Chiseled in Stone

The Lost Manuscripts of William Singer

.....

“I recognized this music as a simple plea. It beckoned me.”

Harlan Howard

“Nobody knows. Nobody sees. Nobody knows but me.”

Marijohn Wilkin / Danny Dill

ONE

I first met William Singer crossing the Ingraham Commons at Vanderbilt University in the winter of 1995. He was a striking and intimidating figure; a tall, thin rail of a man with hands the size of dinner plates, eyes the color of pitch set above cheekbones that might have been sculpted, and a mane of white hair that hung over his shoulders like an ermine epaulet.  On that bitterly cold afternoon, his greatcoat patterned with a light grey snow whipping across the grounds; his pace, the power of his presence, and his countenance were more reminiscent of Ahab than an English professor and celebrated author.

   Arguably one of America’s  best known if not best loved writers,  his biography of the legendary one-armed alligator hunter Amos Moses is still being quoted from in lecture halls, coffee houses and bait shops across the country, and remains the only book of its kind written almost entirely in the Acadian dialect. In 1989, his Sawgrass Lullaby; a powerful and poetic paean to Florida’s Tillis dynasty earned him his first Pulitzer for historical fiction, only to be followed by his second: Warren County; the long awaited prequel to Faulkner’s Levee. In twenty years he’d authored thirteen books, all of them bestsellers, all of them brilliant. All of them written by a master wordsmith. He was Nashville’s honorary Man of Letters, our own Author Laureate. Every writer in the south, including me, thought he walked on water.

   With a…splash of bourbon.

…

I’d immigrated to the town in the late eighties as an expatriate freelance reporter from Colorado, late of Denver, looking to supplement my largely non-existent income as a journalist with a second stream of revenue I hoped to generate as a songwriter.  That it would likely be an even narrower rill was unimportant; Nashville was the new Alaska; the gold fields, Music Row. If you’d ever even remotely considered writing songs you might’ve given Tin Pan Alley a passing thought, maybe took a look at Hollywood. But when the cards fell, there was really only one place to go.

   Like the vast, unchecked flood of hopefuls streaming into the city every day in those years, I knew nothing about the craft, of course, but thought I sounded a little like Merle Haggard in the shower after a couple of drinks (me, not Hag), and believed I had an innate sense of where to put words on a page so they looked their best, sounded right, and, if necessary, made some kind of sense. Two people, a broken heart, twelve lines, a chorus, maybe a little bridge… how hard could it be?

   In the years I haunted the doorways of publishing houses up and down 16^th and 17^th Avenues, I found out just how hard. Had my growing friendship with Singer not led to my accepting his offer of an adjunct position in the English department, I’d have been sleeping in those doorways, I’m quite sure.

   In those halcyon days, Music Row felt more like a colony of exiled literati than a community of songwriters; fiction authors masquerading as Top Forty tunesmiths who were more apt to write with John Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams as their inspiration than Hoagy Carmichael or Hank Williams. These cats were crafting two and a half minute Great American Novels set to a five-chord chart. Lyrical, concise essays on the human condition, told in simple, uncomplicated narratives that immediately conveyed the essence of the story being told.

   They were creating nothing less than a new genre of literature: novellas you could listen to on a hi-fi.

It was that emerging aspect of the craft—that scholarly warp in the weave—that brought the songs, their writers, and the stories they told up on William’s radar.

   In the beginning, his interest was marginal at best, and a trade-off of sorts; I’d buy the drinks, he’d listen to the songs. As long as I was pouring, he was content to listen to whatever I loaded in the cassette player. He’d hear a line or two that would hold his imagination for about….. that long, then he’d lose interest in the song. But never in the bourbon, of course. Nevertheless, I remained steadfast, earnestly nurturing his budding appreciation for Harlan Howard and Cindy Walker with the same diligence he employed in opening my eyes and ears to Melville and Harper Lee.

   After a time, I resigned myself to the likelihood that the music, the craftsmanship, and the songs would amount to nothing more than a source of fleeting interest to him–an amusement, really–a passing fancy. Then, one night in ninety-two, I played him Willie and Haggard’s cut on Pancho And Lefty; Townes Van Zant’s three-and-a-half minute-long tale of a deal gone wrong and the price of betrayal, and….everything changed.

