Another From Darden Smith

Originally posted September 10, 2009.

As I wrote in February 2007 (for Saturday Single No. 2!):

[T]o be honest, Darden Smith these days is not strictly country. That’s where he started some twenty years ago, but he’s evolved to where his music occupies a place somewhere near the intersection of country, folk, pop and rock.

That’s an interesting place to live, musically, but it’s an awful place for the marketing and promotion folks to figure out. So they don’t try. That’s the only reason I can figure out to explain the public’s failure to elevate Smith to the level he deserves.

That was all true then, when I was writing about “Levee Song” from Smith’s Little Victories CD, a 1993 release, and it remains true as I try to figure out what to say about Deep Fantastic Blue, a CD Smith released in 1996.

Well, it’s got plainspoken songs, with a few nifty metaphors – “Somebody’s pride and joy turned out to be the broken branch on the family tree” for one – and some fairly muscular musical backing (not muscular in a rock sense, with lots of loud, but in a country-folk sense; I think you’ll hear what I mean when you listen).

Here’s what All-Music Guide had to say about Deep Fantastic Blue (and about Smith’s career, ca. 1996):

“When CBS (now Sony) signed Darden Smith in 1987, they may have hoped they were getting another country-pop singer-songwriter like Rodney Crowell. By the time a couple of albums had suffered undeserved anonymity, however, they may have been hoping for a critics’ favorite with a modest commercial breakthrough like John Hiatt. But major labels do not wait forever for even the most promising artist to start exceeding his advances, and with this, his fifth album, Smith is now recording for his manager’s indie label. It turns out this is all for the better, artistically, anyway. Darden’s well-written songs are sufficiently straightforward enough to answer to any one of several production ideas. A good country producer could take them in a Garth-like direction, and a good rock producer could find another Tom Petty. Instead, Stewart Lerman has assembled a stellar backup unit of relative unknowns — anchored by bassist Graham Maby from the old Joe Jackson Band, and guitarist Richard Kennedy and drummer Stanley John Mitchell from the late, lamented Drongos — for a restrained folk-rock treatment that emphasizes the songs. Smith’s lyrics cover familiar ground, touching on restlessness, hopelessness, hope, despair, freedom, aging, and, oh, yeah, lust. But he often has unusual ways of putting things, and he sings with conviction. There may not be a place for him on a major anymore, but he continues to grow as a songwriter and performer, and perhaps an audience will find him yet.”

Okay, so who are the musical referents in that review? Rodney Crowell, John Hiatt, Garth Brooks, Joe Jackson and the Drongos, (who were – and I had to look this up – a pop-rock band that released two albums during the mid-1980s). That’s a wide swath of influences and reflections. No wonder it seems hard to figure out what kind of performer Darden Smith is.

It’s easy for a listener, actually, once you get hold of one of his CDs. Put the sucker in the player and let it run, Track 1 through 10. Wash, rinse, repeat. Listen to it the way people used to listen to music, as an entire piece of work. And during a quiet time on the next Wednesday evening or something like that, you’ll have a melody running through your head, and you’ll realize it’s “First Day of the Sun,” or it’s “Drowning Man,” or maybe it’s “Hunger.” Whatever it is, it’s one of Smith’s songs from Deep Fantastic Blue that’s worked its way inside you, the way the best music does.

(That’s always a risk, of course. If a listener’s life is in turmoil or worse, the music may attach itself to that time of his or her life and how it felt to be there. I came across Darden Smith during a difficult portion of my life, and some of the songs on the first CDs of his I bought pull me back to my apartment on Bossen Terrace in Minneapolis and to a time that, well, wasn’t very pleasant. Somehow, though, Darden’s music only lightly recalls that time; even though his CDs were never far from the stereo then, they are, thankfully, not reminders of grief. On the other hand, Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia, which I loved and put into the player about as frequently, is these days still nearly unlistenable for the sonic reminders it brings.)

