More Songs About Dirt Roads and Rain
I was an indoor kid. I liked comic books and television and whatever sounds happened to be emanating from the radio. This doesn’t mean I didn’t like being outdoors at all - far from it. Our backyard was ripe ground for exploration. Me being a very small person at the time, that yard seemed to go on forever, green all around, like a couple of damn football fields. Of course it was actually only a patch of grass, maybe a couple dozen square feet. Whatever. The imagination distorts things, and I say let it. At least when it comes to things as relatively inconsequential as backyards. I mean, don’t push it.
My family used to go fishing sometimes. That’s an odd memory to consider now, given that several decades later I am still very much an indoor kid, with an aversion to anything that bites, anything that is slimy, and any situation in which I might have to walk around in wet clothes for any length of time. But when I was a kid, I loved these fishing trips. It meant dirt roads and strange vegetation, weird rocks and insects and animals. Those hordes of cattails popping up out of the ground seemed so exotic to my young imagination. Compared to the household plants my mom kept around they seemed like some kind of hallucinatory vision.
These fishing trips would have happened roughly in 1975, right around the time that Willie Nelson had an enormous hit with his cover of the classic Fred Rose country tune “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain”. It’s an unassuming song, so short and spare it almost floats away. But if you put together a playlist of songs to go fishing to, it would surely be in strong consideration. Something in the lilting, lonesome sound practically begs to have a bonfire built.
Country music wasn’t as ubiquitous in my world as one might have guessed given that I grew up within a few miles of Nashville. We listened almost exclusively to pop radio. Willie’s song crossed over to the pop charts that year, so it was all over the airwaves. Even if that hadn’t been the case I would have heard it anyway, because my father was a big Willie Nelson fan.
More broadly, my father was a fan of a particular style of folk music; one that incorporated blues and country in a way that melded them together so that the music seemed elemental, made up of dirt and dampness, humidity and grit.
One of his favorites was the self-titled debut of the folksinger Bob Frank, released on Vanguard records in 1972. Frank looked to me like a character right out of my father’s own circle of friends - scraggly facial hair, faded jeans, playing a beat-up acoustic guitar. He sang songs about getting drunk and getting stoned and spending the night in jail, the burr in his quavery southern drawl suggesting a man who sang from firsthand experience.
If the song titles tell a good deal of the story - “Wino”, “Return to Skid Row Joe”, “Memphis Jail” - the rest is summed up by the loping, laid-back mood that the acoustic-with-harmonica sound creates. Scruffy, lightly comic in a self-deprecating way, the album evokes light breezes and weedy patches of grass. It’s back porch music; like when a sudden rain shower has soaked you to the bone and sent you scurrying for shelter. And maybe there’s a dollar bottle of rose grape wine on that back porch.
Our little town suffered flash floods during Spring 1975 and I remember being caught in one. We were in the car and the rain came so heavy and hard that the windshield became a pure white blur. Opening the car door lightly we could see a river of water rushing by underneath. Luckily it subsided before we were completely stranded and we were able to get home. I remember the feeling in the air later that day, a kind of heaviness, elusive, like it was the end of something and the beginning of something else.
A mirage had appeared. My young brain couldn’t process it logically, so I stuffed it, fully, mysteriously intact, into the songs I’d been hearing.
In his song “Paradise” John Prine sings about traveling with his family to Muhlenberg County in Kentucky, going down the Green River (maybe the same one that CCR sang about, why not?) to see the abandoned prison and shoot bottles with pistols. With a keening fiddle and a melody that seems remembered from an echo heard long ago in a mountain grove somewhere, Prine’s song carries whoever hears it to their own long-gone childhood idyll, real or imagined.
That old-timey backwoods feeling rang in my consciousness like a railroad whistle during those days when it had been raining and everything was green and growing. Scattered gravel here and there, mosquitos buzzing over puddles.
Nostalgia’s no good, you can get drunk on it as surely as you can cheap wine. Even John Prine admits that his childhood memories are worn, and that’s before he explains that Paradise was ruined when the coal company came along and stripped the land.
Likewise, distorted memories can do a lot of harm. We make unwarranted connections, assign motives and blame in spurious ways, often based on recollections that may or may not be completely dependable.
Feelings are powerful, though, and so are the songs that we use to mirror and decipher and explain or expunge them. Songs have a tendency to absorb and retain feelings so that when we hear them years or decades later the feelings are as fresh and vivid as when we first experienced them. In this way, they are extremely useful.
It’s up to us how we want to sort through our own feelings, and the simple nostalgia or cheap fantasy that a song can evoke are viable, relatively harmless options. If I wanna get that feeling of dampness and back porch breezes, it’s easy enough. That Bob Frank album contains it all in convenient song form. All the moss-covered rocks, high swaying cattails leading down to a dirt path beside a small stream that I may or may not be remembering accurately, it doesn’t matter, because it’s there, easy to access.
It’s a feeling that I can’t get much of anywhere else, short of going camping. Please don’t make me go camping. Why bother going outdoors when you can just put on a record?
