Books

The Biggest Song I've Ever Written

On growing up in the holler, a life spent carrying other people's songs, and why I finally wrote my own.

Bicentennial Baby releases July 4, 2026, in ebook, paperback, and audiobook. Reagan Boggs is an Appalachian writer, singer-songwriter, and audiobook narrator based in East Tennessee. She narrates the audiobook herself, with original songs written and recorded for the story.

The holler doesn't let go of you

I grew up in a holler outside Pound, Virginia, in the far southwest corner of the state, where the mountains close in tight enough that the sun shows up late and leaves early. If you've never been to the Virginia coalfields, here is the thing to understand: the land itself has an opinion about you. It is beautiful and it is hard, and it does not particularly care which of those you needed it to be on a given day.

The women who raised me were tough the way the mountains are tough — not hard, exactly, just forged instead of nurtured. My grandmother survived my grandfather. My mother survived my father. They did not hand down tenderness. They handed down rules. Have something that's yours. Don't owe anyone. Need less. Don't complain. I could recite those before I could recite much of anything else, and I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make that sound like a complaint. It isn't. Those rules kept a roof up. They got people through winters that money didn't. They are, in their way, a love language — just one that never quite says the word.

But rules like that have a cost, and the cost is the thing I've spent most of my creative life circling. You can build a whole self out of don't need anybody, and it will hold, and it will also quietly cost you every soft place you might have had. That tension — survival on one side, selfhood on the other, and a woman standing in the middle of it trying to figure out if she's allowed to want both — is the engine of everything I make. It took me a long time to be able to say that out loud.

No matter how far you run, the holler stays with you. Mud on your boots. The smell of coal dust and honeysuckle in the same breath. The songs your daddy sang when he wasn't too far gone to carry a tune. I left at eighteen, the way a lot of us leave, certain I was getting out. I have come to understand that you don't get out of a place like that. You just carry it to wherever you go next.

How I learned that music was currency

There was always music in the house, and I learned early — earlier than I understood I was learning it — that music was a way to be seen. It wasn't love though, just the currency for love. You played well and a room turned toward you, and for a child who came up under need less, don't complain, that turning was something close to oxygen.

I followed that all the way out of the holler. I'm a product of Virginia's Crooked Road — the heritage music trail that runs through this part of the state like a vein — and I came up playing the rooms you play when you're serious and broke at the same time. Barrooms. Festival side stages. The long drives between them that nobody puts in the bio. I performed twice on Mountain Stage, which if you grew up where I grew up is a little like being told the mountains were listening back. I placed a song on a Mother Jones tribute compilation. I wrote, constantly, the whole time — songs were how I metabolized everything, the only place I could put down what I couldn't say plainly anywhere else.

Three decades of writing songs teaches you a particular way of working. A song doesn't have room to explain itself. You get a few minutes and a melody, so you learn to be compressed, to lead with the image, to trust the thing said sideways over the thing said straight. I didn't know it at the time, but I was in training for something. Every song was a small rehearsal for a longer kind of honesty I wasn't ready for yet.

What I want to be honest about is this: I was good at the work, and the work also kept me moving fast enough that nothing could catch up to me. That is a distinction it took me three decades and one entire novel to be able to see clearly.

Singing cover songs for a living

In 2017 I started narrating audiobooks. Since then I've narrated more than forty of them, for major publishers including Penguin Random House — other people's stories, in other people's voices, brought to life as carefully and completely as I knew how.

I love that work. I want to say that plainly, because what comes next can sound like I'm diminishing it, and I'm not. But narrating someone else's book is, to me, like singing a cover song. You can sing a cover beautifully. You can sing it better than the person who wrote it. You can find things in it the writer didn't know were there. And it is still, at the end of the night, theirs. You are the instrument the song is played on. You are not the song.

I did that — cover after cover after cover — for years. I was very good at being the instrument. And somewhere in there, in the quiet after a recording session, the obvious question finally got loud enough to hear: when do I sing one of mine?

Why I finally wrote Bicentennial Baby

The novel is about a woman named Lacey Brummett. She was born on the Fourth of July, 1976 — the bicentennial — and the nurse tied a scrap of red-white-and-blue ribbon to her hospital bracelet and called her a firecracker. Her mother took her home to the holler and raised her on the same two rules I was raised on: have something that's yours, and don't need anybody.

Fifty years later, Lacey is still trying to figure out how to do both. She's a musician who's all but stopped. She has a son, and an almost-marriage to a man who can't quite say the thing she needs to hear, and a quiet, growing suspicion that the life she built to escape her mother's might be the same life wearing better clothes. Then her mother collapses three days before Christmas, and Lacey drives home — to a hospital room, a childhood house, and a red folder full of songs her mother wrote in private and never finished.
The book started the way most of my songs start: with a single image I couldn't put down. A drawer that shouldn't have had anything surprising in it. A woman standing over it, realizing she'd never once thought to wonder what her mother did with all those quiet hours. I didn't know yet that it was a novel. I just knew I couldn't walk away from that drawer, and that whatever was in it was going to cost the woman looking something to understand.

I'm not going to tell you Lacey is me. She isn't. But I will tell you that I could not have written her without having lived close enough to the questions she's asking. This isn't a memoir. It is fiction with the engine of real-world life sitting underneath. The novel moves across three generations of women — a grandmother who was abandoned and never reached for anyone again, a mother who was done with men and built a life alone and kept singing anyway, and a daughter who loved hard and created harder and is trying to understand which parts of all that she chose and which parts simply got handed to her. That's the real subject. Not the marriage, not even the music. The patterns. What we inherit without ever agreeing to. It's a book about a song that took two generations to finish, and a daughter who finally stepped close enough to her mother to hear it.

I set it at home, in the coalfields, because Appalachia in fiction is so often either a postcard or a punchline, and the people I come from are neither. They're complicated, and funny, and proud, and wounded, and they deserve to be written like it.

The release date is July 4, 2026 — Lacey's fiftieth birthday, and the country's two hundred and fiftieth. That convergence wasn't a marketing decision. It's just true to the book, and I've learned to trust the things that are just true to the book.

I'm narrating it myself

Of course I'm narrating the audiobook. After all those years of singing covers, you don't hand your own song to somebody else.

But it's more than that. The audiobook of Bicentennial Baby includes original songs — written and recorded for the story, because Lacey's a musician and her mother was a musician and you cannot fully tell this particular tale on the page alone. There are things a sentence can do. There are things only a melody can do. The audiobook is where the novel gets to be both.

I've described this book, to friends and now I suppose to you, as the biggest original song I've ever written. I mean that as precisely as I can mean anything. It is the longest, and the most exposed, and the one with the most of me actually in it. For most of my life I was the instrument other people's work was played on, and I was proud of how well I played. This is the first time the song is mine all the way down.

The holler stays with you no matter how far you run. I stopped running. I sat down and I wrote the thing it had been trying to get me to write the whole time.

I hope you'll come hear it.

— Reagan Boggs