We knew that Tim McGraw was cutting so we got it over to him right away. We were doing a demo on Monday and finished it later that week. We bumped it up and put it on the demo session and even the session players, who can be a cynical bunch, said they loved it.
So we sent it over to his label and somebody there said, “Did you know that Tim rode bulls?”
We said “No.” Then she said, “Did you know Tim’s father, Tug, is probably within weeks of dying?” And we said, “No.” So later I talked to Tim and said, “Hey if this is too personal, and you want to pass on it, I completely understand.”
He said, “I realized this is right where I am with my dad, but then I asked myself, ‘Would I cut this anyway just on the strength of the song?’” And the answer was yes, he would. So he did it.
It’s really odd that most of the conversations I’ve had about this song were things that happened after the song came out. This story should be called “the story after the song.” It went on to win ASCAP, BMI, NSAI, CMA and ACM Song of the Year as well as the Grammy for Best Country Song and was nominated for best overall song.
Somebody forwarded an e-mail to me that was sent to Tim’s label. And there was a picture of this couple, late thirties, maybe 40, standing on the deck of their house. And it was just a very simple, short letter, but it brought me to tears. It said, “My wife has been battling cancer for a few years. It’s been tough and I just want you to know that it’s meant a lot to us.”
I’d like to think that that’s my philosophy of life. I’d like to think that I try to live life with some balls, play with some house money, you know. I mean here I am buying buildings and signing new songwriters when the music industry is shrinking. It’s just about having some passion in life. So many people just make so many safe decisions. You start making decisions to ensure nothing happens. And then, the first thing you know, you’re sitting around bitching about how nothing is happening in your life. But you’ve made a lot of decisions to bring about those circumstances. You’ve locked yourself in to “repeat steps two through five.”
I do a lot of songwriter showcases and that kind of thing. The most amazing thing about this song is that I’ve had 300-pound bulldozer drivers — guys who aren’t used to talking about their emotions — come up to me with tears in their eyes and give me bear hugs. Sometimes they aren’t even sure what to say. They just stand there and look at me and say something like, “Man, that song, you know, it’s... it’s...”
I just share a few seconds of silence with them. Then I say, “I understand, man. And I appreciate it.”
Live Like You Were Dying
He said “I was in my early forties,
With a lot of life before me,
And a moment came that stopped me on a dime.
I spent most of the next days,
Looking at the x-rays,
And talking ‘bout the options and talkin’ ’bout sweet time.”
I asked him when it sank in,
That this might really be the real end?
How’s it hit you when you get that kind of news?
Man, what’d ya do?
And he said, “I went sky-diving, I went Rocky Mountain-climbing,
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu.
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter,
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying.”
And he said: “Someday, I hope you get the chance,
To live like you were dyin’.”
He said “I was finally the husband,
That most the time I wasn’t.
And I became a friend a friend would like to have.
And all of a sudden goin’ fishin’
Wasn’t such an imposition,
And I went three times that year I lost my dad.
Well, I finally read the Good Book,
And I took a good long hard look,
At what I’d do if I could do it all again,
Then, I went sky-diving, I went Rocky Mountain-climbing,
I went 2.7 seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu.
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter,
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying.”
And he said: “Someday, I hope you get the chance,
To live like you were dyin’.”
Like tomorrow was a gift,
And you got eternity,
To think about what you’d do with it.
And what did you do with it?
And what did I do with it?
And what would I do with it?
Sky-diving, I went Rocky Mountain-climbing,
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu.
And then I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter,
And I watched an eagle as it was flyin’
And he said, “Someday, I hope you get the chance,
To live like you were dyin’.”
Long Black Train
Story by Josh Turner
Song written by Josh Turner
Recorded by Josh Turner
Sometime back in 2000, I went over to the music library at Belmont University, where I was a student. I got into this little cubbyhole and was listening to the complete boxed set of Hank Williams songs that Mercury had just released. Being the poor college student that I was, I didn’t have the money to buy it, so I was excited when I saw the library had it on file.
It was kind of late, and I was sitting there with my headphones on, just immersed in the music. It was as if I had entered another world. Several of the songs were just Hank and his guitar. He was doing radio ads and work mix demo and those kinds of things. A lot of it had never been released before, and it really inspired me. It made me want to break the music down to its rawest form.
As I was walking back to my apartment, which was on the other side of campus, I had a vision of a wide open place in the plains with a train track running straight down the middle of the fields. It was completely dark, but you could see everything around. There was a harvest moon that was lighting up the sky. I noticed a bunch of people standing around this track. A long, beautiful, shiny black train came down the track and the people were trying to decide whether to get on it. Somehow they knew that this train led to nowhere, but they were wondering what it would be like to ride on it. They were struggling with the decision. As I was seeing all of this in my mind while I was walking, I was wondering what it all meant. It finally dawned on me that this train was a symbol for temptation.
