I was introduced to the music of Stephen Wilson, Jr. in a commercial for diapers, a strange way to discover someone who has quickly become one of my favorite artists. Playing in the background of a Pampers ad was Wilson’s haunting rendition of Ben E. King’s classic song “Stand By Me.” I was immediately struck by this raw, soulful voice, so I ran a Google search to find who was singing.
Wilson’s songs return again and again to questions of inheritance… and the unsettling realization that much of who we are lies outside our choice.
I was thrilled to find a fairly large body of work. Wilson is a singer-songwriter who entered the music industry late; his first release came at age forty. Since then, he has released two EPs and the album Søn of Dad, which commemorated the fifth anniversary of his father’s unexpected passing. Wilson’s music—a blend of Americana, country, and indie rock—quickly became my soundtrack as I completed household chores and graded student papers.
The more I listened, the more I noticed a pattern. Wilson’s songs return again and again to questions of inheritance—of family, place, and past—and the unsettling realization that much of who we are lies outside our choice.
This emphasis runs against one of the most influential assumptions in modern Western culture, that identity is something we construct for ourselves. We see this assumption everywhere, from instructions to “be your authentic self,” to the highly curated identities people share on social media, to the countless narratives in film and fiction that frame identity as something that is discovered by looking inward rather than recognizing what is received.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has described this mindset as “expressive individualism,” characteristic of what he calls our “age of authenticity,” a cultural moment that treats being true to oneself as one of the highest goods. It is true that humans are not merely the products of their circumstances and that our choices matter; however, taken too far, this vision obscures how much of our lives we do not choose and how deeply we are shaped by things we have received as an inheritance.
In a culture that emphasizes choice and neglects givens, we often misread our own lives and the lives of others. We can be tempted to give ourselves too much credit for successes that are not fully our own, and we can lose compassion for others whose circumstances we mistake for choices.
Wilson’s songwriting is animated by just this awareness. His lyrics aren’t preoccupied with inventing a self from scratch. Rather, they are intensely focused on reckoning with what has been handed down, both good and bad.
Maturity comes in acknowledging that life is shaped by elements we don’t choose but cannot fully discard.
In “Father’s Søn,” he begins with something as simple as a name. His grandmother “got it from the Bible,” and then his dad “passed it onto me like granddaddy’s rifle.” His name carries weight, a legacy that he didn’t choose for himself. Wilson doesn’t romanticize this. He acknowledges that he “tried to be different / Tried to go against the grain.” However, resistance gives way to acceptance: “I wear his blue jean jacket and his name like a badge of honor.” The refrain “I am my father’s son” lands not as resignation but as recognition. Wilson is not the sole author of his story. Maturity comes in acknowledging that life is shaped by elements we don’t choose but cannot fully discard.
Wilson’s attention to what is given extends beyond the family to the places that form us. His songs depict places that are thick with memory, marked by both attachment and pain.
In “Holler From The Holler,” he explores the indignities of growing up in poverty, saying he “came from the mud where the low lives waller / Sailor-swearing, single-parent, double-wide squalor.” He had restless and directionless energy, where he was “[b]ored as a two by four, fighting just for fun / In the middle of nowhere with nowhere to run.” Critically, though Wilson moved away from the place, its imprint remained. The “pain that put the holler in the holler” is a part of his identity. The voice that cries out is inseparable from the place that formed it.
Wilson also examines the idea that leaving is possible but never complete in “Hometown.” He wrestles with the enduring pull of the place he came from, longing to be “home in [his] own hometown.” The song is full of the textures of a place known from the inside: waking up to somebody’s cooking, the familiar roads, the high school crush, and “a graveyard there where my granddaddy is.”
As Wilson puts it, his “roots ran wild” there. The place is not a background but a foundation. Nonetheless, Wilson no longer feels entirely at home there. That particular place formed him so thoroughly that he will carry it with him forever, but every place after it has also had a formative effect. Wilson has gone through changes independently of his hometown, and in his absence, his hometown has changed, too. That means any return home will be complicated.
An individual severed from family and place is not more free but less whole.
For Wilson, family and place are givens we must reckon with, realities that both shape identity and constrain possibilities. Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime making the same argument in essays and fiction. Wilson chose to leave his hometown in southern Indiana, a choice many people must make for one reason or another. His songs are a record of what that departure costs but also what can be preserved. Berry, on the other hand, chose to return and stay in his hometown. Interestingly, his farm near Port Royal, Kentucky, is only seventy miles or so from where Wilson was raised. The two are drawing from the same well, a cultural memory of small towns, farms, and the erosion of rural community.
Berry’s essential argument time and again is that we are not self-originating, and any pretense that we are is dangerous. To belong to a family or a place is to have “membership,” to participate in the deep and reciprocal bonds of community. It is to be a part of a supportive network, where members have a responsibility to one another.
In his 1994 speech “Health is Membership,” Berry says that “community … is the smallest unit of health.” An individual severed from family and place is not more free but less whole. Berry explores that truth further in novels like Nathan Coulter, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow which chronicle the history of the people who make up the Port William membership, a community that includes all the town’s residents, past, present, and future.
This is why Wilson’s lyric about his granddaddy’s grave registers as more than sentiment. For both Wilson and Berry, the dead don’t leave; they remain present in the places that hold them, continuing to make a claim on those who are still living. In Jayber Crow, Berry makes this tangible as Jayber earns extra money digging graves, and Port William’s meaning is inseparable from those it has buried. Like Wilson, Berry avoids romanticization. The people of Port William experience the failure, grief, and limitations that are common to humans.
To be formed by a family, a place, and a past we did not choose is not a problem to be solved but is the very ordinary condition of creaturely life. It is to live within limits.
Also, like Wilson, Berry resists the modern reflex to treat the given as something simply to escape or overcome. In his 2012 “Jefferson Lecture,” he recounts the two types of people as described by his teacher Wallace Stegner. On one hand are the “Boomers” who “pillage and run” and are motivated by greed, power, and mobility. On the other hand are “Stickers, … ‘those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.’” They are motivated by affection, grateful for what they have received and aware of their responsibility to preserve it for others.
Both Wilson and Berry are operating within a tradition much older than either of them. The Christian vision of life has always insisted that we are creatures before we are creators, that our very existence is a gift before we have done anything to merit it. The theological term for this is creatureliness, and it carries a specific implication: to be formed by a family, a place, and a past we did not choose is not a problem to be solved but is the very ordinary condition of creaturely life. It is to live within limits, an idea explicitly found throughout Berry’s writings and implicit in many of Wilson’s songs.
Denying those limits does not make us more free; it makes us more rootless, cut off from the very sources that make identity and belonging possible. Berry, whose agrarian vision is inextricable from his Christian faith, understands this deeply. In his own way, so does Wilson. His songs trace the long, difficult movement where inheritance becomes not just a burden but a belonging.
