After some thought, I have realized that four blogs (three here and one on Blogger) are way too much for me to handle.

SSSOOOOOO--I will be combining my music and book blogs (Music! Music! Music!! and Gimme a Book) in one place.

That place is called Fairweather's Books and Music at the Red Mud Inn, over on Blogger. I will be posting Saturday music, book reviews, art, and poetry there.

Fairweather Lewis will continue to be my main blog. Ghost stories and the misadventures of Madame Sadie will still be posted there.

Big adventures on the way! Come check 'em out!

"The Vanishing Hitchhiker" is probably the most familiar of all so-called "urban legends", largely thanks to the story of Chicago’s Resurrection Mary, said to be the spirit of a girl buried in Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Avenue, who hitches rides back to the grave she was buried in in 1934.

In two songs from the 1960s, this theme is taken up in very different styles. The bluegrass band The Country Gentlemen recorded their version on an album of the same title. It has the bare bones of a story: a driver on a dark, rainy night picks up a young girl (on the album cover, she’s depicted in braids, a tartan skirt, knee socks, and saddle oxfords, if I remember right), who asks to be delivered to a certain address, but has vanished by the time they arrive.

The Country Gentlemen, "Bringing Mary Home" (1965)



This version has a detail not common to others: that chilly, matter-of-fact thanks from the girl’s mother. "You’re the thirteenth one who’s been here bringing Mary home."

In that same year, the Memphis-born singer Royden Dickey Lipscomb, a former Sun artist who recorded under the name Dickey Lee, recorded "Laurie (Strange Things Happen)" in a teen pop style.

Dickey Lee, "Laurie (Strange Things Happen)", 1965



Lee had previously recorded a song about teen suicide called "Patches" that was banned from many radio stations for its morbidity. Both songs are very much in line with other sixties songs, though, from the Shangri-Las’ "Leader of the Pack" to the Everly Brothers "Ebony Eyes" to Jan & Dean’s "Dead Man’s Curve" and even to Stonewall Jackson’s "BJ the DJ"--although it's the only such to tell a ghost story.

Lee’s is an expanded variant on the legend, including the details of the girl asking for a sweater (or jacket) because she was cold and the garment being found later draped over her grave or tombstone.

There is also a version of the story from the Deep South, retold in a Nancy Roberts book, about the girl leaving a string of pearls in the car; when the enamored young man who picked her up tries to return the jewelry, he learns she is dead and has been for years. That variant, as best I know, has never turned up in a song.

Call ‘em morbid, call ‘em spooky—I call ‘em danged good stories.

This post was written as a contribution to Take This Tune, hosted by my friend and fellow music lover Jamie. Each Friday, she posts a song and invites listeners to write about the associations the song brings to mind. If you’d like to participate, click on the Take This Tune link, listen—and start writing.

Tired, restless, discouraged. In the knobs, we say, in this mood, that we're "out of heart." When one is out of heart, one takes comfort in dear, familiar things: books, poetry, pictures, music. This early AM, my insomnia having kicked in, I'm taking comfort in this piece:



Beethoven's original MS of this piece was dated April 27, 1810; the title he gave it was Bagatelle in A minor, but he added a dedication, which was miscopied when the piece was first published in 1865. The dedication, thought to have been "Fur Therese" for a woman whom he hoped to marry but who rejected his proposal, was transcribed as "Fur Elise" and thus has been called ever since.

Have to say though--it never fails to make me think of Shroder.

My music-maven friend Jamie, who hosts the meme Take This Tune has issued music lovers a challenge this week leading up to Halloween. Beginning today, and going through next Friday, she will post a Halloween-themed tune—"ghost songs", as she puts it—and the individual music lover can choose to do one song, all the songs, or pick and choose. Well, you know me. I’ve done picked up that gauntlet. Today’s tunes are David Allan Coe’s 1983 hit "The Ride" and Alan Jackson’s 1992 song "Midnight in Montgomery", both of which deal with a ghost who haunts not merely specific places, but all of country music: the legendary Hank Williams Sr., whose New Year’s Eve 1953 death in the back seat of a Cadillac, in a drug-and-alcohol induced stupor, was a sad and lonely culmination to a sad and lonely life.

