Day Seven . . . Driving to Opelousas - - Louisiana

It has been a momentous week.  We have already been included in the Top 25 Folk Music Blogs and we have only resumed writing this week.  Check them out if you haven’t already seen their list.

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It’s day seven since leaving Tacoma and we’re within sneezing distance of the Big Easy.  It has been easy weather for driving since that first wet, icy, snowy, windy day.  We did a lot of driving long straight stretches today too.

     I don’t mind driving in a straight line, as I previously mentioned.  Once again it gave rise to song lyrics as the states rolled past my peripheral vision.  I don’t listen to music on the radio while I drive; songs just make their own playlists, visiting in my mind depending on where I am in my travels.
     Ray Benson kept repeating a joyful western swing refrain, crooning to me in his sexy baritone, “Miles and miles of Texas” for a couple of hours of straight driving.   Then we began to notice swamp beyond a muddy ditch and Rodney Crowell invaded with

“I gotta roll on between the ditches
It's just an ordinary story 'bout the way things go
'Round and around nobody knows but the highway
Goes on forever, that ol' highway rolls on forever.”

And if you can name that song you know what state we finally made it to.
    Steve somehow makes himself impervious to fear, or so it might seem on the surface, when embarking on a big trip.  He appears not to cross that threshold of terror into which I thrust myself while trying to prepare for every move into the unknown.
     In one of his most recent songs called “The Very First Time” he sings to me, “I’d go to the ends of the earth with you, I’d go to the end of the line”.  Those lines are inexpressibly dear to me.  Right now they’re quite real, too.  We have succeeded this wintry time in getting to a pretty far-flung corner of the continent from where we started.
     We are in Opelousas, Louisiana tonight after a nice drive from Wichita Falls, Texas.  Texas is a state that has a songwriting heritage, and Louisiana is close behind it so inevitably songs crept into my consciousness as we drove along.  You will see Kristi had thoughts of songs too.  "Lonesome, On'ry And Mean" by Waylon Jennings kept crossing my mind.  There were others, all country songs.  Although country music hails from every state in the union, and several countries besides ours I think of it as springing from the culture of the rural South.
     I love singing country songs, the more maudlin the song, the more I love ‘em. If a song works, then it works. That doesn’t mean that every successful song works for me though. I think there’s a good “folk” tradition that is inherently a part of country songs. As a matter of fact, there have been quite a few “folk” songs that have been turned into country hits over the years, and there have been quite a few country songs that in the long run have been adopted as part of the folk repertoire.

     One thing I have to say right here is, don’t take what I say too seriously. I’m just talking off of the top of my head ya know? I have been called a “folk” artist from the start. That in spite of all of my efforts to rock, or to be a country kinda guy. I don’t know that I have any musical authenticity happening for me. I think I am an authentic songwriter though. I just don’t have any loyalty to any particular genre of music. I don’t think of myself as any kind of a purist.

Amede Ardoin

     We have found that most states have information stations, places where you can pick up a map and a brochure or a hundred brochures, but mostly we are interested in the maps of the different states. We keep thinking that we can just set the GPS and go, but inevitably end up desiring a paper map of our destination. We are pretty digital, but sometimes we just hark back to our same old used to be.

Tomorrow. New Orleans.