   Singer was more than intrigued with the song; it fascinated him. And soon his interest bled over into other story songs and their writers. He began reading Shel Silverstein and Guy Clark. He bought scores of albums, copied the lyrics down and analyzed them as works of literature, works of narrative poetry. “Studies in Homerican verse,” was how he framed it. He devoted entire lectures to a handful of them, delving into story arcs and characters as if they’d been written by Hemingway or Styron.

That winter, he lodged a formal application and began lobbying heavily to make the study of the compositions a credited class. Part of the English curriculum. The class would ‘read’ ten songs over a year rather than ten classics. The Story Song as American Literature: Ten Short Narratives, Three Chords And The Truth became his passion.

   Eventually, though I could not have known at the time, it would become his epitaph.

…

While the same may not be true today, adding a fully credited, formally recognized class to the curriculum of even one department in a major university in those years  was no small undertaking  The application alone was some twenty pages and change, doubled in length with answers applied, and once completed, had to pass the desks of God knows how many departments and offices, who, each in their own turn would be required to read, critique, and provide insight, commentary, and suggestions, as well as their position on whether or not they’d support the new course.

   If the application was approved, the entire process was repeated, but with a full-length proposal outlining the complete course structure and trajectory across an entire study year. Materials, exams, guest lecturers, internships, costs… the task was Herculean, and the frustration level promised to be monumental, particularly for William, whose primary province lay in convincing the university’s more… conservative heads how the study of Dean Dillon and Curly Putman would benefit the students of a Magnolia League school’s vaunted English department in a town divided so sharply for so many years along the lines of Old Money and New Record Royalties. It was not, I knew, a campaign he relished mounting. William was, after all, a writer first and a professor second, and most decidedly not a politician.

Moreover, the concept was just far enough off the normalcy radar to virtually guarantee that no self-respecting Trustee or member of the Board of Regents in their hallowed halls and slate-roofed estates would approve. The Belle Meade crowd and Nashville Society had long harbored a deep-seated loathing of hillbilly music and the stain it had rendered upon the face of their fair Athens of The South. To even suggest that the stewards of the revered name and legacy of Vanderbilt would somehow see their way clear to place their seal of approval on a university course, validating and magnifying what they saw as the country’s lowest common musical denominator was beyond out of the question; it was ludicrous. The term Singer’s Folly began to creep into faculty meetings and conversation at cocktail parties. The powers that be began to smell blood and William began to smell the scent of failure. Regardless of his profile and his command, no one, including myself (privately of course), thought it stood a haint’s chance in broad daylight.

   One would have thought that the very foundations of Kirkland Hall itself had shifted and cracked when the Department quietly gave William the green light in February to put a pilot proposal together for the coming fall semester.

…

Initially, I was his guy Friday, drafting the class outlines and curves, setting the minimums… the nuts and bolts that would make the course run, make it operate like any other university-level lit class.

   But the meat of the course—the songs and the writers and the stories—that was William’s bailiwick. His domain. And from the beginning, it became his obsession. He guarded it zealously. Ruthlessly. While it is not a well-known fact, the business of education is a cutthroat world, and any hard-core academic looking to raise their profile is as treacherous as any filcher in a den of thieves. The interviews were unannounced and conducted in clandestine locations; William and the writer only, no family, no reps, no handlers, nobody. The selection of the songs was shrouded in secrecy, the lecture modules recorded and the cassettes kept in a safe deposit box he alone held the key to. But that was just in the beginning. In retrospect, obsession may be too kind.

   In the early stages, we would meet in his study in the evenings following the day’s classes, my recorder and pen both set on pause as he briefed me on his progress and sketched out ideas, which flowed out of him at nearly the same volume as the bourbon that flowed in to him; into both of us, I must admit; a viscous, amber glue that bound us together, yet loosened our minds and tongues. Slowly, over the weeks and fifths that followed, the structure of the course, the lesson plan, the semester, began to take form… something more than just conceptual. Less than two months in, William had won over nearly all the trustees, and we both realized we were pioneering something unique here; something that had never been done before.

