Good evening, bloggers! Please allow the frustrated country music historian in me to debate with the ghost story buff on the origins of a song about a ghost. (No yawns till the end--I'll know cause I'll start yawning too! Those suckers are catching!)

Ahem. In 1967 the late Woodrow Wilson "Red" Sovine (1917-1980) released what is arguably his greatest hit: the recitation "Phantom 309." It tells the story of a hitchhiker who gets a ride from a trucker named Big Joe one cold rainy night. Joe takes him as far as a diner in a small town and gives him a dime for coffee before driving off into the darkness and vanishing from sight. At the diner, when the hitchhiker mentions Big Joe, the manager tells him that Big Joe and his truck--the aptly named Phantom 309--are ghosts. Ten years earlier, Big Joe had topped a nearby hill to find a school bus stopped in front of him; rather than hit the bus, he turned the truck off the road. In the ensuing crash Big Joe died and his beloved truck was destroyed. In life Big Joe had picked up hitchhikers and helped them on their way; in death he's no different. The manager tells the hitchhiker his coffee's on the house, and as for the dime, "keep it as a souvenir/From Big Joe and the Phantom 309."

I've always loved this song; it plays to Red Sovine's strength at recitations (he was affirmatively not the best singer ever to hit Nashville), and it's an outstanding example in a small number of country and bluegrass songs that deal with the supernatural.

Fast forward to 2004. In her book GHOSTS AMONG US, Leslie Rule recounts an item from an April 2002 edition of the Halifax, Nova Scotia DAILY NEWS. According to the item, hitchhikers around Halifax's Waverly Road have been reporting for some four decades that they have gotten lifts from a trucker called Joe (his truck has no name, apparently), who has been dead for many years.

Coincidentally, the period 1967-2007 spans precisely four decades. But here's where the chicken or the egg conundrum comes in: was Red Sovine inspired by Nova Scotian folklore to write "Phantom 309" or did "Phantom 309" inspire Nova Scotian folklore?

I have a copy of what may be the best-known collection of Nova Scotian ghost stories in my personal library: Helen Creighton's BLUENOSE GHOSTS (1957). These stories do not include a phantom trucker; most of them deal with ghosts from the sea and date back many decades before "Phantom 309." If Red Sovine was inspired by folklore, he didn't find it there.

Red Sovine's fellow country star, singer Hank Snow, was a native Nova Scotian, but Snow had permanently relocated to the United States some two decades before the earliest reports of the ghostly Halifax trucker, so it seems unlikely that he told Sovine such a story.

There are several accounts online (thanks Willard) that insist that the stories in Nova Scotia predate "Phantom 309" but these reports are so vague as to dates for the earliest sighting of Big Joe as to be virtually worthless to the serious researcher.

So which DID come first: the chicken or the egg?

Big Joe has much in common with a story from 1940s Newfoundland regarding a ghostly moonshiner called Smoker who rescues people lost in the snow to expiate his sins. I suspect Big Joe also lurks at the back of David Allan Coe's "The Ride," in which the ghost of Hank Williams gives a hitchhiker a ride to Nashville. All in all, though, whether he was a ghost first, or whether he's a character from a song who became a ghostlore figure, Big Joe sounds like a man worth knowing.

Till next time, fair thee well.

Theoretically I should not be a fan of Anthony Bourdain, chef/author/host of Travel Channel's NO RESERVATIONS. For one thing, I'm not a "foodie." Swear it's true, I have always said that as long as there's a tin can in the world, I will not starve to death; and even with tin cans, I'm a lousy cook. Then there is the undeniable fact that Tony Bourdain is a snide, snarky, cynical, cranky son of a bitch (I can say that because he says as much himself). Oughtn't to be my cup of tea at all. But Monday nights at 10 PM, here I am, snack in hand, breathlessly watching as Bourdain does a chef's crawl of food venues in some truly breathtaking locales.

This past Monday night, he went to New Orleans. And in the midst of making the rounds of such redoubtable eating establishments as Antoine's and Emeril's and mourning the dreadful loss of much of the Big Easy's tourist trade following the devastation left in Hurricane Katrina's wake, he went down to the Lower Ninth Ward.

The Lower Ninth Ward, you will remember, was left essentially depopulated. We'll never know for certain, I suspect, how many died there. It's a ghost town, for what that loaded term is worth. It reminded me, watching Bourdain and his guide walk through there, of a song about quite another type of ghost town, by C.W. McCall:

Once there was laughter, and once there was life. . .

As another part of that lyric says, there once was also singing and song; many musicians lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, as did chefs, sous chefs, waiters and the like from the restaurant world. Now there is street after street of abandoned houses. Some are still standing but are windowless; others are mere piles of rubble. There are weeds in some areas as high as a tall man's waist (and Tony looks to be quite a tall man). On many of the houses, you can still see the painted X's and numbers where the houses were checked for survivors by rescue personnel; many of them show more dead were located than living. It's eerily silent, except for the wind that moans through the deserted houses.

And it occurred to me that New Orleans, always a top contender for America's most haunted city among those of us who love a good ghost story, has a whole plethora of new ghosts. They drowned, they died under collapsed buildings, they died of thirst and lack of medical care. And, like their famous counterparts from other eras--the great voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the infamous Madame LaLaurie, sad octoroon Julie who froze to death for love--they are bound to the city they loved.

