On Sept. 29, Texas Tech University Press released “Daughter of a Song,” a biography/memoir written by Sarah Curtis, detailing the life of her father singer-songwriter Sonny Curtis and her relationship with him.
From Meadow, Texas to Los Angeles to Nashville, Sarah Curtis explores her father’s world and the impact that had on her family.
Read more: Remembering Sonny Curtis: music legend, mentor, and friend
On Nov. 11, Sarah Curtis returns to the South Plains to give a presentation at Literary Lubbock, the annual fundraiser from the Texas Tech University Press.
KTTZ reporter Samantha Larned sat down with her to discuss the book.
The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Sarah Curtis: I'm Sarah Curtis. I am the author of “Daughter of a Song,” which is a biographical memoir I wrote about my father, the musician Sonny Curtis, who grew up in West Texas and sadly passed away on September 19th.
Samantha Larned: How long have you been working on this book?
Sarah Curtis: I began researching it in 2015, actually after my dad was diagnosed with stage three cancer. And I just started by asking him to write down some memories about his life. I really wanted to preserve his story and his memories as he was battling this fatal disease and I wasn't sure he was going to make it.
And he actually gave me a 50 page typed memoir, which I really appreciated. And then I started actually writing the book the following year in 2016. So all in all, it took me about nine years to finish the book.
Samantha Larned : Wow.
SC: Yeah. A little too long. I'm glad that I didn't know how long it would take before I embarked on it, or I might not have started it.
SL: Yeah, I mean, that's daunting enough on its own to write about your own relationship with someone.
SC: Yes. Yes. And I have a journalism background. So when I started writing it, I really started it as a straight biography and it was very dull. And it eventually dawned on me that I wasn't a biographer of Sonny Curtis. I am a daughter of Sonny Curtis. And this had to be a more personal story or it wouldn't land. And it wasn't interesting to write or really to read. I mean, there's countless biographies about Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings and the people he played with. The story I was writing was more personal.
So it took years to find my footing in the book. And that's partly why it took so long.
SL: You just saying you're not a biographer of Sonny Curtis, you're a daughter. What was that process like knowing that you read the biography written by Waylon Jennings' son about his life? Did you draw any sort of inspiration or parallels there?
SC: I definitely read as many biographies by children of famous musicians, and artists, especially musicians, as I could. Not just Waylon's son, Terry Jennings, but John Cheever's daughter Susan Cheever wrote a great memoir I drew a lot of inspiration from, called “Home Before Dark.”
“Famous Father Girl,” I believe, by the daughter of Leonard Bernstein. I love that book. So yeah, I really wasn't sure how to go about doing such a thing. I didn't know if it had been done before, and it turns out it had.
I really read as much as I possibly could about artists written by their family and figured out a way that I could blend memoir with biography to form something hopefully kind of seamless. Personal, but also, you know, journalism-based and in a lot of ways.
SL: You talked about that memoir that your father wrote for you. You had a lot of sources in this book. You had his memoir. You had — like you said — other biographies, interviews, news articles. You went to a Buddy Holly tribute show.
SC: I did.
SL: When you decided to write your father's story, where did you find yourself looking for him?
SC: Well, first, like I said, I relied upon his memoir, which I quote a lot in the book. I try to incorporate his own words as much as possible throughout the book. Then, you know, I looked to his songs.
I mean, my dad was really, even though we were very close, he was always kind of a mystery to me. He was a West Texan to his core, and he grew up in a time and a place where you didn't really express your feelings aloud.
So I think he expressed his feelings in many ways through his art and his music. So yeah, I looked to his songs and that's partly why I begin each chapter with a verse from one of his songs that fits the chapter that I'm writing about.
And that was really the driving force behind the book just to sort of get to know my dad better at the end of his life.
I called him constantly for years to ask him, you know, ‘What year did you record the second DECA session?’ I mean, just little trivial questions. And he always said the answer. He was just amazing with dates. He had such a great memory. He was, in some ways, a biographer's dream in that way.
I also looked to the geography of his life, the places and the cultures that shaped him. So starting with 1950s, well, he was born in 1937, but the 1950s birth of rock and roll in West Texas.
Then later in LA during the California hippie movement, early 1960s through the ‘70s. And then, you know, onto Nashville where he and my mother raised me.