   Somehow, through some stroke of fate, I had found my way onto the coattails of a man history would surely vault into greatness, and I was being carried along on those coattails into a classic story line of my own; An aging master and his dutiful apprentice risk their lives and careers in a great and noble experiment of American letters.

But the story was incomplete; the setup was there, the inciting event, the conflict…. but there was no resolution; there would be no denouement.  Because the great and noble experiment that was The Story Song as American Literature would never come to pass.

…

By the middle of May, the pilot proposal was all but completed, but despite our best efforts at maintaining secrecy, word of the course leaked across campus and advance placement queries began coming in from underclassmen and graduate students both, like early ticket buys for an Old Crow Medicine Show gig on The Opry. In a matter of weeks, every seat in the class was gone, and the story broke locally. The media began calling. Requests for interviews were coming in daily. Songwriters were leaving messages on the machine by the hour, and William’s publisher and his agent were both sending faxes by the minute.

   It was all a bit heady—for me, at any rate. While most of the attention was naturally given to William, for obvious reasons and rightly so, I was encouraged and, admittedly, somewhat flattered, when, after a largely somnambulant, short-lived career as a journalist, one that had seen me toil in abject anonymity since my departure from home and alma mater, I began to see and hear my own name occasionally emerging from the shadows of literary obscurity onto the pages And the airwaves carrying the story; blurbs and mentions that any freshman writer still wet behind the ears would kill for. Not wishing to appear plebian when sightings were reported to me by colleagues or associates (especially when in William’s company), I would thoughtfully light my pipe, and blithely toss them off with just the right amount of bored abandon, as if dealing with the press was becoming a terribly inconvenient but ever-so-necessary nuisance.

   I threw the pipe in just now for a little extra color.

Mercifully, notwithstanding all the titillation that comes with publicity, especially when it’s about you, the initial buzz subsided sooner rather than later, and while a residual current of excitement and anticipation continued to thrum just under the surface, a certain modicum of normalcy returned to life on and off-campus. Final exams came and went with the usual flairs of melodramatics. End of the year reviews both crushed and elevated dreams and dreamers alike, and academic futures were made or broken.

    The rewards of being the grader and not the gradee are legion.

   Two weeks before the end of the school year we quietly submitted the pilot, tied up all our respective loose classroom threads, and ended the semester for the summer. That it went out with a bit of a whimper and not a bang was just fine with both of us. After the flash-fire of attention in the wake of the news of the course, we welcomed the removal of the spotlights and the return of relative quiet.

   “A necessary evil for a writer, publicity,” William said one night at Murphy’s over a Jack and branch. His fourth that night; not a rarity by any stretch, but for the first time in countless such lubricated evenings, the fires that the bourbon normally lit behind his eyes as we talked were dampened; He appeared pale, and distracted. “I suggest you get used to it.”

   “I’m not concerned about publicity,” I answered him. “If you want to know the truth, I’m actually concerned about you. You look… I don’t know… ragged.”

   “Thank you, son. Remind me to call you whenever I need a pick-me-up. My boy, I look this way at the end of every school year.”

   He smiled, and for a brief instant, the fires leaped behind his eyes again.

   “And, at the beginning of every new book I’ve begun.”

   He kissed the rim of my glass with his own, and drained the last of his drink, catching the bartender’s attention and holding up two fingers.

For a moment, the passage of time seemed to warp, as if a molecular groundswell of the very fabric of things rolled through the bar. Like a visual effect from The Matrix.

   “You’re not… you’re not talking about a book you’ve begun reading,” I asked, stated, really. I knew the answer as the comment left my lips.

   “Well, I am reading it,” he said. “…As I write, or rather, compose, you could say. But, no. I am in fact, not speaking about a new book I’ve begun reading.”

   The next round arrived. His fifth, my… I don’t know, third, maybe. “The reading, and the editing, I sincerely hope, will be your task,” he continued as he fished his VISA card out and laid it on the server’s tray. “…when the first drafts are completed. Two months, perhaps. Maybe sooner.”

