There is a certain feeling you can get singing; but it has to be with a voice close to your own -- not in pitch, but in the yearnings and delights, in the timbres of love and the fear of dying and the hope to God that you hear in between the notes, and you can get this feeling like you and that other person are right on the damn stairway to heaven together just for those minutes. If you're doing a nice harmony, and you understand those things in him, or her, why, this feeling can come. The world backs off and kinda melts because those notes, and all those meanings that you both are so sure are there in the air between you -- well -- it just happens sometimes and there is no feeling like it in the whole world.

And the first time she sang alongside of Greased Lightning, the boy from Hazard, the one with that amber and gold and red Les Paul, well, that feeling came up between them and Patty felt it just about washed her right down the river, it was clean and good and strong and right. And she knew he felt it too -- he had closed his eyes and was throwing his head back and letting the world hear his heart come right out through his throat singing "Charlottesville" and she was stepping him in third and she thought they both completely walked away from there bodies at that moment and were nothing but a pure pair of notes hanging together in a moment of forever.

And for Patty, that's about how it started.