In the last in our series,
music writer Grayson Haver Currin explains how the Nashville artist made him understand the tensions in his own childhood home
I was well into college the first time I heard the term “patriarchy,” but I instantly knew what it meant: I’d witnessed it at home for 18 years.
I saw it in the way my mother, a schoolteacher, cooked, cleaned, and cared for two sons while my father tended the television and gas-powered fireplace. I understood it in how he ran a small business though she minded the bank statements, another domestic duty in a glut of them. I heard it when he accused her of having an affair with a shaggy-haired peer, one of the few
Friends her packed schedule would allow. They were both raised by dominant
Women, forces of nature who made up for their faulty men. Their own relationship seemed a form of gender-relations revanchism, a way to restore an antiquated imbalance.