Dear log,

That’s how it starts, right? I never had the need to tell my life in a book, but now, at the age of 42 years old and with few hours of life left, I feel the necessity to do it. Eileen had promised me that she will write a sum about us, specifically about me. And who, better than myself, could explain what I felt in the existence? I hope that she will use it as inspiration and giving here some thoughts to reflect.

So, I will start from the beginning when I was only a child with many dreams and desire to explore the world and the music.

8 January 1935
This is my birthdate. I am born in Tupelo, in Mississippi, in a little and picturesque house to my eyes but full of draughts. We were really poor and we cannot permit a modest way of life. In the family, the person that work was my father Vernon: he started to work at 4 a.m., going to milk the cows and working hard in the fields. Many of us, for living, we worked as farmers. My twin brother Jesse died at birth but I thought that event was due to the fact God wanted for me to change the world.

Due to our poorness, we were forced to change our home a dozen of times in my first thirteen years of my life; there’s nothing that bond us in a place, the only constant, over the presence of East Tupelo, was that we depended from each other.

My dad was, and it is, a good worker and since it was a child toiled to buying me all that I wanted and for that he goes to jail when I was 3 years old: he had falsified a check and for six months he’s been behind the bars. My mother, Gladys, wrote letters to let him be freed, because he’s health wasn’t good and must look for me. At that time, we lived family friends’ house given that, due to money that did not arrive, we did not pay the bank loan and they had evicted us. The kindness of the East Tupelo’s people helps us to get out from that bitter period. At the age of four, my dad was finally released and started again to change house after house.

When I had six years old, I started the school and I remember that I liked learning new things and I wanted to make happy my mother: I didn’t want that she got tired with the housework but I wished that she lived a comfortable life. I’d really loved treating her like a queen.

Since I was child, I was really reserved, and still I am, about my health problems, so much that Eileen, my father and the doctors that followed me knows how much they are big. Knowing that this is a personal log I can express freely without any embarrass. I had great asthma issues and suffered for terrifying nightmares. Looking that at that epoch there’s no money for medicine, all was resolved with a pray. Over the asthma I had suffered of stomach ache and tonsillitis. To solve that problem of constipation Gladys gave me magnesia milk, but that was ineffective.

Our financial situation got resolved when we transferred to Memphis, where I found the person that would become one of the most important of my life.