Marzine forges her comeback

It frightened her that day, in court with her heart in her hands, singing to the skies above, as reality drifted away and she was back on the plains in Juarez, NM after the breakdown.

Staring at the cattle, after being let out by the rickety gate. She'd spent the past few years here, after her time on opium in China, after her legacy was all but destroyed by the Committee.

After the court case she came here for solace, to suffer the loss of her husband and her career. The Committee for Un-American activities found Marzine guilty of being a communist conspirator, and she was forged in the grip of fear and paranoia that swept across the nation. The fear and misunderstanding led to the burning of her band's records. The stinging harangues in the op ed pieces of the local paper meant she had to lay low. Other folkies were seeing the backlash. Woody Guthrie was dead; She'd seen her influence ignored in the way Dylan was created seemingly out of thin air. She knew of him once, as a teenager in Greenwich Village on the run from Hibbing, MN. Marzine's cultural legacy was destroyed the moment the Committee For Un-American Activities convened their first meeting, slammed the gavel down, and began to hollow out the lives of creative Americans everywhere.

The record company destroyed her masters. All of her life lived on slate acetate wiped clean from the public record. Hershel no longer visited, the medication saw to that. The doctors didn't want any distractions, and thought that the visions were clear signs of schizophrenia anyway.

Then one day the letter came. They were doing a documentary on the creation of folk music. Hershel had been mentioned right along with the carter family, for it was he who'd yodel out Carter Family tunes while hanging suspended from the rear throttlerod of the last caboose, swaying his hat in his right arm, singing "Who will keep my grave clean, MaryLOUUUUUUU." and it was said that the off-key singing could be heard from several counties away.

Hershel spread these songs across the railroad circuit, and was a key factor in the Carter Family's success. They would have never made it to radio if thousands hadn't have heard Hershel belt out their songs while hurtling across the continental divide, albeit in the worse off-key Kansan drawl you've ever heard.

In the letter, the writer, a one Campbell Ketchum of Duluth, MN wrote to inquire on the current availability of the single "If you go away".

Marzine had been hacking away at a series of 15 songs for the past five years. Each night she'd work by candlelight, in the hope that Hershel might come back and return her once again to the loving arms of fatherly love.

She'd been single since her husband was killed by the unruly mob. She was too old for Absynthe, and too old to haphazardly seduce a wayward ranch hand. It didn't take long before the notebook came out again, and using the same charcoal pencil shed used in the days of her band, began the process of her comeback.