When I got back to my apartment, I picked up my guitar and strummed a B flat chord. I just strummed for what seemed like an eternity, but once the words finally started pouring out, they didn’t seem to want to quit. I wrote three straight verses and a chorus that night and then went to bed. The next morning, I got up and a feeling came over me that this song was not finished, so about 11:00 that morning, I wrote the fourth and final verse. Then I knew it was done. The ironic thing was that I thought to myself, “Nobody is ever going to want to hear this song. It’s too old fashioned. It’s too old-timey. Nobody is really going to get the metaphor.”
I was sitting there playing that song and a friend of mine walked in and said, “What is that?” I told him it was something I had just finished, but I wasn’t sure how good it was. He said, “That’s incredible. You need to play it for so-and-so.” So I went and played it for this person and he said, “You need to put that in your senior recital.” Then it started snowballing. I started playing it at showcases and writers’ nights.
Before long, I did a demo of it there at Belmont and played it in one of my classes. One of my classmates was doing her internship at a publishing company owned by Jody Williams. This girl asked me if she could take it to Jody and, of course, I said “yes.” She came back later and said, “Jody wants to sit down and talk with you.” I called him up and he wanted to sign me to a publishing deal. He signed me to a production deal, he took me to MCA, and we played them a few songs, and the next thing you know I had a record deal, too. And it all ha
ppened because of “Long Black Train.”
I was going through a lot personally during that time. It was my first time away from home, I was chasing this dream, and I was in a long distance relationship, so I was going through a lot of different emotions. “Long Black Train” ended up becoming the title track on my first album and I started playing it on the road. The song really related to what I was going through. But when I started coming into contact with fans, I found out that many of them were looking at the song in different ways. They would say, “My brother is going through alcoholism,” or “My sister is going through a drug addiction,” or whatever. So, it dawned on me, “This song is not just for me. This song is for everybody, because everybody has their own weaknesses and their own struggles. Everybody has their own long, black train.”
I went down to Alabama to do a promotional thing for a radio station after the song was released, just an acoustic thing, and a lady pulled me aside after the show. She said, “Josh, I want you to know that I’ve struggled with depression. Just the other day I had a whole bottle of painkillers and I was going to take the whole bottle and end it all. And the radio in my bedroom started playing ‘Long, Black Train.’ When it came on, it distracted me for a moment, and then I started listening to the words, and I realized how selfish I was being.” She said, “That song changed my life. I threw the pills down the toilet and walked away a different person.” She said she was pretty much over her depression. Here I was, this young kid straight out of college, thinking that nobody would even want to hear this song, and here this woman was telling me how it saved her life. It was at that moment that I realized how powerful this song could be.
In November of 2001, I signed my record deal and I played the song on the Opry the Friday before Christmas that year. That time of year, the show moves to the Ryman Auditorium downtown for a few months. I had been signed for about a month. I didn’t have a website; I didn’t have a record out; I didn’t have a video. Nobody had ever heard of me when I walked onto that stage. I was scared to death. I was playing with the Opry staff band because I didn’t even have a band at that time. That was the only song I had learned. Pete Fisher of the Opry agreed to let me go out and sing this one song late in the show. When I sang the song, the crowd just erupted. People were standing up and cheering before I could even finish the song. I was completely overwhelmed.
Then Bill Anderson, who was hosting that segment, said to the crowd, “Do you want to hear some more?” And they got even louder. I made it all the way down the stairs toward my dressing room when I heard Bill say, “Hey Josh, let’s make that train a little bit longer.”
I came back onstage and told him I couldn’t do an encore, because we had only rehearsed one song. So he asked if I would sing it again. I did, but I was really emotional the whole time. What really choked me up, though, was when I looked up into that balcony and it hit me that this was the same balcony that Hank looked up and saw when he played here. I barely got through the song after that.
Long Black Train
There’s a long black train, comin’ down the line,
Feeding off the souls that are lost and cryin’
Rails of sin, only evil remains
Watch out brother for that long black train
Look to the heavens you can look to the sky
You can find redemption starin’ back into your eyes,
There is protection and there’s peace the same
Burn in your ticket for that long black train
CHORUS:
Cause there’s victory in the Lord I say,
Victory in the Lord
Cling to the father and his holy name,
And don’t go ridin’ on that long black train,
There’s an engineer on that long black train,
Makin’ you wonder if your ride is worth the pain,
He’s just a waitin’ on your heart to say
Let me ride on that long black train
CHORUS
Well, I can hear the whistle from a mile away,
It sounds so good but I must stay away,
That train is a beauty, makin’ everybody stare
But its only destination is the middle of nowhere,
CHORUS
Yea watch out brother for that long black train,
That devil’s drivin’ that long black train
Long Black Veil
Story by Buck Wilkin
Song written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin
Recorded by Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash, Joan Baez, and others
[Editor’s note: In the 1970s, songwriter Danny Dill told author Dorothy Horstman, “So I said, ‘I’ll write me a folksong’ — an instant folksong if you will. I worked on it for months and then it all came to me. There was a Catholic priest killed in New Jersey many years ago under a town hall light, and there were no less than 50 witnesses. They never found a motive. They never found the man. Until this day, it’s an unsolved murder. Then the Rudoloh Valentino story’s always impressed me — about the woman that always used to visit his grave. She always wore a long, black veil. The third component was Red Foley’s ‘God Walks These Hills With Me.’ I always thought that was a great song, so I got that in there, too. I just scrambled it all up, and that’s what came out.”]
