Salt Of the Earth

So I moved to the country. My grandfather homesteaded in North Dakota and it seems that the desire to live inconveniently on the land skipped a generation and landed on me. I bought a 180 year old log cabin on 80 acres for next to nothing due to it’s sitting on the wrong side of a creek in an area not soon to be considered attractive to develop. I was barely settled in when one day I looked thru the window and saw a man crossing the low water bridge and making his way up to the house. It turned out to be a rather old gent carrying a burlap bag. I went out on the porch to greet him.

“Howdy,” he said,”I’m Ike Daniel from down the road. I was wondering what you was planning to do with your doc far backer bonn.” I had him repeat his query several times until I figured out that he was saying dark fire tobacco barn.” What’s that?” I asked him. “That barn down yonder in your holler. Are you gonna grow backy?” I was catching on and deciphered that as tobacco, the major cash crop in our area. “If not I’d like to use it for my crop of dark fire.” “Well, we can sure discuss it,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it.” I tried not to stare at the burlap bag but he caught me glancing at it. He grinned and opened the bag and shook out a small dead squirrel. “This here’s a red squirrel. Don’t see many of these around here so I killed it and brought it over for you to look at.” “Ah, thanks,” I said, trying not think about the lessening of the ranks of red squirrels for my edification.

“Well, if’n you figure out to let me use that barn be sure to let me know,” and he scooped up the poor dead critter and headed back down the hill.” I’ll do that. Bye,” I called after him. He just nodded slightly and continued on.

Claude Dixon was a short, bandy legged cross between a troll and an imp. He used to, for some unfathomable reason, perch up on the frame that held his mailbox and wave at folks as they passed while he waited for the mailman. One day I was driving by and noticed two men at the side of the road who appeared to be struggling with each other. I pulled up next to them and saw that one was Claude and the other was a slightly older more bent over version of him, clearly his brother. I rolled down my truck window and asked them what they were doing. Claude’s brother answered. “He’s got the diabetes and I’m s’posed to take him to the doctor today so they can take his water but he won’t go.” Claude started swinging wildly at him again and hollered, “Don’t you go tellin’ anybody who’ll listen about my bidness. I ain’t going and that’s that.” They started flailing at each other again, both of them connecting only with air. As it seemed they wouldn’t or couldn’t hurt each other I just drove on.

Brown Hill was a tall lanky man who was very shy. He seemed always to be there when you needed help with something, like when my truck got stuck in the creek with me in it during a flash flood. I had a gig in New York so I was on my way to the kennel with all my dogs and cats in the cab. Brown arrived with his tractor and threw me a rope attached to a chain which was hooked to his axle. He hollered at me to jump in and he’d pull me to shore. Much to his dismay I insisted on tying the rope to each of the dogs first. After he’d successfully hauled them all in I picked up the cats and tossed them to the bank and jumped in and was pulled to safety.

This was how I made my first contact with an incredible breed of old-time farmers who lived up and down the road. As they began to pass on I started a poem to them which I couldn’t quite finish, poetry being an unfamiliar vehicle with which I was not very comfortable. As we were compiling material for the new record I was reminded of the unfinished work and decided to try to make it into a song. Again, I ran into difficulty writing in a new format, this time story songs, so I went to the master, Guy Clark, for tutelage. He helped me put it together in a smooth, story-telling way and threw in some wonderful lines and I took it home to finish it. I encountered another obstacle writing about Brown Hill, my next door neighbor, who I loved a lot. I couldn’t create a picture of the man and that was the most important thing for this song. I went to see Alice Newman, now Vestal, who had grown up across the road from Brown and was as close to him as her own family. She has become an excellent singer/songwriter and completed the picture beautifully. So there you have it.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the picture on the back is Brown’s old hat and his mama’s oil lamp on the mantle, (the knife isn’t visible in the picture), and the front cover is Brown’s front porch. And Alice and I did sing Amazing Grace at Brown's funeral on a cold November day.