In any event, Deep Fantastic Blue is a worthwhile listen. I checked at Amazon this morning, and it’s available – one copy through standard means, others through other dealers. There’s also an import version available. (Those listings seem to change from day-to-day.) And most of Smith’s other work is available there as well, with all of it save Little Victories still in print.

If you like what you hear, explore the rest of Smith’s catalog. I’ve posted most of what he recorded up to 1996. (I don’t recall if I’ve ever posted Little Victories, but next week might be a good time for that.) He’s continued to write and record, though it’s been three years since his last release, Field of Crows.

Deep Fantastic Blue by Darden Smith [1996]

Tracks
First Day of the Sun
Broken Branches
Running Kind
Skin
Silver & Gold
Drowning Man
Different Train
Chariots
Stop Talking
Hunger

Deep Fantastic Blue by Darden Smith [1996]

Afternote:
I got an email the other day from the operator of the fine blog The Vinyl District, asking me if I’d tell last week’s tale of Echoes In The Wind for a feature he calls “TVD Pop Over.” I did so gladly, ripping five favorite tunes from vinyl to accompany my words; the post went online today. My thanks to Jon. And some advice for regular readers here: If you don’t already do so, you should make TVD one of your regular stops in blogworld.

‘Every Heart Is On Parade . . .’

Originally posted August 7, 2009

Welcome to the Ocean. Welcome to the Sea of Meant to Be.
Ferris Wheels. French Brocade. Every Heart is on Parade.
All These Things We Dream. All These Things We Dream.

Those are some of the first lines from “All These Things We Dream,” a song by the Living Daylights that I posted two days ago. Since then, the song’s been downloaded only thirteen times. That’s what happens, generally, when I post something that’s not ever been very popular. And the Living Daylights was not a popular band.

The band was, to be honest, utterly obscure. So obscure that there are very few references to the band on the ’Net. (I searched using the name of the band coupled with the name of each band member. The search was complicated by the existence of the James Bond film of the same name: The Living Daylights.)

There is an entry for a band called the Living Daylights at All-Music Guide, with a different album listed for a different year, and the description of the band and its work is entirely at odds with how the CD I have sounds. It’s not the same band.

A search under “Song” at All-Music Guide for “All These Things We Dream” comes up empty. The Living Daylights is a band that seems to have made almost no impact on modern life, and that’s happened during an era when one can hardly avoid coming to the attention of Google even by accident.

So why am I writing about the Living Daylights and what seems to be the band’s only CD? Because even though it’s always a joy to hear songs and write about songs that I’ve heard for forty years – that’s seventy-one percent of my lifetime – it’s also a distinct and rare pleasure to find something new, something I’d not heard when it came out, and be able to enjoy it to the same degree as I do the music I’ve carried around in my head for years.

And that’s what happened when I came across The Living Daylights on the discount shelf of a bookstore in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, almost eight years ago. All one can judge by in those circumstances is the cover and the song titles. None of that was familiar, but the impulse to buy the CD and bring it home is something that I’m sure every music lover has faced: This CD wants me to buy it, and I don’t know why.

I’m certain that the CD cost me no more than two dollars, a minor investment. And when I got home and heard the first strains of “All These Things We Dream,” I was hooked and the hook set in as the rest of the CD played on.

What’s the frame of reference? Who does the Living Daylights sound like? I called the Texas Gal into the study this morning and played her snippets of four or five tracks. Her overall judgment was that “it sounds a little like Darden Smith,” and of course, over the last two-plus years, I’ve made well-known my affection for Mr. Smith’s work. But her first reaction, her first thought on hearing the Living Daylights was “It sounds like America.” (I asked her later if the meant the band – the “Horse With No Name” boys – or the country, and she said she meant both: “It sounds a little like the band, but it also sounds like life in America.”) Looking for guidance, I checked Darden Smith’s entry at AMG, and the first style listed is “Americana.”

