Original Song- “Burn Silent Houses” Live at the Guitar Bar

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Published 2022-06-06

This is a song I wrote awhile ago after watching a storyteller in Asheville. The lady was old, around 85, and told many stories that had a kind of a haunting beauty to them. One of these was about her father, a black man who married a white woman in the 1930s. That alone was an amazing story, but the story that truly stuck with me is the one about her father as a child. He grew up in the deep Mississippi during the Spanish Flu, and lived in an incredibly poor and segregated community. One of his jobs, even as a child, was to drive with his father to town and knock on the doors of houses, trying to rouse the inhabitants. If there was no answer from inside, his father would light the house in fire. This was to ensure that the disease didn’t spread throughout the rest of the town, and also meant that the family inside had more than likely all succumbed to the sickness.
The words the old woman spoke as she said this story were dark, and the whole experience is ingrained in my mind. To me, part of the purpose of art is to keep these old stories alive and appreciate those who actually lived them. This song is dedicated to that old woman and her family

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