The best of America
musical interlude
It’s not an official patriotic song, but it evokes the heart of our country. Written by an American but done best by an Australian, this version is set like a hymn.
If you’ve never heard this version, treat yourself; it’s a weeper.
A long time ago when I was very young, before everything went dark, there were sweet, comforting moments. One of them was my mother in the front seat of the car, cigarette in her left hand with blue smoke trailing out the vent window and the soft blue lights on the dash as she sang along to this in her pretty soprano, doing the higher harmony line.
’I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me—the radio reminds me of my home far away’
God bless America.
Awwww, what a sweet memory indeed with your mom.
Country Roads is a very special song for me too. I grew up in southwest Pennsylvania, mostly in Pittsburgh, but my beloved grandparents lived further south in the country, just a spit away from West Virginia and with its own tall hills. I LOVE those mountains, I yearn for them. Driving down the road, I sometimes get the feeling that I should have been “home” yesterday.
My grandparents had a bit of a twang to their speech, and Pap-Pap was a coal miner, and they qualified as hillbillies I suppose, but the good kind. So yeah, my memories of the mountains and the country and my family are of an Almost Heaven.
Totally. Country Roads is imbued with that elusive and intangible spirit sometimes called the Old Weird America, or what I call Blue Jeans and Rock and Roll America. It’s the alternate universe where baseball is still the national pastime, and curiously transcends wooden bat and leather ball just as blue jeans do sturdy cotton twill fabric. It’s not all sweetness and light; there’s an unknowable wildness there. It can be found in upstate New York, the Gulf Coast, Topanga Canyon…
…and the Virginias, West and otherwise. It can be usefully repurposed for lots of locales in the general region! An example would be Northern Virginia…Soccer Mama…take me home…i-66.