And the summer sun might burn me till I’m blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin’ on the back roads
By the rivers flowin’ gentle on my mind
I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin’ cracklin’ cauldron
In some train yard
My beard a roughening coal pile
And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands ’round a tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you’re waving from the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
Ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind
Ghost in This House
Story by Hugh Prestwood
Song written by Hugh Prestwood
Recorded by Shenandoah, Alison Krauss
I’m from El Paso, but I moved up to New York about 30 years ago to pursue a music career. I lived in Manhattan for about 10 years and then moved out to the end of Long Island. I’ve never lived in Nashville, although I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. If I were more of a co-writer, I probably would have moved there, but I tend to write by myself. I got to the point where I decided I really don’t like having the music business right in my face all the time. And if I’m in Nashville for more than a week or so at a time, I start feeling pressure to hurry up and write.
I am a pretty slow, methodical writer. I tend to write about one song a month and I only write one song at a time. The melody comes pretty fast, and then I chew on the lyric for a couple of weeks. There’s usually a line or two that I keep thinking I can improve and keep coming back to, and it usually drives me crazy until I get the last couple of pieces of the puzzle.
“Ghost in This House” was like that. I first got the idea for it while I was watching the movie, The Grapes of Wrath. There’s a scene where the character named Muley has just lost everything he has, and they’ve run him off this land. At one point, he says, “I’m just an old graveyard ghost. That’s all I am.” And I thought, “That would be an interesting idea for a song,” so I wrote it down in my song idea book.
About a year or so later, it was in the dead of winter. My wife had been in a minor car wreck, so she was in a lot of pain for a month or two. And I began thinking, “What if it had been a really serious accident, and I had lost her?” And it was a really dreary night and I started writing. That’s where the song came from, out of that mood that night.
I usually like to visualize a lot when I’m writing lyrics. I started imagining this big house with only one light on upstairs, with this great sense of emptiness and quiet. It came out of a real pure emotion I had, which is where a lot of my best songs come from. I didn’t have too much regard for whether it was going to be commercial or not. I kept getting these images of smoke and matches and fire, too, so I put them into the song.
I wrote this song in the 1980s. I really wrote it with Michael Johnson in mind. He had already done a couple of my songs, but he was actually in between deals, so he was not in a position to record it the time I wrote it. Then a little while later, Rick Hall down in Muscle Shoals got it. He was co-producing Shenandoah at the time with Robert Byrne, and he played it for them and they liked it. I really like Marty Raybon’s voice, so I was thrilled when I heard what they had done with the song.
I actually had envisioned a version that was a little darker — something a little darker than what they did — much slower and heavier. Then when Alison Krauss recorded it, she took it where I had initially thought I wanted the song to be. It’s just two different ways of looking at the same song. Marty’s was exactly right for radio.
When the Shenandoah version came out, I was kind of wishing it was less produced, but when Billboard reviewed it, they said it was a “numbingly sad song.” Alison’s version is a little more artistic, but I doubt hers would ever make it as a single. When she played it at the White House last year, she was there with Brad Paisley and both The New York Times and The Washington Post mentioned the song when they reviewed the show. So that was kind of cool.
Ghost in This House
I don’t pick up the mail
I don’t pick up the phone
I don’t answer the door
I’d just as soon be alone
I don’t keep this place up
I just keep the lights down
I don’t live in these rooms
I just rattle around
CHORUS:
I’m just a ghost in this house
I’m just a shadow upon these walls
As quietly as a mouse I haunt these halls
I’m just a whisper of smoke
I’m all that’s left of two hearts on fire
That once burned out of control
You took my body and soul
I’m just a ghost in this house
I don’t mind if it rains
I don’t care if it’s clear
I don’t mind stayin’ in
There’s another ghost here
She sits down in your chair
And she shines with your light
And she lays down her head
On your pillow at night
CHORUS
Oh, I’m just a ghost in this house
Golden Ring
Story by Bobby Braddock
Song written by Bobby Braddock and Rafe Van Hoy
Recorded by George Jones and Tammy Wynette
I got the idea for “Golden Ring” from a made-for-television movie I saw around 1976. It was a biography of a handgun. The gun started off belonging to a police officer. Then someone stole it and committed a murder with it. Then it ended up in a pawnshop. The last scene in the movie showed a little child standing on a bed, finding the gun and looking at it. That’s how it ended.
