that sounded like it came from the same country as my grandparents’ humming—something with a banjo or a fiddle and a voice that cracked a little on the high notes. Those caught my ear. But for the most part, the music I lived with every day was homemade: April’s voice threading through the sound of the sewing machine, Brandon’s quiet baritone rolling along with the rustle of the newspaper.

My mother left early in my life, and there are whole parts of that story I still don’t know. What I do know is that absence is its own kind of presence. There were questions I didn’t know how to ask and feelings I didn’t have words for. The house was full of love, but it also had its hollows. When you’re a child in a small town with a missing parent and more emotions than vocabulary, you have to find some way to make sense of things. For me, that “way” turned out to be music.

At first, that just meant humming the way my grandparents did. I’d sit on the back steps with a notebook, pretending to do lessons, and sing nonsense syllables under my breath while I watched the laundry flap on the line. The wind in the Buckeye trees around our place had its own rhythm, pushing and pulling at the branches. Trains passing in the distance laid down a low, steady percussion. The world had a beat even when nobody was trying to make one. I wanted to answer it somehow.

It took me a while to get my hands on an instrument. We didn’t have spare money lying around for guitars. What we did have were coffee cans and jars on shelves where a coin or two might land when there was any left at the end of the week. When I was old enough to understand what “saving up” meant, I started slipping my own little bits in—babysitting quarters, holiday tips from neighbors, the odd crumpled bill. Later on, Ohio rolled out one of those postwar education grants for promising youngsters who wanted to do something “constructive.” I don’t know that they had a factory-town girl with a head full of songs in mind, but my teachers from the few official classes I took put in a kind word, and somehow I qualified.

Between the grant and the coffee can and my grandparents’ quiet decision to go without a few small comforts, there came a day when April and Brandon walked me down to a shop that smelled like sawdust and metal and possibilities. I remember the rows of instruments hanging on the wall like strange fruit. I remember feeling like an impostor among them. We didn’t pick anything fancy. We chose the guitar the man behind the counter said would “stay in tune if you treat her decent.” It was plainer than some of the others, with a few dings even when it was new, but when I wrapped my hand around the neck, it felt like something in me had been waiting on that exact shape.

That first week, my fingers blistered and ached. I practiced at the end of the kitchen table while April measured and pinned and Brandon corrected my spelling. We didn’t have lessons in the official sense, just borrowed songbooks, chord charts passed along by church ladies, and whatever I could steal by ear from the radio when a folk tune slipped through the static. Before I ever tried to sing over it, I found myself chasing a little pattern of notes that sounded just like the wind in the trees out back. It rose and fell the way the leaves did, it sighed when the trains passed, it stumbled when my fingers missed a string.

I didn’t know to call it a composition. I just knew it made that restless feeling in my chest quiet down for a few minutes. Later, other people started calling it “Buckeye Breeze.” To me, it was just the first time I managed to get something from the outside world and something from the inside of my own head to meet in the middle and shake hands.

For a long time, that was all the music I thought I’d make: little private answers to the noises around me. I played for April and Brandon in the evenings, while the soup simmered and the snow piled up at the door. Sometimes Brandon would stop reading and just listen, his brow furrowed like he was checking the math on an important problem. Sometimes April would hum along, harmonizing without even thinking about it. That was my first audience, and it felt more than sufficient. I was singing to keep myself steady and to pay them back, in the only currency I had, for all the years they’d spent keeping me fed and clothed and loved.

Then the songs started slipping out of the house.

A neighbor would drop by and hear a bit of something through the open window. A church friend would ask if I’d be willing to “do a little piece” at a potluck. Brandon took me along to a union meeting one evening and, before I knew what was happening, someone shoved a guitar into my hands and said, “The girl’s been practicing.” I was terrified, but my fingers knew their way around “Which Side Are You On?” better than my voice knew its way around a speech, so that’s what came out.

Later, when Eddie’s Tavern needed someone cheap to fill in a few nights a month, one of those union men recommended me. Eddie’s was nobody’s idea of a glamorous venue. It was dim and a little sticky, with a dartboard that had seen better days and a jukebox that worked when it felt like it. But it was also where my neighbors came after long days to blow off steam, argue about the news, and see who in town could still keep a tune after two beers. Those early nights at Eddie’s weren’t “concerts” in the formal sense. They were just extended kitchen-table sessions with more smoke and more opinions.

The people who listened in those rooms were not “fans.” They were farmers and line workers, nurses and teachers, widows and teenagers, union organizers and the occasional lost soul hiding from a fight at home. They were my grandparents’ friends, my classmates’ parents, the same folks who’d stood in line with us at the post office and sat behind us in church. When I stumbled through my early songs—some borrowed, some half mine—their faces told me everything I needed to know. If I sang something that rang false, I could feel the room pull back a little. If I sang something that hit close to home, I’d see heads nod, or shoulders slump with relief, or eyes go distant in that way people get when they’re remembering their own lives.

Up until then, music had been mostly a way for me to cope—to make sense of the empty places and the too-full ones, to file away questions I didn’t know how to ask out loud. But standing in those rooms, with April’s workmates and Brandon’s fellow travelers and the whole patchwork of Geneva looking back at me, something shifted. I realized the songs weren’t just containers for my feelings. They could hold other people’s stories too.

A woman would come up after a set and say, “That one about the train? That’s how it felt when my husband left.” A man would mutter, “You got that boss down to a T, even if you never met him.” A kid would say, “I didn’t know you could sing about being mad at the whole world. I thought songs had to be about love.” Every time that happened, the music bent itself a little more toward the people in front of me.

That was the change, right there. I stopped thinking of songs as something I did to feel better and started thinking of them as something we could use together—like a shared tool on a job site or an extra pair of hands when a storm blew a tree down. I still played in the same little taverns and halls. I was still the same girl from the narrow house with the kettle on and the sewing machine clattering. The difference was that now, when I picked up the guitar, I wasn’t just asking, “What do I need to say to survive this day?” I was also asking, “What might help the people in this room carry what they’re carrying?”

If anything that came after ever looked like a “career” from the outside, know that in my head it never stopped being that simple: a girl from Geneva with a guitar, trying to keep faith with the kitchen table she came from and the neighbors who, without ever using the word, made her into a singer.
For all that, I need to admit something that might surprise you: being heard scared me half to death at first.

It’s one thing to sing in a kitchen where the worst that can happen is your grandfather raises an eyebrow and says, “That line doesn’t quite land,” or your grandmother reminds you gently that the soup is boiling over. It’s another thing entirely to step into a room full of people who have had hard days and long lives and offer them something from inside your own head. I worried about all the ways it could go wrong.

I was afraid of being misunderstood, of having a line pulled out of a song and twisted into something cruel or foolish that I never meant. I was afraid people would think I was full of myself, that this girl from a narrow house in Geneva had suddenly decided her feelings were important enough to be broadcast. I was afraid of being taken out of context, of someone hearing only the chorus of a song about anger and missing the verse where I admitted my own part in the trouble. And underneath all that was a deeper fear: that I might hurt people I cared about by naming things too plainly, that in trying to tell the truth I’d trample on wounds I couldn’t see.

When I first started playing at Eddie’s, every one of those fears came along and lined up beside me on that little stage. Eddie’s was not a forgiving room on paper—clinking glasses, low conversations, the thud of the cooler door, the constant threat of the jukebox deciding it had something to say in the middle of your quietest verse. The first night, I stood there with my guitar and felt like my legs might give out. My mouth went dry. I could hear my heart in my ears more loudly than I could hear the crowd.

