_She is always, in my memory, a creature clad in white. She stands onstage before a mike that is slightly taller than she is, so that she must rise onto her tiptoes to launch her amplified voice—childlike but piercing—out over the airwaves. Her favorite number was “A Vision of Heaven.” Diane was her name. She was eleven or twelve years old, dark-haired and plump-cheeked, and while I would not be surprised to learn that today she weighs two hundred pounds, has bad teeth, and lumbers around town in mismatched rayon warm-ups, I would be surprised if her voice is anything but gorgeous.

She sang with a team named Danny and Randy, who, like Ira and Charlie Louvin, played guitar and mandolin. Every Saturday night throughout the early ’60s, Danny and Randy performed on The Big 10 Jamboree on KTVE out of El Dorado, Arkansas. All of the older performers on that show—Danny and Randy, Dude Bernard, Floyd McClendon, Merle Kilgore, and Big Daddy—were part-time musicians, ordinary people who worked during the week as roughnecks in the nearby oil fields, as gas station attendants, truck drivers, as law enforcement officers. Only Kilgore, who went on to perform on the Grand Ole Opry and today manages Hank Williams, Jr., ever found a career in music.

I recently asked Kilgore how he’d rate the musicianship of those who appeared on the show. A friendly and charitable man who has performed with the likes of George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley, Kilgore considered the question for several moments before replying. “Well,” he finally said, “I reckon I’d say it was kind of average.”

From time to time even my untrained ear could detect a sour note or two. Also, the performers were always breaking guitar strings or getting shocked by the microphone. One evening, while Kilgore sang and Big Daddy, the local sheriff, stood behind him slapping the acoustic bass, the head of a deputy sheriff—who had apparently crawled across the floor trying to stay out of the picture—appeared at the bottom of our TV screen. Startled, Big Daddy glanced down at the deputy for a few seconds, then dropped the bass and ran offstage. A moment later you could hear the unmistakable sound of a siren.

The show reached all of Southern Arkansas, most of Northern Louisiana, and parts of the Mississippi Delta, where I grew up. My parents and my grandparents and I would gather before Grandpa’s Zenith with a big bowl of popcorn or some of Grandma’s molasses candy, and watch, sometimes singing along. We were doing what thousands of other white, mostly rural, families were doing throughout the area called the Ark-La-Miss: having a Big 10 party.

My mother’s favorite performer was Dude Bernard, a short, tow-headed man who always wore a rhinestone-studded cowboy shirt and every now and then attempted, with a notable lack of success, to play the guitar behind his back. Dad’s favorite was Kilgore, who had already begun to write and perform numbers like “Wolverton Mountain” and “Dear Momma”—songs that would later make him famous. My grandparents both loved Floyd McClendon, who sometimes missed the show because he was working overtime on an oil rig. McClendon had coal-black hair and an unassuming, get-down-to-business-pick-and-sing manner that probably convinced Grandma and Grandpa he was just like them: a regular hardworking individual who just happened to be blessed with a musical voice.

But for me the show revolved around Diane. I heard her voice in my dreams at night. Off and on all day, I imagined what I would say to her if I ever met her. I would tell her that I could sing, too, that I believed my voice would sound better in harmony with hers than Danny’s and Randy’s ever could. I would tell her that I planned to be a musician when I grew up, that I already played the guitar (a bold-faced lie, by the way), and that I had never missed church and never would.

If I was ever face-to-face with her, I promised myself, I would tell her I loved her. That promise was easy to make because, after all, I was a six-year-old boy who’d never been farther away from Indianola, Mississippi, than Yazoo City and never expected to be, and could not truly conceive of the possibility of seeing her in person, let alone getting close enough to talk to her.

That was before the manager of the television station realized that he had a group of entertainers who were wildly popular in the Ark-La-Miss and that there was money to be made off their popularity. He bought a tape machine and made regional broadcast history by creating a mobile recording studio within the confines of a house trailer and taking The Big 10 on the road.

