Send us Fan Mail

This episode of Noted Stories, “Kinfolks,” features three “relatively true”songs. My love of stories and story songs began with my dad and his family in Jordan Springs, a rural Tennessee community without electricity. In the 1930s, battery-powered radios brought the Grand Ole Opry into my grandparents’ parlor. Neighbors gathered on Saturday nights to listen, sometimes joined by my great-uncle Tom, who played guitar despite having lost fingers in a dynamite accident. He taught my dad, and my dad taught me. The first song, “Tractor Battery Radio,” celebrates those nights and the family who made them possible.

My mother’s family lived near the Tennessee River until the TVA moved them to make way for Kentucky Lake. Her father, Daddy Bud, became a deputy sheriff in Dover. He loved wrestling on his black-and-white television, cheering Jackie Fargo and booing Tojo Yamamoto. Years later, I learned the rivals were friends. That inspired the second song, “Motorola Cigarette,” a relatively true song blending Daddy Bud’s love of wrestling and hand-rolled cigarettes with a tale of the wrestlers traveling together.

“Soapbox Derby Days” recalls my cousin Gary, born ten days after me and as close as a brother. In 1964, he won Camden’s Soapbox Derby and earned a trip to Akron for the finals. Years later, living in Brooklyn Heights, I remembered our childhood summers and wrote the song about the closeness—and distance—of growing up.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI