4/2 We start calling the black backdrop behind the stage the “blackdrop”…Bascom Lunsford tunes on the rental car CD player, songs stripped to the bare knuckles of a voice and a few silver strings. His “Banejo,” he calls it. The plucked notes and the sung notes collide as well as blend and that to me is their prime power, the collision of the individual lament with the pre-existing melody. This vocal strength of weightlessness! And it is the strongest strength. Feeling blowing through [ostensibly slight] lyrics doesn’t bring the song down, the song survives the ordeal of its re-birth—re-configuration—as in a forest a frail-looking leaf endures intact the same storm that rends tree trunks to splinters.
In the following clip Dale Williams owns my few-word story “Cage dies bird flies”:
Ben Miller, author 