I started with other people’s songs, the way most of us do—old union standards, a few church hymns that had slipped their collars and wandered into the bar, a ragged version of a ballad I’d half-learned off the radio. For a while, the room did what rooms do: some folks listened, some half-listened, some didn’t listen at all. Then, because I’d promised myself I would, I slipped in one of my own.

It wasn’t a grand song. It was small, about a freight train and a snowstorm and a woman standing at a window waiting on news. My pick caught on the string in the first verse, and my voice went a little thin in the middle, but I kept going because I didn’t trust my knees if I tried to stop. Somewhere in the second verse, Eddie stopped wiping glasses. A man at the bar turned his stool around. The woman at the corner table, the one with her work badge still clipped to her shirt, put down her drink and folded her hands.

By the time I reached the last chorus, the room had gone quieter than I’d ever heard it. Not silent—there’s always an ice cube settling, a chair shifting—but quiet in that particular way where you can feel people listening with more than just their ears. It terrified me. It also felt like someone had opened a window in my chest.

Walking home afterward, I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. Part of me wanted to never play another original song again, to go back to the safety of tunes that had already proven they could carry a room. Another part of me, the stubborn part my grandparents called “your mother’s streak,” knew there was no going back now that I’d seen what could happen when something true landed right.

If I hadn’t had an earlier experience to lean on, I might have let the fear win. But years before Eddie’s, back when I was still more girl than woman, there’d been a record.

It wasn’t an official release meant for children. It was a bootleg, passed from hand to hand the way good contraband always is. Someone’s cousin had copied it from someone else’s cousin, and it ended up in our house in a plain sleeve with a scribbled label. All I knew was there was a man with a banjo on it, talking to a roomful of kids like they were worth his full attention.

That man was Pete Seeger. I didn’t know, then, what he meant to the wider world. I just knew that when we set the needle down, his voice filled our kitchen with something that felt like both play and instruction. He sang songs about rivers and unions and nonsense verses that made April laugh. Between them, he talked to the children in the audience as if they were capable of understanding big things, not in a heavy, scolding way, but by inviting them in.

There was a moment—I remember this as clearly as I remember the color of our front door—when he must have flubbed a note or lost his place. You could hear a little stumble. Instead of pretending it hadn’t happened, he chuckled and said something along the lines of, “Doesn’t have to be perfect. You just have to sing like you mean it.”

That line rooted itself in me. I was a serious child in some ways, picky about words and details, easily embarrassed by my own mistakes. Hearing a grown man, a professional, admit on a record that perfection wasn’t the point changed the rules. Here was someone whose job it was to stand in front of people and sing, telling kids it was okay to crack, to miss, to be human, as long as the heart of what you were doing was honest.

So when my voice went thin at Eddie’s, when the guitar buzzed on a chord I knew perfectly well how to play, I had that voice in my ear: Doesn’t have to be perfect. Sing like you mean it. When, later on, a song came out longer than I intended or shorter than someone thought it should be, I reminded myself of that too. The point wasn’t to impress anybody with my control. The point was to show up fully, even if my hands shook.

As time went on, I began to understand that the fear I felt was not a sign I should stop. It was a sign I was handling something that required care. If you’re never scared, you’re probably either not paying attention or not being honest. The trick, I learned, wasn’t getting rid of the fear. It was listening to what it was trying to protect, and then deciding, with a clear head, when to step past it and when to heed it.

A big part of what helped me make that decision, night after night, was how I’d been raised to think about work.

In our house, and in the circles my grandparents moved through, labor was sacred in a plain, unadorned way. You did your share if you could. You tried not to take more than you needed. You looked out for the ones who were carrying heavier loads. Work wasn’t a ladder to climb above other people. It was a way of keeping the roof on for everybody. That was the socialism I grew up with—not slogans on a banner so much as a set of kitchen-table rules about fairness and responsibility.

When music became more than a private hobby, I didn’t know any way to think about it except as another kind of work. It wasn’t factory work, and it wasn’t nursing or teaching, but it still felt like something I owed care to. I wasn’t interested in using songs to make myself look clever or special. That didn’t sit right with what I’d learned watching April scrub someone else’s floors and then come home to cook, or Brandon stand up in meetings and risk his job for a chance at better conditions for everyone.

So I started asking of each song the same questions my grandparents might have asked about a day’s labor. Does it help anybody? Does it make anything easier to carry, even for three minutes? Does it make somebody feel less alone, or more awake, or a little braver? If it didn’t comfort anyone, didn’t provoke any thought, didn’t at least get a foot tapping or a head nodding, I considered it unfinished. Not bad, necessarily, just not done yet. It hadn’t done its share.

That’s what I mean when I say music is a service. Not in the sense that I was any kind of saint or that every song had to be a sermon. Service, to me, is what happens when you put your skills—whatever they are—in front of other people and say, “Here, this is what I can offer. Does it help?” A mechanic does that with an engine. A nurse does it with a blood pressure cuff and a steady hand. A good teacher does it with a chalkboard and a patient voice. I tried to do it with a guitar and some words.

When I stepped onto a stage—whether it was a literal stage with lights or the corner of a break room—my fear of being misunderstood or of accidentally hurting someone never went away entirely. I don’t think it should have. It kept me from being careless. It made me double-check the edges of a lyric, make sure I wasn’t punching down at anybody or pretending to know what I didn’t. It reminded me that people come into a room carrying grief and anger and private burdens I have no right to toy with.

But alongside that fear, there was also a growing sense of calling—not in the churchy sense, but in the “I have work to do” sense. People were tired. They were overloaded. They were trying to raise kids and pay bills and make sense of a world that kept changing the rules. If a song could give them three minutes of recognition, or a little strength to go to the next shift, or a moment of shared laughter that broke the tension, then it was worth the risk of stepping out into the open with my imperfect voice.

So I kept singing, cracks and all, not because I stopped being afraid, but because I understood that the fear and the service were braided together. If nothing else, I could show up and mean it. And over the years, you showed me again and again that, while it might not be perfect, it was enough.

Any place I ever reached, I didn’t get there alone. Whatever name you might put on what I did—folk singer, protest singer, children’s entertainer, odd aunt with a guitar—I knew I was just one branch on a very large, very old tree.

On the musical side, my family tree ran through people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, of course. Men I never met in person, but whose records and stories and bootlegs filtered into our little house and gave shape to things I’d already been feeling. It ran through the union song leaders my grandparents followed—the ones who could turn a picket line into a choir and a tired crowd into a wall of sound that wouldn’t budge. It ran through Black gospel singers whose voices I first heard on crackling radio broadcasts and later, if I was lucky, in person, when someone would drag me to a revival or I’d find myself in a back pew on a Sunday off. It ran through Native drummers and singers who welcomed me, later in life, into circles I never assumed I had a right to, and who taught me that rhythm isn’t just something you add to a song; sometimes it is the song. And it ran through the women whose names I never learned—the ones whose work songs my grandparents passed down, who sang over washbasins and fields and stoves, keeping time with their bodies because nobody had ever offered them a metronome.

If you took away every record I ever heard, every concert I ever attended, there would still be those voices in the background: anonymous and specific at the same time. A woman bending over a scrub board, humming something low. A man on a picket line, shouting a call-and-response until his throat gave out. A group of kids in a church basement clapping on the off-beats because that’s how their elders did it. I never thought of myself as the trunk of anything. I was one of many branches, grown from a root system of people who used whatever sound they could make to stay human under pressure.

And then there were the books.