I thought it would be pretty interesting to write a song based on the history of a wedding ring. Normally, when I write a song, I just write it and then figure out later who it would be good for, but in this instance, I knew George and Tammy were recording, and I wanted to write something for them that would sound like a gospel song. There was a band I used to love called the Chuck Wagon Gang, and they did Pentecostal-sounding songs. I wanted to write a song like that that for George and Tammy. I thought it would be a new twist for them. I called up Curly Putman. He was on his farm out near Lebanon and I asked him if he wanted to write a song with me, and he said he wasn’t coming in to the office that day.
About that time, Rafe Van Hoy came in the front door of the publishing house, and I said, “Do you want to get in on this song I just started?” He said, “Sure.” His mom worked at a jewelry store and I remember we called her for technical advice about rings. We finished the song together, and Rafe did the demo for me.
Buddy Killen was producing Bill Anderson then, and he couldn’t find him for some reason, so he sent the song over to producer Billy Sherrill to play for George and Tammy. It was recorded in a few days and it was playing on the radio within two months of writing it. Today, the trip from the pen to people hearing it is at least a year, but back then, things were different.
There was no reason I set the song in Chicago. I just liked the way “Chicago” sounded. Billy made one small change in the lyric. I wrote the last couple of lines in the second verse as “as they fought their final round / He says ‘You won’t admit it / but I know you’re runnin’ ’round.” Billy didn’t want to rhyme “round” and “’round” even though it’s really two different words — “round” and “around” — but he didn’t look at it that way, so he added, “I know you’re leaving town.” Usually when Billy did that, he made it a better song, but in this case, I liked the original lines better. When I do it live, I always sing the original lines. I think “running ’round” has a little more impact than just “leaving town.” Even though it’s getting to be a pretty old song now, it always gets a good response when I sing it live.
Golden Ring
In a pawn shop in Chicago
&nbs
p; On a sunny summer day
A couple gazes at the wedding rings
There on display
She smiles and nods her head
As he says, “Honey that’s for you,
It’s not much, but it’s the best
That I can do.”
CHORUS:
Golden ring, with one tiny little stone
Waiting there, for someone to take it home
By itself, it’s just a cold metallic thing
Only love can make a golden wedding ring
In a little wedding chapel later on that afternoon
An old upright piano plays that old familiar tune
Tears roll down her cheeks
And happy thoughts run through her head
As he whispers low, “With this ring, I thee wed.”
CHORUS
In a small two-room apartment
As they fought their final round
He says, “You won’t admit it,
But I know you’re leavin’ town.”
She says, “One thing’s for certain,
I don’t love you any more.”
And throws down the ring
As she walks out the door
CHORUS
In a pawn shop in Chicago
On a sunny summer day
A couple gazes at the wedding rings
There on display
Golden ring.
Gone Country
Story by Bob McDill
Song written by Bob McDill
Recorded by Alan Jackson
The people in that song were a composite of real people that I have had lunch or drinks with in Nashville who said the kinds of things that are in the song: all these weak, thinly veiled excuses for moving to Nashville. The only people that said, “That was really neat” were other songwriters.
Some of the other things were made up, and some of it was just obvious cultural bias on my part.
I’ve met people like the fellow from L.A. in the song who was “schooled in voice and composition,” and I’ve heard over and over that “L.A. is no place for children.”
The song was pitched around town and most people were afraid of it. Didn’t want to make fun of those Yankees, you know. I’ve always heard it said that we southerners on Music Row are afraid to make fun of people from New York and L.A. just because nearly everything on Music Row is now owned by people in New York and L.A. But I prefer to think it’s just good manners. We love to make fun of ourselves, yet we rarely make fun of people outside of the South.
Dan Hill, my publisher at the time, took the song to Alan Jackson and he loved it. But that’s why he’s had such an incredible career, because he calls his own shots, and does what he wants to do, and that’ll pay off for you in the long run.
Alan introduced the song at the CMA Awards and I think some of the people in the audience were pretty flabbergasted. I’m talking about some of the country singers!
After that, radio stations started playing it off the CD before it was even released. I think it charted before it was ever even released. That almost never happens.
A friend of mine is a dentist and he has Alan as a patient. One time he said to Alan, “That ‘Gone Country’ was a pretty interesting song. Do you think all those industry people recognized that the song is poking fun at them?”
Alan said, “Nah, all they heard was, ‘he’s gone country. Look at them boots.’”
