How Son of My Father Found Its Name - The Story Behind a Book Title, and a Half-Forgotten Song

In 2022, I wrote a book called Son of My Father.

I remember the moment the title came to me. I was pacing around my home, thinking — searching for a phrase that might hold the whole story together. Titles can be elusive things, they are jotted down, forgotten, some look great, then they don’t. I had a handful of ideas, each discarded for one reason or another. 

None seemed to bring the chapters together in the way I wanted.

At one stage, I had an idea that I felt could really work — to open each chapter with a subheading drawn from a song of the time. A piece of music that had shaped not only my personal experiences, but also the atmosphere of the era I was writing about. I imagined each song acting as a lyrical thread connecting memory, mood, and meaning to the story.

Then reality intervened. Copyright.

Yes, “fair use” might have allowed me to borrow a few lines, but even that felt like a legal grey area. The deeper I looked, the more it became a potential minefield of permissions and costs. Reluctantly, I let the idea go.

Still, once music had entered the conversation, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Songs have a way of unlocking memory, and as I sifted through those from my past, one stood out: Son of My Father, a 1972 hit by Chicory Tip.

I can’t say the band were favourites of mine, nor that the song had any special place in my life at the time. I remember it being played on the radio and Top of the Pops, but I was more into music by T Rex, Slade, Sweet and ELO. Years later, the song — and something in its story — resonated. It felt as though it was an ideal title for the book.

Here’s the song:

I later discovered that the title had been used before — in books, in other contexts — but that didn’t matter. For me, it fit.

Because although my book isn’t solely about my relationship with my dad, he is the presence that runs through it. The man, the mystery. As he left my life almost fifty years ago now, the book is most of what I know about him.

Writing Son of My Father was, in part, an act of discovery — not just about the past, but about what remains when memory fades and imagination takes its place. 

Read more reflections like this here.

 

Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay