Part Ten

On certain Country radio programs his song, “My Daddy’s Blood” was heard and he did a music video for it.

The song is from the perspective of different sons who give more-or-less a eulogy of their fathers, one was born in the Great Depression, one was a WWII medal recipient, one was in the Olympics, one cured cancer and one made the world in six days.

The video’s story spans over eighteen years and begins with a father driving a pickup truck from his home and his son inside the house peeking through the blinds.

Then the father stands at the counter of a gas station with an Indian clerk and points to a pack of cigarettes, and when he gets them he shakes his head and points to another pack. Each pack he points toward is the pack he receives and he points to a different pack three times.

He sits down in a bar, and his son grows up. Body turned upside down in a bathroom and head dumped into a toilet, beaten up after class by bullies, the same kid fifteen years later at the altar, and the same bullies interrupt the ceremony to beat him, and his own mother and wife yell, synchronized with the lyrics as sung, “Kick him in the head,” and “Tear out his eyes.”

This experience happens throughout the song, at a job interview, sitting in his den watching football, at the hospital while his wife gives birth, in the grocery store reading from a list and grabbing a box of cereal. And at church while he’s holding a hand in the air singing Hallelujah.

The scenes are intertwined with Thomas playing and singing the song, on a ship from Ireland in the seventeenth century bound for America, playing in the Georgia fields full of cotton, playing on a stage before the Founding Fathers, playing on a stage before Civil War soldiers, and WWII soldiers, and Vietnam protest rallies, and Alabama and Mississippi sixties massacres, singing, “My daddy’s dreams came up roaring and screeching/And all that remains from them are burnt tire marks,” and singing on the moon with the American Flag, floating finally, through outer space, beyond Jupiter and Neptune and passed by an alien aircraft whose passengers marvel through the windows at this lost American singing through space.

At the end of the song the son blows out a number 30 candle on a cupcake and walks into a bar and the old man is sitting there half asleep and he sits down beside him and orders a drink, and the old man asks him for a drink and gets one and then bums a cigarette and his son lights it for him too, and the two don’t recognize each other and they shake hands and smile and are conversing. The old man laughs and puts his arm on his shoulder and ashes his cigarette.

Then the bullies come in—still aged around ten years—and throw him from his chair and throw him through the window and his father helps him up and looks at the twinkle in his eye and seems to recognize him and appears that he’s going to hug him, then punches him in the face, and they all have a good time beating him.