It was late. I had just finished performing my one-man spasm in Tupelo, Mississippi. We were tired. My wife and I had a long drive ahead.

But there was one stop I had to make.

The GPS was confused. Siri led us on a raccoon chase. We were going in circles. At one point, we realized we had passed the same Dollar Tree four times.

But eventually, we pulled into 306 Elvis Presley Drive.

The narrow house, the place of Elvis Aaron Presley’s birth, was as big as a minute. About the same size as the junk house my daddy grew up in. A shotgun house. White clapboards. Gray porch. Porch swing. Screen door.

I had my guitar in the van. So I sat on the porch swing and tuned it. The balmy Mississippi air will detune a guitar in only seconds.

I sang “Peace in the Valley.” Same tune we sang at my old man’s funeral. I still remember watching my daddy’s ironworker friends cover their weathered faces and sniff their noses.

My father was an Elvis fanatic. There were only three performers he nearly idolized. Hank Senior, Ray Charles, and Elvis. One of those three was always playing in his garage workshop, over the tweed speakers of a Philco radio.

“If you were a kid in the fifties,” Daddy once said, “you loved Elvis. He was in our drinking water.”

And love Elvis he did. He could sing all the hits. Every lyric. Every inflection.

I have vague memories of driving in Daddy’s F-100, with my bare feet on his dashboard, with Elvis playing. Only, I could hardly hear Elvis over Daddy’s singing.

I don’t have many memories of making Daddy proud. Save, for one.

It was a Fourth of July picnic. I was 9. There was a plywood stage. There was a gospel quartet. There was a band.

The event planners asked me to sing an Elvis song for the picnic. Daddy worked with me out in the garage for weeks, preparing. I was to sing “Peace in the Valley.”

We worked on the song night and day, in the garage, while my daddy played the guitar and sipped a Pabst. I sang in the Labrador-tones of a true hack.

The crickets would be howling. Daddy would be clad in the grease-smeared and soot-stained denim uniform of a stick welder. And when we would finish, he’d smile and say, “If that don’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.”

I sang at the picnic with all my heart. The quartet sang backup. The people asked for an encore. I didn’t know any other songs, so I sang the same one again.

When I finished, I walked off the platform and my old man was standing backstage. He had his thumbs hitched in his pockets. There were pink rims around his eyes.

“You done good.” That was all he said.

I could smell the sweat and soot in his clothes.

I didn’t do a great job. I know that now. But I believed then, just like I believe now, that there will indeed be peace in the Valley for me someday.

Just like there is now for Daddy.