History: Harvey Family

Drive-By Truckers Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife

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Drive-By Truckers have been lauded for their singular talent as a band that can tell stories. Sometimes they tell stories are about real people whose lives attain an almost fictional air of mythology (like "The Buford Stick" and Sherriff Buford Pusser.) And sometimes they tell stories about fictional people with such simple clarity that they start to feel real. The Truckers' multiple songwriters bring a diverse and wide-reaching range of experience to add an almost universal-perspective to their detailed mini-dramas of life in the American South.

A clipping from a Virginia newspaper about a former local indie-rocker and toy store owner becomes the basis for three minutes and six seconds of heartbreaking prose. On January 1st, 2006, Bryan Harvey, his wife Kathryn, and his two young children Stella and Ruby were found bound and beaten in the basement of their burning home. They had been murdered some short time earlier by Ricky Gray and Ray Dandridge- 4 victims out of over a dozen assaulted, tortured and/or killed in what would become known as the Richmond Spree Murders.

On the opening track of this year's Brighter Than Creation's Dark, Lead Trucker Patterson Hood wonders, in the voice of a man who strangely arrives in a familiar scene of domestic bliss, just his family could endure such cruelty on Earth. In the afterlife the family is united. His girls are 9 and 4 years old, his wife is radiant, and every moment of existence is like his favorite memories of them spent all together. The creak of Hood's voice betrays the sad, frightened frustration of those on Earth who mourn their friends, as piano accents drift through the tears for memories of a still-young family and the knowledge of the brutality visited upon their mortal lives.

That the song comes from real events is excruciating to a listener, and the subject matter draws out almost too many emotions to reconcile. In two lines, Hood verbalizes the dualities of trying to make sense of such a crime, asking if an eternity in peace is the same thing as an eternity at peace.

Is there vengeance up in heaven, or are those things left behind?

Maybe every day is Saturday morning, two daughters and a wife

Two daughters and a beautiful wife

"Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife" is the very best kind of story that the DBT tell: of real people and real events without the fanfare of media, history, or folk-legend. It is a story of loss more affecting than our deepest collective shared histories. It is a song about complete strangers that devastates, personally and completely.

This is a reader submission from Brendan O'Grady.