I’d covered them both, in a desultory way, in the first part of a two-part blog about spooky songs a couple of Halloweens ago, and beg leave here to reprise parts of those observations.

Coe’s song "The Ride", surely must be the godchild of a 1967 song by Red Sovine called "Phantom 309". While "Phantom 309" is about a ghostly trucker who picks up hitchhikers, "The Ride" tells a tale of a spectrally pale stranger in a Cadillac who picks up a singer-songwriter riding his thumb to Nashville, and drops him off at the outskirts of town "cause I’m goin’ back to Alabam’." It’s been fairly obvious, to the country music lover, that the man must be Ol’ Hank, based on the subjects he covers in conversation (not to mention the broadest possible hint, the Cadillac), but Coe seals the deal with the last line the driver speaks: "You don’t have to call me Mister, mister/The whole world calls me Hank." That ending always gave me cold chills.

"Midnight in Montgomery" is, by comparison, essentially a mood piece, despite the brief appearance of "a drunk man. . .in a cowboy hat. . .shiny boots and a Nudie suit with haunting, haunted eyes" who may or may not have been there. It incorporates images from some of Ol’ Hank’s songs, is written in the key of D minor (as are several of Ol’ Hank’s most haunting songs), and the video was partly filmed in the Montgomery, Alabama cemetery where he’s buried. Stories have persisted ever since that, during the filming, the techs were plagued with paranormal phenomena, mostly in the form of orbs and lights.

Ol’ Hank also haunts the Mother Church of Country Music, Nashville’s venerable Ryman Auditorium. Ol’ Hank left the Opry in 1952, fired by management because his drinking, by then totally out of control, was leading to missed performances and, according to the mores of the day, sullying the Opry’s image. He never meant to be gone from the Opry forever, it appears; his steel guitarist, the great Don Helms, commented on that in a duet recitation he recorded in 1981 with Hank Williams Jr. "Hank looked at me with a funny-lookin’ grin/Said I’ve been to the Opry and I’m goin’ back again. . ." In the flesh, he never returned; he was dead by the new year, and not long afterward, was first reported to have returned as a spirit. In the 1960s, on two separate occasions, his spirit was blamed for disruptions and power outages during tapings of two popular weekly television shows, hosted respectively by Jimmy Dean and Bill Anderson. As recently as the 1990s, he’s been spotted in the wings, in his trademark hat and Nudie suit, holding his old Martin guitar and waiting to go onstage as he did in the years when he was country’s most charismatic, meteoric and tragic star.

My brother and sister have both gone on the tour at the Ryman, both stood center stage and had their pictures taken behind one of the old-timey microphones. Neither shares my love of ghost stories, but they both said the place was haunted. My brother said he had the distinct feeling that, had he just turned his head and looked into the wings, he would have seen Ol’ Hank standing there—but he didn’t turn his head.

The Ryman’s on my bucket list. The one time I was in Nashville, on an eighth grade school trip, it wasn’t on our itinerary (and I was the only one who would have appreciated it anyway). And I hope, when I get there, that I will look over, and Ol’ Hank will be there, drawn back by the love of a fan just once more.

This blog post was written as a contribution to the meme Take This Tune, hosted by my friend and fellow music lover Jamie. Each week, Jamie posts a different piece of music, and contributors are invited to write about their thoughts or associations inspired by that week's piece of music. If you'd like to participate, please click on the Tune link above. Full instructions are given there.

I first heard this 1875 piece by the French composer Camille Saint-Saens as a mere snippet: the little violin theme was used as the main theme for one of my favorite BBC series, JONATHAN CREEK.

A symphonic tone poem based on lyrics written by Henri Cazalis, this piece was originally scored for voice and piano, and later rescored for solo violin and orchestra. Cazalis's poem is, in turn, based on a French superstition: that Death, a fiddler, summons the dead from their graves on Halloween to dance as he plays.

Quelle horreur, n'est-ce pas?