I’ve talked a lot about music, but the truth is, my songs were as much made of paper and ink as they were of chords and melodies. We didn’t have money for a lot of luxuries, but my grandparents understood the value of a library card. The Geneva library became my second house. I’d walk down there with a sandwich in my pocket and lose whole afternoons among the shelves, pulling down anything that smelled like trouble in a useful way.

That’s where I met Eugene Debs—not the man in the flesh, of course, but his speeches and letters. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor between two stacks, reading his words about standing with the prisoners, the poor, the broken, and feeling something in my chest click into place. Here was someone putting into sentences what my grandparents had been living without ever dressing it up.

Steinbeck came next, with his dusty roads and hungry families and the way he managed to draw a straight line between individual heartbreak and systems that benefited from that heartbreak. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking gave me factory floors and slaughterhouses and the knowledge that the things we take for granted—clean food, safer workplaces, basic protections—were not handed down by benevolent bosses but wrenched into place by organizing and sacrifice. Later made-up stories, and later thinkers, joined them, but those were the first voices that showed me how to talk about power without flinching.

Those pages gave me a vocabulary I didn’t have at the kitchen table. They gave me words like “solidarity” and “exploitation” and “collective,” words that left a different taste in the mouth than the slogans I heard on commercials or campaign posters. When I put pen to paper to write lyrics, those words were right there beside me. I didn’t always use them directly—nothing kills a song faster than stuffing it full of jargon—but they shaped the spine of what I was trying to say. If one of my songs ever sounded like it understood something about landlords or bosses or war that I couldn’t possibly have learned just from our little town, it’s because I had those writers breathing down my neck, insisting I widen my view.

So when people tried to tell me, later on, that I’d “invented” some kind of style, or that I was some lonely voice crying in the wilderness, I had to laugh. There was nothing solitary about it. I had union songs in one ear, gospel choirs in the other, folk records on the turntable, drums and rattles from ceremonies I’d been allowed to witness, and a stack of books under my arm. I was never alone in this work, and I don’t want to be remembered that way.

All of that is the long road to say this: if you picked up a guitar, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a camera, or a sewing needle because of something you heard me do, you are not my “disciple.” You are my colleague.

I’ve met some of you over the years. You came up after shows with calloused fingertips and shy eyes and said, “I started playing because of you.” Or, “Your songs got me through high school; now I’m writing my own.” Some of you brought me demos or chapbooks or photos on your phones, speaking quickly as if you were running out of time. Some of you never spoke up in person, but I heard about you from others—the kid who wrote her first protest song after a House of Song open mic, the boy who started a zine in his town because he heard me say once that you don’t need permission to tell the truth.

If you are one of those people, here is what I want you to know, as clearly as I can say it: you don’t owe me anything.

You don’t owe me loyalty. You don’t owe me stylistic resemblance. You don’t owe me polite deference at the expense of your own instincts. You don’t even owe me liking my work forever. People grow. Tastes change. The song that saved you at seventeen might ring hollow at thirty-five, and that’s okay. I would be more worried if nothing in you ever shifted.

What you owe—if “owe” is even the right word—is to your own truth and to the people who choose to listen to you. That’s it. Tell the truth as you see it, with as much care and humility as you can manage. And treat your audiences as partners, not consumers.

By partners, I mean: remember that they are not there to feed you praise or to validate your existence. They are there because they, like you, are trying to make sense of their lives. They bring their stories into the room. They bring their hurts and their hopes and their weary bones. They may not clap on time. They may check their phones. They may miss your favorite line entirely and latch onto some throwaway phrase you almost cut. That’s their right. Their lives are not props in your performance. Your songs are offerings, not commands.

You will be tempted, especially if the world starts paying attention to you in a way it never has before, to think of your listeners as a market. People will talk to you about demographics and branding and engagement and all the modern words for what is, in its best form, simply a gathering of human beings. I can’t tell you to ignore those conversations; we all have to make a living, and there’s no shame in wanting to keep the lights on. But I can ask you not to lose sight of the fact that the person sitting in the fifth row with a tired face and a sore back is not a “unit.” They are your equal, meeting you for an hour on common ground.

I’ve seen what happens when people remember that. I’ve seen it in small, quiet ways. A nurse wrote to me once, on thin stationery from a hospital break room, to say that one of my songs kept her company on nights when she was the only one on duty in her ward. She said she’d sing the chorus under her breath while checking vitals, and that it steadied her hands when she had to call a family in the middle of the night. She didn’t ask for a reply. She just needed to say, “This helped,” and to let me know she was doing her work with as much heart as she could.

Another time, a teenager came up to me at a festival with paint on her hands and a handmade sign under her arm. On the cardboard, in shaky letters, was a line from a song I’d written years before about refusing to be silent in the face of injustice. She told me she’d carried that sign at a march in her town, that the words made it easier to keep walking when her feet hurt and the chants got tired. She looked almost embarrassed, like she thought I might scold her for taking the lyric out of its original context. I hugged her instead. Once a line leaves my mouth, it belongs wherever it’s needed.

There was a man who brought me a photograph of a mural in his city—my words, not my face, painted along a brick wall that had once been a target for every kind of ugliness. Now it had flowers and children and a verse I’d written about keeping your neighbors’ names in your mouth like a blessing. He said the kids in that neighborhood called it “the singing wall,” even though it never made a sound.

I’ve seen my lyrics scribbled on the margins of notebooks, tattooed in tiny script on wrists, slipped into wedding vows and memorials and school projects. I’ve walked into the House of Song and heard a young person I’d never met using a melody of mine as a jumping-off point for something entirely their own, bending it in directions I’d never have thought to go. I’ve watched Glenda’s girls and their friends turn a scrap of an old chorus into something wild and new, full of rhythms and slang that don’t belong to my generation at all, and I’ve felt nothing but gratitude.

If you are among those who have done things like that, hear me: I am honored when you carry my words or melodies into your own work or your own life. But I never wanted to be a destination. At most, I wanted to be a trail marker: “Somebody walked through here before. The path goes on.”

There will be people who try to tell you that the point of making art is to be “original,” as if anything worth saying springs up out of nowhere. Don’t let that anxiety eat you alive. Every song, every poem, every mural, every play is part of a long conversation. You are allowed to answer your elders, to argue with them, to finish their sentences, to change the subject entirely. The only thing I would ask, as someone who walked ahead of you for a while, is that you listen as much as you speak. Listen to the people who came before. Listen to the people in your own community who will never see their names on a marquee. Listen to the ones who disagree with you, at least long enough to understand what you’re disagreeing with.

And when you find yourself in a room—real or virtual—where people are listening to you, remember the nurse on the night shift and the teenager with the cardboard sign and the kids in front of the singing wall. Remember that somewhere out there, there may be a child listening from the hallway while an adult plays your work in the next room, soaking up more than you know. You won’t see most of the ways your creations move through the world. You won’t be able to control them. That’s all right. Your job is to do the work as honestly as you can, thank the ones who make it possible, and then let it go.

If you started down your path because of something I sang or said, I am humbled to be part of your origin story. But the story going forward is yours. Carry what’s useful. Leave what isn’t. And when it’s your turn, years from now, to think about who comes after you, I hope you’ll tell them something like what I’m telling you now: You don’t have to do this perfectly. You just have to mean it. And you are not alone.

I say you are not alone because I never was, either. Whatever courage I managed to scrape together in the hardest years, a great deal of it came from you. You were the fuel that kept this old engine running long past the mileage anyone would have predicted.