And maybe Americana is as good a tag to slap onto the Living Daylights as any. Years ago, I might have called it folk-rock, balancing the intersection of the acoustic guitars with the rock rhythm section. But that’s a crowded intersection at which to stand, and it’s too easy a label. Maybe it is Americana. Whatever it is, from the opening moments of “All These Things We Dream” through the end of “Anna,” The Living Daylights is one of those CDs that – without being self-consciously and artificially hushed – provides me with a gentle place from which to view the world.

Ten of the eleven songs on the CD were written by the group, with acoustic guitarist and singer Rick Barron being the chief writer, having been credited on all of them. The only cover is a version of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sunshine.” (It’s a decent version of a song that I’ve never particularly liked.) The highlights? Beyond the opener, “All These Things We Dream,” I like “I’ll Be Good To You” with its organ foundation and fills; I also find the wordy “Life Is,” the spare “Medicine Lake” and the melancholy closer, “Anna,” worth attention.

Members of the Living Daylights were: Rick Barron, vocals and acoustic guitar; Paul Peterson, vocals, upright and electric bass, keyboards and percussion programming; Joe Finger, vocals and drums; Troy Norton, vocals and electric and acoustic guitar; Wayne Cullinan, vocals and percussion; and Don LaMarca, acoustic piano, Hammond organ and keyboards. [Note from 2022: Both websites are now gone. Note added May 13, 2022.]

Tracks
All These Things We Dream
I Am Here
We All Shine On
I’ll Be Good To You
Sunshine
All These Tears
Strong Man
Somebody’s Gonna Love You
Life Is
Medicine Lake
Anna

The Living Daylights by the Living Daylights [1996]

Afternote

I should mention the two sites I’ve found that mention the Living Daylights. One is the website of Paul Peterson, also known as St. Paul Peterson, a former Prince protégé. A page on his site about his album Blue Cadillac notes that Rick Barron of the Living Daylights helped on his album. (Thanks for reminding me, Steve!) The other is a site called Professional Drum Tracks, which lists the Living Daylights and shows the CD cover.

‘Things’

Originally posted August 5, 2009

A long-time friend stopped by for dinner the other evening. We talked about our cats (five between the two households) and about K’s work in online education – she teaches students all over the world from her home in Nevada. We talked about our families and about the Texas Gal’s current college coursework. We talked a bit about books, and we shared the nuggets of news that folks do when they’re catching up.

As we were dipping into dessert, K began to look around the dining room/library, then craned her neck to peer into the living room. “Where are they?” she asked.

I was puzzled. “Where are what?”

“The penguins.”

I laughed. For years, I collected penguins, mostly ceramic, and at one point – when I lived in Minot, North Dakota – had a collection of about twenty-five, maybe thirty. I also had penguin bathroom accessories – wastebasket, shower curtain and soap dish – and there were other penguin things around my home.

It was an accidental collection. In 1976 or so, I was sharing pictures from my time in Denmark with my then-fiancée’s family. One of the pictures was of a fountain on the pedestrian mall in downtown Fredericia, a fountain decorated with statues of penguins. My future mother-in-law thought it was odd that I’d take a picture of something so prosaic; from then on, during nearly every visit to her home before and during my marriage to her daughter, she gave me a ceramic penguin figurine or something with penguins on it. The collection grew, and other folks – family and friends – gave me occasional gifts of penguin stuff.

I liked my penguins, and I happily displayed them in two homes in Monticello and then in my apartment in Minot, after the marriage had ended with a sigh of exhaustion. I think that’s where K saw them, during one of her visits to Minot. I might also have had them on display in my next place, in Anoka, Minnesota, where she was a regular dinner guest.

But the penguins are no longer on display. I’m not even sure where the collection is, whether it’s in a box nested in another box on the shelves in the basement or whether I gave them away sometime in the past twenty years. I still have a few penguinish things: A stapler, four newer figurines on the mantel, a sweet powder blue Pittsburgh Penguins cap and a few other items here and there. But my days of collecting all things penguin are gone. I do wonder a little bit about the whereabouts of the ceramic penguins. Some of them were quite nice, and I imagine some had some value as collectibles. But I honestly don’t remember what I did with them.

