Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story Read Online Free

am the accumulation of the dreams of generations
And their stories live in me like holy water
I am my father’s daughter
Oh
I am my father’s daughter

two
    broken harmonies
    B ut we did not always live on the homestead. We started out in Anchorage. We started out as a family, with a mom and everything.
    My father was the first one of his family to carry music from a passion into a profession, and began writing his own songs when he was a teenager, eventually making a living at it. He took his guitar to Vietnam, where music helped him to assuage the trauma of his childhood and the effects of war. When he met my mother, he found a new family in her religion that felt safe to him. He converted and they were married in the Mormon Church. At first they lived in a remote cabin at the head of Kachemak Bay. They had their first child, my older brother Shane, in 1971. Their second son, Vance, was born in September of 1972. He died suddenly, before he was a year old.
    My dad decided to pursue academics, and they moved to Utah, where he got his master’s degree in social work at Brigham Young University, becoming the first college graduate in his family. I was born there in 1974 while my dad was attending school. When he graduated, we moved backto Anchorage, where he worked with troubled youth. We lived in an apartment until my dad had the money to build us a larger house. Only a few memories stand out for me. I remember feeling safer by making myself a pallet of blankets by the bedroom door, choosing to sleep there instead of in my bed. I remember a giant rotating Big Boy sign across the street. I remember a small kitchen window where sunlight streamed in. When we moved to a larger house shortly after, I got my own room and was allowed to pick my own carpet—pink shag. My younger brother, Atz Lee, was born in 1976.
    Around this time my parents began to sing together, first doing dinner shows at hotels for tourists. Their act evolved into a variety show that consisted of some original songs (my dad singing lead, my mom harmony), a segment where they showed a 16-millimeter film that documented Dad’s family pioneering and settling the state, and a few skits with him dressed as a sourdough (local vernacular for an original Alaskan settler: part gold miner, part hillbilly, part frontiersman) and my mom as a can-can saloon girl with a feather boa and long, curled rooster feathers in her hair.
    Music was the happy part of our lives. The sound of my parents practicing during the day, melody and harmony wafting through the house like the smell of baking pie, but for the ears and for the heart. Warm, sweet. Me, wandering around the house till I found them, engrossed and focused. I loved that focus. Even more than the singing, I loved the feeling of being so overtaken by something. At a very young age I fell in love with the puzzle of harmonizing and learning melody and vocal control. I became fascinated with the effort of learning, so consuming that everything else left your mind. The time travel of losing yourself in practice. Even when there was fighting in the house, even when practicing with them was hard, I loved the puzzle of trying to get better. No matter how much my dad yelled or how impatient and angry he was to work with, Ihung in there. Shane and Atz Lee were part of the act at first but could not tolerate the heated and often agonizing practice sessions with my dad. I practiced all the time. In my room. At school. Learning to yodel is probably the reason I had no friends in kindergarten. It’s just not a pretty thing to learn. My brothers teased me, saying that I sounded like a cross between a dying seal and a cow in labor. But I was determined to learn because my dad had told me I was too young to. What an insult! Too young? I took it as a challenge and became obsessed with disciplining the crack in my voice. Teaching my tongue to obey the tongue twister of yodel-ay-ee yodel-oh-oo yodel-oh-oo yodel-ay-ee over and over until