Living nearly a century means you collect more than your fair share of hard seasons. I came of age in the shadow of one war and lived long enough to see far too many others. When I was young, the news arrived over the radio—voices reading casualty lists in steady, practiced tones while my grandparents stood very still in the kitchen. Later, the pictures came on television: villages burning in places I’d never touch with my own feet, soldiers in uniforms I recognized only because my neighbors’ sons wore them. Later still, the trouble shrank down onto the little screens we carried in our pockets, the kind you can’t easily turn off because they go where you go.

There were nights when I’d watch those images and feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. I’d think, “What business do I have singing songs when the world is on fire?” It felt indecent, almost, to pick up a guitar when there were bombs falling and people running for their lives and politicians talking about “acceptable losses” as if they were discussing spoiled fruit.

And yet, in those same seasons, you kept showing up.

You came to the taverns and the union halls and, later on, the House of Song, tired and frightened and angry and determined. You brought news from your own corners of the world: kids drafted, loved ones deployed, refugees arriving in your towns, layoffs and strikes and sudden price hikes that turned already-tight budgets into something worse. You sat in those chairs and stood against those back walls, and when I sang something that named what you were feeling, you didn’t turn away. You leaned in.

I remember one particular year—one of those times when the television seemed permanently tuned to footage of deserts and smoke—when I seriously considered cancelling a run of shows. I thought, “Nobody needs to hear me pick at a guitar while rockets are flying. It’s disrespectful.” I was composing the apology in my head when a letter arrived from a woman whose son had just shipped out. She wrote, “Please don’t stop. I need somewhere to go where people will say his name out loud without turning it into an argument. I need a room where someone will sing something that isn’t a marching song or an advertisement.”

So I kept the dates. That first night, I walked onstage feeling heavier than I’d ever felt under the lights. I sang a little wobbly in the first set. But halfway through, I started to see what she meant. People weren’t ignoring the war by being there. They were bringing it with them. They were staking out a small, temporary territory where sorrow and fear and anger could sit together without being told to pick a side for the cameras. The room itself became a kind of protest: not against any one government, but against the idea that human beings are only valuable as soldiers or consumers. I left tired, but less hopeless. You had done that for me.

The public storms were hard enough. The private ones nearly knocked me flat.

When April died, it felt like someone had taken one of the load-bearing walls out of the house. For a long time, I couldn’t sing certain songs without hearing her alto slip in underneath mine. I’d open my mouth, and instead of sound I’d just get tears. Brandon followed later, with the same sort of quiet dignity he’d carried all his life, and I remember thinking, “Well, that’s it. The people I’ve been singing for all along are gone. The rest is just echoes.”

What kept me from packing up the guitar entirely in those years were, again, your faces. People who’d been coming to my shows for decades would slip up to the front and say, “I’m so sorry about your grandparents. They were there the first time I saw you play.” They’d tell me stories I’d never heard—about April pressing a sandwich into their hands when they were teenagers hanging around the edge of the stage, about Brandon arguing politics with them in the parking lot after a show and then insisting on walking them to their car so they’d be safe. Those stories reminded me that my grandparents’ reach went further than our front porch, and that by continuing to sing, I was continuing something of theirs, too.

There were other losses—the quiet end of my marriage, which I won’t dissect here except to say that love can be real and still run its course; the deaths and illnesses of friends I’d thought I’d grow old with; the gradual disappearing of my contemporaries until I’d look around backstage at a festival and realize I was the last one left from a whole cohort. Each time, I thought, “Maybe this is when I stop. Maybe I’m allowed to sit this part out.”

You had other ideas.

In the years when my body started to show its age in more obvious ways, I used to dread the journey from the dressing room to the stage more than the performance itself. My knees complained about stairs they’d handled without comment for decades. My lungs wheezed in cold air. My memory, once so sharp I could carry a dozen verses without blinking, began to drop a line here and there like a sloppy knitter. I was afraid you’d be disappointed. I thought you might be secretly comparing me to some younger version of myself—fresher-voiced, quicker-fingered, less scatterbrained—and finding the present wanting.

Instead, you adjusted around me like water finds a new path.

You insisted, loudly and collectively, that I sit down during sets if I needed to, that we lower the stage lights so I could see where I was putting my feet, that somebody put a bannister where there hadn’t been one. You organized chairs near the front so I wouldn’t have to squint to see you. Some of you knitted scarves and shawls and brought them to the House of Song “for when she gets cold up there,” as if I were an elderly relative whose comfort was a shared responsibility. I have lost count of the hands that reached out, steady and unhurried, to help me up and down those stairs.

There was a period when I had a health scare serious enough that the doctors used words that made my mouth dry. I took a break from performing, not knowing if it would turn out to be a pause or an ending. During that time, the mail came in thick and steady: cards, letters, drawings from children, a few scrawled notes on the backs of utility bills because someone had grabbed the nearest piece of paper in their worry. The messages were so kind they were almost unbearable. They said things like, “If you never sing another note, you’ve already given us more than enough,” and, “Please take care of yourself. Rest is not a betrayal.”

I believed the doctors when they told me what was happening in my body. It took me longer to believe you when you said I didn’t have to earn your love by pushing myself past my limits. But little by little, your insistence wore down my stubbornness. When I finally came back to the House of Song after that hiatus, we announced it as a “conversation” rather than a concert. I sat in a comfortable chair with my guitar across my lap, told more stories and sang fewer songs, and you met me right there. Nobody shouted for the old marathon sets. Nobody booed when my voice cracked or I skipped a verse. You laughed with me when I lost my place and had to ask, “What was I talking about?” It felt less like a return to work and more like a family gathering where everyone was just relieved to still be in the same room.

I want to speak directly now to the different generations who kept me company across those years.

To those of you who first saw me in smoky taverns and union halls, when the ceilings were low and the ashtrays were full and the air was thick with arguments about contracts and elections and wars: you were my first teachers in what a song could do. You were the ones who taught me that a room can change temperature when the right line lands, that a chorus sung together can make people stand a little straighter walking back into a hostile workplace. You taught me the difference between performing and participating. If I ever managed to bring even a fraction of that energy into the more formal places I played later on, it’s because you drilled it into me in those early days: this is not a one-way transaction. This is a circle.

To those of you who only ever knew me as the white-haired woman at the House of Song—perhaps you’d heard stories about the younger me, perhaps you hadn’t—you met me at a time when I could no longer pretend I was anything but old. You saw the tremor in my hands when I tuned the guitar. You heard the way my breath caught in my chest if I laughed too hard. You stayed anyway. You weren’t coming to see if I could still hit the high notes or play as fast as I used to. You were coming because that room had become, for all of us, a kind of community living room. We sat together in that space and let music—mine, yours, the children’s, the guests’—remind us that there is more continuity in this world than the headlines would have us believe.

To those of you who never saw me in person at all, but grew up with parents or grandparents playing my songs on old formats—tapes, records, crusty CDs dug out of glove compartments—I am especially grateful. You inherited my voice the way you might inherit a piece of furniture: something that’s just always been there in the corner of the room. You listened from the back seat or the hallway while your elders did dishes or drove to work. Maybe you rolled your eyes at first. Maybe you swore you’d never listen to that “old folk stuff” on purpose. And yet, somewhere along the way, a lyric or a melody slipped past your defenses and made a home in you. When you turned up at the House of Song years later, dragging those elders up the ramp and saying, “This is her, right there,” I felt like I’d met a new branch of the family at a reunion.

All of you, across those different eras, helped hold me together in ways I didn’t always understand at the time.

In my younger years, when I was eating more worry than food some months, your ticket money and your insistence on passing the hat made the difference between paying the heating bill and shivering. That’s the plain, unromantic side of “fans as fuel”: you quite literally kept the lights on and the guitar in working order. You brought casseroles when someone close to me died. You slipped grocery vouchers into my hand “by accident.” You organized benefits for other people and then dragged me onto the bill so I’d remember that my voice counted as a contribution, too.