The process of writing the book really brought me closer to my dad, which is something I'm really grateful for. And, you know, of course, I relied upon my own memories, as unreliable as those can sometimes be.
SL: So this is a memoir biography between you and your father, but it also honors so many people: your mother, your great-grandfather, other family members like your second cousin. Was that a deliberate choice when you started writing this book? Or is that something that kind of came about organically when you're writing about your own family and history?
SC: It came about organically. That was one of the biggest challenges I faced when starting the book was figuring out which people and events to include and which to leave out.
I remember feeling really frustrated in the beginning for years because my dad's story seemed so epic. I mean, in the book, I call him a Texan Forrest Gump, because he just lived through so many monumental eras: the Dust Bowl, the birth of rock and roll, the California hippie movement, and the country music outlaw movement of the ‘80s in Nashville.
So I guess, you know, in the end, I operated under the governing principle that I would include the people and the events that I thought shaped his identity in ways that then, in turn, trickled down to shape our family and parts of his identity that I inherited.
For example, I include a chapter in the book about a lot of the musicians my dad knew in LA who died from addiction. Because even though that was a relatively, I guess, brief period of his life, I think he saw so many tragedies related to fame. I mean, starting with Buddy Holly, throughout those formative early years of his career that I think that that changed him. And so that was something I wanted to discuss in the book because I think it shaped a lot of how he saw fame.
But yeah, I mean, I really did have to leave out a lot of things. A lot was left on the cutting room floor that I wanted to include, but just couldn't figure out a way to do it. And that's one of the biggest challenges of memoir, to curate a story from these countless raw events and figure out what to include and what not to include.
SL: You talked a little bit about the mythologies that surround us. You grew up at an intersection of so many: the South, the West, America in general, masculinity and femininity. And then I feel like one of the big ones is just the mythology of “the artist” in general.
SC: Yeah.
SL: Tell me a little bit about the process of trying to unravel and understand those things and the impact they've had on you.
SC: Yeah, that's a good question. In college, I really got into Roland Barthes, the French philosopher who wrote this great book called “Mythologies.” And it examines the way in which mass culture creates and perpetuates modern myths like the ones you just mentioned.
As a culture, we tend to take mythologies for granted and see them as these natural things when really they're man-made. They stem from complex histories and ideologies. So, yeah, you touched on some of the mythologies that I look at in the book, such as Texas gun culture, the ‘back to the land’ era of the ‘70s.
Even on a personal level, my parents' own romance and their dramatic elopement story was a mythology I inherited, that I had to reckon with in a way.
So yeah, I guess as a writer, I'm just always trying to decipher the meaning behind these mythologies, which I tried to do in the book.
That was another theme that sort of organically came up as I was writing it as well. And it's funny how the things we read in college shape what we write about in our life, because I do think — looking at the things that I'm interested in as a writer — I do think the book “Mythologies” really did shape how I look at the world.
Like, I love the research portion of writing. And I tend, you know, you can start researching something and think this is kind of a boring topic. And then all of a sudden, you're just fascinated by it. And it's all you can think about all day. And I mean, I was getting into cotton farming, writing this book and Googling everything I could and reading, buying old almanacs on eBay. And I love that part of being a nonfiction writer. It's really a great way to get lost in culture.
SL: I did adore how you kept coming back to the moon, and towards the end of the book, when you apologize to the moon.
SC: Yeah, that chapter is one of the more literary. That's called "Sky Mother" in the book, but it was originally published in The Threepenny Review under "Six Phases of the Moon." And that was a very sort of literary, probably my most literary chapter. So I had to sort of massage it for the book to make it fit in a little bit.
But I mean, my Texan ancestors lived by the laws of the Almanac, which I find really fascinating. We think about Gen Z being into astrology today and it's like, oh, they're so woo-woo.
Well, guess what? My ancestors planted cotton according to when the moon was in Gemini, when that they called it twin days. And so that's something I write about in the book. Yeah, I find that fascinating how they were very Christian, but they were almost pagan in how they lived according to the laws of the sky.
SL: That almost spiritual element of it…
SC: Yeah.
SL: But then seeing it very practically.
SC: Right. And who's to say it's woo-woo? Maybe they had it right all along.
SL: So another recurring motif, along with these mythologies and the moon and the stars, another one that keeps coming around is shadows. You talk a lot about the shadows that Buddy Holly and his death, and Waylon Jennings in his life, cast upon your family. And then the shadow that your father and his songs — intentionally or not — cast on you.