They were, after all, just things. Nice things, yes, but just things. And as I thought about my penguins this week, I also thought – and not for the first time – about how we here in the U.S. have let our things become so important to us. We collect, accumulate and want more things, whether they’re automobiles, backyard decks, bracelets, books, cookware sets, CDs, sweaters, power boats, coffee-makers or any of the other desirable bits and pieces with which we seem to clutter our lives.

Clutter? Yeah, sometimes – a lot of the time – I think so. We’re not rich, the Texas Gal and I. But we sometimes look around our home and realize how much stuff we have, stuff that decorates our lives and makes them more pleasant. It’s nice to have those things, but in the end, they’re not essential. They’re things. I sometimes think that we can examine our priorities by thinking about what we would make sure to take out of our homes if they were on fire.

Even during the times I had them on display, my penguin figurines would have been far down that list. What’s at the top of the list? Obviously, the Texas Gal and the three cats come first. Then the box that contains documents like our birth certificates, marriage license and so on. Then would come our financial records, which we’ve made easily accessible and portable. Then, if there were time, the Texas Gal would probably grab as many of our photos as she could, and I’d grab my journal from my year in Denmark and my external hard drive, where I keep my writing projects (as well as my mp3s). In a fire, I think we’d be lucky to get that much. And if all we got out was ourselves and the cats, well, the rest of it – all of it, no matter how dear some of it may be to us – is just things.

Are those things irreplaceable? Some of them truly are, and we would grieve those losses. But in the end, we’d be safe and whole and they’re just things.

A Six-Pack Of Things
“A Thing Going On” by J.J. Cale from Grasshopper [1982]
“You’re The Best Thing” by the Style Council from Cafe Bleu [1984]
“All These Things We Dream” by the Living Daylights from The Living Daylights [1996]
“Bags and Things” by Dennis Lambert from Bags and Things [1972]
“Things Yet To Come” by Sweathog from Sweathog [1971]
“If It Ain’t One Thing It’s Another” by the Staple Singers from City in the Sky [1974]

All I’m going to say about these songs today is that, even though a couple of them are by lesser-known artists, they’re all worth hearing.

‘I Think I’ve Been Here Before’

So here’s the problem that pops up now and then when you’ve written 2,400-some posts and don’t have them indexed:

You find a track buried deep in a folder on the hard drive and think, “Wow, I didn’t know I had that! Let’s write about it and the cover versions it inspired!”

And after investing an hour or so in research and formatting, something clues you in: You’ve written about this before. In the past two years. This one’s a little bit different, maybe even better, but it’s basically the same post.

Ah, well. Here’s the appropriately titled “A Sense Of Déjà Vu” by Al Stewart. It’s from his 1996 compilation of outtakes and demos, Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

A Random Six-Pack

There are currently 79,000-plus tracks in the RealPlayer, most of them music. (I have about thirty familiar lines from movies in the stacks and some bits of interviews, too.) And today, we’re going to take a six-stop random tour through the stacks. We’ll sort the tracks by length; the shortest is 1.4 seconds of broadcaster Al Shaver exulting over a goal by the long-departed Minnesota North Stars – “He shoots, he scores!” – and the longest is the full album with bonus tracks of Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, clocking in at an hour and eighteen minutes.

We’re going to put the cursor in the middle of the stack and click six times and see what we get.

We land first on a track by Joe Grushecky & The Houserockers: “Memphis Queen” from the group’s 1989 album Rock & Real. At All Music, William Ruhlman notes, “Grushecky’s songs of tough urban life are made all the more compelling by his rough voice and the aggressive playing of his band.” The track in question, “Memphis Queen,” tells the tale of a Pittsburgh boy headed to New Orleans on the titular riverboat, stopping in St. Louis to search for the “brown-eyed handsome man” and meeting a girl named Little Marie, whose daddy is “down in the penitentiary.” I found the album at a blog somewhere when I was going through a Grushecky phase a few years ago. It’s a good way to start.

