He was a handsome football player. She was a lovely singer. So High School?
It’s the month of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour documentary (six episodes) and the final show from Vancouver on December 8th of last year, both now streaming on DisneyPlus. And Taylor Swift’s birthday. I’ve long looked forward to writing this third in my trilogy of posts about Taylor as a historian of herself and of women in the world, and about how important family–and thus genealogy –is to her vision. This seemed like the right time.
No spoilers, but really it is giving nothing away to say that in the 5th episode of the documentary series, titled “Marjorie,” Taylor uses that song as the thread to explore and explain all the ways that family and connection gave the Eras Tour meaning and shape. It’s the song she wrote for the Evermore album about her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Moehlenkamp Finlay (1928-2003). Marjorie was a singer, and footage in the documentary but also plenty shared publicly in various places beforehand shows her delighting in and maybe starting to encourage her granddaughter’s enthusiasm and talent for music. What we hear in the documentary is more from Taylor’s mom, Andrea Finlay Swift, about how being attentive to the musical career of her mom prepared her in some ways for her daughter’s extraordinary career. Certainly it prepared her for supporting someone for whom music was essential, albeit in ways she surely couldn’t have imagined.
So family is a central part of Taylor’s story. But there is more than the family musical connection. It’s about her writing, too. Remember when we were alerted to the genealogy news that Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson are related? In the spring of 2024 Ancestry.com announced that Swift and Dickinson, the globally famous songwriter and the reclusive New England poet were sixth cousins, three times removed.
Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th century English immigrant (Swift’s 9th great-grandfather and Dickinson’s 6th great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut).
Ancestry.Com as quoted to the Today Show, April 18, 2024.
Given my interest in the history of genealogy and in Taylor of course I was going to perk up for this. As we were reminded in coverage of this genealogical treasure hunt, Taylor had invoked Dickinson explicitly during the Evermore era by releasing it in 2020 on December 10th, the poet’s birthday. Yes, that’s the same album that “Marjorie” appears on. So was Taylor aware of this connection? The Dickinson connection is not, for those who want to keep track of these things, on her mother’s side but her father’s. So is Taylor a double inheritor of the genius that allows her to make metaphor into music? Maybe.
If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the quill genre.
Taylor Swift, Nashville Songwriter’s Awards, September 2022.
It isn’t the lineage connection to Dickinson –or even Marjorie– that makes the difference for me, though. As a historian I’m interested in how genealogy can function as a practice of individuals and groups to explain and express powerful feelings and to reveal historical contexts. People have intense family experiences, positive and negative, joyous and deeply sad –and in the series, multiple Eras tour folks are spotlighted having a range of these. There is also an important discourse of family for the tour group as they describe the bond they formed.
But I’m also interested in the ways that people describe and find meaning in family history (vernacular genealogy in fact), another aspect of which is the connection with heirlooms or family archives. When Taylor sings about wishing she had more left from her grandmother, she says she wishes she’d kept “every grocery store receipt.” Yes, she knows she has powerful memories, and even recordings of her grandmother singing; those recordings are so meaningful to Taylor (and surely to her mother) that she includes them as backing vocals on the song. But somehow one more “scrap,” like a receipt, would be treasured for what more it might reveal.
Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt
Taylor Swift and Aaron Dressner, “Marjorie.” Evermore, Republic Records, 2020.
‘Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me
Watched as you signed your name Marjorie
All your closets of backlogged dreams
And how you left them all to me
So is this both the loss and the connection Taylor talking about? How does that shape how we understand the role of family history in how Taylor tells her own story, including most recently in the Eras Tour documentary? Historians will always say, no matter the topic, that “it’s complicated.” That there is no single narrative and that many things are always happening at once. In her fashion, this is exactly what Taylor describes as both the immediate fan experience of an Eras Tour show and her own and other performers’ experience of the era of the Eras Tour. There was loss, there was passion, there was hard work, there was serendipity. Family history, as I write regularly, is both the experience of family, good and bad and both and neither, and the structure of family that’s embedded in law and politics and economy. “Marjorie” is the perfect vehicle for exploring the kinds of legacy she inherited and the legacy she is building, and the complexities of both. Taylor is embracing what family brought her, what family gives her, and what family she has made. It’s notable that all that was happening as she was also learning about and beginning to build a next chapter with her fiancé and with another family, the Kelces.
