Yancey Strickler is the managing editor of eMusic, writes for SPIN, Blender, the Village Voice, and a number of other publications, and runs Get Up Stand Up.

My father is an alcoholic and a musician in that order, and those two traits define our relationship. There could never be one without the other. When I was seven, my father cajoled me into learning how to play the guitar. He was sober then. A year later he returned to drinking—somehow putting his decision on me—and our “guitar lessons” became awful scenes of an overeager, soused father and a cowed son too afraid to complain about how much the guitar strings hurt his soft little fingers.

Soon after, I quit playing the guitar for a few years. When I was 12 my father seemed unhappy, so in a birthday card I asked him to teach me how to play again. We both cried and hugged and suddenly things seemed like they would be alright. We started with the Beatles’ “Blackbird” because my dad wanted me to be a fingerpicker like him. And I practiced forever on my little Sigma acoustic, and pretty soon I had it down. So we moved on to different songs, almost all of them country because my father spent his life trying to “make it” as a country or folk singer. In my bedroom there was a framed promotional poster of my father leering in his cowboy mustache and with a Stetson perched atop his head. In big red letters above his nervous eyes the picture said: “WANTED: C.G. STRICKLER DEAD OR ALIVE.” When I knew better I found the picture funny. When I was younger it scared me.

My little brother Dylan—a proud and sweet eight-years-old—is going through the same sort of thing with my dad right now. Only Dylan wants to please dad even more than I did, because my father almost died last year. Every night before Dylan goes to bed now he gives my father this enormous, forever-lasting hug. He squeezes his eyes so tightly when he does it, and because he and I share blood, I know what he’s thinking: “Please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die.” I used to think the same.

But Dylan’s a good guitar player and I think he can make it if he can outrun my dad’s demons. I’ve managed to, and with that distance and the belief that I can conquer my own genes, I’ve grown to cherish those awful nights with my father and—just as much—the songs he would play for me. The songs I worked hard to learn because they meant so much to my father and he meant so much to me. The songs I will play for my own son or daughter, but with a clear head and a sweet smile that my little one will never doubt or fear.

Bob Dylan– Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, [The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan]

My dad used to play this song so often I thought he wrote it. The fingerpicking style Dylan uses here (and rarely used thereafter) mirrors my father’s playing perfectly. Or, more likely, my dad’s style mirrored Dylan’s. No song in the world means more to me than this one. I’m not even sure if I hear notes anymore when I play this. I see visions, smell the Virginia breeze, feel the sort of longing from which the greatest works of art emerge. No matter my mood this song can fit it.

[buy The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan here]

Little Feat– Willin’, [Little Feat]

Lowell George, the now-dead singer/songwriter of Little Feat, was one of my father’s heroes. In the ’70s my dad had given up on being a folk singer and decided to go country & western because of two people: George and Gram Parsons. My dad grew up sort of a cosmopolitan country boy. His father owned a lot of land, and my father even ran a rock club and a record store for a brief while. I think my pops heard himself in this song, even though the only line that sounds like him to me is “driving the back roads so I don’t get weighed.” Not because my father was a trucker (he wasn’t), but because cruising country roads with a six-pack of Bud in the floorboard was probably his third-favorite thing in the world, after music and fucking.

[buy Little Feat here]

The Byrds– Hickory Wind, [Sweetheart of the Rodeo]

According to my father, the greatest song ever written. I can’t say I disagree. There is everyone else’s forlorn, and then there’s Gram Parsons’ forlorn, which ranks up there with Hank Williams, Son House, and nobody else. Even when he was far from Waycross, Georgia in the Hollywood Hills singing country songs to people even richer than him, Gram had a sadness in his eye that he could never escape, and his voice—always shaky and humble—embraced it so eagerly that listening back to even his early records, you knew he would die young.

When my father taught me how to play “Hickory Wind,” we were sitting on our back porch. It was a sopping summer eve, and he had been pounding down vodka all night. We started with him playing the song on his Martin while I mimicked his fingers on my Gibson. I sang the words and his head hung low, grazing the body of his guitar, as he grunted in approval, really getting into the music. We went through the song once and then, without stopping, started again, this time with me playing guitar too.

Occasionally he would pipe in a phrase or two with me, but I was doing most of the singing. Then, again without stopping, we started the song for the third time. And then the fourth. And midway through the fourth go-around, I realized my dad had stopped playing. I glanced over, expecting so see him smiling proudly at me for mastering his favorite song. But instead he had passed out, his face resting on the guitar, drool running down the pick guard. And for reasons I cannot explain, I’ve loved the song even more since.

[buy Sweetheart of the Rodeo here, read Todd Hutlock’s Dead Letter Office piece on this album here]