We jump from 1989 back to 1972 and a track from Mylon Lefevre. “He’s Not Just A Soldier” comes from Lefevre’s Over The Influence album. Originally recorded in 1961 by Little Richard, who wrote the song with William Pitt, the song reads on Lefevre’s album as an artifact from the Vietnam era, declaring that a young man in military service “is not just a soldier in a brown uniform, he’s one of God’s sons.” And there’s a surprise along the way, as Lefevre is joined on vocals by Little Richard himself. There’s also a great saxophone solo, but I don’t know by whom. (I saw a note on Wikipedia that said the album was a live performance, but I doubt that’s the case.)

Next up is a cover of a piece of movie music: “Lolita Ya-Ya” by the Ventures. The tune originated in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita. Penned by Nelson Riddle, the song is source music from a radio the first time that the movie’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, sees the title character who will become his obsession. Sue Lyon, the actress who played Lolita, provided the vocals for the film version of the tune. The Ventures’ cover of the tune was released as a single, but got only to No. 61 on the Billboard Hot 100.

From there, we head to 1968 and Al Wilson’s first album, Searching For The Dolphins, recorded for Johnny Rivers’ Soul City Label. “I Stand Accused” was the fourth single from the album aimed at the Hot 100; the most successful of the four was “The Snake,” which went to No. 27. “I Stand Accused,” a good soul workout, bubbled under at No. 106. As usual with Rivers’ productions, the backing musicians were spectacular: Hal Blaine, Jim Gordon, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborne, Jim Horn and James Burton. (A 2008 reissue of the album provided as bonus tracks eleven singles and B-sides recorded around the same time for the Soul City, Bell and Carousel labels.)

Lou Christie’s fame (and his appeal), as I see it, rests on five singles: “The Gypsy Cried” (1963), “Two Faces Have I” (1963), “Lightning Strikes” (1965), “Rhapsody In The Rain” (1966), and “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” (1970). He shows up here today with “Wood Child,” a track from his 1971 album Paint America Love, released under his (almost) real name, Lou Christie Sacco. (He was born Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco, according to discogs.com.) I’m not sure what the song is about, except that its lyrics are evocative and include the recurring choruses, “You’ve got to save the wood child” and “Take a ticket and get on this boat.”

(A 2015 appreciation of the album by Bob Stanley for The Guardian said: “Yet another side of Christie emerged in 1971 when he cut his masterpiece, Paint America Love, a Polish/Italian/American take on What’s Going On. Orchestrated state-of-the-nation pieces (‘Look Out the Window,’ the extraordinary ‘Wood Child’) compete with majestic instrumentals (‘Campus Rest’) and childhood reminiscences (‘Chuckie Wagon,’ the Sesame Street-soundtracking ‘Paper Song’) in a gently lysergic whole. Online reviews compare it to Richard Ford and John Steinbeck: fans of Jimmy Webb are urged to seek it out.”)

I’m not sure where I got the album, probably a long-lost blog, but I suppose I should take Stanley’s advice and listen to it more closely.

And our six-pack this morning ends with “Long Line” from Peter Wolf, one-time member of the J. Geils Band. The title track from his 1996 album, the tune shifts from straight-ahead tasteful rock to a spoken interlude and back. It sounds a lot more like 1972 than 1996, with some nifty piano fills, which makes it a nice way to end our trek.

‘Why’

We pick up on our project of Journalism 101 with “why,” the penultimate of the six basic questions any reporter keeps in his or her figurative pocket. Those six are, of course, who, what, where, when, why and how.

And when we sort the 72,800-some tracks currently in the RealPlayer, well, the first thing we note is that we have been relatively diligent here in working on rebuilding the stacks. After last autumn’s external drive crash, we had a bit fewer than 60,000 mp3s on the digital stacks. We’ve made progress, but there is still much work to do: We still have about four years’ worth of CD purchases to restore to the stacks, and after that, there will be much work to get tags correct.

