Americana Highways brings you this premiere of Garrett Bryan’s “Trinity.”
Year after year on the road, songwriter Garrett Bryan struggled to keep the tragic story off his mind, a horrifying reality young women face every single day. What if he came back? What if it wasn’t just a drunken, angry phone call?
She never dreamed he would be hiding in the shadows outside of her home. She never dreamed she would cry in the trunk of a squeaking old car. She never screamed louder as the passing cars ignored her pleas.
“She’d been gone for quite some time,” Bryan sings on Trinity, “and no one knew the reason why.”
Her friends called when she didn’t show up for work.
Townsfolk banded together after the river flooded, picking out debris and returning ruined priceless photos and silverware to grandmothers that were handed down from generation to generation. They didn’t know whose car was sunken at the bottom, piled under destroyed homes and rusted bicycles.
“When they found her she was in a trunk,” Bryan sings, “mixed in with all the mud and muck.”
When they put him on trial, he begged them to call him insane, never wanting to face the same trauma he caused her that fateful night. The jury knew better.
“I went to write it as just the perspective of someone living in that town,” Bryan said as he recalls the story. The names and location have been changed to protect the family involved.
When Bryan went to film the video, people he met told him it would have been her forty seventh birthday.
Bryan had to dig through microfilms at a local library to find details published in the local media. Outside of the rural area her ghost has long since been forgotten.
He discarded the gun he used to force her into the car that night as he walked back into town. When local authorities caught up with him he cried into his palms, not understanding how he became a monster that took away a mother’s child in a fit of rage.
Bryan thought about the story for years as he toured, but never knew how to complete it. He asked former neighbor, and law enforcement officer Lynn Pierce to help with the song writing process.
“I sent him a couple of different things, and he rejected them a few times,” Pierce said. “He knows he’s not going to hurt my feelings when he tells me ‘hey that’s not what I’m looking for.”
As a law enforcement officer, Pierce knows the heartache of knocking on a father’s door in the middle of the night.
“I’ve had to make notifications to family members before about their loved ones not coming home,” Pierce said. “Victims like this should never be forgotten.”
Sitting up after long nights patrolling the streets, Pierce pulls out his guitar and a pad of paper scribbled with memories of the trauma that comes along with the job.
“I never intended to become a songwriter.” Pierce said of pouring his stories into melodies.
“He’s fed off of my life experiences, and so many others,” Pierce said of co-writing with Garrett. “He has the ability to take my life experiences, or experiences of people he knows, and he doesn’t just understand them, he feels them. He may not live through some of those same things, but he has a passion to understand it, and just an uncanny way to translate it into a beautiful song.”
The video was produced and directed by Gaje Garrett & Kimberly Brian:
Thank you Garrett Bryan for writing this song “Trinity” for you see Misty Eslick was my best friend and like a sister I never had… I went on trips with her and her family her mom and dad were my mom and dad… My birthday is March 15th and Misty had to work and could not come and see me, so on Saturday March 18th she called me and said her parents were out of town she was off of work and wanted to come pick me up so that we could hang out at her house and for her to give me my gift… Oh how I will never forget that day you see I was pregnant and a senior in high school so when it was time to take me home I couldn’t go out because I was pregnant but she took me riding around the drag a couple of times to say hi to a few friends and then on to my home it was… Oh how I wish I did not have to leave her that evening for that was the last evening I ever saw her I will never forget Misty my sister… I love you so very much, and I miss you… I could tell you more things FACTS but I will leave it as is for now… I just wanted to thank you for the song and remembering her and her story too… Christy Newsom
Christy, did Misty ever mention a friend named Vince from Houston? I went to school with her at Milby High School until she moved to Crockett and stayed in touch with her as pen pals. Haunted by her memory, I have searched the internet over the years and thanks to a special person I ended up here. So, Garrett didn’t actually know Misty personally, but he chose to write about her story? I am not a huge Country fan, but I bought this song. It has haunted me since her mom called me to ask me if I had heard from her or if she had come back to Houston for some reason. I told her about something that Misty wrote about in her letters to me. I remember going to the funeral which was the strangest funeral I can remember. Strange as in, “I don’t remember seeing many of your faces here since the last time we had such a tragedy.” Misty was such an amazing girl. She deserved so much better. I still have so many unanswered questions about the aftermath. Many times I wanted to reach out to the family, but held back. What if this was the day that thinking about Misty didn’t make them think about what happened. Talking to me could only drudge up bad memories and I didn’t want to do that. Sadly, I saw that both of her parents have both now passed and I never had any way to reach her sister who stayed in Houston. Because of that, I will probably always have unanswered questions.