   He lifted his glass, but, overfilled, the precious Jack Black and branch water cascaded lazily over the lip and down the transparent walls. He lowered the glass back to the table, and then, like a great and venerable old horse that he was,  he lowered his immense, craggy, snow-capped head down to the rim of the glass, and sipped the overfill down a good two fingers.

   Dabbing his lips with his napkin, he raised his glass, and raised his eyes to me.

   “For God’s sake, son,” he said. “Close your mouth. You look like a simpleton.”  

…

Try to understand something, here; this was not merely passing news. This wasn’t simply idle conversation between two colleagues. This was one of the foremost writers in the known free world telling a cadet, a rookie, an unproven—and for all practical purposes unpublished—writer not only that he’s writing a new book, but that he wants the same plebe to read the first draft and then edit it. This from an author for whom secrecy has been the stuff of literary legend. By his fourth book (“The Craft, The Draw and The Pinto”), his sales and profile put him on a par with Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Joan Didion. His eccentricities were largely overlooked, because he simply couldn’t turn a manuscript in that didn’t pole-vault to the NYT Bestseller list in a matter of days if not hours. The last nine of his thirteen books were delivered to his agent, his publisher and his editor simultaneously; neither one having so much as a clue what lay behind the frontispiece.

   “I should have a passable first draft ready for you by the first of September.”

   The server returned with the receipt and William’s card.

   “That is, of course, assuming that you’d like the job.”

   There was no question I’d like the job, and, and after I’d found the use of my voice, I told him so. The question I had was one he refusing to answer. Specifically, what this newest book was about, and regardless of how pleadingly… how supplicantly I plied him, he was intractable.

   He was also hammered, a fact I tried—unsuccessfully—to take unfair advantage of as we waited for his cab, making an embarrassing attempt at wheedling, which had never been one of my strong suits.

   “You’ll know soon enough,” he said, folding himself into the back seat of the taxi. He closed the door, rolled the back window down and took my hand. The fire that had just minutes earlier been burning behind his eyes was again ashen. Ashen and dark.

   “You must make me a promise,” he said under the hum of the big National’s idling V-8.

   “Of course, but….”

   “Tell no one, son. I trust you.”

   And he was gone, the cab leaping over and around traffic up Woodland like a big yellow sockeye working its way upstream.

…

In the days that followed, we spoke twice on the phone, and I busied myself almost exclusively with getaway plans. With summer full on, I was looking forward to disconnecting from things for a couple of months, and after a last working dinner with William a week later (which again left me worried about his health, and lacking in any information on the new book), I left for a long sabbatical back home in Denver, where I hoped to hang out undisturbed in my old room, overeat, sleep late, argue with my father, and if at all possible, perhaps even finish my own book.

   Two out of five wasn’t bad. Another few weeks and I might have hit three, if Rosa, William’s housekeeper, hadn’t reached me by phone the last week of July.

“You are the next person I was to call if so’thing was wrong,” she said across the line.

A ball of iron, cold and black, dropped from the back of my throat to the pit of my stomach.

He’d been locked in his office for three days, she said. She could hear the typewriter, hear his voice. But yesterday, she stopped hearing both. Stopped hearing anything. This morning she summoned the courage to open the door.

Seated upright at his desk, dressed in his customary coat and tie, his office virtually immaculate, he appeared for all the world to be sleeping.

William Abraham Singer was dead.

…

TWO

By the time I returned to Nashville two days later, William’s sister, Gayden, and his lawyer, the estimable Tucker Franklin, were well into the funeral plans and press releases. His house was overrun with people I’d never seen before, let alone met. I found Rosa in her room, packing. I never visited the house again.

   The next few weeks were nothing if not chaotic; a blur. The Board of Regents issued a lengthy obituary and the English department hung black cameos from all its doors.  Murphy’s christened their Black Jack and branch water The Billy Singer; an event that garnered a mention on all but one of the morning shows. Cause of death was listed pancreatic cancer, stage four. His will left everything to his sister and her two children. The service came and went so quickly, I spoke but cannot recall precisely what I said.  Because of the advance work that had been done, I agreed to helm The Story Song as American Literature  class for a semester, but nearly two-thirds of every advance seat withdrew within a week of his passing, and after a somber half-hour meeting with the Department heads in late August, the course itself was withdrawn.

