MUSIC CAN TAKE YOU HOME

I grew up in two places.  I was raised on the Alberta prairies, but it seems that part of me was rooted in Tennessee, even though I never set a foot on Tennessee soil until I was 53.  It’s the country music that made Tennessee feel so much like home.  Without being really aware, I knew as much about the front porch swing of Dolly Parton’s Tennessee mountain home as I knew about the Blue Canadian Rockies.  When I got to Knoxville, my head filled with the story of a man who loved and murdered a Knoxville girl because she would not marry him.  In Gatlinburg I could hardly restrain myself from asking directions to the saloon where the Boy Named Sue found his errant father. 

 

The stories I know of Alberta towns have come from my visits, and also from the daily news.  My stories of the Tennessee towns are more poignant, more detailed, more eloquently situated in my imagination.  They are told in the words of others in the country songs I heard on my mother’s lap.  I was a tourist in Tennessee.  But now I know what they mean when they say music can take you home.