When he was a teenager with a guitar and a high-lonesome voice, Vince Gill had the great fortune to cross paths with fiddler Byron Berline in Oklahoma.
At the same point in his life, Darin Aldridge found a mentor in Charlie Waller, and was soon invited to join the Country Gentlemen.
Years later, when Byron died after a stroke in 2021, Vince wrote A Million Memories (A Song for Byron), and performed it at his funeral, and on the Grand Ole Opry. Darin and Brooke Aldridge, listening from home, heard the song that night and got a little teary.
And now life and music have come full circle. The Aldridges have just released the song as their newest single, and with the help of Vince’s daughter, Jenny, have also put out a touching video to accompany it.
It almost didn’t happen. When Gill sent the song and several others for the Aldridges to consider last year, Darin assumed it was a mistake.
Did you mean to send it, Darin asked him. He did. Because of his commitment to the Eagles, he wasn’t going to be able to record it anytime soon.
It was a good fit. “We were looking for a song that I could sing,” he told me in Raleigh during the 2024 World of Bluegrass. Darin has a sweet, tender voice, but doesn’t get many chances to be out front. Such is life when you’re married to IMBA’s four-time female vocalist of the year.
So Darin and Brooke cut the song, with one caveat. They wanted Vince to sing on the record.
The result is chilling and powerful. I get chill bumps every time the second verse rolls around and Vince sings:
“Old friends are so hard to come by,
And it killed me to hear you were gone.”
The song was a natural fit for a video.
Enter Jenny Gill van Valkenburg. If the video she produced is a clue, look for her to have a fulfilling career.
From the opening moments of the video, just Darin fingerpicking the guitar, to when Brooke, leafing through scrapbook of photos of Vince and Byron, joins the chorus, everything is tender and poignant without being over the top.
“I knew I wanted the video to have a sentimental feel to it,” Jenny said in a telephone interview from Nashville. “I knew how much Byron meant to my dad, and I know how much dad means to Darin.”
Because of other obligations, Vince wasn’t in town when the video was recorded at Nashville’s legendary Station Inn, but he appears in old photos from his time spent with Berline.
“I knew I wanted to shoot at the Station Inn because of its importance to bluegrass,” Jenny said. Asking owner Josh Ulbrich wasn’t exactly a cold call. He used to drive the tour bus for Jenny’s stepmom, Amy Grant, while Jenny was singing in her band. “I asked how much he would charge to use the space when it was closed during the day,” she recalled. “He said, ‘are you kidding? Just pick up the key.'”
She stumbled into video making by accident. A life in music was practically a given, as might be expected for a gifted daughter of country royalty (mom is Janis Oliver of Sweethearts of the Rodeo). But when COVID hit in 2020, and her stepmom’s band came off the road, she needed something to do.
When Jenny was in middle school, she used a family camcorder to “film my friends being silly.” So she picked up a camera again and posted some of her work on YouTube. And with a better camera – a gift from her family – she made a free music video for a friend.
“It wasn’t terrible,” she said. She was off and running.
Making this video gave her an opportunity to learn more about Berline, a legendary genre-crossing fiddler who worked with Country Gazette, The Dillards, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and even the Rolling Stones.
“This was a really precious friendship,” she said.
Among the bittersweet aspects of pulling everything together was working to incorporate old photographs of Vince and Byron. Because of a devastating fire at Byron’s fiddle shop, there weren’t many images of the two. She and director of photography Travis Flynn made the best of what they did find, especially in the scenes featuring Brooke leafing through a scrapbook at the bar.
“It was really fun to see my dad in his 20s at the start of his career,” Jenny said. “I was really, really pleased at what we accomplished with what we had,” she said.
Darin, too, loves how everything came together. “Vince’s story is kind of how I was raised in the bluegrass community,” he said. “I had so many people who encouraged me.”
This week, Darin and Brooke Aldridge will play Byron Berline’s home festival in Oklahoma. One song is guaranteed to make the set list.