In my middle years, when the world seemed determined to swing between one extreme and another politically, your questions and your arguments in the lobby after shows kept my mind from calcifying. You challenged me when I missed something. You broadened my perspective by telling me what it looked like from where you stood. You kept me from falling into the trap of nostalgia, of pretending some earlier decade had all the answers. You made me keep learning.

In my later years, when my body and brain started to fray at the edges in earnest, your care was not metaphorical. It was hands on my elbow and steady voices saying, “Take your time.” It was emails that began with, “If you don’t answer this, that’s all right; I just wanted you to know…” It was people showing up at the House of Song not expecting a show but simply wanting to share space, to listen to whoever happened to be playing, to keep the circle going even when I couldn’t be there in person.

There’s a fashion, in some circles, for talking about boundaries between artists and audiences, about mystique and distance and not letting people get “too close.” I understand the reasons for that talk. There are ways in which my life would have been simpler if I’d drawn a thicker line. But the truth is, I don’t know how I would have survived the hard years without the permeability we built together. You knew me as a human being, not as a projection. You saw me tired and cranky and forgetful. I saw you in hospital gowns and work uniforms and hand-me-down jackets. We recognized each other. That recognition was our fuel.

So when I say that you kept me singing, I don’t mean that flattering my ego pushed me back onstage. I mean that knowing you were out there—living your complicated, beautiful, difficult lives—gave me a reason to keep trying to make something useful out of breath and wood and string. On the days when I thought, “No one would notice if I stopped,” the letters and the faces and the small acts of mutual care told me otherwise. Not because I was indispensable, but because what we had built together was worth tending as long as we could.

If I managed to carry you through a few hard nights, know that you carried me through years.

By now you’ve probably noticed a pattern in the way I talk about music. I don’t really treat it as a job, or even a hobby. I talk about it the way some people talk about weather, or family: something that was here before me and will be here long after I’m gone.

When I was little, before I had language for any of this, I used to lie awake at night and listen to the world around our narrow house in Geneva. We were close enough to the lake that, on cold nights, you could hear the ice shifting—low creaks and groans like an old person getting comfortable in a chair. The Buckeye trees out back had their own way of talking, leaves clacking softly against each other when the wind moved through. Every so often a train would pass in the distance, that steady metal-on-metal rhythm laying down a line underneath everything else. Inside, the radiator hissed and popped, old floorboards settled, April’s sewing machine clicked and hummed if she was up late finishing a job.

If you put all that together—the lake, the trees, the trains, the house—you got something that sounded an awful lot like a song, even when nobody in the room was trying to make music. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, of course. I just knew that sometimes, if I listened hard, the fear in my chest would quiet down a little, and the world would seem less random.

“Buckeye Breeze,” that little pattern of notes I stumbled onto as a girl, was my first clumsy attempt to answer that background song. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody or make a name for myself. I was trying to catch the way the wind moved through our trees and the way the trains faded in and out and the way my own heartbeat tried to match them. That tune didn’t have words for the longest time. It was just a way of saying, “I hear you,” to something bigger than me.

As I got older, I learned that my sense of the world being full of quiet music wasn’t unique. I’d had hints of it from my grandparents, who treated certain sounds with a kind of ordinary reverence. The first day of the thaw, when water started trickling through the gutters again, Brandon would cock his head and say, “Hear that? Spring’s tuning up.” April would pause during a storm and listen to the rain drumming on the roof, then hum along under her breath as if she were finding the key. They didn’t call that spiritual; they just called it life.

Later in my life, I had the honor— and I do mean honor—of being welcomed, carefully, into the lives of Shawnee and Seneca-Cayuga families. I want to be clear here: their stories are theirs, not mine, and there are teachings I was given that I won’t repeat in a letter that might end up on a wall for strangers. Some things were shared with me in confidence, or in ceremony, and it would be a betrayal to drag them out into the light for the sake of sounding wise.

What I can say is that being allowed to sit at the edges of their gatherings changed, deepened, and corrected the way I understood music and land and time.

I was taught, in small, patient ways, to pay attention to cycles I’d previously treated as background: the way the light changes over a field as the day goes on; which birds fall silent when a storm is coming; how the wind on your face is different just before snow. I was invited to listen to drums that didn’t just keep time for a song but seemed to keep time with something older—the heartbeat of the earth, if you’ll forgive a phrase that sounds grander on paper than it feels when you’re sitting there feeling it in your ribs.

There were ceremonies of gratitude that felt, to my Midwestern eyes, both entirely new and deeply familiar. Offerings made to the land, songs sung at certain times and places, not for entertainment but as a way of acknowledging relationship. I’d grown up with mealtime prayers and church hymns and union chants, all of which have their own power. This was another thread in the same cloth, but woven with a particular attention to the fact that we are guests here, not owners.

At one point, after I’d been stumbling around their edges for a while, doing my best not to be a nuisance, I was given a name. I won’t write the language here—it’s not mine to mangle—but loosely translated, it meant something like “a little wolf with a gentle voice.” I wept, privately, when I understood what they were offering me with that. Not a title. Not a badge. A reminder. Be small enough to stay curious. Be wolf enough to protect what matters. Keep your voice soft enough that people can lean in, but strong enough that it carries when it has to.

That name, and the care behind it, stayed with me every time I walked out onto a stage or a porch or a patch of grass with a guitar. It reminded me that songs are not separate from the places they’re sung. When we sing indoors, we’re still vibrating air that has passed over fields and through trees and down city streets. When we stomp our feet in time, we’re still landing on the same ground that holds the roots of those Buckeye trees and the bones of our ancestors, whoever and wherever they may be.

I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that when I say “music is eternal,” I’m not talking about the music business. I’m not guaranteeing that any of my songs, or my name, or the places I played will be remembered in a hundred years. They might. They might not. That part doesn’t interest me as much as you might think.

What I believe, with the kind of quiet certainty that doesn’t need an argument, is that the spirit of music will exist as long as there are beings capable of listening.

It’s in the wind that rattles the last dry leaves on an Ohio tree in November. It’s in the way lake ice cracks and moans when the thaw comes, and how that sound slides up and down like a slide guitar only much, much older. It’s in the first chorus of spring frogs when the ditches fill with water, that ragged orchestra tuning up while the sky is still light. It’s in the creak of a porch swing where two teenagers are trying to decide whether to say “I love you” for the first time. It’s in the clack of a train on worn-out tracks at three in the morning, carrying people to jobs they don’t want and families they love. It’s in the laughter that erupts when a toddler does something unscripted in the middle of a solemn event and everyone realizes, together, that they’ve been taking themselves too seriously.

I have heard music in hospital corridors, where machines beep in uneven rhythms and somebody down the hall is humming to distract themselves from the smell of antiseptic. I have heard it in grocery store aisles when a mother absent-mindedly sings to her baby while comparing prices, and the baby kicks their legs like they’re already dancing. I have heard it in the collective inhale of a crowd just before a storm hits at an outdoor show, that shared anticipation as tents flap and instruments get zipped into cases and everybody looks up at the sky together, united for a moment by nothing more than weather.

You don’t have to call that “God” if that word doesn’t fit you. You don’t have to call it anything at all. But I suspect most of you know what I’m talking about: that sense of something moving through us and around us when we give our full attention to a sound, or a silence, or each other.