_In his fine recent book In the Country of Country, Nicholas Dawidoff argues that the point of country music was not so much that it was country but that it “took into account an audience that thought of life as a struggle.” For my parents and grandparents, life had always been a struggle, just as I suspect it had been for most of the performers on The Big 10. Neither of my parents had graduated from high school, nor had Grandpa. My grandmother, blind in one eye since the age of six, had only attended school for two years and as a result was functionally illiterate. The only life they knew involved working in the fields from sun-up ’til dark, anxiously scanning the skies (either hoping for rain or dreading it), and once a year, at the end of winter, going into Indianola to see Mr. Moore, the local banker, before whom they would figuratively kneel, begging for this year’s “furnish.” They believed, like A. P. Carter of the Carter Family, that it took a worried man to sing a worried song, and they were convinced that when Floyd McClendon, Dude Bernard, and Merle Kilgore sang about hurt and trouble, they knew what they were singing about. They also believed, I think, that these men and the other performers on The Big 10 Jamboree had found a way to transcend their troubles—whatever those particular troubles were— and that way was through music. But my family’s interest had something to do with celebrity, too, with being a public, as opposed to a purely private, person. As people who were noticed only by the folks whose fields bordered theirs, my parents and grandparents saw in the performers on The Big 10 a group of individuals who had found a way to plead their cases before a greater jury. If their hearts hurt, they could tell folks about it every Saturday night. Their aches, their pains, their troubles and worries, were beamed all the way to Fordyce and Pine Bluff, to Bastrop and Lake Providence, to Belzoni and Indianola.

When The Big 10 went on the road in late 1961, and it was announced that one show would be taped in nearby Greenville, my folks were among the first to buy tickets. I can remember the day my mother told me, with a measure of awe in her voice, that in only two weeks, we’d be seeing The Big 10 Jamboree live.

“Maybe I’ll get to talk to Diane,” I said.

“Aw, now, I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much,” she said. “There’ll be a lot of people there. It’s gonna be held in the armory, and that’s a mighty big building.”

In the end, I was not the one whose hopes rose too high. My hopes, in fact, would desert me when I finally met Diane: I would hide behind my mother, holding her leg and staring down at the floor, my face on fire. But in that moment, something mysterious would happen to everyone else in my family—something so utterly unforeseen and uncharacteristic that to this day everybody in my family has a different explanation for his or her behavior that night in Greenville.

_To be fair, I am not without musical talent. In later years I would become a passable guitar player and a halfway decent singer. At the time I’m speaking of, though, my only claim to musical skill was the ability to imitate the sound of a pedal steel guitar by putting a sheet of paper up to my lips and whining through it.

So what could have convinced my folks that they had in their midst the next Hank Williams?

I think they believed that to give me a cleaner, easier life than the ones they had all led they had to seize every opportunity, no matter how far-fetched. After all, they'd had many conversations with my uncle, a member of the Tupelo police force, who claimed complete amazement at the success of Elvis Presley. Uncle Cecil had lived behind the Presleys for a time, and he said that Elvis used to get out in the backyard with his guitar and try to sing, and it would stir up all the dogs on the block—those dogs thought Elvis was one of them, and if you’d heard him, according to my uncle, you would have thought the same. If a man who sounded like a dog could make millions, my folks may have reasoned, why not Stevie?

Whatever it was that made them behave like a rabid pack of Colonel Parkers that Saturday night, I saw no warning signs of it as we piled into the car. The talk, as best I recall, was about such topics as the cost of pre-emergents, the foolishness of our neighbor, Mr. Alvin Poe, who had just bought a new John Deere, and the embarrassment our preacher had suffered the previous Sunday when he got carried away during his sermon and shook his head so hard his dentures let go and landed in the organists lap. Only Mother mentioned the forthcoming show at all, and that was just to say, “Wonder whether or not Dude’ll sing ‘White Lightning’?”

