The Fort Worth Blues

The power of songs and the emotions of hearing them at just the right time (part 1)

(Part 1)

Several years ago, I was late into a long drive home from inheriting my late father’s pick-up truck. I had agreed to pay my brothers for their 1/3 each because I needed a truck, and we had just enough money for this to be practical. This would be the 2^nd black Ram pick-up truck that I would drive that had belonged to my dad.

I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast¹ episode called The King of Tears. It features the story of (and interviews with) Bobby Braddock a Nashville songwriter renowned especially for his gift for sad songs. In this episode Gladwell makes the case for country music’s ability to “embrace” rather than “tolerate emotional volatility.”

As I listened to the episode my mind wandered inside the cab of the truck. I thought of my dad, and his life in this truck, and the other truck that I would now be able to sell to my teenage neighbor. I couldn’t help but think about songs that had moved me in the ways that Gladwell and Braddock discussed. I thought about all the sad tears, the angry tears, the cleansing tears that had washed through my eyes over the previous 7 years during which we lost both of my wife’s parents and then my dad to cancer. Then at almost 26 minutes into the episode the podcast mentions “terminal cancer”.

I decided that I would stop the episode to do some of what they were describing. Letting myself be sad, thankful for my “new” truck and my dad, sad about the circumstances under which I had acquired it and some of the other circumstances that swirl around the memories of my childhood with him at various distances.

I began to listen to one song. I listened to it over and over again. I found versions of it that had been recorded by different artists, live versions on YouTube, studio versions, covers, duets, everything. I cried quite a bit.

It was a song written by Steve Earle called The Forth Worth Blues. He wrote it as a tribute to Townes Van Zandt, his friend and mentor who died at the age of 52.

The song is sad to begin with, but over the years it came to mean more and more to me. Fort Worth was my birthplace and where my dad’s family roots are deep. I moved away from Fort Worth around age 7 but visited there regularly to see my dad for most of my life. It was always a place that was fun and meaningful and at the same time painful and confusing. I have my own brand of Fort Worth blues. My dad lived 60 of 67 years of his life in Fort Worth, for the other 7 (4+3) he was an undergrad at Louisiana Tech (where he met my mom) and a law student at Texas Tech in Lubbock. After my parents’ divorce, I lived with my mom and two brothers for 2 years in Colorado, 1 more year in Fort Worth, and then lived the remainder of my school days in Ruston, Louisiana where my mom’s family lived.

When my dad passed away, I thought that the song was taking on new meaning, but the more I listened to it, the more I realized that these were the same feelings that had been there the whole time. It wasn’t about Fort Worth, it was about loss. Fort Worth had always felt like loss to me. It summoned a type of grief that I need to feel now and again – to connect to. It was not all sad, it was that sort of ache that comes around to remind you of something painful but necessary, like your hamstrings after “leg day”.

The song is also about growing up, and seeking to understand yourself as you follow someone else and see the world through their eyes.

“You used to say the highway was your home

but we both know that ain’t true.

It’s just the only place a man can go

When he don’t know where he’s traveling to.”

“There's a full moon over Galway Bay tonight

Silver light, over green and blue

And every place I travel through, I find

Some kinda sign, that you've been through”

That night in the truck that had belonged to my Dad, I listened to “The Fort Worth Blues” until I couldn’t listen anymore. As I worked it all out in the glow of the dashboard lights, I listened to Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris, my eyes watering like Nancy Griffith’s did on Austin City Limits when she listened to Steve Earle play it on stage in front of her.²

I wondered what Fort Worth would become to me now. My grandparents were gone, my dad was gone, I still had some uncles and cousins there who I always enjoy, but the ties binding me to Cowtown had loosened and seemed to be dragging along the dark pavement as I crossed two state lines headed for my own family in Hattiesburg. I did not know how much of that was good and how much was bad, but I knew I needed to feel it, and I had done that by soaking myself in this song.

