Although for the purposes of these liner notes I wish it were otherwise, my first memory is the sound of a trumpet at a tent meeting revival. The notes jarred my conscious mind awake and I looked around as if for the first time. In my short life prior to this, there had been only watery shadows and grey lights and distant muffled voices. But now I was seeing and hearing. I saw what I instinctively knew were my people. My older brothers, Conrad and Jonathan came into focus. And my sister Grace’s braids. My mother who had always been part of me was suddenly separate. I could see her. She was smooth and dark-haired and inviting and wore glasses that couldn’t hide bright eyes. She half smiled at something distant. Warm, familiar, brand new.

Later, sitting on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat with the dusk, doing my pre-language best to sing “Blessed Assurance” and “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” I realized my father owned a rather odd moving vehicle with a cream-coloured steering wheel that made everything go by. It was called a Volkswagen bus. And I should have been tired, but I was strangely awake and alive. It had been hard work emerging from my earliest years, my mind opening tentatively above ground like a curled seedling, feeling the first air, discovering memory. My mother faded. And the eggtooth trumpet. And the world.

The next memory that stands out is numinous and sheer. My mother had taken the me that was trapped in a toddler’s body to the Yoder’s home in Cochranton, Pennsylvania for a late morning visit. They had adopted a boy who I soon discovered inside pedalling and touching a wooden house that made universe after universe come into being. Here was God and he turned out to be an adopted boy playing the piano. As I maneuvered my twenty-some-odd pounds of humanity across the floor and stood up on unreliable legs leaning toward the back right corner of the dark wooden bench steadying my wobbly unbelievable head, I learned two defining things in the space of a few moments. First, this machine was calling me. I was now not only awake and alive, I had a reason to live. Second, I was utterly and completely unwelcome. The adopted boy who was God looked down at me and I felt scorn and violence for the first time. I can see now that he was well aware that any attempt at a duet would have proven bothersome and noisy. I can see now that he was pretty smart. But back then I knew only that he was up and I was down and he wanted to keep it that way. In short, I learned in those very first moments that music was an alluring cutthroat business. Somebody somewhere must have stolen the very soul of God and turned it into a competition.

There were as of yet no musical instruments in our house except for my father’s harmonica, but there was a reel to reel tape recorder and a small radio and a record player and now of course other memories begin flooding in.

But my parents as children had been Amish and my mother told me that there was a piano in her classroom at school and that she went home one day as a young girl and made a keyboard out of cardboard with a scissors and played the cardboard keyboard in the evenings which made music only inside of her.

We got our first upright piano in Fairpoint, Ohio when I was in the third grade. When Grandma Overholt came to visit, my sister Grace said we should close up the piano and she might think it was a furnace. I could go on and on.

These songs without words take me back, way back to the beginning to a pure resonant place deep within. Not that it matters, but I think this is maybe American music: a mingling of different traditions that have seeped into all of us.

This record was initially included in a collection of Michael Wilson landscape photographs called First Kind Sight. Dave Nixon wrote some words which were a part of the book. The titles were mostly taken from Dave’s words, a short postscript that Michael included in the book and conversations heard round the dinner table at the Wilsons one evening. If you ever need a few good titles, give Henry, Polly or Sonny a call.

Linford Detweiler, March 1999