“I don’t know,” Grandma said. “Seem like he sung that last week, didn’t he?”

Personally, I didn’t care what Dude sang. In truth, I didn’t care whether he or anybody else except Diane showed up.

_When we came around the corner, we saw throngs of people waiting outside the armory. The other thing we saw was the house trailer. It stood near the curb, right in front of the building. A banner draped over the windows read, “The Big 10 Jamboree.” Floyd McClendon, guitar case in hand, had just stepped out of the trailer. People shouted, “Floyd! Hey Floyd!” and McClendon grinned and waved.

I cannot recall a lot about the show, even though I watched it again on TV the following week. I know that we sat in the front row, and I remember that Merle Kilgore, dubbed “The Long Tall Texan,” wore a bright blue suit and cowboy boots and that he looked, up there on the stage, as if he were ten feet tall. I recall the enormous cameras—there were two of them—which the cameramen rolled back and forth in front of the stage, and I know that at one point, when one of the cameras took a crowd shot, it focused on me.

Kilgore, the host, said into the microphone, “Isn’t he cute, folks?”

The crowd roared. To the private person I had of necessity always been, the boy whose only audience was generally his dog, that roar—which was surely good-natured and not nearly as loud as it seemed to me then and seems to me now—sounded mocking, hideous. In that moment, I experienced the first epiphany of my life. I understood that the image the camera would convey was not really me. It was a thinner, flatter version of me, one that would reduce Stevie Yarbrough to a pair of slack jaws, an open mouth, stricken eyes. Had it been a still photo, the caption beneath it might have read A Country Boy Looks Startled.

When Dude Bernard came out and tried to play the guitar behind his back, I didn’t even notice, and when Danny and Randy and Diane appeared and Diane sang “A Vision of Heaven,” it failed to produce even a slight tingle in my spine. I had ceased to pay attention to anything except the camera. I was determined to duck if it found me once more; if necessary, I decided, I would hurl myself onto the floor.

The show ended, and the crowd called the performers out for an encore and they all stood together onstage and did a long version of “Stay a Little Longer,” each of the stars stepping up to the mike to sing a verse. Afterward, several of them descended into the crowd to shake hands, make small talk, and give autographs.

Suddenly, my folks and I were inches away from Danny and Randy and Diane. Danny, a small, dapper-looking man with a pencil-thin moustache, was talking to my dad about the Carter Family, and Randy was telling Grandma that yes ma’am, he sure did love those old hymns, too. And Mother was looking down at me and saying, “Well, now, here she is. What is it you been wanting to tell her?”

As I said, I had already been disoriented by having the camera pointed at me. So I was not at my best, and Diane was not at her best. She was still young, the hour was late, and she probably wished she could get back home to El Dorado and have a glass of warm milk and some cookies. Instead of looking at me, she seemed to be looking right through me. Whatever was on the other side of me must not have been very interesting, though, because the expression on her face was one of boredom. She looked like she couldn’t wait to go to sleep.

My cheeks blazed, my ears caught fire, I stuck my head behind my mother’s leg. So I didn’t see Kilgore walk over, but when he said, “How y’all doin’ ?” I recognized his voice.

“Real good,” my mother said. “Y’all sure can sing.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder. She exerted gentle pressure, trying to push my head into view. Simultaneously, I felt someone else’s hand on the back of my neck. It was a big hand, much heavier than Mother’s. It could have belonged to either my dad or my grandfather, though later on both of them denied having touched me.

Kilgore was looking down at me and smiling. “Hey, little fellow,” he said. He put his hand out. “You like country music?”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.

He shook my hand and said, “A person never can tell. Maybe one day you’ll be a country singer, too.”

“He already sings,” my mother said. “You ought to hear him.”

Danny said, “Got a voice, has he?”

“He can sing them harmonies,” Grandpa said, “just like old Bill Monroe.”

Dad said, “Naw, he actually sounds more like Ralph Stanley.”

