Chapter 2
Two
Ryan Holding
I think I was just thirteen when I went on what I like to call my “first tour.” Before then, I’d played in my bedroom, for my friends, for my teacher.
And there was something very special about that.
I had room to experiment, to be bad; I bounced a million awful and unoriginal ideas off my little circle, and I’m lucky they still supported me through that.
Honestly, I once wrote a song about feeling like a frog stuck in the mud.
I mean, sure, in the right hands it could’ve worked—if Three Dog Night did it, maybe.
But not me. One of the lyrics was something like “My legs are meant to swim, but I can’t move an inch”—like, whew!
It’s a good thing I got that out of my system.
But that’s what you need to do as a creative, right? You have to have the freedom and support to let things be “good” or “bad” so you can find the voice that’s really yours. And it’s going to sound really strange and unfamiliar at first—because you’ve never heard anything exactly like it before.
At the same time . . . you can’t work in a vacuum. I hear so many of these really tough, singular artists being all, I work alone. No one understands me. My sound is so unique.
Okay, sure. Except everything we make is informed by all the musical traditions that came before us; our music exists in conversation with other artists. You’re not special, buddy.
Bluegrass made me understand this more than any other genre would have.
Hazel Dickens, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Cotten, Flatt and Scruggs—and Arnold Shultz even before them, who developed the thumb-style picking we still use today.
They’re all building off this old American music and then off each other.
They pay tribute to each other’s sound. And it grows and grows: Singers like Dolly Parton and Olivia Newton-John built careers off bluegrass and folk.
It lends itself to community with others and these incredible cross-genre opportunities.
It’s an amazing thing, it really is. It’s very close to my heart.
But back then, like I say, I didn’t have any of that community. I have my first teacher to thank for changing that. And my parents. And my friends.
The whole bluegrass community, in fact—I’m a lucky gal.
Mari
So, I want to be clear. Everyone who talks about Ryan’s privilege, her silver-spoon upbringing, the chances she got that no one else had—I mean, I’m not here to go on record and tell you that they’re wrong.
I think, in a lot of ways, that’s the point of most famous people.
That’s why they call it a “lucky break.” Anyone who’s successful in life, in any field, has arrived there because they had the skills to do so combined with opportunities that weren’t available to others.
It’s nature and nurture. There are also plenty of people in the world who have opportunities that aren’t available to others, and they do nothing with them.
Ryan took the opportunities presented to her. And one lot in life in which she was extremely lucky was the fact that she had supportive, open-minded parents.
I was actually having dinner with Ryan and her family the night that Frank called about the River Rocks festival. She and I were setting the table while Barb made spaghetti, and it was John who answered the phone.
“How are you, Frank?” he asked, which was our cue to start listening—the call was definitely about Ryan, and possibly me, if Frank was on the other end.
I remember him saying something like “Oh. Well, that sounds—you just mean to attend, right?” He’d frowned into the phone and then said “Oh” again, glanced back at us. We pretended we weren’t paying any attention.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said at last. “We’ll have to have a talk about it and let you know . . . All right . . . All right . . . You too.”
Ryan and I shared a glance and hurried to sit down at the table as fast as we could. John looked perturbed as Barb dished out the spaghetti and joined us.
“Ryan,” John said as we picked up our forks. “You have any interest in going to a bluegrass festival?”
“Sure,” she said. “But only if I can play in it.”
And John looked at her very levelly. He hadn’t even begun to eat his dinner.
“Did Frank say anything to you about this?”
“About a festival? No,” Ryan answered. Although John and Barb looked skeptical, I believed her; I would have heard about it too.
“Which festival?” Barb asked.
“It’s called River Rocks, Frank said. Down in Rhode Island. I don’t know anything about it, but Frank told me it might be a good opportunity.” John shrugged.
“That could be fun,” said Barb. “I don’t think you’ve ever heard any live bluegrass, have you, Ry?”
“Never ever,” Ryan said. “When is it?”
“End of August. The tickets aren’t cheap.” John rubbed his chin. “But . . . Frank thought you might be able to go as a performer.”
“What?” Barb said.
And Ryan grinned.
“She’s barely thirteen,” Barb protested.
John opened his hands to avoid blame. I just sat there with my head going back and forth like I was watching a tennis match and wondering what the odds were that I’d be allowed to go to Rhode Island too.
“There’s a new-artist stage,” John went on. “Sounds like they have young talent perform sometimes.”
“What do I have to do?” Ryan asked.
John finally looked back at her. “Record a tape, I think. And if they like it, there’s an audition in June.”
“I’ll get started, then,” Ryan said.
“Hold on, now,” said Barb. “Your father and I have to talk about this. We need to check this thing out, make sure it’s going to be a—well, a wholesome place for young ladies. Heck, we need to look at the calendar to see if we can even make those dates.”
