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Leon
ALDRIDGE
A Story Worth Telling “Music is probably the one real magic I have encountered in my life. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.”
— Tom Petty
Leadville, Colorado, came to mind. The year was 1976. Or was it ’77? Oscar Elliott, myself and others from Mount Pleasant were in the middle of a motorcycle sabbatical through the Rockies.
On this trip we topped Monarch Pass and crossed the Continental Divide, elevation 11,312 feet. This marked the first time I rode a motorcycle over the Continental Divide and the first time I traveled on snow-covered roads with the frozen stuff still steadily falling.
The song playing on my Pandora today brought back those memories. It was the same tune I remembered hearing on the jukebox in the bar at the back of the restaurant where we ate that night in Leadville, the one next to the motel where we woke up the next morning to find the city and our bikes covered in snow.
The tune was “Y’all Comeback Saloon” by the Oak Ridge Boys.
Funny how that works. As a kid, it amazed and amused me when my Uncle Bill, mom’s little brother, told stories about how he and his Navy buddies spent time listening to tunes.
“When a song came on the radio,” he told me with a smile, “the objective was to recall a car we owned at the time, where we were when we heard the song and the name of the girl we were with when we heard it.”
As a journalist introduced to the news business through the art of photography, the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” makes a great deal of sense to me. But it’s also apparent that any wordsmith worth the paper his or her thesaurus is printed on can likewise argue for a thousand words expressing as much as one photo.
However, as a lifelong music lover, I will concede the power of both words and pictures to the magic of music.
My mother introduced me to that magic with her collection of 78 pm records from her central Kentucky high school days. I remember the mixture of tunes by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Patty Page, Eddie Arnold, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Hank Williams Sr.
My mom played them over and over while she went about her Saturday housecleaning, singing along with them.
As a grade-schooler in the 1950s, that genetic appreciation for music led me to exchange weekly allowance money for records at the Richardson’s White’s Auto Store in Mount Pleasant featuring artists such as Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson and Fats Domino.
High school and college band memories from the ‘60s are infused with John Phillip Sousa marches including “King Cotton” and “The Washington Post” and remembering goodness knows how many football games.
At the same time, my car radio was always tuned to KLIF in Dallas during the day. Making memories at night, it was WNOE in New Orleans, whether cruising the streets or watching the moon rise over the city lake.
Vietnam-era music by The Box Tops, Creedence Clearwater Revival or Country Joe and the Fish typified the times, broadcast on dragstrip PA systems wherever I was hanging out.
Even today, the tunes evoke memories of changing spark plugs at Interstate 20 Raceway in Tyler on Saturday night one weekend and the next, listening for the next round of class call to the Dallas International Motor Speedway staging lanes.
Even work memories are bookmarked by music. Let me hear “Crazy” by Patsy Cline, and I’ll tell you about the night Johnny Garner and I sprayed a late-night paint job on a big truck at Sandlin’s Body Shop in Mount Pleasant with the radio keeping us awake.
And should I hear George Strait’s “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind,” you might have to endure my memories of good times with a dear friend 30-plus years ago at Joe T. Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant.
Long-time “American Bandstand” host Dick Clark, whose name is synonymous with music, is credited with saying, “Music is the soundtrack of our lives.”
Maybe that’s why mom always appeared as though she was in a different world, lost in time while cleaning the house.
It might also be why you might catch me at home on any given evening after work sitting and strumming a few chords on the guitar, singing and smiling. Remembering that time that
me and…
— Contact Aldridge at [email protected]. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com