…

In 2001, a year to the day after leaving Vanderbilt, Capstone Press published my first novel, and immediately tied it to a sequel of sorts, which I am gratefully at work on now, having finally concluded my promised task on the works that this prologue serves as an introduction to.

In the first few years that followed his passing, it became clear that Rosa, in all likelihood, had divulged information regarding one or more aspects of her tenure with William. Rumors began to spring up around his death, the manner of it, the circumstances surrounding the way in which he was discovered; fully dressed, his desk clear of all clutter and work, nothing out of place anywhere. William himself, seated just so.

   And on the heels of those whispers, a myth, one that anyone would almost certainly expect to manifest and hang around after the passing of a celebrated writer; particularly one with a well-known penchant for solitude and secrecy.    

   Specifically: that he was working when he died.

   That an unfinished manuscript existed.

That he had hidden it, believing that the hour of his own death was upon him.

   Like legions of others, but not for the same reasons, this aspect of the legend held a singular fascination for me. And because of my apprenticeship under him and the partnership we shared, it was assumed by nearly all that I must know something. Marshall Chapman bought the whole story and Anthony Flacco’s feature in The Atlantic didn’t help.

   I did know something, of course, but I was sworn to silence, notwithstanding the fact that the one I gave that allegiance to had been cremated nearly three years before. But while I publicly tossed off the reports and conspiracy theories as so much literary drivel, our last conversation at Murphy’s replayed in my memory for many, many more months to come.

   As the years passed, however, and my days grew longer, the Lore of The Lost Manuscript and my recollection of William’s disclosure of beginning a new book that night at Murphy’s eventually waned, and with its fading came the realization that perhaps there never had been a new book he’d begun work on. That it was the bourbon and the years talking. The bourbon and the years and the illness I sensed was threatening him even then.

   Eventually, the rumors died, as William had. Along the way, the Billy Singer stayed on the menu at Murph’s, sales of his books spiked globally, with two optioned for film rights, and  

the Board of Regents had a small, bronze, circular plaque fixed permanently on the door to the lecture hall. Against all odds, my second book, ‘Asa’s Law’ debuted at #8 on the New York Times Bestsellers List. I had, it seemed, moved on.

   Until a year later, when the ghost of the lost manuscript found me again.

…

Contrary to a widely held misconception, a bar is a great place to write. Sober, of course. Before five o’clock if possible; four, really. The hardliners tend to start coming out of the woodwork by then. Murph’s opened at ten, was under half full until noon or so, with anybody left after the lunch rush usually sitting at the bar between two and four o’clock. From five until closing, you were lucky to get a table.

   Off the main floor and up a step, a separate area with wall to wall windows overlooking the avenue felt almost like a private patio on the many late mornings that found me there. Over the past several years the table and corner I now occupied had become a second office on many of those mornings: laptop, legal pad, pencil and pen, and a cup of owner Annie Murphy’s coffee: third best-kept secret in town.    

   But more than a decade ago, it had been the same table and corner I had commandeered with William on nights more numerous than I can count. Colleagues and friends. Teacher and pupil. Master and acolyte. Holding court and spellbinding those within it. Tales of high adventure from the magnolia’d halls of higher learning and stories of a life among the giants of literature. Hours-long discussions on the fall of Samuel Clemens or debating the need for punctuation. Bourbon-fueled, contentious deliberations on everything from the politics of Merle Travis to the prose of Cormac McCarthy.

They were, in the span of my brief fifty-one years on earth, the most unforgettable, drunken, and enlightening nights of my life.

   We owned this corner. Anyone that needed to find us knew where to look. And while I had occupied this very same space for many hours, days and years since those extraordinary times amid recollections that had faded to mere shades and wisps of remembrances, sitting there that morning in August that I now write of, fifteen years to the day after his death, his memory, and the memories of those nights were more powerful than I had experienced them in years.

   Tucker Franklin knew Murphy’s and knew the corner I was in. He’d been William’s attorney for nearly his entire life, after all, and still represented him, now handling his estate. At eighty-one, stepping through the door of Murph’s, he was moving somewhat slower than I’d remembered, and appeared to’ve very possibly lost maybe two inches in height. The vintage leather valise he was carrying drew him down maybe another half inch altogether. Even across the floor, I recognized it immediately as William’s.