Danny Dill walked into the office with a poem. This was at Cedarwood Publishing, downtown on 7th Avenue, before there really was a Music Row. The staff writers down there were my mom, Mel Tillis, Wayne Walker, John D. Loudermilk, Fred Burch, and Danny Dill. Danny walked in and gave that poem to my mom and she tweaked the lyric a little bit, put a melody to it, and then they did a demo.
The publishers then were almost like the old Hollywood Studios. They were strong and they romanced people for cuts and things like that. This was when the publisher was king.
I saw Rosanne Cash recently on the Don Imus show and she was talking about how this song was on ‘the list’ of classic songs that her dad had given her and, of course, she just released a collection of those. She said it was a love story, a murder mystery, and a ghost story all in one.
A lot of people think it is an old folk song, but it’s not. It was written in 1958. My mom wrote for Cedarwood from about 1958 until 1962 or 1963. She started Buckhorn in 1964. In that one year or two — around 1958 or 1959 — she won several BMI Awards. She had “Long Black Veil,” “P.T. 109,” “Waterloo,” “Cut Across Shorty” — just a whole bunch of songs. The first song that was in the Buckhorn catalog was a song I wrote and sang called “GTO (The Hot Rod Song).” Kristofferson came to town in 1965, and he wrote for Buckhorn.
“Long Black Veil” has probably been recorded 700 or 800 times. Right now, Rosanne Cash’s version is my favorite. She put in a few extra chords and added a nice rock beat to it. That was a nice Christmas present, to hear her sing that song. And times have been a little slow in the music publishing business, too, so when that came out in the fall of 2009, I thought, “This is great. My mom’s alive and well,” and it made me very happy to hear Rosanne’s version. My second favorite version of it is probably the one by Joan Baez. I’ve heard Dave Matthews’ version and I didn’t really get it. But I’m 63, so he is like a punk rocker to me. But I thought, “Well, this is cool. Congratulations, Mom.”
I think it was the biggest song my mom wrote, maybe second to “One Day at A Time.” She had two distinct periods in her life. She went through a period of alcoholism and then she quit drinking and she quit writing secular music after that. She only wrote gospel music after that.
Her dream was to come to Nashville and write music. She was an elementary school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s one of those dream-come-true success stories. There were very few women pioneers in that industry and in that era, especially ones like my mom, who was a successful writer and then became a successful publisher, too.
Long Black Veil
Ten years ago on a cold dark night
There was someone killed ’neath the town hall light
That the slayer who ran looked a lot like me
The judge said “Son, what is your alibi?
If you were somewhere else, then you won’t have to die”
I spoke not a word, though it meant my life
I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife
CHORUS:
She walks these hills in a long black veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees
Nobody knows but me
The scaffold is high, and eternity’s near
She stood in the crowd and shed not a tear
But sometimes at night when the cold wind moans
In a long black veil she cries over my bones
CHORUS
Love, Me
Story by Skip Ewing
Song written by Skip Ewing and Max T. Barnes
Recorded by Collin Raye
I was getting ready to go out on tour one year, back in the early 1990s. This was when I had a record deal and was performing quite a bit. I had a girlfriend and she wasn’t able to travel with me, so she wrote me a letter before I left. At the end of the note, she just signed it, “Love, Me.”
I got on the bus and I said to my guitar player at the time, Max T. Barnes, “There is something very intimate about that little act. You can’t sign something to someone as simply, ‘Love, Me’ unless you are really close to that person. I love that. Is there any way we could work this into a song? I think that is something a lot of people could relate to.”
I am someone who looks deeply at relationships and do my best to try to understand the different kinds of energies of love and the feelings between two people in relationships, especially the ones that last a long time. We talked about how certain kinds of love traverse those boundaries that we, as human beings, seem limited to. But love doesn’t recognize any of those limits. It’s as big and wide and deep as it’s able to be.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music: The Inspirational Stories behind 101 of Your Favorite Country Songs Page 15
