Photo by Heidi Ross
“It was still dark outside and they were gone just like that.”
On Aug. 12, 1986, Allison Moorer’s father shot and killed her mother and then killed himself at the family’s home in Mobile, Alabama. The 14-year-old Moorer is awakened by a gunshot, “terrified to move even a centimeter or even to breathe.” She can’t see much as she enters the dark living room, but she knows that she’s heard “the unmistakable sound that takes a life.” As it turns out, it came from the front yard, just outside the living room wall. The reverberations of the shots in that moment and throughout the lives of Moorer and her sister, the singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne, echo throughout Moorer’s new memoir, Blood, and her new album of the same name, out Oct. 25.
“Writing a book is something I’d never thought I’d do,” says Moorer. “About six weeks after my son was born [in 2010], I was invited to be a guest on Maya Angelou’s radio show. … She asked me, ‘What are you going to tell John Henry when he grows up?’ It blew my mind.”
Moorer began writing Blood, the book, in 2012, and five years later had finished a draft she was ready to share. While she didn’t set out to record a companion album to her memoir, she discovered, around the time she finished writing the book, that she had some songs that dealt with the same themes and issues as the book. The pain, ache, desperation, anger, and love she so lyrically shares in her memoir weave through the album’s sparse melodies, fierce rockers, and spare blues. While a book and songs involve very different kinds of writing, Moorer says that “I feel like my maturing as a songwriter are steps I’ve taken toward writing the book. I am more sure of myself now.”
Moorer’s been living with the traumatic events of that morning for 33 years now. Some of the memories of her father and mother and the violence that marred their marriage and the family are seared in her psyche, and others live just below the surface, appearing now and then unbidden. “I ask myself all the questions,” she says. “I made myself do active remembering. You make yourself look at photos or recall an event and remember every detail you can about it. I went through a box of photographs and made myself recall smells, sights, words associated with the time in the photo. I made a stack of index cards I would [use to] cast myself back to certain stages in my life.”
In the book, Moorer wavers between anger and grace. She recalls the closeness and unity of family, and her father’s encouraging her and her sister to play music. She also recalls episodes when his anger exploded in verbal and physical abuse of their mother. “The words I heard come from my daddy’s mouth while I lay in bed terrified me. They bounced down the hallway like ricocheting bullets and landed in the bedroom Sissy and I shared. He called Mama a pig, a worm. My ears burned and my heart hurt. I don’t know how she stood it. I don’t know how he did either. It’s hard work to be that mean. She didn’t fight back very often, if at all; I don’t think she knew how.”
Despite her father’s meanness and violence, Moorer recalls his love for her and her sister. “I say in the book that I have to give credit to my Daddy for making us daredevils,” she says. “He didn’t want us to be afraid of the world. He was the one in the family who wanted to be an artist. He was the one who arranged the gigs, who took us to fiddler’s conventions. He set us the example by letting us know that this was a viable thing to do. When I was 13, we came to Nashville. I didn’t see anything unusual about that.”
Shelby Lynne, left, and Allison Moorer (photo by Chris Griffy)
“He gave me my mouth,” she adds with a laugh, “and that’s not something I’m proud of.”
Yet, she writes in the book, “out of everything I remember about my childhood, my mama is what I want to hang on to most. I want to keep her fresh and right in front. I want to remember how she smelled, how she talked, how she walked, how she laughed, how she dressed, the shoes she wore, her hands, her jawline, her skin, the way her arms felt around me, and how she tilted her head in little almost imperceptible backward nods, and blinked a lot when she got insecure or anxious. … I struggle to keep her close with those small details and things like rings, photographs, and the songs we used to sing and that she loved.”
Moorer recalls, “My mother was the kind of woman who could light up a room. She was just a lovely person. I inherited her capability for figuring out how to do a lot with a little.”
Through all the violence and the loss, Moorer bonded with her older sister, Shelby Lynne. “We are very different, but we have a bond as sisters,” Moorer says. “We share the bond of music. Our voices are like hope to one another. We also share a trauma bond, which is incredibly strong. When you share an experience like the one we did, you share a bond. I have a sister, and I am rich beyond measure.”
A Hummingbird Hovering
Finding a voice — to speak truth to power, to share past injustices, to recall the beauty of small moments, to speak words once unsayable — lives at the center of Moorer’s memoir. And what she can’t say, she sings. In the book she writes, “It calms us — the vibration in the body, the resonance rumbling through — there’s a reason lullabies put babies to sleep. To sing is to pray, to meditate, to speak the unspeakable, to let go of what has been kept silent. To sing in harmony is to share those things, to wrap one voice around another and fall in love in some way, to become alchemists of notes and create mixtures of soundwaves that magically put the feelings in order, even if it has to rile them first.”
In conversation Moorer reflects more on vibration in song: “The mid-belt is a place in your diaphragm that produces the purest part of the song. When I hit that it’s inspiring. It feels like someone opened a glass of butterflies, or a hummingbird is hovering there.”
On the album Blood, Moorer traces in song the arc of the story she tells in her memoir. The album opens with the soaring, ethereal, and haunting “Bad Weather” — “and the sky looks like bad weather / nothing shines through the gray / looking for my sweater / waiting on the rain” —with its notes of impending darkness, despite its bright music. The story moves through the spare “Cold Cold Earth,” about the events leading up to her parents’ deaths, and the lullaby-like “Nightlight,” about the two sisters holding onto each other in that night. Then it’s the swampy blues “The Rock and the Hill,” about her mother’s struggles (“I’m tired of pushing this rock up the hill”); “I’m the One to Blame,” a song by their father that Lynne found in a suitcase after his death and wrote music for; and the reflective title track that acknowledges the insidious quality of family and the traits they pass along to you: “Why do I carry what isn’t mine? / Can I take the good and leave the rest behind? / Can I let go and watch it all unwind? / Can I untie the ties that bind?”
“Cold Cold Earth” first appeared as an unlisted hidden track on Moorer’s second album, The Hardest Part (2000). “I wrote it on the fly in 1999,” Moorer recalls in the book. “I didn’t share it with anybody, but my then-husband was going through some of my things — because that’s the kind of guy he was — and found it and said I should include it. It was only three verses and a coda then, but after I wrote an essay about the song for my publisher back in the spring, I knew I wanted to revisit it. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do with this song.”
Moorer closes the album with the sparse piano and vocal arrangement “Heal,” a soaring affirmation that despite the troubled blood that courses through the wounds she’s suffered, she has found healing through her bonds with her sister and music, and through her memories and writing.
Ultimately, Blood — both the album and the book — is about healing. As she writes in the book, talking about her family, “That I cannot cancel my love and attachment to them is a testament to the bonds, good or bad, of blood. It’s fascinating to try to figure it out, though, and I have a hunger to do so. It’s medicine, a balm for the wounds still healing.”
But now, Moorer says, “I feel more healed than I ever have.”
