To begin, let me say, this road trip of Madame's is getting curiouser and curiouser. I'm beginning to think the old bat is capable of bilocation or maybe even TRIlocation, as the following events illustrate.

You will recall that she and the Bud Light truck were last seen, officially, outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, hitting the nearest interstate as MD troopers closed in to impound the truck. (The young trucker is, I understand, still hospitalized, gibbering about old bats and shrieking at the sight of anyone with gray hair. It could be worse; he could have seen Madame in her red wig.)

A day or two after that, Willard got a phone call. She has a private number so this was ominous to say the least, and got more so when the voice on the other end growled: "What has that old bat gone and done with my daddy?"

"HUH?"

It turns out that Madame Sadie hasn't told Willard and me quite everything about her background. Her real name is not Sadie Lipshitz, which we thought was pretty improbable anyway; it's actually Sadie Willows, and she's from some wide place in the road in the mountains. The man who called Willard is Madame's nephew, and he's worried about his dad, a former "ridge runner" (a guy who in the good ol' days ran moonshine, usually made by HIS daddy) who reformed and now works on a NASCAR crew. This brother has disappeared, but his son got suspicious when THIS sighting was reported:

Dateline St. Louis, MO: A semi with a Bud Light trailer crashed through the front gates at the main entrance at either Anheuser-Busch HQ or at the home of the owners thereof (details are understandably sketchy). As security moved in to try to stop the truck, it made a breathtaking U-turn and roared back out the way it came in, leaving officers choking and gasping in a cloud of diesel smoke.

The nephew seems to think that, since Madame is undoubtedly impaired (you surely didn't think she was gonna leave the cargo untouched!) and his daddy, like many a former ridge runner, is a teetotaler, she whipped by some NASCAR track and picked him up. Oh, great; instead of DRIVING MISS DAISY, we got DRIVING MADAME SADIE.

Things were quiet for awhile, then our friend Sherry up in NY reported a--well, let Sherry tell it:

Fairweather,

I um have to tell you I saw someone who looked suspiciously like Madame riding on the back of a Harley up here in my neck of the woods. I was heading to my local Walmart this morning when a Hog went roaring past me. Some guy with a long gray beard split by the wind so it was tickling the face of the rider behind him from both sides of his head. She had on this hat with some kind of flower in it and what looked like a bottle of beer in her hand.

Can you imagine? The "couple" seemed to be having some kind of fight, which I should imagine was hard to do on a Harley. How could he hear her screaming at him? Anyway, she would let go of her hat, pound his shoulder for a bit, take a swig of beer and grab onto her hat to keep it from blowing off.

They were headed South on Rt.49. He looked like some sorta throwback to the late 60's Hells Angels group. A bit long in the tooth but still sporting all the ink and skulls. A definite unsavory sort, mark my words. Sure hope if it was Madame that she makes it home in one piece.

Sherry

I suspect that was indeed Madame and her brother. I'm afraid to say where they might have ditched the truck and hotwired a Harley--Surely Madame hasn't drunk her way through a whole truckload of Bud Light yet! As for the beard, many a moonshiner wore a long beard, and could scare a Hell's Angel into church. (Sure did more than a few revenuers--the ones who survived, anyway.) He was probably griping at her about her drinking--especially if she clipped him upside an ear with a bottle.

To make things worse, though, there was that day that Anexplorer came down from Canada to interview me for Bookworm's "Inquirer" feature. Anex can tell that story better than me, so let me get a plug in here for the interview (the graphics are fantastic): check out http://librarycat.blogstream.com.

Sorry, Anex, to cut the interview short--but the old bat got away again. I should have taken along that butterfly net she used to try to catch Shorty the leprechaun, but I was very nervous about the interview and forgot all about it.

The park rangers are safe, though. They barricaded themselves inside the visitors' center and last I heard had radioed for backup. Nobody is quite sure who has jurisdiction, so they may be there awhile.

