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Rating: This is a sad story from the southern United States. One of those stories that seem too tragic to be true. This is also a small story because to find something about the tragic end of Amy and Derrick Ross, you have to delve into the online archives of the Tucson Sentinel, the newspaper of the capital of the state of Arizona. A story that ended in October 2013 after 13 years of wandering through the southern United States to bring their music. The music of Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl.
I stumbled upon them by chance; they had played opening for a band, also little known, that I had discovered randomly... well, I won't go on. The strange coincidences of music. Amy and Derrick are husband and wife. Amy is beautiful, but it's a kind of beauty that has something strange about it. The marks, the marks on the skin. Amy suffers from lupus, an autoimmune disease, and the spots are the classic rashes of the disease that mostly affects young women aged 15 to 35, nine times more frequently than men, and it also weakens the internal organs. And wandering around for 13 years playing here and there doesn’t help one's health.
They started from Bisbee, Arizona, a small town of 5,000 inhabitants, 92 miles south of Tucson. A barren landscape of scorched earth, where the myth of the Far West still lives. And the Wild West is one of the myths of the two. Amy is 27 years old and Derrick is 26. They moved in 2000 and then they started. A wandering that would end on October 14, 2013, with the death of both, leaving behind thousands of miles, three beautiful albums, hundreds of concerts in the most varied places. The last of the three is called Children of Fortune, a self-production, but you can listen to it on Spotify. Among the songs of delicate folk tinged with melancholy, small melodic pearls, there is, for example, "If only I", which talks about what Amy would have liked to leave behind. Perhaps because she already knew that soon the blood infection would kill her.
The end comes, as mentioned, on October 15, 2013. Amy is hospitalized in Tucson, her condition has worsened. That morning, this message appeared on the duo’s Facebook profile: “Hey guys! Bad news! I died this morning and Derrick didn’t know how to tell you. I love you all and hope you go out and be kind to someone. Funerals are a bore so I hope I don’t have them. Leave Derrick alone for a bit”. Yes, Derrick. Derrick leaves the hospital after saying “ok guys all good, I’m going home to rest,” he goes to one of Tucson’s gun shops, buys a gun, and goes home. He spends a few hours, perhaps looking at photos, perhaps watching videos of Amy, then he shoots himself in the head. On the Facebook profile, there is one last post, programmed to appear at the right moment: “I'm sorry to give you more bad news. Derrick at some point last night decided to join me. I thought it was better to let you know myself. Enjoy every sandwich. We love you and will miss you all. Go now and try to be kind to someone.”
Amy was 40 years old and Derrick 39. In a radio interview a few weeks earlier, he had stated that if Amy for some reason died, he would commit suicide. It was not just a declaration of dark love. On the cover of one of their three albums, prophetically, the nowhere man and the whiskey girl are drawn sitting on their tombstone. If you look for their page on Facebook, it’s still there, with just over 2000 likes, to make you understand how small this story is. But the music is truly worth listening to.
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