Sing For Me Daddy Poem by Jim Manning

Growing up a depression child, I remember seeing men sit back on their haunches, using a stick to draw a California route in red dirt. I heard one grunt, “there’s work out there.” After they left, daddy picked up his guitar and sax and joined up with a country-western dance band passing through.

Daddy could play every instrument by ear, could write songs in his head all the time. Momma figured he’d thrive, that during times of numbing poverty, people would pay a dime to dance away despair.
He did, became a “fill-in” and sent money home from towns across
the country.

I grew up among the women who stayed behind planted vegetable gardens and raised chickens and pigs. They knew their men felt useless, shamed, scared of failing family—“let them chase their dreams, ” they said, “All we need is right here, keeping home together is the most important thing.”

Over the years, I saw beaten men straggle home.Sometimes on hot nights, I heard man-moans, the whisper of his comforting woman
drifted on heavy air to my bed under a tree—
“hush now, hush now—just go on living.”

From time to time daddy came home. At sundown we’d go out on the porch and he would lower his head over the frets, tuning, then he would pick out fresh melodies he’d written. “Sing that one again, Daddy”—I wanted to etch it in my memory, write it down in my Spiro notebook.

Darkness gave light to stars. Train sounds throbbed through the hollow, he’d pause, a whistle wailed, his eyes lit a stare in the pine gloom. I knew then he’d be gone by morning.

He sent money home, forgot to come home, forgot to send money.
I was thirteen. We moved to Oklahoma City, out of necessity,
momma said. She got a job. I got a job. We got on with our lives.

When I was thirty he looked me up—he needed money for a recording session in Nashville. I asked, “Record your songs? ”
His chin dropped. His head shook a murmur, “fill-in.”

I lent the money.He left.

He was lost again until I tuned in a CW radio station. His voice with strong, sad singing filled my head. Linking songs, he talked, picked, and introduced the next number, written by Dusty Rhodes, he said. He sang it to me when I was ten. I still had my Spiro notebook with all his songs written down.

A week later, I found him in a downtown flophouse. He’d lost his radio job, said guess he’d go visit his sister in California.
Sing for me, daddy. Well I would, but…

I got his sax and guitar out of hock. He sat on a park bench, I on the grass. He tried the sax first. A squeaking bawl replaced the deep, sonorous blues I remembered. His lip was dead. He polished the sax with his shirttail, cradled it into its case and bent over the guitar. Picking a refrain, he sang a song I ‘d learned at age ten. Silently I sang along with him.

I was thirty-two when I drove to Phoenix to bury him. He had lived fifty years. I found his sax and guitar in a downtown pawnshop—paid the ticket price and lugged them home.

At sixty, I resurrected the guitar from a deep closet,
thinking I should have buried it with Daddy.

But I didn’t love him enough then.