“Do what you need to do,” Ryan said, spooling a massive bite of spaghetti onto her fork.
That was her, to a T; she didn’t want to wait.
She wanted everything to move as quickly in reality as the vision that was materializing in her head.
I could almost feel the energy radiating off her from the other side of the table.
In her mind, I knew, she was already on that stage in August, unleashing her music into the breeze off the Atlantic.
Frank
She crushed the audition tape, of course.
I helped her with the application form and let her use the little studio and mic equipment in my shop to record two songs of her choosing.
She wanted both of them to be original, but I encouraged her to do at least one cover—the judges would want some point of comparison.
We’d been working on “Travelin’ This Lonesome Road” by the Osborne Brothers, so she went with that.
I’ve talked a lot about her string skills, but not much about her voice.
I know so much has been said about it—hell, they’ve had folks down at Johns Hopkins write articles about her vocal cords by now.
But it was just real pretty even then, sweet and clear.
A Massachusetts kid through and through, but Ryan managed to nail that traditional bluegrass vocal break that’s such a hallmark of the genre.
Maybe it was in her blood, with Barb being from Kentucky and all.
It was still a young girl’s voice, but it had some weight to it.
She sang like she was really thinking about the words coming out of her mouth.
How many kids genuinely grasp the feeling an adult would have, listening to a song like “Lonesome Road” about being all alone while storms are raging.
But she did, somehow. Or was at least able to represent what she didn’t fully understand.
She did do a couple of takes to get a recording she was happy with. After the third or fourth time around, Ryan ended the song and did this firm nod of her head, and I knew. To be honest, all the takes had sounded like winners to me.
“That sounds real nice in your range,” I said.
And she looked straight at me and told me, “Well, that’s why there should be more bluegrass singers who are girls!”
And I laughed. Not at her, not at all, but—well, she did like to speak her mind. And she wasn’t wrong.
With the next piece, I let her go ahead and record one of her own songs.
I’d worked with her a little bit on some of them.
I know this book you’re writing isn’t about me, but I’m not too humble to admit I had some success back in the day.
I was the leader of my jug band, and we did do the festival circuit and some New York shows on the songs I wrote.
Got a couple of awards for them, nothing to puff me up too much, but enough for a steady gig schedule.
I was happy to help Ryan out with chord progression, hooks, bridge ideas, the like.
But the lyrics were all her own. I’m not touching that—and I didn’t need to.
She would come in with her tattered old notebook and just write about what was on her mind that day, the things that happened in school, and so forth.
But she had a way of framing them so poetically—I mean, Ryan’s what happened when you took the lyricism and depth of Bill Monroe and packaged it in the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl.
She still had a normal life, back then. I’ll say this: When I suggested River Rocks to the Holdings, those festivals were as far as I ever expected or intended Ryan to go.
It was my opinion that she needed a community and an outlet for her obvious talent.
But the way she soared was nothing I could have predicted.
Should have, maybe. I think we all underestimated her.
Now, I’m no “hater,” as my grandson would call me. And wherever she may be, god bless her, I still say I’m Ryan’s biggest fan. But I—I do feel responsible. Would I have set her on this path if I knew it would cost her her childhood, the best of her teenage years—any sort of a normal life?
No. No, I don’t think I would have.
I don’t know. Maybe there was something in me that knew I couldn’t stop her as I sat in that little studio listening to the song she recorded.
It was “Providence.” Yes, the very one that appeared on her first album. I got to hear it before anyone else. It was a little different back then, but those verses—it was poetry beyond her years.
It’s just you and me, William / How many years will we be young? / I’ll keep you with me down this lonesome road. / It’s Providence that brought me here / The same that sends you off, I fear. / I hope you’ll wait for me on Wickenden.
William was—well, you know. He was that boy she ended up having so much trouble with down the line.
The melody was something she’d been playing around with for some time.
I know she adapted it to name the venue location for River Rocks, and I thought that was pretty clever of her.
A nod to “Lonesome Road” to make for a nice pairing on her audition tape, a little homage to River Rocks’ home.
And it was pretty heads-up for a kid like that to grasp the double meaning of Providence.
“Have you even been to Rhode Island before?” I asked her. “How do you know Wickenden Street?”
Ryan grinned. “Looked at the atlas for something that would rhyme.”
She recorded the song in one take. And she let it be what it was.
Of course, at those last concerts before her disappearance, she sang, It’s just you and me, William / How many years will we be young?
/ It’s getting old to walk this lonesome road.
/ It’s Providence that brought you here / The same that makes us strange, I fear. / You left me all alone on Wickenden.
So, you know. The lyrics evolved to reflect what had happened.