“Who he reminds me of,” Grandma said, “is really Alton Delmore.”

Having just had the Country Music Hall of Fame flung at him, Kilgore behaved exactly as I would have behaved had I been in his shoes. He behaved, in fact, exactly as I do when someone tells me that his son or daughter is a really talented writer, that I ought to see the poem/story/novel/screenplay the kid just wrote last week, because it’s every bit as good as the best of Robert Frost or Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner or—and things fall off a bit here—Quentin Tarantino. I grin and give my office phone number and pray I’m not there when the call comes, as the call inevitably will.

Before he left us to greet other folks and shake their hands and try, for a few seconds, to make them feel special, Kilgore said, to no one in particular, “Y’all ought to bring him over to El Dorado sometime. Let him go on the show.”

He moved off into the crowd, not knowing what he had done.

_I might as well admit that for me, even under the best of circumstances, being a child was infuriating: I could always tell when something was up, but I could never quite tell what it was. I have noticed that nothing is so maddening to my own children as being only partly in the know. My six-year-old daughter, stumbling into our bedroom one Saturday morning, rubs the sleep from her eyes and says, “Are you guys having socks?” When we’ve recovered our wits, we tell her that no, we are not having socks, we never have socks, but no amount of reassurance can convince her. For the remainder of the day, she regards us with undisguised suspicion. She knows she’s onto something.

It’s hard to say when I became aware that I was onto something. It might have been the day Dad pulled down his Sears acoustic arch-top, which he could not play, and put strings on it. Since he had no idea how to tune the guitar, he just tightened the strings until they sounded nice to him. I asked him what he was doing. He said, “Oh, this old box’s been wanting somebody to pick it. Thought maybe before too long that person’d come along.” Or it could have been the day Mother picked me up from school, which was in itself unusual, because we lived six miles from town, and I always rode the bus. We drove over to Greenville, went to a store that sold Western apparel, and I was fitted out in a black cowboy suit, with matching hat and bandanna. When I asked her why she was buying me a cowboy suit, she said, “Everybody needs new duds from time to time.”

The week after we saw the show live in Greenville, we watched it on TV, and even though I tried to claim a lack of interest, everybody insisted that I just had to see it. My stricken face finally appeared on the screen, and Merle Kilgore said, “Isn’t he cute, folks?” and once again I heard that terrible roar.

Grandpa dug his elbow into my ribs. “A person could get used to seeing hisself, couldn’t he?”

“That little old Diane can’t do nothing Stevie can’t do,” said Grandma.

Dad said, “Can’t do most of what he can do.”

Mother said, “When she gets a little older, that girl’s gonna be fat.”

“Gonna have a deeper voice too,” Dad said. “Yes, sir, I’d say that little lady’s days in the spotlight are numbered.”

Everybody nodded, taking grim pleasure from the belief that Diane would soon return to anonymity. I clung to the arm of the couch, my palms sweating, my muscles tense. Shame and anger, I felt certain, would destroy me.

_Reconstructing the events of that Saturday—exactly two weeks after we saw The Big 10 live in Greenville—has always been difficult. Various explanations, for instance, have been advanced as to why my father remained at home, while the rest of us went to El Dorado. Dad says that it was picking season, that he was still busy in the fields, trying to get the last of the crop in, and so he couldn’t go. Grandma claims that he didn’t go because the car wasn’t big enough for all five of us to take such a long trip. Mother says he stayed home because he had a bad cold.

I don’t believe any of their explanations. If I got up right now and walked into my living room, where the TV stands, I would see our children’s collection of video tapes. There’s a whole row of Disney classics—Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Lion King—and on the shelf above those, there’s a row of homemade tapes. We have tapes of six different trick-or-treating expeditions. We have tapes of piano recitals, tapes of birthday parties, christenings, first communions, school plays, ballet rehearsals. We even have one tape in which my eldest daughter, two at the time, sits on the toilet and receives fulsome praise from both my wife and me for successfully completing potty training. In the media age, we don't believe in the significance—or perhaps even in the reality—of events until we get to see them on the tube.

