"In Tennessee where I grew up, there were animals, farms, wagons, mules"

A handful of everyday nouns conjures a whole world: Tennessee fields marked by seasons, chores, and the slow, steady rhythm of work. Animals, farms, wagons, mules, each item is utilitarian, unadorned, and embodied. They signal a childhood shaped by proximity to land and labor, a place where value comes from what pulls, carries, feeds, and endures. The tone is matter-of-fact, almost inventory-like, suggesting a life too occupied for embellishment. It feels like remembering by touch and smell: dust kicked up by hooves, creak of a wagon board, sweat on a summer afternoon.

The list is also historical. Rural mid-century Tennessee meant limited resources and communal interdependence, especially for Black families navigating the legacies of Jim Crow and sharecropping. Mules, not tractors, speak to a threshold era, modernity visible but not yet accessible. Movement existed, but at a wagon’s pace: steady, incremental, practical. That pace becomes metaphor: progress through persistence rather than spectacle.

There’s no romantic gloss. The words imply discipline learned early, responsibility to animals and soil, an understanding that everything costs effort. From that emerges a durable ethic, resilience, thrift, patience, that later undergirds public poise and stamina onstage. The blunt syntax mirrors the backbeat of Southern music that would shape her voice: work songs, gospel, blues flowing up the Mississippi seams. You can hear the timing of footsteps down a dirt road echoed in a driving groove.

Set against later images of global celebrity, the rural lexicon becomes anchor and contrast. Sequins and stadium lights are a layer over clay-stained boots. The memory isn’t about escape so much as origin, a compass bearing that clarifies how far one has traveled and what was carried along the way. Compressed into those few nouns is a map of geography and character: a world that taught endurance, gave rhythm to living, and defined success as the ability to pull the load and keep moving forward.