This week, Ashley McBryde is the guest on the Human School podcast, and she got very deep into some of her childhood and past trauma, which mostly stemmed from her relationship with her father, William McBryde. He is a former physician and Church of Christ preacher, and he very much disapproved of the entertainment industry and her choice of career path.
He refused to listen to her music, even after she started winning major awards and joined the Grand Ole Opry, and on songs like “Learned to Lie,” she addresses childhood memories of her father’s infidelity, and she has also spoken about how he was very cold towards her and never had nicknames for her, like “princess,” and she never felt the love she imagined a father should have as a young girl.
Now in his 80s, Ashley shared that her dad was fighting a terminal, degenerative illness, and even though they were never close, he is a big reason she got into music. He had an old Martin D-35S guitar that she was forbidden from playing, and on his 70th birthday, while he was away, she snuck the guitar out of his closet and used it to write her incredible track, “A Bible and a .44.”
Later, she played the song for him, and he gave her the guitar.
It sounds like she’s done a ton of work to find forgiveness and have a relationship with him, and her song “Hand Me Downs,” from her Wild album, details the generational trauma in her family. Written by Ashley with Jessie Jo Dillon and Lauren Veltz, it finds her admitting all of the not-so-great traits she inherited from her parents:
“I’m a wrеcking ball when I get lonely
Courtesy of my old man’s old man, and his old man
And that ain’t the kind of heirloom that I wanted
Oh, and don’t it make me think I’m only made of broken things that I can’t stand
Like Daddy’s anger and his pride
My mama’s sadness she taught me how to hide
There ain’t a damn thing that’s ever just been mine
I’m out here walking around, oh, in hand-me-downs”
She knows it’s going to take a lot of time to make sense of it all and overcome the things she needs to, but she’s not going to quit util she does because “they won’t put me in the ground in hand-me-downs”:
“Oh, and damn it, it’s gonna take a long time
But if I can just understand it and leave something better behind
And if that’s the only thing that’s ever just mine
They won’t put me in the ground, oh, in hand-me-downs
Hand-me-downs”
Just brilliant and so incredibly raw and honest.
Ashley went into detail on how that song is from her real life experiences, explaining how she was “angry” at her dad for most of her life, and it took a very long time, but she eventually got to a place where she realized she owed it to herself to set that down:
“I’ve done the anger part, and I did that for most of my life. I was mad at that man for most of my life, and then when he left my mother and left us, I didn’t even speak to him for years. And anger loves us the most, it’s the first one to raise its hand and go, I call bull***. But it’s also the easiest thing to feel.
And I had been angry at my dad, and so I finally figured out, decided, you can stay angry at him, or you can find a way to still have a dad. And you were talking about moving through the anger part, and another part that’s important is to grieve the fantasy part that they didn’t meet. The thing that you wished he would be. Take a minute and acknowledge that wasn’t the case.
That is sad. It’s okay that it’s sad. There’s room for it to be sad. What made him this way? And, he’s never gonna ask that question. He’s never gonna ask, what made me this way? And I’m not gonna excuse him, I’m not gonna excuse a lifetime of tyranny, but his dad wasn’t very nice, and neither was his. And he doesn’t know where to set that down. So he sat it on you.”
She talked about how she started to change her perspective on everything:
“And that moves me toward, let’s say this is not your father, this is another 82-year-old man that you just met, how do you feel about him? I feel bad that that’s the life he lived, and I bet that guy has some cool stories to share about his life.
So, for the purposes of tonight’s performance, the character, Bill, the tyrant, has been recast, and in his place is this old man that lives on a mountain, and if you’d like to go visit him and have a little bit of compassion for his story, maybe that would be okay. And if while you’re there, the actor that used to play that guy shows up, you don’t have to stay…”
She can finally accept all of his faults, while still trying to come to some sort of understanding as to why her dad was the way he was, which was a generational thing she is determined to put a stop to and it’s commendable:
“Was he mean? Yeah. What a dumb, deluded, small way of explaining a person who did not know how to be uncomfortable. He’s also hurt, he’s also scared.”
Ashley also talked about how, even though her mom is a “precious baby angel,” she had things to work out there too:
“And even on things with my mother, who is a precious baby angel, I had to find the things to give her credit for, for the lack of credit for, and be angry about that, and then go through the whole attitude of, if I have these tools, and I can access these tools, you can access these tools, and screw you fro not trying.
Good, now you’re at that part, what’s on the other side of that part? What were her plans before she was my mother? What if that’s a woman, what if she’s another 70-year-old woman, what did she think about doing and having for her life before her husband, in their 20’s, was killed and she was left with a three-month-old baby and no resources.
Are you mad at her? Of course not. You hate that that happened to her. Some of that got left in the goodie bag when she gave you the goodie bag. It does not excuse it, but it helps you understand it.”
She got very emotional speaking about all of it, and she understandably cried several times throughout the interview, but it was beautiful and she is so open about all of it and it only makes me respect her that much more.
Of course, plenty of artists talk about their intimate life experiences, both good and bad, in their music, but to sit behind this kind of microphone and actually talk about everything she’s been through in such a vulnerable way is just so impressive. She’s as real as they come, and she remains one of the most underrated artists in country music which I will just never understand…
Check out “Hand Me Downs” here:
The full podcast is available below, and it’s incredible.