If my appearance on The Big 10, which was after all a media event, were to be truly significant, it had to be observed by someone in the family. Since the VCR did not properly exist in 1961, and the show in El Dorado would be broadcast live, somebody had to stay home and watch it. That somebody was my father. It would be interesting to know whether he claimed the role for himself, got it by default, or was chosen by secret ballot.

I recall that as Mother nudged me toward the car, Dad walked along beside me, the guitar case in his hand. Knowing he couldn’t go with me, he gave me his pep talk right then. “Tonight,” he said, “don’t let yourself get nervous. Just go on up there and hit a lick or two and sing a little bit. You never can tell—they liable to decide they like it.”

“Who’s liable to?” I said.

“Them that’s running things.”

“Them that’s running what things?”

“Things,” he said. With his free hand he gestured at the gravel road, at the cotton field across the road and the distant horizon that lay beyond it. I understood the gesture to include all of reality—past, present, and future.

I was toting the mail for Team Yarbrough. The weight of the living, the dead, and the unborn rode my shoulders.

_We reached El Dorado at three in the afternoon. An attendant at a gas station gave us directions to the studio. When we got there, we found a tiny, dingy-looking building that resembled nothing so much as a shoebox. You couldn’t have packed a hundred people into it even if you’d removed the roof. Except for a couple of cars, the parking lot was deserted.

The transmitter, an orange tower perhaps eight hundred feet tall, stood right behind the building. Grandpa sat gazing up at the tower for a moment, then looked into the backseat at me.

“That thing up yonder”—he gestured at the transmitter—“it’s gonna beam you back home.”

It did not, in that moment, strike me that Grandpa had just hit on a marvelous title for a country song. What struck me in that moment was a wave of nausea. It washed over me, and I drowned in it, and when I floated back up, I had accepted the inevitable and been reborn. Right there in the parking lot outside Channel 10, I had become a fellow who, after much grinding and gnashing of teeth, after no small amount of wailing and wringing of hands, will generally find a way to make the best of a bad situation. By taking me to El Dorado and forcing this transformation on me, my folks did indeed present me with a gift, though it was certainly not the one they had in mind.

I said, “Let’s go get something to eat before the show.”

“Now you’re talking,” Grandpa said.

As we left the parking lot, Grandma began singing “Keep on the Sunny Side.” By the time we reached the highway, we had all joined in.

_Things glimpsed first on TV are invariably disappointing when you see them firsthand. In achieving their natural three-dimensional status, they are somehow reduced, they become merely real. Suddenly you see what surrounds them, all the stuff that has previously lain beyond your frame of reference.

On TV the stage where The Big 10 singers and pickers performed had looked huge, and the noise the crowd made sounded as if it had been produced by hundreds, if not thousands, of people. But the stage, if you could call it that, was little more than a space about fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep. It was also the setting for the nightly newscast. When we got there that Saturday night, a couple of guys were rolling the anchorman’s desk away and another one was hanging a dark blue sheet—the backdrop for The Big 10—over a wall map of Arkansas. I recognized the wall map as the same one the weatherman used.

A few metal folding chairs—no more than fifteen or twenty—had been lined up in front of the stage. One of the guys who’d rolled away the desk came back and started setting up microphones. Since nobody seemed to be paying us any attention, we sat down and waited.

Dad’s guitar lay in its case, and the case rested in the aisle. Nobody who came in could fail to see it. So it was no surprise that Big Daddy, the sheriff who played bass, noticed it as soon he entered the room.

He was wearing his sheriff’s uniform, as he often did on the show, and toting the bass. He stopped, looked down at the guitar case, then grinned at Grandpa and said, “We got us some help tonight, have we?”

“Merle said to bring this boy over and he’d put him on the show.”

