Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley? co-worker and friend
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive? >50
This song was a mystery of my childhood. It always seemed to start
playing on a summer day when it was around one-hundred degrees in
Modesto. Summer days in childhood were made up of swimming pools and
the sun-tea my dad made. There was a lot of driving with the top down
and every part of it was wrapped in the oldies radio station in town
or my dad’s cassette tapes. Usually we listened to a lot of The Beach
Boys and The Beatles but the radio station played everything from doo-
wop to seventies rock.
This is how I remember first hearing this song. The radio station
didn’t say who sang it or the name of the song but I was entranced.
Something in the slow beat matched the weight of the summer heat and
the simplicity meant that I was instantly listening to Bobbie’s
voice. I think this is the song that ignited my love of folk music to
this day, listening to a story with music that wrapped around the
lyrics.
I didn’t know what the song was REALLY about. Listening to it again,
I still don’t know for sure…and it gets me every time. What was
happening on the Tallahachee bridge? Why did Billy-Joe do it? Why did
the town have to care so much and see everything? The way Bobbie
sings the story the same vocal tone accompanies her tales of her
dad’s death or of eating dinner at home; she is painfully calm while
sharing hints to great pain happening to and around her. To me, there
is something very truthful, and seemingly small-town American, in
some way. Something about rolling along with the punches and just
moving on to the next event in life that arrives.
It took me years of catching the song on the radio to finally find
out who sang it and the name of the song. It wasn’t something I could
easily find at the CD store and actually listening to the song,
catching it on the radio randomly, meant a blessed few minutes in my
day. It still simplifies everything when I hear it, makes all the
melodrama fold down into a reality that just is.
-Courtney Conley
[Note: This song and review were first published in the email format on September 7, 2006. From time-to-time, with the author’s permission, we will be republishing them on the site.]