Shane looked down at the familiar pattern of scratches on the floor, a lopsided snowflake etched by years of boot heels and chair legs. As he did every week, he found the sooty remnant of blue electrical tape that he’d always treated as center stage, or as a spot close enough to center that the emcee never corrected his placement.

He pulled the rickety wooden chair half an inch forward and eased into it without moving the guitar. As he fixed its tuning and adjusted his capo over the second fret, he looked at the sparse crowd, scanning the foreheads so as not to distract himself with eye contact.

Shane thought through the short set he was about to play, and about whether his voice felt up to it after a long shift taking drink orders. He thought about whether to open with Dink’s song again or save it for last. Mostly, he thought about Dink.

He thought a lot about Dink.

That poor woman had seen so much in her life. Sent from Tennessee to Texas with a bunch of other poor women just to keep some workers from having nothing to do on weekends but beat each other up. Probably not old enough to have been through slavery, but not much younger than that either.

The way John Lomax told it, he heard she had some voice, and paid her a little railroad gin to hear a song. Dink agreed but couldn’t even take a break from washing her man’s clothes. She had to sing while she scrubbed, like a Cinderella whose fairy godmother was never going to find her by the banks of the Brazos River.

Shane knew there were people who thought Lomax shouldn’t have done that, shouldn’t have written the words and music down and put them in a book. But if he hadn’t, neither Shane nor anybody else would be singing Dink’s song. Nobody would remember Dink, and Shane wouldn’t think about her so much, or about how the men in that camp might have built a railroad, but it didn’t have their names on it.

More people probably knew Dink’s name than John Lomax’s. Probably more than knew Alan Lomax’s these days.

When Shane introduced the song every week, a few patrons would nod or say something to their neighbor to show the rest of the bar that they were clued in, but more heads would always bob a few strums in as people realized they knew the words. By the time Shane finished the first verse and hit the chorus, a good number always joined in. They could have been at a real hootenanny, or sitting around a campfire, or at a Greenwich Village café in 1960. Singing about having wings and saying goodbye, and doing it in Dink’s words, close to a century after she’d drawn her last breath. Nobody really knew for sure.

The next morning, he’d go to his weekly songwriting class and try to craft something worth bringing on stage. He found he could hone some nuggets, bits of what could become a song sometime down the line if he could piece enough of them together. A few of his classmates were better at it than Shane, but even their best songs felt specific or ephemeral. Putting in the work himself made him appreciate all the more how rare it was for a song to last. Thousands of students like him were doing the same thing every year, and at least some of them had real talent, but he doubted their songs would get knowing nods in a bar while they were moldering in the grave. Shane knew he was no Dylan, but he knew even Dylan sang Dink’s song when he was starting out.

He always wondered if she had other songs. Did she even write the one she sang, or just hear it? Or did she write dozens, all but one lost to history or passed along anonymously like a game of telephone because nobody wrote them down?

Walking back to his apartment after closing time, he realized that he was doing so in drizzling rain, and the thought got Dink’s song stuck in his head again. With his guitar safe under his umbrella, he whistled the tune the whole way home.

– Jeff Fleischer