“He did, did he?”

“Yes, sir, he sure did.”

“Well, then I reckon that’s what we ought to do.”

By then Floyd McClendon and Dude Bernard had entered. Both were carrying their guitar cases. They stopped to say hello and Big Daddy said, “This boy here’s gonna help us out tonight.”

“Say he is, huh?” Dude said.

“Sure enough.”

“What you gonna sing?” Dude said.

I was certain that when I opened my mouth no sound would come out. So I was as surprised as anybody when I heard myself say, “I may sing ‘White Lightning’ or I might do ‘Wolverton Mountain.’ ” I did not know the words to either of these songs, but for some reason that did not seem like a huge impediment.

“Well,” Dude said, looking at Floyd, “I reckon if the boy’s gonna sing ‘White Lightning,’ I’ll have to do something else.”

“You could sing ‘Fraulein,’ ” Floyd said.

“You ain’t done that one in two or three weeks.”

While this conversation was taking place, Danny and Randy had come in, as had a few more spectators. The odor of electricity, of tubes and diodes heating up, filled the air.

Big Daddy clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, boy,” he said, “get your guitar and let’s go."

_Merle Kilgore, “The Long Tall Texan,” had just sung the last lines of his newest composition, a song called “Johnny Reb” that would soon become a hit for Johnny Horton. As the house band played out the last few licks, Kilgore raised his guitar, hit a final chord, and the audience burst into applause. Kilgore grinned at the camera and said, “Thank you, friends and neighbors, thank you.” When the clapping subsided, he turned around and looked at Big Daddy and said, “We got a special guest tonight, don’t we, Daddy?”

Big Daddy pulled the bass up to the microphone. “Yeah, Merle. We got a young man here tonight that’s gonna make his musical debut.”

“Well, let’s get the boy out here.”

Into the limelight I plodded, my jaw clenched as if I were prepared to go fifteen rounds. The guitar hung down around my knees. My cowboy hat had slipped over my eyes, so that Big Daddy had to reach down and set it straight. I stood and faced the camera almost as if I were daring it to frame my image.

I’d finally had a conversation with Diane. Backstage, waiting to go on, I had somehow sensed her presence. Because what was in front of me scared me more than what was behind me, I turned around and looked at her. She could not have failed to notice that I was shaking. To steady me, she laid her hand on my arm. “Are you nervous?” she said, and when I nodded, she said, “You got as much right to sing as anybody else.”

This was the knowledge I was armed with as I glared grimly at the camera: I’ve got as much right to sing as anybody else. I may not have the voice, I may not have the ear, my pitch may be imperfect as hell, but I’ve got a story, and it’s one I’m going to tell.

Big Daddy said, “Well, boy, what’s your name?”

“Stevie Yarbrough,” I told the world.

“Where you live?”

“Well,” I announced, my gaze never wavering, “they’s a old grudge ditch next to the house, and Mr. Alvin Poe’s place is right down the road.”

There was a huge round of applause. I knew I had the audience on my side.

“You gonna sing a number for us tonight?” Big Daddy asked.

“Yes, sir, I sure am.”

“What’s it gonna be?”

“Gonna be one I made up.”

“How’s it go, son?”

“Well, sir, it goes like this.”

On tiptoes, like Diane, I raised my mouth to the microphone. When I broke into song, I sang in the key of Me. It took the band a few seconds to find it, but eventually they did, and I heard them there behind me, Big Daddy slapping the bass, Merle and Floyd chording their acoustics, the pedal steel crooning.

Beam me back, beam me back,

Beam me on back home.

I done been gone away too long,

And I want to go back,

So beam me on home.

The audience clapped and stomped. The band, this collection of ordinary folks who played for the best reason of all—because, by God, they could—was beginning to swing. I was standing there thinking that the spotlight won’t kill you—that in certain places, at certain times, whether you’ve got a voice or not, the only thing to do is take the stage and sing your heart out.