Dolly and Biggie

by Jacob Weber

My daughter and I were a bluegrass-R&B fusion band. At our first performance at the Orioles’ Nest Barbeque and Wings open mike night, I started us with a joke. I said, “Hi, I’m Michael and this is Nyeshell. We’re a bluegrass-R&B fusion band. Can you guess which one of us is bluegrass and which is R&B?” If we’d had a drummer in the band back then, he’d probably have given us a barump-bump. Nyeshell thought it was funny that night, her unnaturally tiny ears flexing like butterfly wings as she laughed with the audience.

I’d only been a father for a few months. I’d had to jump into it with Nyeshell already a teenager and probably having sex, although I didn’t know the second part then. Nyeshell was a student in my wife’s fifth grade class. She was living with an aunt. Jenna said Nyeshell’s school file had once used words like “bright” and “eager” about her when she was in kindergarten, but now it read more like a manual on how not to set off a gas explosion. Nyeshell had been in more fights in just seventh grade than I had in my whole life.

The first day of school, Jenna always has her kids write down personal information on index cards of various non-threatening colors. They write their names, phone numbers, and who the responsible adult is for Jenna to call when they act up, although she doesn’t put it that way. She adds a line at the end where the kids are supposed to write “something you think I should know about you.” On her first day of fifth grade, Nyeshell wrote “I hate white people” in that space.

A few weeks later, Jenna caught Nyeshell reading an Angela Johnson novel while she was supposed to be writing her journal. Jenna told Nyeshell she would hold the book at her desk until the end of class. When Nyeshell came to get it, Jenna asked if she wanted more books like it. By the time Jenna bought her Sharon Draper’s Tears of a Tiger in the spring, Nyeshell was telling Jenna her whole life story in her journal entries.

Like every kid, hers was a story her parents wrote most of for her, and if you knew her parents, you’d know how shitty a story it was going to be. Jenna’s seen plenty in her career in Baltimore. I can’t remember one year where she didn’t go to a funeral for one of her former students. She has a scar on her wrist from the pins they put in after she broke it separating two kids fighting. She got maced in that one, too, when the school cops finally came in to put an end to it. She’s seen kids on drugs and kids selling them. She’s seen sixth graders pregnant. So when she couldn’t talk to me about the things Nyeshell was writing in her journal, I knew they had to be bad.

Jenna told me one day she was going to have to go to the authorities, and when she did, Nyeshell would have to move out of her aunt’s house. She wanted us to take her in, and she hoped I’d be on board. But I wasn’t on board. Not then. Not yet. I thought it was my job to be the rational one, and I thought I had reasons to say no.

Reason One: Jenna and I were only a year into really trying—the kind of trying that involves doctors and a lot of money–to have a baby of our own. I thought Jenna asking to bring Nyeshell home was her throwing in the towel.

Reason Two: What if we did succeed in getting pregnant right after we brought Nyeshell home? It’d be like trying to figure out how to walk down two unmarked paths in the woods at the same time.

Reason Three: I didn’t want to set a precedent. That was only Jenna’s fifth year of teaching. If we started bringing home every child with a sad story who deserved something better, we’d be overrun in no time.

So we waited a while to take Nyeshell in. She left her aunt’s and went to live in a group home.

The first time Nyeshell and I played music on a stage together, there couldn’t have been more than twenty people listening. We didn’t know how to fit bluegrass and R&B together. This was way before Nyeshell started dating a D.J. who showed us how to mix songs. The formula was always for Nyeshell to sing TLC or En Vogue with her top-shelf-whiskey voice while I picked mandolin to a bluegrass song in a complementary tempo and key behind her. Then we’d switch, and I’d try to survive singing some Alison Krauss or Ricky Skaggs tune that stayed within the 14-note range I can actually hit while Nyeshell played R&B keyboard. We’d do a little “Shoop” by Salt-n-Peppa, followed by “Rockytop” or “Rollin’ in my Sweet Baby’s Arms.” We went back and forth like a relay race with us passing the baton off to each other. It was more musical comedy than music, although we didn’t see it that way. At the end, we’d come together and harmonize with two songs at once.

I was awkward on stage, never knowing what to do with my feet when Nyeshell was singing, but she was like a lion with a gazelle. She never looked more natural. She has a mouth as thin as spaghetti, and those few times that she smiles, her mouth almost disappears. But the sounds that came out of her mouth made audiences gasp. Her eyes would close for long stretches, and when she opened them, it’s like she was looking at everyone with something new she’d just learned. It was the longest I ever saw her keep her eyes closed. She didn’t sleep well.