I have stood in a lot of different kinds of rooms with a guitar in my hands. I’ve sung in churches where stained glass filtered the light into colors you could almost taste, and people folded their hands politely until some old hymn slipped out of my mouth and they couldn’t help but join in. I’ve sung in union halls under fluorescent bulbs that made everybody look ten years more tired, where the sacredness came not from architecture but from the fact that people were risking their livelihoods just by gathering. I’ve sung on courthouse steps, in school gyms, on flatbed trucks, in hospital rec rooms, in backyards strung with Christmas lights in July.

The thing they all had in common wasn’t a particular doctrine. It wasn’t the words we used for whatever might be bigger than us. It was the quality of attention in the room when people let down their guard for a minute and listened together.

There were nights in church basements when, for a few verses, the distance between the believer and the skeptic, the lifelong member and the stranger at the back, narrowed to almost nothing. There were nights in very secular spaces—bars, festivals, political rallies—when the hush that fell over the crowd felt more reverent than any formal liturgy I’d ever experienced. I’ve seen people close their eyes and tilt their heads back, holding onto a note as if it were a rope thrown across a chasm. I’ve seen others stare straight ahead, faces dry but jaws clenched, as a lyric they didn’t know they needed finally gave shape to something they’d been carrying alone.

Whatever you call that… that’s what I mean when I say the act of making and sharing song is something like prayer.

Prayer, in my experience, is less about reciting the right phrases and more about paying attention on purpose. It’s saying, “I acknowledge that I am not the center of the universe. I am listening.” When we gather around a song—whether we’re singing or just breathing along while someone else does—we’re doing something like that together. We’re saying, “For these three minutes, we will notice the same thing. We will let it move us. We will set down, just briefly, the illusion that any of us are doing this alone.”

You don’t need a church for that. You don’t need a doctrine or a label. I have seen it happen in living rooms with a broken-down piano, in prison chapels with missing keys, in school music rooms where the instruments are held together with tape and hope. I have seen it in circles of drumbeats where no one person is “leading,” just everyone listening hard enough that the pattern emerges on its own.

The teachings I received from my Indigenous friends, my grandparents’ work songs, the union hymns, the church choirs, the records and books and demonstrations and potlucks—all of it braided together into this one conviction: music is not a product we invented. It’s a language we share with the world around us.

Some of us are fortunate enough to spend our lives speaking that language a little more fluently in public. Others hum to themselves while washing dishes and never think to call it art. Children babble nonsense tunes that accidentally contain more truth than anything on the radio. Elders who can’t remember their own names some days can still sing all the verses to songs they learned as teenagers. None of that depends on me, or on any particular genre, or on whether there’s a place called the House of Song in Geneva, Ohio.

Long after my voice is gone, long after my recordings wear out or get buried under newer sounds, the wind will still move through the trees in a way that suggests a melody. The trains—whatever they look like by then—will still lay down their steady rhythms on cold nights. People will still hum to their babies in whatever languages are spoken where you live. Someone will still find comfort in tapping out a beat on a steering wheel at a red light. Someone else will sit very still on a porch somewhere, listening for the first spring frog and feeling, without needing to say it out loud, that they have just heard something holy.

That is what gives me peace, writing this as an old woman who has spent most of her life leaning on six strings and a voice. I am not asking you to keep my songs alive for my sake. I am asking you to keep listening for the music that is already here, underneath the traffic and the headlines and the static. Add your own notes when you can. Whistle, drum, strum, clap, cry, laugh, sit in silence with other people and let the quiet ring.

If you do that, if you keep turning your ear toward that bigger song, then no matter what happens to my little corner of it, I’ll know that in some small way, we were in tune.

If you’re holding this letter in your hands somewhere, or reading it on a screen, I’m glad for your company. But if you’re reading it framed on the wall at the House of Song, I want you to do me a favor.

Look around you for a minute.

Don’t just skim the words and move on. Let your eyes wander. Notice the scuffed floorboards—some of those marks are from the days when this place was still Eddie’s Tavern and you had to dodge spilled beer to get to the stage. Some are from kids running back and forth between chairs while their parents tried to shush them. Some are from musicians pacing to calm their nerves before a set. If you listen closely, you might almost hear the ghosts of those footsteps.

Look at the walls. You’ll see photos of performers from all over the map—folks with names you might recognize, and plenty you won’t. Look for the ones who are laughing mid-song, mouth wide open, eyes squinted. Look for the ones whose hands are blurred in the picture because they were moving too fast. Look at the different bodies, ages, shades of skin, the different instruments: guitars, fiddles, drums, flutes, horns, sometimes nothing but a voice and a chair. Those images are not there to impress you with a roster. They’re there to remind you that this room has held many stories and that yours, whatever it is, belongs on that wall of memory too, even if nobody ever snaps your picture.

If you see children’s drawings taped up somewhere—stick figures with guitars bigger than they are, crooked rainbows over a building that sort of looks like this one, wobbly letters spelling out “Thank you for the songs”—take a second with those. Those are my favorite decorations. They mean that little hands have been busy here, that kids have been allowed to be present and noisy and themselves. If this space ever gets too polished for construction-paper art and crayon hearts, I hope someone gently messes it up again.

Take in the smells if you can. Maybe by the time you’re reading this, the place smells more like coffee and soup and sawdust than cigarette smoke and beer. Maybe it smells like rain-wet coats and whatever someone just baked for the bake sale. Whatever the specifics, I hope it smells lived-in. A little worn around the edges. Not like a museum.

Now, if you’re standing there and your heart is beating a little too fast, and you keep glancing toward the doorway that leads to the stage, this next part is for you.

Maybe you’re about to go up there for the first time. Maybe someone talked you into signing up for the open mic, or you lost a bet, or you finally ran out of excuses. Maybe you’ve been playing for years in your bedroom or your garage, but this is the first time you’ve ever let strangers hear you. Maybe you’re a kid whose knees don’t quite reach the floor when you sit in a chair. Maybe you’re older than you ever expected to be and you’re thinking, “Who do I think I am, starting now?”

Whatever your situation, I can almost guarantee your stomach feels like it’s full of rocks and bees. You’re convinced everyone can see your hands shaking. You are very sure that the song you chose is suddenly the worst song any human being has ever written.

Take a breath.

I am not there in person to grab your hand, but if I could be, I’d say this: It does not have to be perfect. It never did. It never will. That is not the point.

The people sitting in those chairs are not here to judge you against some invisible standard. They are here because, consciously or not, they are hungry for honesty. They’re carrying their own fears and griefs and joys. They have made mistakes they’re still trying to forgive themselves for. They have done kind things they barely remember because being kind is just how they move through the world. They do not need a flawless performance from you. They need you to mean what you’re doing.

If your voice cracks, that’s all right. Voices crack in grief and in laughter every day; nobody calls that a failure. If your fingers fumble and you have to start a verse over, that’s all right. Most of life is starting things over we thought we’d already learned. If you forget a line, make a new one or hum through it. If you’re so nervous you have to sit down for a minute and sip water, do that. Look out into the room. You’ll see more faces nodding in sympathy than rolling their eyes.

You are not auditioning for heaven or history. You are joining a conversation that has been going on long before you and will continue long after. All that’s being asked of you in that moment is that you show up as honestly as you can, offer what you have, and let it go.

For those of you who are not performing, but simply visiting, listening, passing through: you are part of this legacy too. The House of Song was never meant to be a shrine to me. It was meant to be a living room big enough for a whole town.

If you find yourself there on a Tuesday morning, when nothing much is happening except someone sweeping and the coffee pot gurgling, I hope you feel welcome to sit down for a while anyway. If you stop in on a night when a teenager is squeaking through their first fiddle tune, I hope you clap like they’re headlining the biggest hall in the world. If you drift in on a long, low Sunday afternoon when an elder is telling stories more than singing, I hope you listen with the same attention you’d give a polished act. In all those ways, you help keep the place doing what it was built to do.

