This is how Lassie would come home if she were a guitar:

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/after-46-years-country-singer-george/n20080604192209990003

An acoustic Martin 000 is being returned to the immortal George Jones some forty-six years after it was stolen at a concert in Texas.

The guitar, nicknamed "White Lightnin'" after Possum's 1959 hit, has been in the possession of a man who bought it for ten dollars (not knowing it was stolen) for most of the succeeding years. He has spent many of those years trying to get in touch with Jones so he could return the guitar, and finally, with the help of a DJ who's a longtime friend of Jones, will do so at a concert in Bossier City, Louisiana, on June 14th.

My brother had something of the same experience awhile back; a guitar stolen from his house during a burglary turned up in a local pawnshop more than a decade later and he was able to get it back.

For the sake of poetic justice, I could wish that the guitar would be returned to Possum in the city where it was stolen so long ago--Fort Worth--but hey, can't have everything.

George Jones is getting an old friend back, and country music is getting a piece of its history returned. Don't get much better than that.

And on that sentimental note, fair thee well.

Over at that messageboard where I contribute a little hillbilly political commentary and a lot of BS, we liveblogged the Montana and South Dakota primary coverage last night. I have to admit that I was momentarily distracted at the beginning (we didn't start blogging until 8 PM) by Keith Olbermann wearing an exceptionally ugly and disheartening purple tie, but once we got started we actually blogged more about Montana landscapes and etc. than about anything to do with the primaries.

One of my monikers, bestowed on me some time ago by my friend and partner in anarchy Moonstone, is "music maven" and this AM, after a night's sleep and some meditation on the subject, I contributed some thoughts about songs that mention South Dakota and Montana. For reasons of brevity (I tend to be afflicted with diarrhea of the keyboard) I'll confine myself to these observations about three songs.

Moonstone posted a picture of a Montana landscape that prompted another blogger to ask if there is a song about "blue Montana skies." Moon did most of the research regarding this topic, coming up with a Gene Autry song, "'Neath the Blue Montana Skies," from a 1939 movie; unfortunately, neither of us could find the original Gene Autry lyrics. I came up with what I hope is a reasonable compromise: a song of the same title and apparently from a Riders in the Sky tribute album to Gene Autry.

With two other songs I was on firmer ground. As a longtime Emmylou Harris fan, I knew that her 1985 album THE BALLAD OF SALLY ROSE opens with a title song about Sally Rose's upbringing in "the Black Hills of Dakota" and goes on to describe how she left her home on a reservation to seek fame as a singer:

So she left Rapid City in the blue moonlight hour
with her eye on the highway and her foot on the floor. . .

adios, South Dakota, adios, Sally Rose. . .

And then there is "Montana Cowgirl." I first heard this on an album from the 1980s by bluegrass singer Delia Bell, on her major label debut. The album was produced by Miss Emmylou, who also sang harmony on most of the tracks. Simply titled DELIA BELL, this album is on my personal list of the most perfect albums ever recorded; at the time of its release, thanks to Warner Bros.' refusal to promote it as it should have been, it sank like a rock and is no longer available.

Emmylou recorded "Montana Cowgirl" on her 1992 CD AT THE RYMAN with her all acoustic band The Nash Ramblers. It is indeed bluegrass at its best: in fact, one could argue it's the progenitor of the rock "unplugged" fad of the 1990s, proof positive you can rock without electric instruments.

Proof positive, also, that if you're interested in politically oriented music, I'm the wrong person to talk to.

And on that musically and politically incompatible note, fair thee well.

Yucca filamentosa--aka New Zealand yucca--a member of the agave family. Grows in the "hot dry" parts of the US which generally refers to the desert Southwest, but we have them here in the humid Southeast too. Yucca filamentosa flowers look like waxy bells. We have three in the yard. Yesterday Blackadder was in a playful mood, so he hunkered down behind one and with a war whoop "pounced" on me as I came back up the driveway from the mailbox. They make good hiding places for him, as they have broad flat and quite extensive foliage.

Later, dears. Fair thee well.

Gonna whine a bit today. The month of May was a doozy: between Mom and me we had three doctors' appointments, a mammogram, and assorted Xrays and bloodwork. Time spent traveling, time spent waiting in doctors' lobbies--where you sit sometimes for two hours, listening to people talk about how they have this ailment, or a cousin died of that one, or this one has that plus another, or that one has BOTH plus another--

I have a vivid imagination. By the time I'm taken back to an exam room I have all the symptoms of EVERYTHING I heard about in the lobby. And the doctor wonders why my pulse is racing.

Yesterday PM our little chest freezer gave up the ghost (I cannot think why--it was only fifteen years old) so I had to make a trip to find another before Lowe's closed--

In short, this has not been our month or six weeks.

