Day 2: Winchester to Wytheville, Virginia

I was thrilled to be traveling in the mountains today. The wether was perfect for it. I had never traveled I-81 north of Roanoke, and the panoramic mountain view is terrific. There are not many places I've traveled where you can see mountains on either side and ahead of you.

I looked in vain for the home of a friend of my daughter to have lunch with her, but she lives far back in the country and I ran out of cell phone signal before we connected. It was fun to run those backroads though. I am still in love with my new car, a 2009 Hyundai Elantra Touring.

Here are some videos of the trip in general today:



OK, I promise not to take any more videos in the car at 80 mph. But it was fun:



And, all you need is highway, truck stop, mountains, hotel:

Lynchburg, Virginia: Don Reno

I'm pretty sure that my commentary on these video clips doesn't really do justice to Don Reno. He was an extremely versatile entertainer -- a killer banjo player who pioneered an entire style of playing, a fearsome rhythm guitar player, a great singer, an excellent songwriter, a decent comedian (comedy was a highlight of the Reno and Smiley band). Reno died too young. He should be around still, jamming with Earl Scruggs.

Winchester, Virginia: Patsy Cline's Memorial

So I ran into a guy at a welcome center in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who said that the *real* story about Patsy Cline is that she was raised by her grandparents in rural Elkton, Virginia, and wasn't really from Winchester (which is slightly less rural). I didn't find that out, though, until after I had visited Patsy Cline's memorial in Shenandoah Memorial Park in Winchester. Below are the videos I made.

I have to admit, I was moved to sing a few soft bars of "I Fall to Pieces" while I was out there, and as soon as I started singing, a small flock of ducks at the pond commenced to quacking. Whenever I quit singing, they quit quacking. Coincidence? You decide.

Song of the Day: 'West Virginia My Home'

Last January I had been in Boston for two months, didn't really know anyone much except my co-workers, was trying to wrap my mind around my impending divorce, and was shocked to realize that the winter sun sets at about 4 pm in Boston. Plus the temperature did not get above 20 degrees, even in the daytime, for about a three-week stretch.

The last Saturday of January I packed up the cheap Yamaha guitar I had bought to play while my Martin was being repaired after its fateful brush with Southwest Airlines baggage handlers and went out to the Stagecoach Inn in Groton, Mass., for the monthly Boston Bluegrass Union jam. I knew absolutely no one there. By the end of the night, a young fiddle player asked me if I knew the song "West Virginia My Home" and I said I knew of it, loved it, and had never tried to sing it. I promised her I would learn it before the next jam, and I did. Whenever I sang the words "Well, I've paid the price for the leaving/and this life I have's not one I thought I'd find" I was singing my own life right then, even if my home was Texas and not West Virginia.

"West Virginia" was written and sung by Hazel Dickens, a woman with a powerful, direct delivery and by her own admission, a casual relationship with pitch. In a great Washington Post story from 1996, Dickens told writer Richard Harrington, "Oh, I never hit the right pitch. I go for that feel, I go for the jugular. I can't even think about [the pitch]. When I'm singing, I'm thinking about the real things."

Yesterday I drove through a bit of West Virginia between Maryland and Virginia, and I thought about that song again. Here's a video clip of Dickens, then 73 years old, singing "West Virginia" at the 2008 Folk Alliance conference along with Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz. And yes, that is Kathy Mattea, also a West Virginia native, who spontaneously comes up to add more harmony.

Day 1: Over the Mason Dixon Line

Got a late start due to the overall disengagement issue, but I did make it all the way to Winchester, Virginia, as planned. The day started gloomy and rainy, and stayed that way right up until about 4 pm and Pennsylvania. My GPS choked at a crucial moment when I was merging in a spaghetti-like interchange in New York City, and I ended up meandering around some run-down part of New Jersey until it was all synched up and I was back on route again.

So I've said that going back to Texas is about going home for me, although the truth is I have no actual home town, due to a majorly unstable childhood. In many ways my sense of "home" is tied up in old country music, especially honky-tonk, because that music was itself all there was of stability in my childhood, and in my mind also much of what there as of happy times -- playing music with my dad, talking about songs, listening to music.

Because of that and because there's someone in Massachusetts I'm not happy to be driving away from, I felt too sad to delve into country music today for all those hours in the car. Instead, I revisited the 70s and 80s via XM radio -- disco! new wave! dance music! -- the music of my teens and 20s. I needed the high energy too. I heard a Kasey Kasem top 40 countdown from Aug 31, 1975. On that date in the year when I was 16 and just starting what turned out to be my final year of high school (starting at Oswego High School in Oswego, Illinois, and ending at Springfield High School in Springfield, Tennessee), the #1 song was "Get Down Tonight" by KC and the Sunshine Band.

As Thelma Houston was whaling away on "Don't Leave Me This Way," I crossed from Pennsylvania into Maryland and saw to my amazement an actual highway sign for the Mason Dixon Line. Didn't know there was one, but I'm on the other side of it now than I was yesterday.

Disengaging

Probably we're none of us very good at disengaging from one thing, one place, one person, or one set of people. It doesn't feel good.

So this living in Massachusetts has been in no way a bad situation. I'm just not at home here, and I want to go home for awhile. I want to base myself at home and travel to here from there, and not vice versa. But, I like many things here in Massachusetts. In 10 months, I've developed routines, friends, places I like to go to, and things I like to do here.

However, in order to leave here I have to disengage from those things and those people. And even though I'm going to be coming back relatively soon, and returning to a routine of coming here once a month for a week or so at a time, I still have to disengage, right now, from the place and from people I've come to care about.

I know people who have a hard time disengaging from a conversation, much less a place and a set of people. I'm not that bad. But I've definitely passed out of my comfort level regarding the process of disengagement here.

In 12 hours, though, one way or another I'm going to be finished deciding what goes and what stays (because some stuff can stay and be shipped later). I'll stop putting stuff in the car, finish disengaging, and go.

The Big Trip

It started on Facebook.

I'm leaving Arlington, Massachusetts, where I've been living for almost a year, to return to Austin, Texas, via Arlington, Texas. I posted on Facebook that I was about to take an epic road trip by myself and wondered if friends had suggestions about potential routings and stops. A friend pointed out that her husband had once visited the graves of the Carter Family in southwest Virginia and the same day also visited Jimmie Rodgers' grave in Meridian, Mississippi. I didn't want to top that feat but it gave me a great idea -- visit the graves of pioneers of bluegrass and country music and post writing, audio, and video along the way. This blog will be the chronicle of the trip.

So it sounds like a great idea to me now, but it's a seven-day trip and we'll see how I feel long about Day 4!

I'm leaving the day after tomorrow, and I'm not quite ready.