VOLUME IX: Roadhouse, Columbia, Missouri

When Debbie D'Agostino was 15, her father took her to see a young and then relatively unknown Tina Turner in St. Louis as part of her musical education. It was in a bar much like this one, small and smoke-filled. Debbie recalls that her mother objected, but that her father won out, saying, "Maggie, think of all she'll learn." Perhaps as Turner worked her way through her first-set play list way back then she looked out on a scene similar to the one Debbie sees as she starts her evening tonight at the Bears Breath ó the happy-hour crowd gradually turning into the nightly bar crowd as the light and heat outside slowly fade. Flanked by a beer-pitcher tip jar and a music stand, Debbie sings the blues and watches the parade. An after-work softball team strolls in, looking somewhat overheated in their royal-blue uniform shirts. Three women in heels and office clothes take a table next to the dance floor ó Debbie waves to one ó and a sinewy, weather-beaten man in a sweat-stained hat walks in with his equally road-wizened friend, "Cowboy," and orders two beers. This weekly gig takes Debbie away from the monotony of her day job and back to her roots. "My father was Italian, and Italians sing," she says, going on to describe a childhood filled with music. "My brothers and sisters and I used to fight over songs the way other kids fought over toys." According to family rules, if you started a song, you had the right to sing it the way you wanted. If someone else started singing it differently, you could go to mom and tell.

Hear Debbie live at the Bear's Breath:

By the time night falls, the band and the bar scene are in full swing. Faces in the crowd glow and then recede into the semi-darkness as matches are struck, cigarettes lit. A man cools himself in the breeze of the circular metal fan by the entrance. A couple steals outside and dances to the gritty confluence of the music drifting out the front door and the thunder of trucks rolling by toward the interstate. And Debbie belts out the blues, one number after another, as she has for nearly 20 years now and as if she knows just what she's talking about.