Not knowing what to do next, I drove along in silence for some time. My head clear and my eyes sharp. Finally, I clicked back into the podcast, I never like to leave an episode unfinished, even if it means zipping through it on 2x speed towards the end.

I set down the memory of my dad and I picked up the podcast where I had left it, for some reason, at 25 minutes and 54 seconds.

Before the timer reached 26:00, I had to pull over.

I had unknowingly stopped the episode at the instant, THE. VERY. INSTANT. that would allow me to work through all of that, to gain my composure, to think that I had a handle on things and to press on with my trip, breathing in the air that smelled the same as the air had smelled in every vehicle that my dad had ever owned.

I re-started the podcast at (time stamp 25:55) the instant, the very instant, that would require me to start all over again. I looked down to make sure that I had not made a mistake, maybe I had opened the wrong app, or was there a CD in the truck that I didn’t know about?³

As the volumed picked back up, I could hear Vince Gil singing “Go Rest High Upon that Mountain.” And I heard Gladwell ask (over the tune in the background), “Do you know what Braddock’s favorite song is?”

I realized what was happening and my spine tingled from top to bottom. More tears came, tears I didn’t know I still had. I pulled over and got out. I leaned over the side of the truck with my arms dangling over the edge into the truck bed just above the wheel well, and I laid my head down and cried some more, and talked out loud to God for one of the few (too few) times that I have in my life. Out there on the side of an empty Mississippi highway, it was just me, my memories, and the God who knew exactly where I needed to be and how to get me there.

“Go Rest High on that Mountain” was Bobby Braddock’s favorite song.

“It tears me up… the emotion that is in that song, it’s just … powerful.” -Bobby Braddock

My dad loved that song. It was the only song that we all agreed to have sung at his funeral. If you told me to name the top 5 songs that remind me of my Dad, I would answer

1. “Fort Worth Blues” for me

2. “Go Rest High…” for him

and then I would have to start thinking about how to rank others⁴ Only those two are automatic.

In God’s kind and severe mercy, he took me even deeper into my grief than I knew I needed to go. I was not done crying. This was a providential gut punch that I didn’t know I needed. After my crawling all the way into (and back out of) the Fort-Worth-Blues-hole, he had given me a 90-minute intermission before He opened another valve of emotion that laid me bare.

He had used Malcolm Gladwell to make me think of Steve Earle to make me think of Fort Worth, to help me grieve the fog that had floated around my birthplace and my roots for 30 years – and then when that cleared, He reminded me of my dad again, his death, his funeral, his voice singing, and our last days together.

It wasn’t just the song. I did not even go back and listen to it right then. I only heard the brief clips playing behind the narration. It was realizing that I had been seconds from hearing it and something had stopped me. It was too strange for me to make up and too powerful for me to ignore.

It has been a while since I have listened to those songs. Of course, I listened to both today. I did not cry, although I am sure that if I give it some space I will.

But Amsterdam was always good for grieving
And London never fails to leave me blue
Paris never was my kinda town
So I walked around
With the Ft. Worth Blues

1. Revisionist History Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell

2. YouTube search “Fort Worth Blues Austin City Limits”

3. I even in that moment thought that maybe one of my phone apps had algorithmed a song into an “up next” slot because “they” know that I might listen to these two songs together.

4. I can remember a Ray Charles tape and a Bruce Springstein phase when my dad had an S-10 Blazer and a floor mounted portable phone. He would leave the same tape in the deck for months. My Dad also was known for singing 2 lines of one song over and over again while driving. “Daddy Sang Bass, Mama sang tenor, me and little brother would join right in.” “In the twilight’s glow I see… Blues eyes cryin…” “How Great thou art, how great thou art” “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” lots and lots of those types of clips in my memory bank. Sometimes I will hear a song and only recognize a two line excerpt in the middle of it, because I had heard my dad sing it 35 times on the way to the lake or to a Texas Rangers game while we sat 4 wide in his 1987 Chevy Silverado single cab.