But I digress.

When we sort those 72,800-some tracks for the word “why,” we are presented with 289 tracks. Interestingly, most of them are useful to us. We do lose some, like the entire 1993 album by the Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (And we pause a moment to remember the recently departed Dolores Riordan.) We also lose full albums by blueswoman Rory Block (Lovin’ Whyskey, 2009) and by the Button Down Brass Featuring The Funky Trumpet Of Ray Davies (Why Can’t We All Get Together, 1972­), as well as most of the tracks from an album by Little Big Town (The Reason Why, 2010).

But that leaves more than 250 tracks, a trove of riches that we can’t entirely grasp. So we’re going to let the RealPlayer do the work. We’ll sort the tracks by running time, set the cursor in the middle, and go random. The only things we’ll skip are those that are not currently available on YouTube.

And we start with “Why, Oh Why” from Little Big Town, one of the two tracks we can use from the group’s 2010 album. Released as a digital single, it showcases very well the tight harmonies and power pop/country backing that’s made the foursome so successful. The album debuted in 2010 at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and eventually topped the magazine’s country chart. I’m of two minds about Little Big Town; I have four of their albums in the stacks – their earlier work, generally – and I don’t mind when it shows up randomly. But a steady diet of it tends to bore me. It seems to be music custom-made for the playlist era.

Then we get a track from Maria Muldaur, a singer whose work has always attracted me but whom I’ve never really called a favorite, if that makes any sense. I’ve enjoyed her intermittently and gathered a fair number of her LPs and CDs, from her self-titled 1973 debut through 2011’s Steady Love, which is where “Why Are People Like That” shows up. It’s a bluesy tune written by Bobby Charles and first recorded by Muddy Waters for his 1975 Woodstock album. Muldaur’s version showcases her strengths as an interpreter even as one hears a little raggedness around the edges of her vocals (the effects of aging, I would guess).

And we fall into a dose of 1958 rockabilly: “Why Did You Leave Me” by Lou Josie & The Spinners. Josie, according to Discogs, was an Ohio-born performer who – as well as heading up those particular Spinners – was a member of B. Bumble & The Stingers (whose name I first heard in Reunion’s 1974 hit “Life Is A Rock [But The Radio Rolled Me]”). The website Black Cat Rockabilly has an extensive piece about Josie, noting his many songwriting credits for other, better-known, performers. Among those, he received partial credit for the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” and, on his own, wrote “Midnight Confessions,” which the Grass Roots took to No. 5. “Why Did You Leave Me” came my way through the massive rockabilly/country collection That’ll Flat Git It.

Having messed up my randomness through re-sorting the useful files, I’ll choose the last of our four stops today: “Don’t Know Why” by the Rutles, selected to mark – a little late, but never mind – the fortieth anniversary of the spring 1978 televising of All You Need Is Cash, which introduced the U.S. to the Prefab Four. It was all a lark, of course, an affectionate tweaking of the Beatles, with incredibly accurate sound-alike songs and performances. “Don’t Know Why,” with its delightful late-period Lennonisms (and an overt lyrical reference to “Norwegian Wood”), came from the 1996 release Archaeology.

Saturday Single No. 557

Today, I thought I’d go back to a moment on our trip to South Dakota. Not long after leaving Rapid City on our way home, we took a thirty-mile detour through Badlands National Park, getting out at several places for photos and to simply marvel at the land:

What in the world, we wondered, did the explorers and settlers of the Nineteenth Century think when they came to these places, stretching for miles under the harsh Dakota sun? Further south, in the park’s Stronghold Unit, lies the place where the Lakota – seeking the survival of their way of life – held their Ghost Dance. As we drove the loop through the park, our comments to each other became murmurs and then became silence, both of us overwhelmed by the savage beauty of the place.