This AM Mom had to have one more Xray--hopefully this will be the last for awhile--but we get home and we're both cranky as hell. So we put classical music on the satellite (Chopin at the moment), she's doing a find-a-word, and I went online and began looking for quiet places. I can look at a picture sometimes and go away there in my mind, and all settles--my pulse, my stomach, and my stressed soul.

I have a love for all things green, so this picture called to me. All that moss, all those trees, and still water. If I close my eyes I can feel the moss under my feet as I sit with my back against a tree; I can hear the wind stirring in the leaves over my head; I can feel the coolness of water as I trail my fingers in the pool.

I'm sure there's some word to describe that--Azron, if you're out there, would it not be something like visualization?--Anyway, it's working. The longer I look, the calmer and more centered I feel. Could almost nap in my little hiding place, even though it's only a picture.

And on that fantastic notion, fair thee well.

Through the years her memory will haunt me. . .Jenny Lou Carson, "Jealous Heart", 1945



The Goodwin Sands are a treacherous stretch of sandbank on the eastern coast of England, mentioned by Shakespeare in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE:

the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very
dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many
a tall ship lie buried, as they say. . .

Eleven miles long, extending four miles in to dry land, and shallowly covered at high tide, they have as sinister a reputation as a graveyard of ships as North Carolina's Cape Hatteras. Some estimate that as many as two thousand ships, over the centuries, have been lost in their quicksands. The legend of one such ship, the LADY LOVIBOND, is one of coastal England's most enduring ghost stories.

Strangely enough, the story begins with a wedding. LADY LOVIBOND's captain, Simon Reed, was a newlywed, and he had his new wife, her mother, and their wedding guests aboard when he sailed his three-masted schooner down the River Thames to the North Foreland and out toward the English Channel, on the evening of February 13, 1748, bound for Oporto, Portugal. With a fair wind behind them, all seemed set for a perfect voyage.

Belowdecks, the wedding party laughed and toasted the married couple. Above their heads, though, a man with a jealous and murderous heart was plotting revenge. The LADY LOVIBOND's first mate, John Rivers, had also been a suitor of Mrs. Simon Reed; she had rejected him in favor of the captain.

Rivers, brooding over the injustice of being bested in love, silently walked up toward the man at the ship's helm and smashed his skull with a belaying pin. The helmsman never knew what hit him; his body was shoved aside, and Rivers swung the helm over hard and headed her for the Goodwin Sands.

The wedding party had no idea that they were no longer riding a fair wind across the Channel; they joked, laughed and drank until the ship gave a sudden jolt as she slammed into the Sands. One can imagine the cacaphony: the masts were snapped, the ship's timbers were crushed, and the wedding party, shrieking with fear and incomprehension, trapped below decks, died with the sound of John Rivers laughing with thunderous glee above their heads. John Rivers also went down with the ship.

By morning, the ship had vanished into the netherworld of quicksand that is the Goodwins.

There was, of course, a court of inquiry held, for only sabotage could account for the LADY LOVIBOND's wreck and disappearance on a clear, stormless winter night. John Rivers's own mother wept as she testified that she had heard her son say "he would have his revenge against Simon Reed if it cost him his life."

The court, possibly, had a bit of trouble with the idea of a man committing murder by shipwreck from thwarted love. They brought in a verdict of wreck by misadventure.

And so the story ends, we're told. . .Townes Van Zandt, "Pancho and Lefty", 1972

Only, of course, it doesn't.

On February 13th, 1798, the captain of a coastal vessel called the EDENBRIDGE was skirting the Goodwin Sands when he was startled by a three-masted schooner under full sail, bearing down on his ship out of the dark. By turning the wheel hard over, the EDENBRIDGE managed to avoid a collision, but the captain was puzzled by sounds of merrymaking that seemed to come from the strange ship's lower decks. He was even more puzzled when he reported the incident to his ship's owners and was given a similar account told by the crew of a fishing vessel who had seen the schooner go aground and break up, only to find the Sands empty and eerily silent when they looked for survivors.

The legend says that the ship has been seen every fifty years since, on the anniversary of her dreadful end, as recently as 1948 for certain, and possibly in 1998.

The LADY LOVIBOND is not the only ghost ship of the Goodwin Sands; there is also a legend of a warship of Sir Francis Drake's time (he was the most famous of the mariners who made Elizabeth I's little island the beginning of the eventually mighty British Empire, and died in 1596) seen going aground in the Sands during the great storm of November 25-26, 1703, during which four ships and over a thousand men were lost in the same area. There is also the legend of the VIOLET, lost in a snow squall in 1857 and seen again ninety years later.

The LADY LOVIBOND is the only one of these ships who returns regularly, however. Her next appearance, if she holds true to her ghostly schedule, will be on February 13th, 2048. I doubt I'll be spry enough, at the age of eighty-six, to be there to watch for her, but I'd like to be.

For the best version of the legend, see Raymond Lamont Brown's PHANTOMS OF THE SEA: LEGENDS, CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS (1972).

And until next time, fair thee well.