I was four-plus hours out of Nashville, deep in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, headed to Huntington for the 50th-anniversary observance of the Marshall plane crash that took out the football team on a rainy November night in 1970. I hadn’t left till after supper, and the time change had put me at near midnight. Before I ran out of steam, I made it to Grayson, KY, about thirty miles west of Huntington.

To stay alert, I’d been listening to a book CD I got off the freebie rack at the library (The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny), but it was pretty academic, and after a few hours of that, I’d had my elegant sufficiency. So I started channel surfing. I soon came across a classic rock station and got a dose of Prince’s 1999. (He was the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.) It was a tour de force of snap, crackle, and pop craftsmanship—surges, reversals, ramblings, warnings, soarings and divings. Impressive, but hard to follow cognitively. (“I was dreamin’ when I wrote this, Forgive me if it goes astray . . .”)

I moved on and came across Mark Chesnutt singing “All my old flames have new names.” It’s the lament of a fellow who moved out to Idaho for a couple of years ago and then found, upon his return, that his former girlfriends had gotten married. The story and lyrics were down home and clear. Though the character wasn’t admirable, his situation was recognizable. You get “My pretty little black-eyed Susie’s now Mrs. Susan Van Der Hoosie” instead of Prince’s “The sky was all purple. There were people runnin’ everywhere.” Yes, you can tease a pre-Y2K apocalyptic and eat-drink-and-be-merry text out of 1999, but it takes work on the part of the listener. And at that late hour, I was happy to let Chesnutt do the heavy lifting.

Here you see the image of my dash, blurred by road vibration on I-64. You can just make out the station, WKCA, 97.7 (“Real Country”) out of Morehead, KY. It was my happy place. (Disclaimer: I live in Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry, so I’m marinated, and gladly so, in country music.)

Coming back to Nashville, I decided to pen a few words of highway narrative myself: “I've been passing everything in sight; Six days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight.” Wait! What’s that? Dave Dudley already wrote and sang that? Well, back to the drawing board. We country writers have to keep at it.