Gone Country
She’s been playin’ in a room on the strip
For ten years in Vegas
Every night she looks in the mirror
And she only ages
She’s been readin’ about Nashville and all
The records that everybody’s buyin’
Says ‘I’m a simple girl myself
Grew up on Long Island’
So she packs her bags to try her hand
Says this might be my last chance
CHORUS:
She’ gone country, look at them boots
She’s gone country, back to her roots
She’s gone country, a new kind of suit
She’s gone country, here she comes
Well the folk scene is dead
But he’s holdin’ out in the village
He’s been writin’ songs speakin’ out
Against wealth and privilege
He says “I don’t believe in money
But a man could make him a killin’
’Cause some of that stuff don’t sound
Much different than Dylan
I hear down there it’s changed you see
They’re not as backward as they used to be”
CHORUS
Well, he commutes to LA
But he’s got a house in the Valley
But the bills are pilin’ up
And the pop scene just ain’t on the rally
He says “Honey I’m a serious composer
Schooled in voice and composition
But with the crime and the smog these days
This ain’t no place for children
Lord it sounds so easy it shouldn’t take long
Be back in the money in no time at all”
Yeah he’s gone country, a new kind of walk
He’s gone country, a new kind of talk
He’s gone country, look at them boots
He’s gone country, oh back to his roots
He’s gone country
He’s gone country
Everybody’s gone country
Yeah we’ve all gone country
The whole world’s gone country
Good Ole Boys Like Me
Story by Bob McDill
Song written by Bob McDill
Recorded by Don Williams
I have a fishing buddy, Tom Connelly, who wrote a bunch of Civil War books, and he reignited my interest in southern literature. He introduced me not only to Robert Penn Warren’s literature, but also to the man personally. I read his last novel, A Place to Come To, and it inspired the song. That song is just about trying to pack all the standard southern themes into three and a half minutes. There are some lines in there that some people don’t understand, but it worked anyway.
I don’t think many people knew who John R. and The Wolfman were, unless they grew up in the South listening to R&R music on the radio. Down in Texas on the coast, we got WLAC after 9:00 when all the other radio stations went off the air. We listened to WLAC out of Nashville, which played “race music.” The DJs there were John R. and Hoss Allen, and some others. We also got TXLR from Del Rio, which was another 50,000-watt clear channel station and we listened to Wolfman Jack on there.
I later became friends with Hoss Allen in Nashville. One day we were talking and he said, “Some S.O.B. put John R. in a song.” I said, “Yeah, I’m that S.O.B.” I was at Slick Lawson’s one time and was sitting next to Hoss on a bench. There was a girl about my age sitting on the other side of him. She said, “Oh Mr. Allen, I used to listen to you on a transistor radio when I was a little girl, under the covers so my parents couldn’t hear.” Hoss said, “We had no idea we had that audience. We had all those thousands of kids listening to us.”
I played “Good Ole Boys” for Don Williams and he wanted Kenny Rogers to do it. Don was already a big act. This was around 1980. He’d had several #1 records, but he wanted to do me a favor and pitch it to Kenny, who was doing a lot of crossover records then.
But Kenny said, “Nah, it’s too literary. It’s too esoteric.” So Don called me back and said, “I guess you’ll have to settle for me cutting it.”
I said, “That’s fine with me!”
Before I fell in love with country, I was living in Memphis trying to learn to write R&B songs, and we moved up to Nashville to be with Clement Music. I was trying to write all these little pop songs. I was riding around late one night with a bunch of guys and I was in the back of Vince Matthews’ Cadillac and George Jones’ “A Good Year for the Roses” came on the radio, and I had an ep
iphany. I got it. There was a real rage bubbling underneath that lyric that I’d never gotten before. There was a real rhythm that I hadn’t understood before either, so I decided I wanted to start writing country songs.
Good Ole Boys Like Me
When I was a kid Uncle Remus would put me to bed
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head
Then daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand
He talked about honor and things I should know
Then he’d stagger a little as he went out the door
CHORUS:
I can still hear the soft Southern winds in the live oak trees
And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me
Hank and Tennessee
I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?
Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does
But you ain’t afraid if you’re washed in the blood like I was
The smell of cape jasmine through the window screen
John R. and the Wolfman kept me company
By the light of the radio by my bed
With Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head
CHORUS
When I was in school I ran with kid down the street
But I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news
When I was eighteen, Lord, I hit the road
But it really doesn’t matter how far I go
CHORUS
Green, Green Grass of Home
Story by Curly Putman
Song written by Curly Putman
Recorded by Tom Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and others
I grew up on a mountain in northern Alabama and left there after high school. In the 1960s, I was working as a shoe salesman. I worked at several Thom McAn stores around the South, in Memphis and Huntsville, but I came to Nashville every chance I could to be close to the music business. We had grown up around music and I played guitar and tried to write songs every now and then. Somehow I decided that I might be able to make a living from music.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music: The Inspirational Stories behind 101 of Your Favorite Country Songs Page 7
