By Crispin Sartwell

[Play first verse of "A Dying Breed"]

When people asked me why I drank all the time, I didn't have an answer for them.

Hank Williams, Jr., whose father - perhaps the greatest songwriter of the last century - died of acute alcohol intoxication at age 29, answered like this, "it's a family tradition."

Hank Jr. was celebrating. But Lonesome Bob, who we were just listening to singing "A Dying Breed," written by Allison Moorer and Butch Primm, is mourning.

Lonesome Bob's album is dedicated to his son, who died at age 21 from a rare form of hepatitis, contracted from a dirty needle.

Addiction runs in families and is often fatal. My father, grandfather and two of my brothers have died from it, displaying such symptoms as liver failure, lung disease, being murdered, and committing suicide. The two brothers who survive are staying sober and clinging to each other for dear life. We're a dying breed.

The song conveys something of the seductiveness and the inexplicableness of addiction. It doesn't try to explain, because all the explanations are false or inadequate; it just shows you what addiction is like.

When you're an alcoholic, you can choose with all your might not to drink and drink anyway. It comes to you as fate. I think of my brother Adam doing his last spike of heroin. He knew for a long time how he would die, and we knew too.

"A Dying Breed" has a fatal structure. First, it's a traditional country song: you know from the first few bars how it has to unfold. The theme of substance abuse is among the most deeply rooted in country music, starting at the latest with Jimmy Rogers in the 1920s. And then the lyrics enact a resignation before a fate that moves through the generations. Form coincides perfectly with content.

But making art out of pain as this song does is one of the great strategies of survival, a way both to acknowledge and remake destiny. If you can do that, you're already emerging

Sobriety, too, is a defiance of destiny, but it is also a betrayal of the people who died to stay high. You want to stay connected to those people, and you want perhaps also to replace them, to be who they were for the people who don't have them anymore, including yourself. And you want to keep getting stoned. That's the family tradition.

Now I am raising five children. I want them also to deflect destiny and stay alive. One way I try to help that happen is by telling them about the people we've lost. But I also know that they're going to have to find their own way into and perhaps through the darkness.

Or maybe, like Bob's son Zachary or my brother Adam, they won't make it.

[Play last verse]

.