American Road Songs: White Freightliner Blues

One subset of the Songs of Place are the road songs. And one of my favorites is White Freightliner Blues by Townes Van Zandt (making this the third Townes song in the series: Brazos River Song, Fort Worth Blues). There are many fine versions of this one, of course, but I'll go with the great Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.

Songs of Place: Fort Worth Blues

Well it's just natural that as I collect these "songs of place" I'm going to lean toward featuring my favorite songwriters. You jsust know John Prine is going to show up here sooner or later, but John wouldn't mind if I came back to the great Townes Van Zandt first. His Brazos River Song has already been featured in this series, but I'm operating on the assumption that you can't over-represent genius.

And so, Fort Worth Blues (sung by Steve Earle):

Townes was a lyric genius, there's no doubt in my mind. His songs capture a kind of endemic personal sadness, known clinically as depression I guess. I can only take so much, before I start longing for  little light and air. Wasn't it Dostoevsky who said it was much easier to write convincingly about sadness that about happiness? Townes did write a few sweet songs, and Fort Worth Blues is less about depression than about resignation. Here the place he sings about is not so much a far away dream, but something you carry with you wherever you go.

River Songs: How many Texas rivers can you fit in one song?

I've always liked river songs. If you know a place, you know its rivers. It used to be we traveled on them, so a river was a highway, the way you got from here to there, maybe from poverty to prosperity, maybe even from slavery to freedom. But rivers were also something to be feared, and there are many songs about great floods.

But rivers were also barriers. The other side of the river, in these songs, is a kind of promised land, perhaps heartbreakingly out of reach. Maybe the greatest river song ever written was by Townes van Zandt, who in my opinion was one of the greatest American songwriters who ever lived. It seems he set out to write a song that named every major river in Texas. The dream down under these lyrics is a dream of crossing, and all these rivers are troubling and dangerous barriers. "La la la li, lend me your hand."