As I left you yesterday, I set up a secondary studio in my neighbor’s basement.  Mic stand, laptop, guitar and headphones.  I came back out for coffee and my notebook and scolded myself.  No coming out until some good work has happened.

I was recording a song about Ashley’s engagement ring.  It’s a fourth generation heirloom and worthy of it’s own folk tale.

The ring was originally bought by her great grandfather in a West Virginia coal mining camp years ago.  It was paid for in script paper.  The ring was passed down twice to Ashley’s mom, Rebekah.  She wore it everyday as a teenager until it was lost playing volleyball.  Twenty something years later she found it in a shop on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina with papers to show it had been bought from an estate in West Virginia.  She would have recognized the antique diamond setting anywhere, and the all the nicks and scratches she’d cleaned as a girl were the same.

Ashley was with her the day she found it.  It was a mother-daughter trip, and Ashley was headed to college that fall.

The song is about Rebekah and her story of the ring.  It was a narrative poem that I gave her for Christmas last year, but it truly needed music.  It’s a folk song now, called “Sing about the ring.”

“The nicks and the scratches were the blemishes of time.  Like the story of a coal field life.”

I’ve got to get back in the basement now and finish it.  Part 2 of today’s blog I’ll say later.  It’s about what happened to the ring next.  (Note: if I tell this story too often, it’s only because I’m getting older.)