Sounds Better As A Song: “Never Coming Home”

I like to tell stories. Every once in a while, I tell the stories with music and stuff. This is one in an occasional series called “Sounds Better As a Song,” in which I share the story that inspired a song I made up.

This is one of the companion songs to “The Wild One,” the story about my great-aunt Lutie Mae Parker. I never knew Lutie Mae; I didn’t even know she existed until May 2016, nearly 100 years after she was born and 78 years after she died in a car crash in September 1938 at age 22.

I never knew Lutie Mae. Nobody in my family seems to know much about Lutie Mae. What little I know I’ve picked up from the public record and from newspaper accounts of the fatal accident.

She lives in my imagination, though. She lives as the antithesis of everything I knew about that generation of my family. People of that generation, people who gave birth to my parents, did not tell their kids to “follow their dreams.” They told their kids “don’t get above your raisin’.”

In my mind, Lutie Mae was high-spirited. She was rebellious. She was loud and obnoxious. And she was a defiant dreamer.

This song is all about the defiance. I’m reasonably sure that she didn’t get much support after she fled her marriage and the family and the sharecropper life in Oklahoma to pursue her dreams of being a singer in Chicago. I’m pretty sure that the reason I never heard of her was that she was considered a pariah, someone never to be spoken of. It’s possible her untimely death was viewed by her siblings as a punishment, as the inevitable result of her choice to rebel against everything that was considered acceptable when you grew up dirt-poor in the Dust Bowl.

And I imagine her raising an immaculately manicured middle finger to all of that.