In that silence, as we drove on out of the Badlands, I thought – not at all for the first time during our Dakota trip – of the man I’d once known as Paul Summers, now Paul LaRoche, whose Lakota ancestors had been among those displaced from their homes and lives during the 1800s. I told his story – learning after the death of his Anglo parents that he had been adopted as an infant and then reconnecting with his Lakota heritage – long ago in the Eden Prairie News and then seven years ago in a post here.

Since that post, recording as Brulé, he’s continued to be one of the most well-known and successful Native American artists, releasing numerous CDs and touring frequently. I had some of his work before we headed west, and I added to that collection while we were in the Black Hills. None of Brulé’s work that I have at hand seems to speak specifically to the Badlands, but this morning, “Buffalo Moon” from the 1996 album We The People caught my ear. And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

‘We’ve No One To Hold . . .’

One of the more sentimental songs in the folk/pop canon is “Turn Around,” written in the 1950s by Malvina Reynolds, Alan Greene, and Harry Belafonte and first recorded by Belafonte for his 1959 album Love Is A Gentle Thing. The song might be most memorable to folks of my generation for its use in a 1960s television commercial for Kodak.

We’ll get to all that, I think, as well as a discussion of which male vocalist sang the tune for the Kodak commercial, in the coming days. Today, I just wanted to note why the song slid back into my life. Not quite two weeks ago, I concluded a brief meditation on autumn with the late Charlie Louvin’s 1996 version of Sandy Denny’s lovely song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes.”

The song was from Louvin’s album The Longest Train, and after I wrote the post, I did some digging, listening to a few more tracks from the album at YouTube and checking out how the album was received by listeners and critics. And I decided to invest a small amount of cash in a used copy of the CD, which arrived yesterday. After listening to the album, I can say it’s one of the best investments of six bucks I’ve ever made.

Louvin was in his seventies when he recorded The Longest Train, and his voice shows it. But the aging that’s evident in his voice adds a poignant touch to many of the album’s tracks. That was true of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” when I shared it twelve days ago, and it’s equally true in Louvin’s take on “Turn Around.”

There are numerous variations to the lyrics of “Turn Around.” Here’s how Louvin sings it on The Longest Train:

Where have you gone, my little boy, little boy?
Where have you gone, my sonny, my own?
Turn around, you’re two.
Turn around, and you’re four.
Turn around, you’re a young man going out the door.

Where have you gone, my little girl, little girl?
Pigtails and petticoats, where have they gone?
Turn around, you’re young.
Turn around, you’re grown.
Turn around, you’re a young wife with babes of your own.

Where have they gone, our little ones, those little ones?
Where have they gone, our children, our own?
Turn around, they’re young.
Turn around, they’re old.
Turn around, and they’ve gone and we’ve no one to hold.

Turn around, they’re young.
Turn around, they’re old.
Turn around, they’ve gone and we’ve no one to hold.

(For those interested, Louvin recorded the song once before, for the 1966 album The Many Moods of Charlie Louvin. That version is here.)

‘She Takes My Blues Away . . .’

Ever since B.W. Stevenson popped up earlier this week, I’ve been digging back into his music. Finding Stevenson’s “Save A Little Time For Love” and “Say What I Feel” through the help of our pal Yah Shure spurred me into ordering two CDs, each of which contains two of Stevenson’s 1970s albums. (The CD offering My Maria from 1973 and Calabasas from 1974 was already on my shelves, though I had a difficult time this morning determining which particular shelf.)

And as I began to dig into Stevenson’s music, I also found myself digging into the work of Daniel Moore, the co-writer of “My Maria” – the late Stevenson’s most successful single – and the writer on his own of “Shambala,” probably Stevenson’s second-best-known work. We’ll get to Moore next week as we listen to some covers of “Shambala” and perhaps a little bit of Moore’s rootsy self-titled album from 1971.

