Daughter of a Song

Born in a Dust Bowl dugout on the hard, flat plains outside Lubbock, Texas, Sonny Curtis picked cotton as a kid, formed a band with his high school friend Buddy Holly, and opened shows for Elvis - and that was just by the age of twenty-two. Now at the end of his long career, Curtis is considered a rock 'n' roll trailblazer. He toured the world with the Crickets and with Waylon Jennings. He wrote the classic songs 'I Fought the Law,' 'Love Is All Around' (the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and the country standard 'I'm No Stranger to the Rain.'
Curtis has left an impression on American myth and music that has gone heretofore undocumented. But to the author, Sonny was a loving if cryptic father as elusive as the spotlight itself. Part biography, part memoir, Daughter of a Song braids together an insider's perspective on an outsider's life. With Sonny out on the road for long stretches, Sarah Curtis pieced his life and legacy together through research and recollection, following her father from the 1950s birth of rock 'n' roll in West Texas to the 1960s Hollywood scene where Sonny met his wife, a Vietnam War protester and California hippie. The two of them would leave Hollywood behind for the rural Tennessee cattle farm where they raised Sarah. With vivid storytelling, cultural commentary, lyrical prose, and a dose of humor, Daughter of a Song considers the complexities of fate and fame, the cultures we shape and the ones that shape us. It is the story of a man saved by art, and the daughter who must navigate to the center of his creativity to reckon with her own.

Sarah Curtis’s essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Salon, The Threepenny Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the anthology River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Michigan. More of her writing can be found at sarahcurtiswriter.com.