Since I won’t be around to nag anyone about it in person, let me put down, in plain language, what I hope continues within those walls once I’m gone.

I hope the shows stay as close to free as is sustainable. Sliding-scale, pay-what-you-can, “drop a few dollars in the jar if you’ve got them”—whatever form it takes, I hope nobody is turned away for lack of money. A room like this should never be a luxury item. Music was given to us freely by the world; it feels wrong to lock it behind a full ticket price. People need to be able to wander in with only bus fare in their pockets and still feel like they belong.

I hope children remain welcome—not just tolerated, but welcomed. That means there will be noise sometimes. Someone’s baby will fuss during a quiet song. A toddler will decide, midway through a serious ballad, that this is the moment to run laps in front of the stage. Teenagers will whisper and giggle in the back, trying on identities the way they try on jackets. That’s life. That’s the sound of the future testing out its voice. If you want complete silence and a perfectly attentive crowd, there are venues that can give you that. The House of Song should always leave room for crayons on the table, juice on the floor, and lullabies woven in between protest anthems.

I hope there is always space in the schedule for both the fierce and the gentle. Protest songs and lullabies belong in the same building, sometimes in the same set. The world does not sort itself neatly into “political” and “personal,” and our music shouldn’t have to, either. There should be nights when people sing furious songs about bosses and borders and bombs, voices ragged from shouting, and nights when they sing about rocking a baby, working a small garden, making soup for a sick neighbor. Most importantly, there should be nights when both kinds of songs stand shoulder to shoulder, reminding us that the big struggles and the small kindnesses are part of the same fight.

I hope the stories of working people continue to be centered here. This room was built on the wages of factory workers, nurses, teachers, cashiers, farmers, mechanics, janitors, aides—the folks whose names don’t show up in history books except as numbers. The songs sung here should keep making room for their lives: the third-shift loneliness, the bone-deep exhaustion, the pride in a job done well even when nobody says thank you, the jokes traded at two in the morning over a pot of old coffee. If you ever look at a season’s lineup and realize you’re only hearing from people who have never worked a day with their hands or worried about making rent, gently but firmly widen the door.

I hope the stories and voices of Indigenous friends and neighbors continue to have a home in this space, not as decoration or tokenism but as part of the backbone. This land had songs long before any of our families arrived, and it will have songs after we’re gone. If the House of Song forgets that, it will become smaller and hollower, no matter how many acts it books. Make room for drums and flutes and languages that may not be your own. Make room for the silence between those sounds, too. Make room for the stories of loss and survival that come with them, without demanding they be smoothed over for your comfort.

And I hope—maybe most of all—that the House of Song never forgets its own humble beginnings. It used to be just Eddie’s: a tavern with sticky floors and ugly lights and a jukebox that skipped on the same track for years. The only thing that made it special was the people in it. We hung curtains and changed the paint and put up better lights, yes, but we never changed that part. If anyone ever starts talking about the place as if it were some holy temple that ordinary people are lucky to enter, I trust you to remind them that it was born out of a bar where mill workers and nurses and truckers came to blow off steam. The holiness, if there is any, comes from the gathering, not the bricks.

You might think it’s funny, an old woman writing instructions to a building. But I’m not really talking to the walls. I’m talking to you—whoever you are, whenever you are—standing there reading these words.

Maybe you’re a board member trying to figure out the budget for the next year. Maybe you’re a volunteer wiping down tables after a show. Maybe you’re a kid whose aunt dragged you here and you’re wondering when you can go back to your video games. Maybe you’re a touring musician wondering what kind of room this is, what kind of crowd you’re about to meet. Maybe you’re just someone who ducked in out of the rain to warm up and ended up staying long enough to read a letter on the wall.

I don’t know your story. But I know this: if you are inside those doors, you are part of the legacy already. You are a link in the chain between the nights I played for a handful of neighbors at Eddie’s and the future evenings when someone I’ll never meet will sing words I can’t imagine to people who haven’t been born yet.

Take care of the House of Song, if you can. Sweep the floor when it needs sweeping. Argue about setlists and soundchecks and fundraising, but never lose sight of the people at the heart of it all. Offer what you have—time, money, talent, patience, forgiveness. Ask for help when you need it. Make room for the loud and the quiet, the polished and the rough, the old and the new.

If, years from now, somebody walks into that room feeling tired and alone and leaves feeling even a little less so, then everything we poured into this place will have been worthwhile. And if you are the one who unlocks the door that night, or sings the song, or simply sits in a chair and listens with your whole heart, know that you’re doing exactly what I hoped would continue.

You, and places like this, are my legacy far more than any record or plaque. Take good care of each other. The rest will follow.

By now I’ve told you a lot about where I came from and what kept me going. If you remember none of the details, I hope you’ll remember this much: more than anything, I want you to keep listening.

Not just to music in the narrow sense, though I’d be pleased if you kept that close, too. I mean listening as a way of moving through the world.

Listen to the elders in your life, even when they ramble and double back and forget what point they were trying to make. Half the time the real story is hiding in the detour. Ask them questions while you still can. Ask twice if you have to. Write down the recipes, but also the jokes and the small grudges and the names of people who helped them along the way.

Listen to the children. They’ll say things that make you want to correct them; sometimes you should. But sometimes they’ll hand you the plain truth in a sentence so simple you’d never have dared to say it. Pay attention when a child tells you what scares them, or what they think is unfair. They often see the cracks before the rest of us.

Learn at least one song by heart that you can sing without an instrument, without a screen, without any help at all. It doesn’t have to be one of mine. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to be something you can carry into a power outage, or a hospital room, or a long walk, and share if somebody needs it. There is a particular comfort in a song that doesn’t depend on electricity.

Support the small places near you that give people room to tell their stories: your local venues, yes, but also your libraries, your community centers, your church basements, your union halls, your school stages, your neighborhood parks. Those are the lungs of a town. When they get starved of air, everything else starts gasping.

Show up for the little shows, not just the big ones. Go hear the high school band concert where half the notes are a little off. Go to the open mic where the poets are still figuring out what a line break is. Go to the cultural night at the library where someone’s grandmother is teaching a song in a language you don’t speak. The stadium acts and the big tours will survive without you. The tiny, brave experiments around the corner might not.

If you have a few dollars and you’re not sure where to put them, you could do worse than a used-book sale at the library, a tip jar at a local gig, a fundraiser for a music program at a school that’s always being told it’s “optional.” You’d be surprised how far ten dollars can travel in those ecosystems.

Listening, if you do it with your whole self, is political whether you mean it to be or not.

Pay attention to who isn’t getting a microphone, or a column, or a chair at the table. Listen for the silence around certain people: the workers whose schedules are too unpredictable to attend meetings; the migrants who are doing the hardest jobs in your town and going home to the quietest apartments; the Indigenous neighbors whose land you’re standing on whether you think about it or not; the kids who are always told to hush because “grown-ups are talking.”

When somebody from those groups does speak or sing or write, try, just for a while, to hear them without immediately running their words through the filter of your own comfort. Ask yourself, “What are they trying to tell me about how the world feels from where they stand?” You don’t have to agree with every word to honor the act of them trusting you enough to speak.

If you’re in a room and you realize the only voices you’ve been hearing sound a lot like your own—in class, in a meeting, on a stage, at a party—see if you can make some space. That might mean stepping back so someone else can step up. It might mean nudging the conversation toward, “Have we asked the people this decision will affect the most?” It might mean giving up a bit of your own airtime. None of us are the center of every story. Listening helps remind us of that.