Three months after Nyeshell went to the group home, Jenna walked in the front door with her one night and said she wasn’t asking anymore if we could take her in. Nyeshell had called her from the group home. It was my first look at the girl who would become my daughter.  She was short but solid as a church pew. She stood at the door with half her hair torn out, one shoe, a gash on her check, and everything she owned in a couple of garbage bags.

There wasn’t much in my life that’d prepared me to know how to raise a black daughter. Dad had volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he’d won a Silver Star for manning a machine gun to cover his platoon’s escape after the first three gunners had all been killed. Then he came back to the States and complained for the rest of his life about what America had become. I think kids like Nyeshell were what he had in mind when he bitched, although he never actually said what he meant by what the country had become.

Monday to Friday, he worked at a feed plant, came home to Natty Bo and my mom’s cooking, and fell asleep in a chair watching the Orioles. If my brothers and I made noise during the game, we’d catch hell.

On weekends, if there happened to be a festival, fair, or concert of some sort within a hundred miles where bluegrass was playing, we’d all hit the road together. He and Mom were like a whole different couple then, her popping French fries into his mouth while he drove the station wagon, him buying her turquoise earrings from vendors at festivals and brushing her hair from her ears to put them in for her. My brother Seth and I were set free to run wherever our feet took us while Mom and Dad listened to the music. We each got a couple of dollars to eat with, no questions asked, which meant something fried and sugared.

Dad loved bluegrass so much, he paid for Seth and me to take music lessons. We both wanted to play banjo, but Dad said we had to learn different instruments so we could play together. Seth was younger, so Dad made me let him have the banjo. That’s how I came to play the mandolin. Dad played a decent fiddle when his shoulder wasn’t hurting him. We were enough of a band to play together, but I can’t remember as we ever did.

Dad didn’t like all music. He hated Motown. He was so mad when the Orioles blew a 3-1 lead in the ’79 World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates, he didn’t watch them the entire next season. I don’t think it was because they lost; it was because they lost to a team that had Sister Sledge’s “We are Family” as a theme song.

Jenna and I got out of Hagerstown together. I took the car Dad had helped me fix up, some clothes, and my mandolin. Dad watched me pack the car without a word. I worked two jobs for a while, helping to put Jenna through Towson University. The hospital saw I was good at managing the cleaning crew and figured I might be able to manage something bigger. I’ve been there ever since.

The truth is, it’s hard to mix bluegrass and R&B. Even Nyeshell’s girlfriend Kendra the DJ – who I have to admit knew her music even though I thought everything she ever said about DJing was obnoxious – had a hard time making them fit. Most bluegrass music is fast, too fast to fit with the kinds of soulful songs that suit Nyeshell. If there’s a slow bluegrass song, you can guarantee it’s in ¾ time. How many R&B songs can you think of that are in ¾ time? You’d have to be an idiot to try to cram R&B together with bluegrass. But I had a new daughter I needed to figure out how to love. She had hair I didn’t understand. She had clothes I didn’t understand. She had a years-long gap in her life I didn’t understand and was afraid to ask her about. The only things I thought I could share with her were basketball and music, and the only music I knew to share with her was bluegrass. I was crazy, thinking I should pass something along to her that my old man had given to me, but I didn’t have much else to give her.

Somehow or other, we settled into a rhythm together. I played basketball with her and her friends on Saturdays. They thought it was good practice to play with someone taller. We didn’t like a lot of the same TV shows, but we agreed on Fresh Prince. She liked the Alfredo sauce I made. I didn’t ask her what was wrong when I heard her crying in her room, because I didn’t think she wanted to talk about it.

Maybe our best number—by which I mean the one that least sounded like we were intentionally trying to be funny—was our mix-up of “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” with TLC’s “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls.” That became our finale.

When none of your songs have the same tempo, it’s hard to keep a rhythm together for long. Not long after Nyeshell started high school, Jenna and I did what everyone predicted we’d do and went and got pregnant once we’d stopped trying. Nyeshell and Jenna were both more excited than I was—I’d just taken on another big promotion at the hospital and was struggling with night school. I’d be up studying, and Nyeshell, who couldn’t sleep, would be on the couch watching something trashy on TV. She saw me stress eat a hundred bowls of ice cream.