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One other thing--those of you who may have left a comment and didn't hear back from me, I'm so sorry. Awhile back my Yahoo was down for two days, and since that unfortunate episode I no longer receive notification from Blogstream that I've gotten a comment or a PM (although I have my settings set to do so). It's not that I wouldn't answer; it's just that sometimes it takes me awhile to check my comments. Please be patient with me; I love hearing from you and will get back to you eventually.

And on that pleading note, fair thee well.

I overslept this morning. Sometime in the night a soft rain began to fall, and I rested better than usual. If I dreamed I don't remember it. It might have looked like this if I had, though:



It's cool and still drizzling just a bit. Lazy, drowsy sort of day. Mom is napping on her recliner, out under the japonica the cat is napping--it spreads out in a sort of little arbor and only gets wet under there if the rain comes in at a particular angle--and frankly I think I'll curl up somewhere and do the same.

Later--

Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president, died on the morning of April 15th, 1865, nine hours after he was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth. After several days of lying in state and funeral rites in Washington DC, his body (and that of his son Willie, who had died in 1862 and rested in a borrowed mausoleum ever since) were placed on a train called The Lincoln Special. This train, consisting of nine cars, left Washington on April 21st on a long, sad, circuitous route through the northern states that ended in his adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois on May 4th.

Lincoln himself has over the century and a half since his death become Washington's most famous ghost. His favorite haunt, you should pardon the pun, is of course the White House. Less common are tales of the reappearance of the funeral train that carried him home.

The best known of these tales comes from Albany, New York. In 1865, the train passed over the Hudson River Railroad, later a part of the Hudson Division of the NY Central railroad, and later still part of the Conrail system. An account from an Albany newspaper, first cited in Lloyd Lewis's 1929 book MYTHS AFTER LINCOLN, begins: "Regularly in the month of April, about midnight the air on the tracks becomes very keen and cutting. . ."

The account goes on to say that clouds obscure the moon, a black carpet seems to roll down the track, and all sounds are silenced. The engines--two; one for an escort train, draped in black crepe and crewless save for one flatcar carrying a band of skeletons playing black, noiseless instruments, the second bearing Lincoln's coffin on a single flatcar--are oldtime woodburners, puffing out great clouds of smoke from huge smokestacks, covered in polished brass as many of the old engines were.

To add to this fantastic appearance, it is said that when real trains are on the track, the ghost train runs right through them, and that clocks and watches, all along the line where the phantom runs, will be five to eight minutes slow once it passes.

A very Gothic sort of tale, but what is interesting is the date when these appearances are said to happen. The ghost train has been reported without exception on the night of April 26-27. There would seem to be no particular reason why it should appear outside Albany on that night, although it did pass through that section about that date, except for this.

On April 26th, 1865, Lincoln's murderer, John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded in a flaming barn outside Port Royal, Virginia, by Federal troops after a twelve-day manhunt. Orders were given to take Booth alive, but he was shot by Sergeant Boston Corbett, who said God told him to shoot Booth. Hit in the spine, and paralyzed, Booth died three hours later on the porch of a nearby farmhouse.

By telegraph, after the War Department and others had been notified, word could have--notice I'm not saying it did, but it could have--reached Albany by midnight.

Are the death of Booth and the sightings of the Lincoln funeral train on the same date coincidences?

You be the judge. I know what I think.

And on that note, fair thee well.

Listen to the wind, wonder what he's sayin'
See that willow bend, everything is swayin'
Seems to be a sadness in the sighin' of the wind. . .

Last night I was in the kitchen, doing danged if I remember what (as an insomniac, I'm often cleaning at hours when normal people sleep) and found myself singing a song from an old "singing cowboy" film. It was originally performed by the legendary western group The Sons of the Pioneers; it was written by their baritone singer and principal songwriter, the incomparable Bob Nolan.

I would, if pressed, say that Hank Williams Sr. is my very favorite songwriter, but Bob Nolan would run him a very close second. Bob Nolan is a fascinating character in his own right. Born Clarence Robert Nobles on April 13th, 1908, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he apparently lost his mother at an early age. He and his father, Harry, moved to Tucson, Arizona when Bob was thirteen, by which time Harry had changed their last name from Nobles to Nolan. He began his singing career in the Chautaqua tent show movement. In 1933, he joined two other young singers named Leonard Slye and Tim Spencer to form The Pioneer Trio. Later, augmented by brothers Hugh and Karl Farr, they changed the group's name to The Sons of the Pioneers. Leonard Slye would go on to even greater fame as "singing cowboy" star Roy Rogers; Tim Spencer would gain fame as the writer of such hits as "Roomful of Roses" and "Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women," but Nolan was the author of most of their greatest original songs.