How do you kind of reckon living under a shadow with understanding the person who casts it?
SC: Hmm. That's a really good question. My dad did live, especially his career was overshadowed in many ways, or I don't want to say overshadowed, but it was hard to separate his career from the long shadow that Buddy Holly left.
I mean, even, you know, in his obituaries, Buddy Holly was usually mentioned within the first few sentences.
And to complicate things, some of those giants that cast these shadows like Waylon Jennings dropped by the house every once in a while. So, yeah, I really did try to peel back the layer of fame and paint a richer, more human picture of musicians like Waylon and Buddy.
It was easier for me to write about Waylon because I had known Waylon personally growing up. So I had some memories of him to fall back on.
But in terms of Buddy, he died well before I was born. And I knew him as a distant iconic figure, a voice on the radio.
So I spent a lot of years reckoning with who he really was as a young man, who he meant to my father — what he meant to my father — the significance that his death played in my father's psyche.
And of course, I grew up under the shadow of my dad, as well as these secondhand shadows of these great male artists. And so this book became my attempt in some ways to separate myself from that shadow and make my own art outside of it as well.
It is startling when you drive around Lubbock, how much of Buddy you see everywhere. His glasses, murals, Buddy Holly Street.
I mean, I think I say in "The Ghosts of Lubbock," when I was writing that chapter, Lubbock was in the process of building the Buddy Holly Performing Center for Arts – I'm not going to get the name right, I'm sorry. And I think I say you know that it was— like it is expected to revitalize Downtown Lubbock and how ironic that is, a ghost bringing a town back to life.
And yeah, it is really amazing how his legacy has lived on. And now it's to the point where nobody really remembers the real man because it was so long ago, but how long will that legacy live on? I don't know. It's interesting.
SL: "The Ghosts of Lubbock" originally published in, if I'm not mistaken, the Colorado Review 2021.
SC: Correct.
I think I spent three years writing it. I mean, I wasn't just sitting alone in a room writing it; that would be pathological. But it took me a really long time to write that… to write that piece because I started out just transcribing it. It was about a visit that my dad and I made in 2017 to his family's farm, which is now out of cultivation. It was a cotton farm. And the dugout where he was born, the site of the dugout. And it's really sort of a site of… speaking of ghosts, I mean, the wreckage of his father's tractor is half buried in the sand, and an old windmill and the ruins of his grandfather's house. It's really like visiting the ruins of my own family, it felt like.
I think what I would say changed between the publication of that chapter in the Colorado Review and then later in the book is just my thinking.
I knew that chapter was really the most important chapter in terms of understanding my dad and probably the closest chapter in the book to my heart in some ways.
And I almost began the book with it, but I decided to place it at the end because I liked the symmetry of beginning the book on the farm and then returning to it at the end after I had gained a deeper understanding of what the farm meant to my dad.
SL: There are some moments in the book where it seems like parenthood, and even your relationship with your husband, helped you understand your parents more, and other moments where it seems like it kind of amplified the differences between you and them. Is that process one that's still ongoing as your kids get older?
SC: Yeah, thank you for picking up on that. I think that's just a universal experience for any parents when you have kids to start examining your own upbringing more closely and choose which lessons to carry on and which to leave behind. Sort of curating your own family in that way.
Having kids, I have three daughters, a 20-year-old and two teenagers, definitely having kids gave me more empathy for my own parents and the struggles they faced, especially raising an only child amidst the chaos of the music business. And it could be chaotic.
The family that I have created with my husband is much more conventional than the family I grew up in. And I think that's probably by design. In a way, maybe I did it subconsciously. Maybe I rebelled by not rebelling.
But on the whole, I feel incredibly lucky that my parents were able to maintain a sense of normalcy in our household. And I think a big reason for that is because my dad never achieved the level of fame that, say, Waylon achieved, even though he certainly wanted to at some point in his early career.
I really do believe that was a blessing in a lot of ways. And I touch on that in the book, how fame can destroy. It's a wonderful thing. It's a lot of fun, but it can be a real curse. So I think that gave me a really normal, happy childhood, even though we were sort of in the eye of the storm at times in terms of the music business.
SL: I feel like throughout the book, there are these different concepts that crop up with fame and attention and beauty, and all of these things coming back to this stance of: those things are powerful. Those things are going to ripple outwards from their source.