The girls thought it’d help me get into the spirit of it if they let me name the new baby. My favorite bluegrass album at the time was Traveler, which the girls had given to me for Christmas one year. So I named him that. Soon after Traveler joined us, we broke our two-year hiatus from speaking to my parents to let them know they had a new grandson.

“So it’s a boy? It’s a boy, Jim,” my mother beamed.

“I heard it’s a boy, Tammy,” Dad said from the other line, no doubt sitting with the old cordless in his chair.

“Oh, Michael, can we come see him?” my mother asked, ignoring Dad.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot going on right now, and our place is suddenly not really big enough for us.”

“Well, don’t go building any new wings on the mansion for us,” Dad said.

“What’s his name?” Mom asked.

“Traveler.”

“Like Robert E. Lee’s horse,” my dad said.

Fuck. Of course like his horse. But the birth certificate was already filed.

Not long after Traveler was born, Kendra, who was just learning to be a DJ then, started showing up at the house. At first, Kendra and Nyeshell would watch TV together in the living room and talk to me when I’d come through to get a snack from the kitchen.

“Hey, Mister Mike,” Kendra would say.

They watched MTV or BET. Once in a while, they’d turn on some basketball, and I’d sit and watch with them, but Kendra wasn’t much of a fan. One day, I saw them holding their bare arms next to each other up to the light.

“Mister Mike,” Kendra said. “Which one of us you think got darker skin?”

I didn’t like being called on to answer a question like that. I thought I wasn’t supposed to notice their skin, or at least not talk about it. I looked at Nyeshell and Kendra. It was close. Nyeshell was a medium shade most of the time, but she’d been outside a lot that summer playing basketball. Kendra, meanwhile, had a couple of names tattooed to her arms in Byzantine calligraphy. I couldn’t focus on her skin, because the ink drew all the light in the room into them.

“I think you’re Brandy, and you’re Monica,” I said, pointing to one then the other.

“Oh, Dad,” Nyeshell whined, dropping her arm. “They suck.”

Not long after, I started hearing a lot of new music coming from Nyeshell’s room: NAS, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu. They would listen for hours without emerging. Kendra stayed until late. Nyeshell asked for a tattoo of her own for her birthday one year. About the time I learned who Mary J. Blige was, Kendra started spending the night in Nyeshell’s room sometimes. I asked Jenna if we should worry, if something was wrong at Kendra’s house. Jenna told me not to worry about it. I did worry, especially when Nyeshell told me she wanted to quit basketball before her junior year of high school.

But we still had music between us, and Kendra seemed behind it. After I taught Nyeshell to drive, they’d head off to record stores together, piling up not only Dr. Dre and SWV, but also Jerry Douglas’ Shenandoah Thunder or The Lonesome River Band.

Kendra arranged sets for us. I was hard to please. I didn’t like gospel, which is approximately half of all bluegrass songs, and I didn’t like anything that could be considered country, which I thought of as something stupid people in Glen Burnie who didn’t know what it was like to really grow up in the country listened to. She accommodated me.

We worked harder than we’d ever worked to get ready for a talent show at the mall. If we won, we’d get a thousand dollars and a chance to perform on New Years’ Eve 1999 downtown. Kendra worked all kinds of tracks together and used some new software she bought to help us mix it. She begged me not to use my joke at the beginning, but I said it had become a family tradition, so she let me have it. We rolled from “This is How We Do it” to “Little Maggie” to “Creep” to the obligatory “Rocky Top.” Kendra could hear anything and figure out how to transpose it into the mandolin, even though she couldn’t play it. She had some kind of freakish genius in her. When we played our last rehearsal, even she had to admit “that shit was pretty tight.”

It ended up being lucky that I kept the joke in at the beginning. We were doing pretty well up there, and we had the crowd revved up. People who’d obviously never heard a bluegrass song in their lives were so into Nyeshell, they stomped their feet to the mandolin while she wailed away with her muscular arms on the keyboard. People who would ordinarily say “rap isn’t real music” accepted it, because it was tied to something they could get. It looked like someone out there started a line dance. But Nyeshell freestyled. That was Kendra’s influence. Instead of sticking with “Waterfalls,” she started in with “Red Light Special.” My daughter was singing these words, with me playing background:

I’ll let you touch it if you’d
Like to go down
I’ll let you go further
If you take the southern route

That was the point at which I stopped playing, red-faced, and yelled, “What the fuck are you singing?”

