There’s a song they sing at every Roma wedding, and everyone knows everything about it. It’s traditional. It’s centuries old. Nobody wrote it. It belongs to everyone.
Only the last part is true.
My father wrote it. He’s gone now. The song didn’t go with him.
It’s been in my head all week, because in six days there’s a wedding (two people we love, up in Seattle) and I’m putting my family in the car and pointing us north out of San Francisco. I live to drive people around. Most are people I haven’t met yet in this life; some are my neighbors, two and three rides a week. This week the car carries only us.
We’ll stop on the way up. Dear Roma friends we haven’t seen in four years; you don’t feel a number like that until a road starts paying it out under you, mile after mile. There’s a tent packed for my wife and kid. I’ll take the car, most likely. The road is right there under it, and the road keeps me warm on chill nights. Maybe I’ll surprise myself. I doubt it.
Here is what a wedding is, where I come from. Not a room gathered to watch two people promise themselves to each other. Two people, made one, turning to promise themselves to the room. The vow is given away in the same breath that makes it; it belongs to everyone who hears it. And the music is how a room accepts a gift like that: somebody plays, everybody sings, and for one night a few hundred different people agree to be one thing.
The last wedding that got into me the way this one is getting into me, I was thirteen. The band went into “Sa e phuvia phirdem” (I traveled the world), and the room rose, full joy, every word, a few hundred people singing something they knew was older than all of them put together.
My father stood at the back of it all, in the corner, the whole room between him and the band. Every back in the place turned to him, all of them facing the thing he’d made. He knew every word and sang none. A small smile and nothing else. His own song coming back to him from a few hundred mouths. They sang it back to him, and had no idea they were doing it. No idea he was even standing there. He could have stood in a crowd of a hundred thousand singing that song and not one head would have turned. It stung me the way things only sting at thirteen: they were singing his song, and he was letting them keep the stage: the whole lit middle of the room handed to the crowd, and him in the dark at the back, giving it away and wanting nothing back. I crossed the room and asked him why he wouldn’t tell them it was his.
He took his time.
“I am happy they think it is a traditional song, hundreds of years old, and I am happy they have such joy singing it. I made it. And there it is in front of us: my whole success. A room full of my own voice. A few hundred people who took it in and made it their own. That is not a thing I gave them. It is a thing they gave me. Most authors never live to see a thing like this; it comes after they are gone, if it comes at all. But here I am. Alive. In the corner, watching it, thankful. I would not trade this corner for that stage.”
At thirteen I thought he was hiding. It took me years to hear it right: he wasn’t losing anything in that corner. He was collecting.
The song came out in 1976, on vinyl, in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. And in that country a record didn’t simply come out. It stood before juries first: musicians, writers, linguists, the national radio, the national television. And every one of them had to say yes before a song was allowed out into the world. He got past all of them. Then the song went where no jury could follow: it slipped out of the record, dropped his name somewhere along the road, and turned up at every wedding as if it had always been there. Rooms he never entered, full of his voice. The country broke apart. The song didn’t notice that either.
Where I grew up, a musician measured his success in pirated copies. Not the number a record store counts. The other one. Poor families copied albums, cassettes first, CDs later, and sold them at markets and out of car trunks, and for many of those families that was the income of the house. It fed children. So the arithmetic ran the only direction it could run: the more your music was pirated, the more families ate off your name, and the more families ate, the bigger the name got. And I’ve seen it go one turn further. I’ve seen the author himself seek out a family that was copying his record and press money into their hands: here. Print more. Print more, sell them all. A man paying to be robbed of his own song, and counting it money well spent. He funded the stealing of himself. Nobody wrote the rule down. Everybody kept it. Copyright turned inside out, and I’ve never heard of a better use for a song.
Every song anyone calls traditional was made by somebody. One person, maybe a few, whose name wore away between the making and the ten-thousandth singing. And I can’t even call that a theft, because the song was never his alone to lose. My father didn’t make his out of nothing. He made it out of us: roads we’d already walked, weddings we’d already danced, griefs we’d already carried, and gave it back with his own turn on it. Take the people out and there’s nothing to write. He knew every word before he wrote one, because we had already lived them. So it was ours before he wrote it and ours after, not stolen, not given. Just ours. A song can’t belong to one person. A thing made by one of us that ends up belonging to all of us: as far as I can tell, that’s just what humanity is.
The bags aren’t packed and the car needs looking at, and none of it matters to the music, which is already in Seattle, waiting, whether we make it or not. Two lovely ladies are getting married. There will be a band. Somebody will play, and the whole room will sing his song, and not one soul will think to ask who wrote what they’re singing.
I know where I’ll be. At the back, in the corner. A room full of a voice that is my father’s and everyone’s now. Knowing every word. Singing none. Smiling it all away.