SC: Well, fame definitely does. I mean, I think I use the analogy in the book that it is like, it's an explosion that leaves a lot of shrapnel in its wake.
And yes, beauty is another one. Absolutely. That plays into the mythology of my parents' elopement and my mom sort of… My dad just thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. I joked — kind of half-joking — that my mother's beauty is sort of the reason why I'm born. I was born because he left his girlfriend for my mom because he thought she was just more beautiful. And I'm sure she had lots of other amazing qualities, but beauty is the one my parents always brought up first. So yeah...
Yeah, no, that's funny. The ripples of beauty. I never thought about that. Thank you for picking up on that. That's interesting.
SL: A lot has happened between your book printing, finishing this book, and where we are now. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about how the past few months have been? You kind of have a dual treatment of it right now with the public and the personal.
SC: Yes. Well, as you know, my dad sadly passed away on September 19th from complications from pneumonia.
It was a sudden death. He was healthy up until the end, which was in many ways a blessing. But it was hard for us. It was hard for my mom and me. We weren't prepared.
And I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's been incredibly hard, especially, or maybe not especially, but to add to the difficulty, he died less than two weeks before the book came out in print.
And that really broke my heart, Samantha. But, you know, he did get to read the book in its entirety. He got the final pass on it before I sent it off to Texas Tech University Press. So I'm really grateful for that.
Also, I was flipping through the book one day and just skimming the first chapter where I sort of articulate my motivating question for writing the book. And it's when my dad was diagnosed with cancer. And I say to him, ‘Dad, you can't die until I've written about you.’ And I’d completely forgotten about that line.
And when I read it, it just struck me like a lightning bolt because I thought, oh my gosh, that's exactly what he did. He fulfilled my final wish. So I don't think that's an accident and it brings me a lot of peace.
And I think he liked the book. He had some quibbles with it. He always had factual quibbles. He was a bit of a perfectionist, but he got the final say on it. And I think he was proud of it. And I think he was proud of me.
So I hope I make him proud.
SL: He gave it the stamp of approval.
SC: And that was rare for him. He was never a man that you would say, ‘Sonny says no notes.’ There were always notes.
SL: I mean, even the start of your book, the vignette that we open with is him telling you that you're sharp.
SC: Yes! Flat.
SL: Your mother's sharp.
SC: Yeah, I was always flat. Oh my gosh, he was such a perfectionist when it came to singing on key. Yeah, he's barking at me at age two to sing on key. But that's funny. Yeah, that is a very good example of his perfectionism. And how I opened the book. So that's exactly right.
SL: You are going to be here in town on November 11th doing a book talk with Literary Lubbock.
SC: Yes.
SL: How do you feel about coming back to Lubbock? Do you remember the last time you were here?
SC: Yes, it was in 2017, which is the visit I write about in the chapter "The Ghosts of Lubbock."
You know, I used to come to Lubbock a lot when I was a little kid. Some of my earliest memories are in Meadow, Texas, outside of Lubbock, which I think the residents actually pronounce it Med-uh. I don't know if they still do, but they used to.
SL: They do.
SC: Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, my mom always said, my dad told her he was from Meduh, Texas. And the first time she came to town, she said, ‘Sonny, you're from Meadow, not Meduh.’
But hey, if it was Meduh to my dad, it's Meduh to me.
Yeah, but you know since my grandparents died, I haven't had as many reasons to come back. I came back in 2017 to see him play a concert. And that was the last time I've been back to Lubbock.
So you know, I'm not going to lie, it feels strange to be returning to Lubbock without my dad. He loved Lubbock. He thought it was the most beautiful place in the world, which my mom and I used to tease him about. He just loved the vast horizon and the flat plains and the big sky.
So yeah, Lubbock is very, very special to me and returning there feels like a lovely way to honor my dad.
SL: Well, I know there's a lot of people who I've talked to who are very excited that you're coming back.
SC: Oh, that's too kind. That makes me happy.
SL: In addition to seeing you on November 11, where can folks find your writing? Where can they pick up a copy of "Daughter of a Song"?
SC: They can go to my website, sarahcurtiswriter.com. The book is also available through the Texas Tech University Press website and through Amazon, Bookshop, all those good places.
You can read KTTZ's previous coverage remembering Sonny Curtis here.
