Excerpted from "A Man, a Guitar, and a Respiratory Disease - The Lymph and Chyme of Chicken-Lungs McGurk"
Adonijah Gallus McGurk was born in 1906 in a hole in the ground outside Difficult, Tennessee. His mother, Bozrah Leah McGurk died of natural causes during childbirth. She died again of consumption when he was 7, and finally of congenital scrofula when he was 13. His adorable puppy Snuggles died a total of 5 times, usually of some embarrassing cancer, and almost always when it was least convenient. His father, Morris Bartholomew McGurk died of a massive heart attack every year on Christmas eve, directly after delivering the traditional holiday beatings.
No stranger to hardship, Adonijah was first exposed to the accoridion at the tender age of 5 by his naked, maternal uncle Pontius. Luckily, his uncle was arrested soon thereafter whereupon the child welfare authority in Tennessee gave Adonijah a gun and a Gretsch to replace the offending squeezebox. Somehow, a soulless bureaucracy had sewn the seeds of a blues legend.
At 6 years old, young Adonijah was forced to take hensmanry jobs at several local chicken farms to help offset his family’s considerable funerary expenses. He quickly contracted a chronic case of histoplasmosis which would remain with him for the rest of his life. A recently passed Tennessee law required all people above a certain objectively observable degree of swarthiness to affect a colorful nickname. Like most of his law-abiding co-workers, his near constant state of pulmonary distress immediately earned him the derisive nickname "Chicken-Lungs." This led to some confusion in the workplace, since shouts of "Hey, Chicken-Lungs, go grind up that dried bird feces without wearing a mask," or "be sure to trip and fall into that enormous vat of bird feces without first donning underwater breathing apparatus, Chicken Lungs" were commonplace, and could easily gain the attention of fifty men at once. It was at this point that Adonijah was in serious danger of leading a quiet life of cruel mediocrity, since everyone who worked on the farms looked pretty much alike to us. Miraculously, he was able to distinguish himself well enough through a combination of blistering after-hours guitar work and lighthearted lunchtime gunplay that he came to need an unique moniker, and was eventually referred to by all as "Chicken-Lungs McGurk." He was the only recorded hensman in Difficult to have an unique nickname.