“I Am My Father’s Son”: Stephen Wilson, Jr., Wendell Berry, and the Fable of Self-Creation

I used to be launched to the music of Stephen Wilson, Jr. in a business for diapers, a wierd method to uncover somebody who has shortly develop into one in every of my favourite artists. Enjoying within the background of a Pampers advert was Wilson’s haunting rendition of Ben E. King’s traditional music “Stand By Me.” I used to be instantly struck by this uncooked, soulful voice, so I ran a Google search to seek out who was singing. 

I used to be thrilled to seek out a reasonably large physique of labor. Wilson is a singer-songwriter who entered the music business late; his first launch got here at age forty. Since then, he has launched two EPs and the album Søn of Dad, which commemorated the fifth anniversary of his father’s sudden passing. Wilson’s music—a mix of Americana, nation, and indie rock—shortly grew to become my soundtrack as I accomplished family chores and graded pupil papers.

The extra I listened, the extra I seen a sample. Wilson’s songs return many times to questions of inheritance—of household, place, and previous—and the unsettling realization that a lot of who we’re lies outdoors our alternative. 

This emphasis runs towards one of the vital influential assumptions in trendy Western tradition, that identification is one thing we assemble for ourselves. We see this assumption all over the place, from directions to “be your genuine self,” to the extremely curated identities individuals share on social media, to the numerous narratives in movie and fiction that body identification as one thing that’s found by wanting inward quite than recognizing what’s obtained.

The thinker Charles Taylor has described this mindset as “expressive individualism,” attribute of what he calls our “age of authenticity,” a cultural second that treats being true to oneself as one of many highest items. It’s true that people are usually not merely the merchandise of their circumstances and that our selections matter; nevertheless, taken too far, this imaginative and prescient obscures how a lot of our lives we don’t select and the way deeply we’re formed by issues we’ve got obtained as an inheritance. 

In a tradition that emphasizes alternative and neglects givens, we frequently misinterpret our personal lives and the lives of others. We might be tempted to provide ourselves an excessive amount of credit score for successes that aren’t totally our personal, and we are able to lose compassion for others whose circumstances we mistake for selections.

Wilson’s songwriting is animated by simply this consciousness. His lyrics aren’t preoccupied with inventing a self from scratch. Relatively, they’re intensely centered on reckoning with what has been handed down, each good and dangerous. 

In “Father’s Søn,” he begins with one thing so simple as a reputation. His grandmother “bought it from the Bible,” after which his dad “handed it onto me like granddaddy’s rifle.” His title carries weight, a legacy that he didn’t select for himself. Wilson doesn’t romanticize this. He acknowledges that he “tried to be totally different / Tried to go towards the grain.” Nevertheless, resistance provides method to acceptance: “I put on his blue jean jacket and his title like a badge of honor.” The chorus “I’m my father’s son” lands not as resignation however as recognition. Wilson is just not the only real writer of his story. Maturity is available in acknowledging that life is formed by components we don’t select however can not totally discard.

Wilson’s consideration to what’s given extends past the household to the locations that kind us. His songs depict locations which are thick with reminiscence, marked by each attachment and ache. 

In “Holler From The Holler,” he explores the indignities of rising up in poverty, saying he “got here from the mud the place the low lives waller / Sailor-swearing, single-parent, double-wide squalor.” He had stressed and directionless power, the place he was “[b]ored as a two by 4, preventing only for enjoyable / In the midst of nowhere with nowhere to run.” Critically, although Wilson moved away from the place, its imprint remained. The “ache that put the holler within the holler” is part of his identification. The voice that cries out is inseparable from the place that shaped it.

Wilson additionally examines the concept that leaving is feasible however by no means full in “Hometown.” He wrestles with the enduring pull of the place he got here from, longing to be “house in [his] personal hometown.” The music is stuffed with the textures of a spot identified from the within: waking as much as someone’s cooking, the acquainted roads, the highschool crush, and “a graveyard there the place my granddaddy is.” 

As Wilson places it, his “roots ran wild” there. The place is just not a background however a basis. Nonetheless, Wilson now not feels solely at house there. That exact place shaped him so totally that he’ll carry it with him ceaselessly, however each place after it has additionally had a formative impact. Wilson has gone via adjustments independently of his hometown, and in his absence, his hometown has modified, too. Which means any return house will probably be sophisticated.

For Wilson, household and place are givens we should reckon with, realities that each form identification and constrain prospects. Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime making the identical argument in essays and fiction. Wilson selected to depart his hometown in southern Indiana, a alternative many individuals should make for one motive or one other. His songs are a report of what that departure prices but in addition what might be preserved. Berry, however, selected to return and keep in his hometown. Curiously, his farm close to Port Royal, Kentucky, is barely seventy miles or so from the place Wilson was raised. The 2 are drawing from the identical effectively, a cultural reminiscence of small cities, farms, and the erosion of rural neighborhood.

Berry’s important argument repeatedly is that we aren’t self-originating, and any pretense that we’re is harmful. To belong to a household or a spot is to have “membership,” to take part within the deep and reciprocal bonds of neighborhood. It’s to be part of a supportive community, the place members have a accountability to 1 one other.

In his 1994 speech “Well being is Membership,” Berry says that “neighborhood … is the smallest unit of well being.” A person severed from household and place is just not extra free however much less complete. Berry explores that fact additional in novels like Nathan Coulter, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow which chronicle the historical past of the individuals who make up the Port William membership, a neighborhood that features all of the city’s residents, previous, current, and future. 

Because of this Wilson’s lyric about his granddaddy’s grave registers as greater than sentiment. For each Wilson and Berry, the useless don’t depart; they continue to be current within the locations that maintain them, persevering with to make a declare on those that are nonetheless residing. In Jayber Crow, Berry makes this tangible as Jayber earns extra cash digging graves, and Port William’s which means is inseparable from these it has buried. Like Wilson, Berry avoids romanticization. The individuals of Port William expertise the failure, grief, and limitations which are frequent to people. 

Additionally, like Wilson, Berry resists the fashionable reflex to deal with the given as one thing merely to flee or overcome. In his 2012 “Jefferson Lecture,” he recounts the 2 forms of individuals as described by his trainer Wallace Stegner. On one hand are the “Boomers” who “pillage and run” and are motivated by greed, energy, and mobility. Alternatively are “Stickers, … ‘those that settle, and love the life they’ve made and the place they’ve made it in.’” They’re motivated by affection, grateful for what they’ve obtained and conscious of their accountability to protect it for others. 

Each Wilson and Berry are working inside a convention a lot older than both of them. The Christian imaginative and prescient of life has at all times insisted that we’re creatures earlier than we’re creators, that our very existence is a present earlier than we’ve got accomplished something to benefit it. The theological time period for that is creatureliness, and it carries a particular implication: to be shaped by a household, a spot, and a previous we didn’t select is just not an issue to be solved however is the very extraordinary situation of creaturely life. It’s to stay inside limits, an thought explicitly discovered all through Berry’s writings and implicit in a lot of Wilson’s songs.

Denying these limits doesn’t make us extra free; it makes us extra rootless, minimize off from the very sources that make identification and belonging doable. Berry, whose agrarian imaginative and prescient is inextricable from his Christian religion, understands this deeply. In his personal manner, so does Wilson. His songs hint the lengthy, troublesome motion the place inheritance turns into not only a burden however a belonging.