This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns and on today's show we'll go on a road trip with dads.

We'll start out in a small town in rural Tennessee that move on to a whole foods market in Milwaukee.

We'll visit Ghana by wave India and Atlanta Georgia, touch pace with a Mormon bishop in Idaho and into front of basketball court in Philadelphia.

Up first, David Kendall. He told his story in an open-might story slam competition. We produced in New Orleans with our friends at WWNO. Here's David.

The first time I fell in love, it wasn't with a girl and it wasn't with a person. I was eight years old and I lived in my hometown of Cottage Grove, Tennessee.

It was a tiny little dot up in the northwest corner of the state. There were 110 people that lived in Cottage Grove.

There was one store, there was a post office, there was a gas station, there was one school, there were four churches.

And that's the kind of place it was. And I realized early on, I don't want to live here the rest of my life.

I don't fit in. And I wondered, are there other people that feel like I do?

Well, as it turns out, there were other people. I never asked. But one of those people, I'm pretty sure, was my father, Ralph Kendall.

And I realized this when I remembered how he used to sit in front of the stereo at night, go through his record collection and play music while drinking fall staff beer, smoking cool cigarettes.

And he would sing along and he would laugh. And sometimes he'd cry if it was Hank Williams.

And I realized at that point, I don't think other daddies in Cottage Grove, Tennessee do this.

And as soon as I got old enough, I started listening to music with him. Because I loved the sounds and also because I desperately wanted some way to connect with this very hard to no man.

And through him, I first heard Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Wilson, the Texas Playboys, Jim Reeves, all classic country artists that I would learn to appreciate the older I got.

But the night I remember the most and the night that changed my life was the night that he went into the closet and he brought out a box of old 78s.

And he started rummaging through them. And he pulled one out and he said, I've forgotten I had this. I never listened to it very much.

He said, but I got a feeling that you'll like it, Hoss. He called me Hoss after Hoss Carr right on Bonanza.

He took the record out of the sleeve. He put it on the turntable. He put the needle on it and the hiss and the crackle and the pop.

Of the old vinyl gave way to this glorious, raucous, epic opening salvo, car-rack guitar riff of Chuck Berry's Maybelline.

And those killer lyrics. As I was a motivator, I saw Maybelline in a coop deville, cattle like a roller-nose, no more, nothing now to run my V8 foe.

Wow, I never heard anything like this in my life. And as a kid raised in a Southern Baptist tradition, I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to like it.

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