The crowd thought it was part of the act, and hooted and fell over laughing. They thought it was a great gag: white dad who tells corny jokes, not hip in any way, old school, bluegrass, unable to relate to his black daughter’s edgy, sexually awakening music. The new whine of Nyeshell’s voice in the old wineskin of my redneck songs. A brilliant, absurd mix-up of two things that would never go together, ending in the old man’s inevitable breakdown. We’d have won, but the organizers said we were disqualified because I’d said “fuck” and the rules clearly said that we had to keep the performance family-friendly. Nyeshell was pissed.

“We were smoking there. Why’d you have to go and trip and ruin it all?”

“What’s that even mean, ‘trip’? When did you start talking like that? With that made-up slang?”

“Made-up? What’s made-up? It’s how I talk.”

“That’s not you talking. That’s Kendra talking through you.”

“It’s the same thing, Mike. Kendra is important to me. She’s the most important thing to me. There’s no difference between her and me. Her talking is me talking, and me talking is her talking.”

Her hair fell down into her eyes as she argued with me. It wasn’t hers, but something she wore on top of her own hair that Kendra had helped her make. I couldn’t remember if it was a weave, a wig, or tracks. She’d explained the difference over and over, but I couldn’t keep it straight.

To my surprise, since I thought of her as the outsider, Kendra wanted us to keep the act going. After they graduated in 2000, they moved in together, but Kendra still tried to dream up another set for us. It was built, rather pointedly, around Aaliyah’s “Try Again.” She wanted to blend it with “Go to Sleep You Little Baby,” from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou. But I refused to do it.

“Why you don’t want to sing that song, Mister Mike?” she asked me, still keeping that name for me although she was grown.

“Because I can’t sing that with her.”

“Why not? It’s a nice little lullaby”

“In the movie, it’s a seduction song. I can’t sing that with a teenage girl on stage.”

“So don’t sing it sexy. Sing it like a lullaby.”

“I can’t do it, Kendra.”

“It’s a sweet lullaby. Why don’t you want to sing a little lullaby with Nyeshell, Mister Mike?”

It never happened. Traveler started taking violin lessons at age five. He had a half-sized violin, which matched his half-sized basketball.

I didn’t see Kendra and Nyeshell much after the last attempt to put an act together failed. Jenna kept in touch, kept me filled in on what they were up to. Nyeshell worked to put Kendra through nursing school. Kendra DJed at some clubs on the weekends. She had a decent following in Baltimore. People came to hear her spin records. Can you imagine? She picks songs off a list and hits “play.” How can one person be better at that than another?

Nyeshell started her own contract cleaning business, mostly taking offices as clients. She and one employee drove a van around town at night, letting themselves into quiet, empty buildings, where she’d run a floor machine or spot dust. I can picture her biceps flexing as she turned a scrubber around at the end of a hallway for another run over granite floors. It’s good work for someone who can’t sleep.

Dad died last year. His kidneys were shit. He could have asked Seth or me to see if we were a match, but I guess he didn’t want to find out what kind of answers we might give. Mom didn’t offer any excuses for him at the wake in their living room, but she did say I was more like him than I might have thought.

“His own daddy was a moonshiner near Cumberland. If you think Hagerstown is a red-neck backwater, you ought to see Cumberland. Your daddy and I went back there a few years ago, and when we stopped downtown, a man tried to sell us drugs.”

“Did Dad say yes?”

“Funny. He drank beer. Nothing else. He promised me that when we left Cumberland together. We thought of Cumberland like you and Jenna thought of here. Couldn’t wait to get out.”

“Dad kind of brought it with him.”

“Not the worst parts of it. His daddy told people he made moonshine to sell for extra money, but nobody ever saw him sell it. He shot a hole in the ceiling with buckshot once that went clean through the roof. Didn’t fix it for years, so rain, snow and sun came pouring down through it. Your daddy said he’d lie on the floor sometimes looking up at that hole in the roof thinking he wished he could just float on up out of it.”

One of Seth’s kids started complaining that his brother had taken the last meatball from the meager wake spread, so Mom took one off her plate with a fork and put it on his.

“We left for Hagerstown at sixteen and never looked back. The only thing your daddy brought with him that he cared about were some of those bluegrass records. You know his daddy used to pick a guitar? I have no idea how he learned. There’s no way he could have known how to read music. The man couldn’t write his own name. But he could play okay. I heard him myself. Something about that stuck with your daddy, I guess, because he wanted to share it with you.”

