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porch to play, and my uncle Willie and uncle Judd both played guitar. This was a band. All the kids would sit around and listen to the music and feel the closeness of the family. I would sit with my feet under the front of the house and play drums with my hands on the old wooden porch, as if I were part of the group. I doubt if I had any talent at that age, but one thing’s for sure—I had an instant love for music.
    A lot of the songs were hymns, and sixty years later they would inspire my 2011 album, The Love of God . A number of the songs on the album were ones my dad and uncles had played on their porch in Apple Springs: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Amazing Grace,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” as well as “In the Sweet By and By,” which I always remember as my mom’s favorite song. She sung it over and over ad nauseam, but when you love a song, you love a song. Others are hymns and songs that I’d loved the minute I heard various artists’ versions: “I’ll Fly Away,” with The Whites, and “Circle of Friends,” with Point of Grace.
    Uncle Willie, my dad’s brother, bought me my first musical instrument, a Dobro. When I was twelve, I was sick with the measles and had to stay inside in a darkened room for two weeks. That was the routine treatment back then. Uncle Willie thought it would be a good time for me to learn to play an instrument. The trouble was, Dobro is a difficult instrument to play. It has a solid metal body, and the strings are about a quarter inch off the fingerboard. But I had two weeks in seclusion and so I learned a little riff I could drive my dad crazy with. I must have played it over and over and over again. That’s where I started getting the feel of playing an instrument and how much fun it could be.
    Although we had fun on Byrd Rogers’s porch, Grandpa Rogers was a tough man. He was abrupt and succinct when he spoke. He minced no words.
    “Two of the happiest days in my life,” he once told me, “are when you come and when you leave.” I’d like to think he didn’t mean that literally, but with him you could never tell.
    Grandpa Rogers believed in teaching tough lessons. He had two animals that he dearly loved, an old horse named Blue, which he refused to work on Sunday, and a dog named Joe. I always felt Byrd, once his kids were gone, loved that old dog like a brother or even a son. They went everywhere together. Byrd never got into his pickup truck without whistling for Joe, who raced from wherever he was in the yard, jumped the fence, and leaped into the truck bed.
    One night Byrd, for some reason, strung an extra line of wire above the fence, raising the height by about six inches. The next morning he got in his truck and whistled. Joe ran, jumped like he had for years, hit that wire, and fell back into the yard, momentarily stunned but otherwise unhurt. As he drove off, my grandfather yelled back with a smile, “Joe, don’t ever assume today is like it was yesterday.”
    That was my grandfather’s lesson for the day. His sons might not listen to him, but by God his dog would. And his grandson, for the next fifty years.
    I remember I had an opportunity one day to impress Grandpa Rogers, whom we called “Gran’sir.” I failed. He was a hunter, a skill that kept his family fed over the years. He decided it was time for me to learn to shoot. In his world, a man never knew when being able to bag a squirrel for dinner might be necessary for survival. So, after some slight weaponry training, into the Piney Woods we went. It didn’t take long for him to spot a squirrel in the trees.
    “There you go, boy,” he whispered. “Let’s get us some dinner.”
    I quickly aimed and wrapped my finger around the trigger. The squirrel looked up, froze in place—and so did I. I couldn’t do it. There was no way I could shoot an animal. It wasn’t that I had anything against hunting or that I didn’t love the taste of meat with my meals. It was just that I