Hills and Hollers and Sparkly Blue Skies: Music as an Antidote to Grief

Fox Theatre Atlanta 2022/Photo by Author

It’s a funny thing, grief. Funny peculiar, I mean. It lies in wait, quietly under the surface, mostly making its presence known through a gentle nudge when someone makes mention of my dad or reminisces on a significant event or a quirky habit of his.

But for me, grief spirals out of control and overwhelms me in a torrid whirlwind of emotions when a certain strand of music catches me off-guard and open to its intrusion.

It started yesterday afternoon.

My mom posted a picture of her and my aunt and uncle at the beach. Good for her — traveling and trying to reclaim her tenuous hold on this new life.

But I noticed the unspoken: three chairs instead of four. A void where my dad should have been. A crushing absence.

I felt the feather-light touch of heartbreak tracing over me.

But the promise of Ray LaMontagne’s soulful, raspy crooning at the Fox Theatre kept grief from bubbling over. I was ready for his plaintive songs, prepared to lose myself in the honest, forthright guitar licks and lyrics. He did not disappoint.

What I was not prepared for, however, was his opening act, a pretty young woman in cowboy boots and sparkly blue dress — “to match the sky in here!” — she said.

Sierra Ferrell.

I had to do a search for her name when she came out on stage.

As soon as she began singing, I found myself drawn into a musical web of otherworldly Pentatonic cadences and dark, rambling country songs that touched something inside of me and evoked hills and hollers, cornbread in iron skillets, washboards on weathered back porches.

Her music spoke to a generations-old penchant for guitars, fiddles, and banjos, and she gave voice to lyrics that my ancestors used to depict the harsh reality of mountain living.

She painted an anachronistic figure on stage in time present, singing like June Carter Cash or Patsy Cline, looking fully modern yet channeling the voices of another age that once came through my great-grandmother’s scratchy Victrola years and years ago.

Then: “I’m from Charleston, West Virginia!”

My heart surged. I knew it. Nobody else could have curated a repertoire like this one except a West Virginia native.

With a dynamic stage presence, Sierra Ferrell recounted highlights of her life story and detailed her mostly unsuccessful search for West Virginia waltzes. So she wrote her own.

Of course she did.

And then the dam broke. All my memories of my West Virginia-born dad came rushing through in a bittersweet flood. Grief and nostalgia overwhelmed me.

“The West Virginia Waltz” made me imagine my dad waiting for my mom — somewhere and sometime, both past and future. “No one holds a flame to you.”

It was beautifully cathartic. Unknowingly, her haunting tunes brought me tears and then, ironically, tamed the wildness of my grief with a promise of love and reconciliation.

Thank you, Sierra Ferrell, for an enchanting and emotional evening. You’ve got yourself a new, dedicated fan, devoted to your music.

Check her out on Spotify and Apple Music. Start with “In Dreams” and “The West Virginia Waltz.” You won’t regret it.

Photo/Unsplash

(Article originally published in Times-Georgian April 15, 2023)