D'ark Media

Why can a song take you somewhere you haven’t been in decades?

Not metaphorically. I mean that strange, almost involuntary thing where a few notes hit your ears and suddenly your brain has pulled a memory out of storage that you weren’t looking for.

That’s what I want to understand.

There’s plenty of science showing that music is deeply connected to emotion and autobiographical memory. We see some of the most fascinating examples in research involving Alzheimer’s and dementia, where familiar music can sometimes reach memories and emotional responses that seem otherwise difficult to access.

But what fascinates me is why.

Why these songs? Why these sounds? Why can music reach backward through years of life, changes in identity, grief, experience and everything else we pile on top of ourselves?

And why in the hell do the Red Clay Strays keep taking me back to church?

I don’t worship Jesus. I haven’t for a very long time. Yet something about their music, including the faith woven through some of it, keeps reaching a place in me that apparently never got the memo.

I think it starts here.

Baby Amanda & Grampa Downing.

Grampa was the deacon and music leader of a little white church in Elkins, Arkansas. Every Sunday and Wednesday evenin’, he was the one telling you to get out your hymnals and turn to page 74 to sing The Old Rugged Cross… again.

His piano player was my piano teacher. Between the two of them, music was simply part of growing up. Getting up in front of the congregation to share your “testimony” was often done in song.

That’s how we connected with God.

By my 16th birthday, I had spent years standing next to Grampa & DiDi singing. When I was asked at another church if I wanted to do a “special,” what the rest of the music world calls a solo, I was ready.

I sang Amazing Grace.

I didn’t know it then, but that little church solo would eventually lead to me becoming the music & choir director for an entire Full Gospel Pentecostal church.

Life went on. Some of it hurt. My relationship with the church ended a long time ago.

But apparently my relationship with the music didn’t.

Certain old hymns can still make me tear up within a few bars.

Then one day, the Red Clay Strays randomly popped up on my Judds Pandora station and sent my memories allllll the way back to those early music moments with Grampa, doing his damndest to share music and Jesus with me.

And I keep going back.

Not because the songs have somehow brought me back to church.

Because they bring me back to him.

Maybe that distinction is part of what fascinates me so much about the psychology of music. I’m interested in musicians, obviously, but I’m equally fascinated by people who have never played a note and are still neurologically and emotionally moved by music.

What is our brain actually doing when a song makes us cry?

Why does it attach music to people and places?

How can something we hear today find something buried decades ago?

I don’t know yet.

That’s part of why I’m in school.

And it’s part of why I’ll be at Born & Raised.

The Red Clay Strays are playing close enough to home in Fayetteville for me to be there.

On September 19.

My birthday.

And somewhere between that photograph and now, Baby Amanda grew up and built a multimedia company that earned access to cover the festival.

So when the Red Clay Strays take the stage, I’ll be there to document it.

And somewhere in all that noise, I suspect my brain will find Grampa again.