A tune started as I made my way to the empty chair. “Honeysuckle.” A thought crossed my mind that Harriet had started “Honeysuckle” without me, one of my Memory Project tunes, to punish me for being late. A second thought crossed my mind, mostly because of the conversation with my students, that probably only three other people in the room knew or cared what honeysuckle was: Tom Mvovo, who maintained the seed bank; Liat Shuster, who worked in the greenhouse—in all our nights together, I never thought to ask her about the honeysuckle plant; Harriet Barrie, music historian, last OldTime player of the generation that had left Earth. To everyone else, it was simply the song’s name. A name that meant this song, nothing more.
When I started thinking that way, all the songs took on a strange flat quality in my head. So many talked about meadows and flowers and roads and birds. The love songs maintained relevance, but the rest might as well have been written in other languages as far as most people were concerned. Or about nothing at all. Mostly, we let the fiddles do the singing.
No matter how many times we play a song, it’s never the same song twice. The melody stays the same, the key, the rhythm. The notes’ pattern, their cadence. Still, there are differences. The exact number of fiddles changes. Various players’ positions within the group, each with their own fiddle’s tim-bral variances. The locations of the bass, the mandolins, the guitars, the banjos, all in relation to each individual player’s ears. To a listener by the snack table, or to someone seeking out a recording after the fact, the nuances change. In the minutes the song exists, it is fully its own. That’s how it feels to me, anyway.
Harriet stomped her foot to indicate we’d reached the last go-round for “Honeysuckle,” and we all came to an end together except one of the outer guitarists, who hadn’t seen the signal and kept chugging on the last chord. He shrugged off the glares.
“Oklahoma Rooster,” she shouted, to murmurs of approval. She started the tune, and the other fiddles picked up the melody. I put my bow to the strings and closed my eyes. I pictured a real farm, the way they looked in pictures, and let the song tell me how it felt to be in the place called Oklahoma. A sky as big as space, the color of chlorinated water. The sun a distant disk, bright and cold. A wood-paneled square building, with a round building beside it. A perfect carpet of green grass. Horses, large and sturdy, bleating at each other across the fields. All sung in the voice of a rooster, a bird that served as a wake-up alarm for the entire farm. Birds were the things with feathers, as the old saying went.
It was easy to let my mind wander into meadows and fields during songs I had played once a week nearly my whole life. Nelson must have gotten under my skin more than I thought: I found myself adding the weeks and months and years up. Fifty times a year, fifty years, more or less. Then the same songs again alone for practice, or in smaller groups on other nights.
The OldTime broke up at 0300, as it usually did. I rolled my head from side to side, cracking my neck. The music always carried me through the night, but the second it stopped, I started noticing the cramp of my fingers, the unevenness of my shoulders.
“What does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?” I asked Dana Torres as she shook out her knees.
“Sorry?”
“What do you think of when you play ‘Oklahoma Rooster’?”
Torres laughed. “I think C-C-G-C-C-C-G-C. Anything else and I fall behind the beat. Why, what do you think of ?”
A bird, a farm, a meadow. “I don’t know. Sorry. Weird question.”
We packed our instruments and stepped into the street, dimmed to simulate night.
Back at my quarters, I knew I should sleep, but instead I sat at the table and called up the history database. “Wind Will Rove.”
Options appeared: “Play,” cross-referenced to the song database, with choices from several OldTime recordings we’d made over the years. “Sheet music,” painstakingly generated by my grandmother and her friends, tabbed for all of the appropriate instruments. “History.” I tapped the last icon and left it to play as I heated up water for soporific tea. I’d watched it hundreds of times.
A video would play on the table. A stern looking white woman in her thirties, black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, bangs flat-cut across her forehead. She’d been so young then, the stress of the situation making her look older than her years.
“Harriet Barrie, Music Historian,” the first subtitle would say, then Harriet would appear and begin, “The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974 … .” Except when I returned, the table had gone blank. I went back to the main menu, but this time no options came up when I selected “Wind Will Rove.” I tried again, and this time the song didn’t exist.
I stared at the place where it should have been, between “Winder’s Slide” and “Wolf Creek.” Panic stirred deep in my gut, a panic handed down to me. Maybe I was tired and imagining things. It had been there a moment ago. It had always been there, my whole life. The new databases had backups of backups of backups, even if the recordings we called originals merely recreated what had been lost long ago. Glitches happened. It would be fixed in the morning.
Just in case, I dashed off a quick message to Tech. I drank