Maybe we can't see them yet, but I'll bet there are those who can hear their voices on the winds and in the bayous, around Lake Pontchartrain, maybe even in the Superdome.

One of my favorite writers is James Lee Burke, who writes a series of novels about a Cajun deputy sheriff called Dave Robichaux. Many of the Robichaux stories are set in and around New Orleans and New Iberia. In fact, the first one of the Robichaux books I read was IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD, which was a sort of ghost story; the Confederate general John Bell Hood, who died in an 1879 yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans, makes an appearance.

I've never been to New Orleans; time and circumstance haven't permitted. One day I hope to get there, though, and I'll be watching and listening for the ghosts. They're there. They always will be.

Sunny but cold here in East Tennessee. How's your weather?

I'm tinkering with a posting. Till I get my shit together and get it in some sort of coherent order, do please go over and read my beloved niece's new post at http://missatheornery.blogstream.com. Too bad all the late night comics made separate deals with their writing staffs; she would willingly have stepped into the breach, and done a damned good job of it.

Till then, fair thee well.

Last night, as a background to the coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, there was news of severe weather affecting the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky. We're all right here, although we had rain so hard you could barely see to the road from our house; same at Willard's some twenty miles down the road. Some wind damage, a few trees down over roads and etc.

West Tennessee and north central Tennessee were not so lucky. At last report there are twenty-four reported dead, ten of those in Macon County, north of Nashville. The pictures from CNN and other news outlets are both horrifying and heartbreaking; trailer parks, a college campus in Jackson, over near Memphis, all but flat on the ground, although miraculously no dead there.

Local aid workers, backed up by FEMA teams dispatched by Homeland Security, are already beginning to try to clean up some of the mess, tend to the injured and homeless, and locate the dead. It'll be a long hard road ahead of everyone involved.

This should be a day when everybody offers up prayers and sympathy for all the victims, when politics, religion, gender, and all those other stupid labels we put on each other ought to be set aside. Imagine my horror, then, when I was scrolling through posts at The Newshole, and ran across this gem:

Tennessee hit by tornados after voting Hillary? Coincidence...?

The person who was crass enough to post this used a pseudonym.

For anyone to suggest that Tennessee brought down the wrath of God on ourselves in the form of tornadoes because the Democratic voters in our primaries chose to support Senator Hillary Clinton is monstrous. Nobody in their right mind could possibly draw a cause and effect between the vagaries of weather in the Southeast in late winter and early spring and a political candidate, but this person evidently thinks they're not only in their right mind, they think they just got off some delightful witticism, reminiscent of the "lady" in South Carolina who cost John McCain my consideration as a candidate when she called Senator Clinton a bitch.

Not only am I appalled at the sheer inhuman effrontery of this person; I am FURIOUS that whoever is moderating the board at The Newshole let the comment be posted at all. I think I have mentioned before that The Newshole is a messageboard/blog for viewers of COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN, a show I have watched for a couple of years now and in general find interesting and fun.

This is a disgrace. I frankly don't know whether I will be able to continue to watch COUNTDOWN or read The Newshole after this; how dare the moderator at the board allow a cretin to slap the people who have lost so much in the faces with such callous abandon? There is a point past which simple human kindness dictates that we give up that noble abstraction called free speech, especially when that speech is made for no other reason than to insult the living and the dead. I doubt very seriously that Saint Peter's going to ask the dead at the Pearly Gates whether they supported Clinton or not. If he does, then Satan has won the battle between good and evil; not because of who we support for our foolish political purposes, but because of the foul insinuations of moral morons.

Pray for the injured, the ones left homeless, and the dead. And until next time, fair thee well.

This is the Cable Mill in Cades Cove. It was a grist mill owned and operated by the Cable family, who were if I remember correctly the first family of German extraction to move into the Cove. This was not the only mill in the Cove, but it is the only one preserved by the Park Service, other than the "sorghum mill." This one, maintained in the same area as the grist mill, was used to crush juices out of sugar cane, which were then boiled to make molasses (or sorghum, which us hillbillies pronounce "sargum.")

The last time I was in the Cove, the mill wheel at the Cable Mill had been out of commission, ostensibly for repairs, for some three years; the flume, which is the long wooden canal sort of thing, has also been torn out because of rot and was in the process of being rebuilt. When both are operating though, the sounds are very distinctive. The water runs out of the flume and powers the wheel. The water hums and sings, and the mill wheel creaks merrily as it turns.

Occasionally during the summer months the mill is in operating order, and makes both corn meal and flour. Corn and wheat are ground in between millstones, very large round rocks powered by energy from the wheel outside (I'm no engineer, so I can't explain how that works). The millstones make an awesome rumble, and there's a fine dust in the air that has a distinct smell and settles on your hair and clothes like powder.

Probably my favorite place at the mill complex (which is located at the midpoint of the Loop Road, the eleven-mile, one way, single lane road through the Cove, with the visitors' center) is inside the mill and out a door onto a platform that overlooks the woods and the creek behind the mill.

I've got a really bad case of spring fever. Does it show?

Till next time, fair thee well.