But for today, we’re just going to deal with “My Maria.” Here’s Stevenson’s version, which went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 1 for one week on the adult contemporary chart:

From what I can tell, poking around at Second Hand Songs, at discogs.com and at Amazon, there are two U.S.-released covers out there of “My Maria.” (At discogs.com, there are some releases listed from other artists in Germany and the U.K. that may or may not be the same song.) One of those U.S.-released covers listed at Second Hand Songs is credited only to “Voice Male” and was included on a 1997 CD of covers titled Up, Up & Away.

(Other tracks on the Up, Up & Away CD include Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration,” Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” Johnny Mandel’s “The Shadow Of Your Smile” and the classic by Ernie, “Rubber Duckie.” Sadly, or perhaps not, the link from Second Hand Songs to the CD’s page at Amazon no longer works, and a few quick checks at other CD emporia brought no joy.)

The other U.S.-released cover of “My Maria” is, of course, the 1996 cover by Brooks & Dunn. Having come late to an appreciation of country music (and not being an expert by any definition of the word), I wonder if Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn are not the most successful country duo of all time. If not, they’re definitely in the running, with – according to Wikipedia – twenty No. 1 hit on the Billboard country chart and another nineteen in the magazine’s Top Ten. “My Maria” wasn’t the duo’s biggest hit. Based on weeks at No. 1, that would have been 2001’s “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You,” which topped the chart for six weeks. But “My Maria” was No. 1 for three weeks in 1996, and, says Wikipedia, was that year’s top country song. So here’s Brooks & Dunn’s cover of “My Maria.”

‘Like A Face In The Crowd . . .’

Maps fascinate me. From the time I could unfold the bulky road maps of the early 1960s – free in those years at nearly every gas station – I’d trace routes from city to city, look for rivers and lakes and wonder what it would look like and feel like to, say, drive south along U.S. Highway 71 from the Canadian border at International Falls all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. (I’ve never done that, and the drive would be much less interesting now than it would have been in the 1960s because it appears that much of that highway’s route now follows the Interstate highways.)

Along with my fascination with maps came a love for place names. Whether they come from Native American traditions or from the names of places left behind by settlers or even from the less-than-fertile imaginations of suburban developers – a trail that leads figuratively here in Minnesota from Wabasha to New Prague to Woodbury – I’m captivated by the names of places every time I look at a map.

And that captivation finds its way into my life in a lot of ways. Most pertinent to this space is that I find myself listening to and collecting records and digital music files that use place names in their titles. I walked briefly through titles that include “Memphis” a couple of years ago. That may be the most popular of place names in my collection, but it’s not necessarily the most fun. Shortly after I began collecting mp3s in 2000, I came across the track listing of country singer Yearwood’s 1995 album Thinkin’ About You.

When I looked at that track listing, one song title stood out: “On A Bus To St. Cloud.” I’d never seen my hometown mentioned in a song, and I wondered if the city in question were instead St. Cloud, Florida. I got hold of a copy of the song and learned, happily, that it was my St. Cloud that was referenced. So I did a little bit of research. I found an interview with writer Gretchen Peters in which she said the inspiration for the song came when she was looking idly at a map and noticed St. Cloud, Minnesota. The name of the city intrigued her and provided the inspiration for what turned out to be a pretty decent song.

Yearwood was the first to record it, according to Second Hand Songs, with Peters recording her version a year later for her album The Secret of Life. Other covers listed at Second Hand Songs have come from John Joseph Nolis and the duo of Neyman & Willé. At Amazon, one finds versions by Leah Shafer, George Donaldson and other names that are unfamiliar (at least to me). One familiar name there is Jimmy LaFave, an Austin-based singer-songwriter whose work I enjoy; he put his version of “On A Bus To St. Cloud” on his 2001 album Texoma. And there are other covers out there, I’m sure.

But as I look for what sounds and feels definitive, I go back – as I often do – to the original. I’m astounded that it’s taken me this long – more than six years of blogging – to write about the song, but here’s Yearwood’s version of a tune that name-checks my hometown.