Willie, Waylon and Me

My friend Joe recently wrote a post about music. (You can find it here: http://apocketfulofmentallint.blogspot.com/2011/03/with-nod-to-brooke.html.) Borne out of a facebook conversation we had, it reminded me of something I thought I'd lost and I've been wanting to type a word or two about it since then.

It is an established fact that I moved around a bit while growing up. There were good things about it (I got to see the Grand Canyon while moving from Alabama to Arizona) and some ever so slightly less good things about it (we only stayed at the Grand Canyon for 15 minutes).

Note: When you move around, you learn not to become too attached to things and sadly, this can apply to people as well. Attachment, as one might imagine, leads to heartache. I sort of inadvertently learned that from my mother, who was gifted at traveling light.

Or so I always thought.

Eventually we found our way to the middle-of-nowhere Missouri at a time, and in a town so small, that we didn't have cable for our television. Besides which we lived too deep in the hollows of the Ozarks to pick up anything so we didn't bother with owning a TV. What we did have was a stereo, complete with a turntable and an 8-track player.

I had forgotten about the box of 8-track tapes.

The only radio broadcast we picked up on a consistent basis was from an AM channel that shut down at 6 pm, finishing their broadcast day with a prayer and the national anthem. During the day the DJs, all high school students, would play an unrelenting mix of country and gospel music. This was usually broken up by the recipe of the day, or a reading of the death notices. On a good day, we'd get both.

At night, however, all we had were our albums and 8 tracks.

So I grew up listening to Jerry Jeff Walker, Merle Haggard, Hank and Don (the Williams Boys) and, whenever I could manage to sneak it onto the turntable, Heart's "Dreamboat Annie" album (borrowed from a friend during our time in Arizona). Yes, I know, it explains so much. I could never understand, as I grew old enough to start talking about music with my friends, why they didn't know the words to "Mama Tried." True story.

I had forgotten my musical upbringing until the "Night Rider's Lament" exchange. And, I had forgotten the cardboard box of 8 track tapes that went with us everywhere we moved. They were so much a part of my childhood landscape, that I can't remember them ever being moved from one place to to another, only that they were always there.

After my mother died and I was sorting through what she'd left behind I found, in the bottom of one of her drawers, three things: Her divorce decree from my father, their wedding picture, and an 8 track tape of Freddy Fender's "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."

It would seem that along with her ability to travel light, I also inherited my mother's flair for the dramatic.

(With thanks to David Allan Coe for the title of this post.)