Tucker had phoned me the night before, the call brief and a surprise; it’d been nearly three years since I’s seen or spoken with him, beyond a couple of events honoring William on campus that the Department and Regents had kindly invited me to attend. But even then, the interaction with him had been fleeting, at best. A quick handshake, small talk, and done. So, his call so late in the evening was quite unexpected. But his tone, hushed and conspiratorial, was something else, refusing to divulge the reason for his call, let alone discuss it.

   “It isn’t something I want to talk about over the phone,” he said. “I will only say that it is a matter of great importance involving William. And you.”

    Accompanying him from the door to the corner, Annie made her way across the floor with a glass pot of freshly brewed coffee and an extra mug. He declined the coffee, she cut her eyes towards him and refilled mine, unceremoniously dropping a trio of little creamer pails on the table when my mug was full.

   “We drop off your radar, did we, Tucker? Or are you slumming this morning?”

   Tucker smiled. “I’ve just been busy, Annette.”

   “For three years? Horseshit.” She gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “It’s good to see you anyway, you old ambulance chaser.”

   We shook, Tucker sat—slowly—setting the valise on the floor by his chair and sliding the cuff of his dress shirt back to glance at his watch. He had an iPhone, but he was old school.

   “I can only stay a minute,” he said. “But this task is my most pressing today.”

He reached down grasped the worn grips of the valise, and lifted it to the table.

“Fifteen years ago, you agreed to keep a secret,” he began. “And agreed to accept an assignment.”

A cold wire slowly encircled my spine, coiling around the vertebrae like a serpent.

   He scooched his chair in, craned his head around like he was expecting spies to be lurking, listening, brought his elbows up to the table and whispered, sotto voce, just under the rattle and hum of the air conditioner…   “Before I go any further, I’m required to ask you one question—“

   “—For Christ’s sake, Tucker. Enough with the cloak and dagger. Are you telling me—after fifteen years—are you telling me now. Here. This morning. That there was a—“

   Tucker was nodding his head.

   “That he was… that the book he told me—“

   More nodding; weighty, sage nodding.

   “—Are you going to tell me, Tucker, that the fabled “Lost Manuscript” is in that briefcase?” I began laughing, miming quotation marks with four fingers around Lost Manuscript. “That the legendary—“

   “—Actually, no. I’m not,” he stopped me.

   “Right. And I’ll tell you why you’re not. Bec—“

   “—There are ten.”

   For a second time in sixteen years, a warp passed through the building, bending time and place for all of a nanosecond.

   “I’m… I’m sorry… there are what?”

   “Ten. Manuscripts.” Each word spoken solitarily; the weight of both measured carefully.

   “I don’t… I don’t understand,” I stammered.

   “You will.”

His countenance grave and dour, Tucker stood, slipping his chair back under the table.

   “The pieces are all in place when you’ve finished editing. Harcourt will of course want an exclusive, but Capstone may have something to say about that.”

   “Why would my publisher have anything to say about a book by William?” I asked.

   “Because, as you will see, he transferred all right, title, interest and ownership of the work to you. The only caveat was I was to wait precisely fifteen years from the date of his death. You’d have been hearing this from my younger associate had I not made it thus far.”

Sliding his cuff back again, Tucker checked his Bulova a second time and took my hand.

“The manuscript, or rather, manuscripts within that valise are the last works of William Abraham Singer, my boy. And they belong to you. I’ll look for your call. And look forward to it as well. It’s been far too long since his voice has been read…..”

   For a good two minutes after he’d gone, I sat perfectly still, my eyes fixed on the valise, my hand gripping the walls of my coffee mug. When at last I could not wait any longer, I pressed the small brass release inlaid into the leather just below his initials, and unlocked the clasp.

   From inside, I withdrew the case’s only contents, a large, brown corrugated manuscript box, placed it on the table in front of me, and set the valise down on the floor beside me.

   The box was perhaps four inches thick, three-hundred page capacity as I recall, bearing a five inch by seven inch white adhesive label on its face. Printed on the label were four lines of text, all in a smudged typewriter font; a title in large, bold caps, and two smaller lines below it.

