Live Oak Blues What happens.

Five Generations of Coates

Last week, my Uncle Michael passed away, the last of my father’s side of the family. In the parking lot after the funeral, I was given a 20-pound Crown Royal box stuffed with photos. When I opened it the next day, I discovered that through some ancient, unspoken process, I had been made the custodian of The Family Photos. My grandfather’s service in WWII is exhaustively documented here, as is my father’s proud march through high school, college and grad school. As near as I can figure, the photos date from 1922 through the early 2000s.

But the jewel of the entire collection is the photo you see below: My great-grandparents, my grandfather, and my great aunt in 1932 (the same year the Carter Family recorded “The Winding Stream” and “I Wouldn’t Mind Dying”) posing with the instruments they played as group, during church gatherings and in the community. My grandfather would go on to become a guitarist of considerable talent, as I’ve documented here. For me and my family, this photograph is a visual origin story. My brother Collyn’s life as a musician, my own lifelong obsession with music, began with the music I heard as a child at their feet.

In the past two years, I’ve lost more friends and family members than I care to list. Attending funerals has become so commonplace that I found myself noting the need for a new suit as I continue my march to the front of the family line.

We are told our entire lives, if not explicitly, that one day we will become the presiding generation: the guardian of family traditions, the teller of stories, the keeper of photos. The implication is that, without us, these familial artifacts will disappear forever. Inevitable, I know, but it still terrifies me. What was once very real and present becomes the prisoner of memory: tenuous, unreliable and, in the end, illusory.

The saving grace is that we do manage to pass it on, like boxes at a funeral, in so many conscious and unconscious ways. My son, Stuart, is a musician with tastes so eclectic and varied that he could only be my son. The licks from his guitar, I swear, I have heard from my grandfather–a musician he never heard play. Anyone who spends more than five minutes with me will hear me preach the gospel of music. It’s a compulsion so strong that, I know, it will live after me.