The weed-choked lot lay between two abandoned buildings on Third Street. Forty-one years ago, Norris’s Music Emporium had stood on this hallowed piece of dirt, beating like the secret heart of Henry’s hometown. Now empty bottles, paper cups, used condoms, and cigarette packs lay among the dying johnsongrass that covered the mud where Albert Norris’s “pickin’ porch” had once stood.

As a boy, Henry had first gone into Albert’s shop because his mother played a little piano, enough to perform at church or for the Christmas show at the grade school where she taught. Henry’s father was a traveling salesman, and rarely home. When he was, he seemed angry, as though he couldn’t wait to leave again. He finally died in a car crash in Lawton, Oklahoma, when Henry was seventeen, but by then he was little more than a bad memory. Throughout Henry’s boyhood, though, his father had always been out there, like a storm that might blow through town at any time. Albert Norris’s store became an escape from all that, and more. It was a magic portal into the mysteries of the universe—not made-up mysteries like the ones his friends read about in books or watched at the Arcade theater, but real ones. Secrets so potent that they changed your life irrevocably the moment you were initiated into them.

A month ago, Henry had dug up an old photograph that showed the store during its heyday. He’d been stunned by how small it looked in comparison to the image in his mind. Held off the ground by pyramid-shaped concrete blocks, the Emporium was actually a converted residence built of unpainted cypress and weathered by decades of sun. Albert had cut a big display window into the front wall to show off the pianos and organs he kept in stock.

One of the store’s secrets was that it wasn’t merely a building, but a musical instrument in its own right, a sound chamber tuned by an accident of construction and played by whoever happened to be jamming inside it: sometimes a leathery old blues shouter thrashing a twangy imitation Stratocaster, other times a first-class pickup band—four or five gifted guys shaking the building with a transformative beat that boomed across the road and out into the little town amid the cotton fields. Often those pickup bands had included Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Pooky Wilson, and other local masters of their craft. But the music that people most remembered was Albert himself alone at the piano, playing after hours. That sound was so mournful and exquisitely pure that everyone who lived or worked within earshot—white or black—had asked Albert to leave his doors and windows open when he played. That was Henry’s first encounter with the paradox of how music that sounded so sad could lift the soul like nothing else in the world.