CHISELED IN STONE

Ten Short Stories, Three Chords and the Truth

WILLIAM SINGER

Instantly, I understood.

   Tucker had not given me ten manuscripts for ten books, but rather, for one. One book comprised of ten manuscripts for ten short stories. Ten stories I instinctively believed I knew. Ten stories I knew I’d heard sung many times….

   I placed my hand on the printed letters as if they were braille, as if I could somehow feel the rises and falls of the digital characters embossed on the paper.

   With the barely contained patience of a museum curator, I gently slid the end-flaps out from their sleeves and took a deep breath, opened the box, removed its contents, and began reading.

   Six hours later, I’d finished. Dusk was beginning to unroll across the tops of the trees and the peaks of the roofs, slowly dimming down the day. I lay the pages back within the box, closed it, held my hand upon its labeled surface and exhaled. Pulling a ten and a twenty from my pocket, I slid the box back into the valise, placed my laptop and legal pad in with it, worked my way through the already packed floor to Annie’s perch behind the bar, slipped a kiss onto her cheek and the thirty dollars into her apron pocket. She said something, but I didn’t hear over the din, and I was a man in motion. Out the door, dodging five o’clock traffic (shod and wheeled) I fairly ran the three blocks to the craftsman bungalow I’d bought two years earlier with the advance for ‘Asa’s Law’.

   In my office-slash-bar, I poured three fat fingers of Jack, muted the phone, locked the door, placed a clean legal pad, a Uniball black ink pen, a Ticonderoga #2 and a red mechanical pencil side by side, opened the manuscript box again, removed the book, drank a good two of those three fingers of bourbon down, and settled back for a second read, and a first pass at notes.

   Five minutes shy of midnight, and two or three inches shy of a fifth of Jack later, I finished the book for the second time that day. To its right, the row of pens and pencils I’d prepared remained undisturbed, unused; the lines of the legal pad as empty of scratchings as if I’d only just removed it from its shrink wrap.

   I poured a last drink, and on the blank legal pad, began writing these first lines of this last Prologue to the last original work by William Singer….the last ten original works, I should say; ten works that are the culmination of one man’s exploration into the lyrical narrative of a song. Ten works that are his posthumous gift to the wholly American art form of Country Music and the craft of the story song. Ten works that are his eulogy, self-penned, kept hidden for more than a decade, a window into the soul of one man, viewed through the eyes of the characters inhabiting these ten tales.

   Here is He Stopped Loving Her Today, the story of a man’s life-long devotion to the woman and life he lost, told through the recorded recollections of those who knew him best.  And here is Golden Ring, the unlikely tale of a couple charged with a great and terrible gift, and the knowledge of the true color of love.

   Copperhead Road: a gripping story of a veteran, a deadly stand-off, and one man’s attempt to save a life. Here is Independence Day; an interview with the daughter of an abused woman accused of murder, and a cautionary tale of the inheritance of violence and the cycle of pain.

   Long Black Veil tells the story of a brutal murder, a case of mistaken identity and a secret taken to the grave. In the Everglades, a land development company learns that the past holds a frightening power over the present in Seminole Wind. And in a borderline cantina on the wind-blown plains of West Texas, a young cowboy finds love and death in the eyes of beautiful Mexican girl in El Paso. Set in Harlan County, Kentucky in the 1940’s, Sixteen Tons tells the story of a solitary miner whose bravery under the yoke of repression lights the spark of defiance launching the Kentucky coal strikes, and here is Pancho and Lefty, the saga that first put story songs on William’s radar; a cinematic tale of a deal gone wrong and the bitter cost of treachery. And finally, here, too, is the collection’s title story of a man for whom the most meaningful lesson he receives in life is one that is Chiseled In Stone.

Ten tales, each a re-telling so thoroughly unique and, in many cases, so completely unexpected, that even the reader intimately familiar with the song and its narrative finds themselves within a storyline utterly fresh and completely new to them.

   Ten stories that are perhaps the most unique literary adaptations of this or any other century, and will stand, without question, among William Abraham Singer’s greatest works.

   jbf

Nashville.  2026

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