Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Oh, yeah, my favorite Emmylou Harris record....

...another one of those songs that could just never get old, at the Roadhouse, Sirius Ch. 62: "Well I'm sixteen-hundred miles from the people I know...I've been doin' all I can, but opportunity sure comes slow..."
Oh, YES! 12:14 pm: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date," 1960. As far as I know, this piano instrumental was this Louisiana native's only hit on the country charts, but damn, it was a great one. Conway Twitty wrote some lyrics for the tune and recorded it some years later, but I think the instrumental stands just fine all by itself, even almost 50 years later.
Yep, this'll do too, 12:29 pm: "What happens now, what will I do with all the memories, and the dreams of all the things we'll never do...but I won't mention it again..." Truth be told I am not a big fan of the later countrypolitan Ray Price records, but I always did like this song. I think probably because of the good memories it brings back. The first time I heard that song was on a February night eight years ago, about six months before I moved here. I was rolling down Highway 59 in deep east Texas somewhere south of Livingston, if I remember right. I was going to the tiny town of Winnie, in eastern Chambers County about an hour east of Houston. It would have been closer to go through Beaumont, but I wanted to be able to listen to Houston's KILT and I had time to kill, so I figured I'd just go on down 59 and cut back across Interstate 10. I was listening to Leslie T. Travis and what was then the '70s at 7, and they played it. And every time I hear that song, it takes me back to that night, and the hope that better things were to come. I had left College Station seven months before that night, and suffice it to say it was only because I absolutely had to, and it left me feeling like a failure. I had been in a bit of a funk ever since I left Aggieland, and that February night was when all of that finally began to lift. And indeed, the better times came...