Rodger McDaniel (RM): Even though my father didn’t have much of a formal education, he taught himself to play the guitar by ear.

And what I remember, from my earliest years, were those Friday nights when he and his buddies would gather in the living room of our small home of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and they would sit around until the early hours of the morning playing their guitars and singing gospel music.

My dad, over the years, developed quite a problem with alcohol. I recall one evening, he had come home drunk. My stepmother, she had told him that, “If you come home drunk again, you sleep in the garage.” And so he headed for the garage and I caught up with him on the back porch of the house and said to him, “Dad, why do you do this?” He looked at me and he said, “It’s inevitable.”

Dad died in 1969 in a one-car accident that was undoubtedly related to alcohol. After his death we all searched for his guitar—that had had a lot of meaning for my brothers and me. But we could not find the guitar.

25 years later, I got a call from a woman who said, ‘Are you Johnny McDaniel’s son?’ And I said ‘Yes.’ And she said ‘How would you like to have his guitar back?’

So I went over to see her and she brought out the guitar and she said, ‘I went shopping at an old grocery store in south Cheyenne back in 1969.’

From the back of the room she could hear some beautiful guitar music being played and somebody singing The Old Rugged Cross she said, ‘I sat and listened to it until they were done and then I rang the bell. And the butcher came out and a few seconds later, another man came out, whom,’ she said, ‘I now know to have been your father and he said: We just ran out of whiskey and money and I’d be willing to trade you this old guitar for a bottle of whiskey.’ And she said ‘I ran down to the corner liquor store and bought a fifth of whiskey and made the trade.’

I’ve had this guitar ever since and my two sons grew up learning how to play this guitar and now they’re grown and gone and I thought you ought to have it back.’

Really up until that time, my dad’s alcoholism and the problems that it brought to the family had defined him in my memory. But that story of the Old Rugged Cross and his old guitar that caused me to think an awful lot about the meaning of grace and forgiveness and how much more than his alcoholism he had been.