Traveler and I had our instruments in the car, and Seth’s old banjo was still in the attic of Mom and Dad’s house. One of Seth’s kids could play guitar, so we played “I Cried all the Way to Kentucky,” to say good-bye to Dad. It’s a terrible, sentimental song about a woman who goes to a funeral for her uncle. She remembers him in a way that is so pure, you know it can’t be even half true. We were terrible, and we had to skip the bridge because none of us could remember it, but we had a good time trying.

So Dad’s funeral ended up with me in a family band for the second time. We weren’t very good. Truth is, we didn’t practice nearly as hard as Nyeshell and I had. Seth’s kids and Traveler were so happy to have someone to play with, we never could settle down to work for long. But we did get together once a week, and while we were together, we did manage to play a little bluegrass. Between us, we were a mandolin, a guitar, a banjo, a violin, and then Seth’s second son, Brian, decided he’d learn to play the Dobro so he could be part of the band. We weren’t great, but sometimes, we weren’t that bad.

We didn’t perform in public anywhere. It would have been fun, and given us something to strive towards, but I was worried what Nyeshell would think if she heard about it. A musical act had been our thing. If I shared it with Traveler, too, she might think I loved him more than her.

Time went by, and I started to look more and more like my old man when I looked in the mirror. I swore off what little alcohol I drank, but because I couldn’t lay off the snacks, my gut still swelled like his. A few months ago, Kendra called me up and said she had an idea for something, and she needed all of us to help. There was a show called America’s Got Talent she thought we’d be perfect for. We’d get a million dollars if we won the whole thing, she said, but even if we didn’t do that, just the exposure alone would help us to get hits on something called YouTube, where we could make money one-tenth of a penny at a time.

Kendra wanted my whole family—Seth and his kids–in it, along with Traveler and Nyeshell and Kendra. She believed America would go crazy for a large, mixed-family bluegrass-R&B mashup band. And when I say “believed,” I mean she believed the same way she believed Jesus is coming back. She was a zealot for bluegrass mixed with R&B. She was relentless about asking, sending me tracks of mash-ups she’d made.

“This one killed at the club last weekend,” she said. “We just got to do this.”

I kept insisting that bluegrass and R&B just didn’t sound right together, that no matter how great they were on their own, we never should have tried to mix them in the first place. I was tired of trying to make them fit.

Jenna asked me why I didn’t want to play with them. Was I afraid of going up on television with such a big audience? Was I still mad at Kendra because Nyeshell had quit basketball? I tried to avoid the question by stuffing Cheetos into my mouth, but Jenna took the bag from me. I swallowed.

“I guess I’m mad I didn’t end up being much better than my own dad.”

Jenna picked up my mandolin that was lying on the table next to me, plucked a string. “You’re a little better. That’s enough. If every son is a little better than his dad, eventually, the whole world will be full of perfect dads.”

“Nyeshell still can’t sleep through the night, Jenna. And I never went in to her room to ask her why, to see if she needed anything.”

She poured some Cheetos into a bowl and put the rest of the bag back in the pantry. “You know why Kendra wants this so bad, don’t you?”

“Why?”

“She and Nyeshell have been trying to have a baby. It’s expensive for them even if everything goes right, and it hasn’t been going right. They’re having a hard time like we did.”

We worked at set lists. K-ci and Jo-Jo, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé. Nickel Creek, the Punch Brothers, the unavoidable Alison Krauss. We all laughed thinking of many terrible names for our band: Dolly and Biggie, Dykes on the Mountain, Earl Scruggs and Two Thugs, John Denver and the Gender Benders. We practiced. We changed things around, then changed them some more. We were ready.

“We’re a bluegrass-R&B fusion band,” Nyeshell told America one night in 2008. Seth’s family, Traveler and I were dressed in overalls. Nyeshell and Kendra had silver shiny sequin dresses. Their matching tattoos stood out on their bare arms.

“Can you guess which of us does the bluegrass and which does the R&B?” Nyeshell asked Jerry Springer and the world. I thought the joke might be funnier if she told it. It was hard to tell from up there, but I thought the way she told the joke really knocked them dead.


Jake Weber is a translator living in Maryland. He has published fiction in The Baltimore Review, Bartleby Snopes, The Potomac Review, and The Green Hills Literary Lantern. He won the 2016 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Contest, and the winning book ‘Don’t Wait to be Called’ was published in fall 2017. He blogs about whether fiction is really good for you at workshopheretic.blogspot.com.