And now, because I know some of you reading this will be grieving, I want to speak to that directly.

Some of you will be crying. The words on this page might be blurry. Your chest might hurt. You might feel ridiculous for being this upset over a person you only knew through songs and stories and the occasional handshake at the merch table. Don’t scold yourself for that. Love and grief pay very little attention to the categories we try to sort them into.

Some of you will be angry. Maybe at the unfairness of age and illness, maybe at the world for taking one more steady point out of your sky, maybe at me for having the nerve to die on you. You might be mad that I got ninety-seven years when someone you adored got twenty-seven. You might be mad that there isn’t an obvious place to put that anger. I won’t tell you not to feel that way. Anger is one of the ways we mark what mattered.

Some of you will feel numb. You’ll read this and think, “I should be feeling something,” and feel guilty that you don’t. You might have had to turn off your feelings to make it through other losses, and the switch doesn’t flip back on just because an old folk singer you cared about has left the stage. That’s all right too. Sometimes the heart is on delay. Sometimes the grief arrives months later, in the middle of some entirely unrelated errand, when one of my songs comes on in a grocery store and you find yourself frozen in front of the canned beans.

However it shows up—or doesn’t—your grief is not a test you can pass or fail. You don’t have to move on quickly. You don’t have to “find the lesson” right away. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine if you’re not, or pretend you’re shattered if you’re mostly okay.

If it helps you to put on one of my recordings, or some bootleg someone made at the House of Song, and sit in the dark and cry until your eyes sting—do that. If it helps you to sing along off-key while you wash dishes, letting the words keep your hands moving—do that. If it helps you to sit in silence with someone you trust, not saying anything at all while the music plays quietly in the next room—do that. If it helps you to put the guitar down, or turn the radio off, and walk outside into whatever weather you’ve been given and just listen to the wind and the traffic and the birds—do that.

Grief and music have always been tangled up together. We sing at funerals, at wakes, at vigils, at kitchen tables after the guests have gone home. We hum without thinking when we’re worried sick. We turn the volume up when we’re trying not to think at all. There is no wrong way to let a song hold you for a while, as long as you’re not using it to hurt yourself or someone else.

If someday you can’t bear to listen to my voice for a time, that’s okay. Put me away. Let someone else’s songs keep you company. There are plenty to choose from. If, years later, you stumble across one of mine by accident and it lands differently—softer, or sharper, or just right—take that as a little hello from the past, nothing more and nothing less.

When I say “keep listening,” I don’t mean “keep listening to me forever.” I mean keep your ear tuned to the life happening around you and inside you. Listen to the people you love. Listen to the people you don’t understand yet. Listen to the ones you’ve written off, and see if, underneath the noise, there is a hurt or a hope you recognize. Listen to your own body when it tells you it’s tired, or joyful, or in need of a change. Listen for the small invitations: a neighbor hinting they’d like company, a child asking for one more story, a co-worker saying, “No really, I’m fine,” in a voice that clearly isn’t.

And yes, listen for the music, in whatever form it takes for you.

Maybe that’s a choir or a band or a playlist. Maybe it’s the sound of your grandparent’s radio in the next room. Maybe it’s a rhythm you tap out on the steering wheel at a red light. Maybe it’s the scrape of your own chair on the floor as you stand up at a meeting and say, “Actually, I have something to add.”

The world, for all its noise and cruelty and hurry, is still full of melodies worth leaning toward. If you can make it a habit to notice them, and to add your own in whatever modest way is yours to add, then in a very real sense we’ll still be connected.

I used to tell audiences, half-joking, that if they ever wanted to find me after I was gone, they should listen for a slightly off-key harmony coming in late on the last chorus. There’s probably more truth in that than theology. I don’t pretend to know what happens after death. That’s above my pay grade. What I do know is that we leave traces in each other—phrases, habits, recipes, inside jokes, favorite songs. We become part of the harmony of other people’s lives.

So when you hear a line that sounds like something I might have said, or a chord change that feels familiar, or you find yourself comforting a stranger in a way that echoes something you once heard in a song of mine, think of me if you like. Not as a ghost hovering in the rafters, but as one more voice folded into the great, untidy choir we’ve all been part of all along.

Keep listening. I’ll be somewhere in the harmony.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, thank you for listening to an old woman spin out one more long story. I know this hasn’t been a short note. Brevity was never my strongest suit when there was a chance to thank people properly.

There are more names in my heart than I could ever fit on a page. Some of them you know already: my grandparents, April and Brandon, who gave me a home and a backbone; my mother, whose absence shaped me as surely as her presence might have; the partner who walked beside me through years of laundry and bills and shared jokes that never made it into a song; Phoebe and Lucille, stubborn and brilliant, who kept my feet on the ground when my head tried to float off; my niece Glenda and the wild constellation of daughters and granddaughters and grand-nieces who filled my late life with glitter and crumbs and noise and new ideas. Many more are strangers to you but not to me: neighbors, co-workers, organizers, nurses, librarians, sound techs, bartenders, ushers, the person who always made sure there was a glass of water on the stage before I walked out.

If you see yourself anywhere in that list—or if you suspect you might belong there even if we never spoke—please accept this as your mention. I have been held up by so many hands over the years that it would take another lifetime to thank each one individually. Consider this letter my best attempt.

I don’t know where you are as you read this. Maybe you’re at the House of Song, with the murmur of tuning instruments bleeding in from the next room. Maybe you’re in a quiet apartment after a long day, with a sink full of dishes waiting. Maybe you’re on a bus with this glowing in your lap, or sitting up late in a hospital chair, or stealing a moment at work on your lunch break. Wherever you are, I hope you feel, in some small way, the thread that connects us—not because of who I am, but because of what we’ve shared.

If you take anything from my life, let it be this: you are allowed to be exactly as ordinary and as extraordinary as you are. You don’t have to be a genius or a saint or a headline to matter. Showing up for your people, paying attention, telling the truth as kindly as you can, singing when you’re able, listening when you’re not—that is more than enough. The world is held together, mostly, by people who will never be on a stage.

You have given me more than I ever expected or deserved: your evenings, your letters, your patience, your corrections, your forgiveness, your applause, your silence when silence was called for, your voices joining mine on choruses until I couldn’t tell where I ended and you began. You let a girl from a narrow house in Geneva grow old as a singer without losing her place at the table. That is a grace I will never be able to repay, but I will be grateful for it as long as any part of me remembers anything at all.

If somewhere down the line you find yourself thinking, “What would Jennifer say about this?” I hope the answer is not a clever slogan but something simple, like: Be gentle if you can. Be brave when you must. Share what you have. Keep an eye on the ones the world tries to overlook. Don’t wait for perfect conditions to sing your song.

And if you’d rather not think of me at all, that’s all right too. I don’t need to haunt your thoughts. Let this letter be what it is—a long thank-you, a blessing of sorts, a way of saying goodbye that still feels a little like hello.

I have had a good, long life. It was not always easy, and there are things I wish I’d done better, but I would not trade the years I spent standing in front of you with a guitar for anything. You turned my small, private way of coping into a shared practice of hope. You made my corner of the world wider and kinder than it had any right to be.

Keep listening—to music, to each other, to the quiet invitations that come disguised as ordinary days. Keep singing if you can, in whatever voice and style the world has given you. Keep making room for one another. If you do that, then whatever little light I carried will not go out; it will simply change hands.

With all my love and gratitude,

Jennifer Fischer-Scott