He doesn’t have a car or much money. He’s a traveling musician without his own guitar. He’s been sleeping on couches in Starkville. But Brandon D. smiles all the time.
“Couch surfing isn’t quite like, you know, ocean waves or anything, but it’s been really fun,” he says.
I first saw Brandon singing and playing guitar at my church, Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern. I remember seeing his long, blonde hair and that smile. “Who the hell is this?”
I thought I knew my local musicians fairly well, and Brandon looked like a Dave’s regular. I didn’t know that was his first night in Starkville or that his uncle, Mathiston resident David Ragland, was outside sleeping in a car. David left his nephew in town that night. Brandon had been visiting David and his grandmother Myrtle Ragland (a sharp 88-year-old who proudly says her grandson is unusual), but he wanted to play music in Starkville. 
About a week later, I am right outside Ptolemy’s Taproom, and there he is on the sidewalk with a guitar on his back approaching the steps. He asks me if I know of any place needing music. He tells me he’s from Washington (state) and sleeping on couches through couchsurfing.org. He talks to Seth, my friend who runs Ptolemy’s, and gets a gig for the next night.
The next morning I told myself this man was crazy. So I went to Ptolemy’s the next night and watched Brandon play someone’s electric guitar as another guitarist, MSU pre-pharmacy student Willie Dunnam, backed him up. It was loud as hell. My friend Austin, the security, said the volume needed to be cut down. Walking back home, I heard guitars for minutes down University.
“It was pretty much having fun,” Dunnam, whose couch was Brandon’s bed for a while, said. “We met him Wednesday, and then we played Thursday night.”
Sleeping on couches is nothing for Brandon, who recently got back to the States after traveling through Latin America with nothing but a guitar and his wits for about two years. His lowest point was sleeping at a bus stop in David, Panama. He and his band had managed to get across the Costa Rica/Panama border by bus after playing music for fare money at a small food stand around midnight.
“You’d have to do those kind of things,” he said. “You think about the hobos on the trains, or you think about other free-spirited people that are on the road trying to follow their dreams. At times when you didn’t have money, you just had to find ways to keep after it. And a lot of times survival became a state of mind because, sure, we could cook something once in a while, but many times the music only equaled our living … to the extent of, it always just kind of equaled our living to the extent of … life, day by day, if you will. Five or 10 minutes [at a time].”
Unlike the structured gig arranging in Starkville and throughout the United States, walk-ins were commonplace for Brandon in Latin America.
“We would walk in and generally get paid because we would request to be paid something and a meal, so a brother can eat, you know?” he said.
Brandon’s purpose is based on faith — the idea that he is blessed and protected by God, but he’s not a Christian artist per se. He likes to play rock ‘n’ roll, folk, country and Latin music, but you won’t catch him drinking or smoking anything; clutching his throat, he asked me to stop smoking after our first interview. Indeed, asking for smoothies in Panama isn’t what one envisions for a musician.
“They’d look at me like, ‘You out of your mind? You just played four hours of rock ‘n’ roll. Everybody loves you. You want what? Give that man some more alcohol!’ And I would never accept,” he said.
Brandon has played a couple of gigs since Ptolemy’s. I saw him play with Dunnam again on the patio at Halfway House. It was an acoustic show, and initially they had to take turns playing songs because they had only one guitar cord and no microphone. While Dunnam was in the middle of one song, Brandon laid his guitar, strings-down, on his lap and slapped it like he was playing bongos. His positivity was contagious. Two little girls and their parents were dancing. The only thing that interrupted the cool vibe was the occasional d-bag’s loud truck on University.
“It was definitely an upbeat crowd,” Halfway House employee Magen Hylander said. “It was good for all generations.”
I watched him play by himself at La Terraza’s Wednesday night. When I arrived, two large tables of people were singing with him, laughing their asses off and talking about music. About closing time a patron asked him about playing April 15 at The Grill. After watching him speak fluent Spanish with the manager for a while, I offered to give him a ride to whatever couch he was sleeping on. Before we could leave, two female students asked him to play at their table. It took them a while to agree on a song (one student kept requesting rap). He finally played “Hey Jude” by The Beatles. You could see the song connecting them at last.
My friend and fellow musician Matthew Alexander recently told me he wouldn’t want to live without music, and if that mentality doesn’t come through in a performance, one should give it up. I’ve seen that philosophy every time I’ve watched Brandon, and as long as he is getting a couch and a meal in Starkville, you can, too.
Dedicated to my late comrade, Adam Kazery.