When the Emily Dickinson story was news, I had just been writing about modern American genealogical enthusiasm as well as finishing revisions on my book about the power of family connect in early America. As in the Dickinson-Swift story, Americans will let genealogy stand in for a lot, when both a fuller account of family relationships and a fuller accounting of how family functions socially is really useful. An important point n on the latter directly relevant to that story is the robust data that has always, especially since the 18th century, been collected about American families. I thought right away of how powerfully Ancestry’s aggregation of that data has been, and how quickly it allows us to make connections especially of free white families and of course it helps to be an experienced researcher.
And then I had joked to someone that I could probably pretty quickly find some connection between my own family and Taylor’s.
And lo. To be clear right away, I don’t know that we have any relatives in common. No clickbait borrowed genealogical glamour here! But I stopped looking pretty much as soon as I realized that while Marjorie had been born in Tennessee, her father was from and eventually she was raised in and had been to high school and college in the same small Missouri town as my own grandmother’s family. Marjorie’s family had, like mine, several generations of German American ancestry in Missouri. They both traced their roots to Hanoverian Lutherans. Like my grandmother’s family there were often multiple generations living under one roof (Marjorie’s family lived with her grandfather for a time). Like my grandmother, Marjorie had a grandmother named Emma.
So would my family have known Taylor’s family? Of course they would have. At the time Marjorie was in high school St. Charles had a total population of just over 10,000. They were part of the same German Lutheran community. More to the point Marjorie was a classmate of my great uncle Ted when St. Charles High School had fewer than 100 students in each class. They couldn’t have helped but know one another. Marjorie was a beautiful young woman, and intensely musical. Uncle Ted was an athlete who lettered in multiple sports though football was his love. He was a halfback, and played quarterback including in some key games that according to his yearbook clinched their school a championship. They graduated in 1946, just after the end of World War II.
Marjorie stayed in St. Charles for college at Lindenwood, located just blocks from my grandmother and Uncle Ted’s family home (built by my great-grandfather). In fact my grandmother would work at Lindenwood part time some years later, including when Marjorie returned for an alumni award. Uncle Ted graduated from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Marjorie went off to sing, and then to marry, and to travel the world, while Uncle Ted stayed local. He worked as an engineer for the St. Louis aeronautics company McDonnell Douglas his whole career. He would meet and marry a professional woman who, like Marjorie’s spouse, was outside their small St. Charles circle.
Taylor sings on “Marjorie” that “what died didn’t stay dead,” that she feels her grandmother’s presence “alive in my head.” It’s a particular experience of humans that we understand chronology from very early; we know that we start young and grow old, and we understand the regular loss of our elders. Family is, in many ways, the ur text of history. It is the foundational narrative. How could a narrator as powerful as Taylor resist its lure, not least given how central her immediate family is to her life and work?
So endeth the trilogy/ triptych on Taylor and the multidimensional power of family history for how we understand ourselves and our world. Which isn’t to say I’m not going to write about her again. But these were the three posts I planned last December as the Eras Tour was wrapping up, and am now completing as we have the documentary series and the final show to watch.
Also, if you read my posts regularly you’ll know that I revise and update them, but I also note where and how I do. See for example the longish post I wrote about the lineage text that opens –and plays a central role in — Jane Austen’s Persuasion (her best imho). I’ve updated it twice to reflect exchanges with Austen scholars. So fun. That’s why I write here, mostly to get things out of my head but also for the interactions around topics that are compelling to me. So if you’re interested in talking more about why genealogy isn’t just a dusty pastime, or how family is more than emotional but always infrastructural, and always always about women and history– or about Taylor and the power of words!– I’m easy to find on social media but also via the contact function on the home page.