Wonder where he goes, darlin' can you hear me
Something that he knows seems to bring you near me
Thought I heard you whisper in the sighin' of the wind. . .

Nolan and the other band members (who of course changed over the years; for a short time Ken Curtis, most famous for his role as Festus on the TV series GUNSMOKE, was a member) appeared in a number of B movies with both Roy Rogers and his rival, Gene Autry. In 1934, Nolan provided vocals for the cowboy star Ken Maynard in a film called IN OLD SANTA FE; Maynard was no singer. Nolan himself had the most distinctive voice of any of the Sons. It's a hard voice to explain: a resonant baritone with a tonality that was not quite nasal. The closest any other singer I ever heard come to Nolan's vocals would undoubtedly be his fellow Canadian, Hank Snow, whose voice was of a slightly higher range.

Among the hits Nolan wrote for the Sons were "Cool Water," possibly the most often covered of all their songs; "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" which began life as a poem called "Tumbling Leaves", written as Nolan watched autumn leaves fall past the window of his apartment and then rewritten for a film of the same name; and the one I've been quoting (and singing for hours now), called simply "Wind."

Sets my weary heart a-longin', yearnin', dreamin'
Starlight lost its meanin' since you went away. . .

Nolan retired from The Sons of the Pioneers in 1949 and lived out the remaining three decades of his life as a semi-recluse. In the last year of his life he made a final solo recording, an album called THE SOUND OF A PIONEER. A Chattanooga radio station whose call letters I've forgotten used to play classic country, folk, bluegrass and western music on Sunday afternoons; a favorite around that time was this last record of Nolan's. His voice was noticeably weaker than it was in the old days, but his writing was still poetic, full of picturesque imagery, as evidenced by the best-known song from those sessions, "He Walks with the Wild and Lonely." He died on June 16th (my birthday, incidentally) in 1980.

Now he's turnin' cold, wonder if he's lonely
Winter in my soul, longin' for you only
Can't you hear me callin' in the sighin' of the wind. . .

The Sons of the Pioneers probably recorded "Wind" more than once in their career, but my favorite version is from a reissue with full orchestration called COOL WATER AND SEVENTEEN TIMELESS FAVORITES. They used their voices and dynamics to stunning effect to reproduce the ebb and swell of the wind.

It would take a full page to list all the Halls of Fame of which Bob Nolan is a member: the Country Music Hall of Fame, various songwriters' halls of fame, western music halls of fame. His influence and that of The Sons of the Pioneers can still be heard in the singing of groups like The Sons of the San Joaquin and, most notably, Riders in the Sky.

And until next time (and maybe another Bob Nolan tune), fair thee well.

I've spent the past few days frantically watching cable news (where they tend to cover odder stuff than the regular networks) and searching the Web for stories about Madame Sadie. I know from watching THE COLBERT REPORT that she never made it to Philadelphia, where he taped his show last week; there was never a little old wonky lady in the audience, waving a sign covered with obscene suggestions at him.

Imagine my horror when I learned THIS: those Maryland state troopers went back to the site of the abandoned Bud Light truck outside Sharpsburg, only to find IT WAS GONE!

OMG, MADAME'S JOYRIDING IN A SEMI FULL OF BUD LIGHT!!!!

I have no idea which way she'll head next. I thought she'd just hold her seance at Antietam with such ghosts as didn't run for cover and then finagle her way home--possibly with another trucker, possibly with another guy on a Harley.

I have a feeling she may turn up once she manages to drink up her stock. Until then--

IF YOU SEE THIS WOMAN, RUN!!!!!!!



If I hear a semi rumbling down the creek and up the holler in the next couple of nights, I'll know for sure--

but until then, fair thee well!!