Cowboy Junkies -- "Anniversary Song" (1993)

And I don't know how I survived those days

Before I held your hand

I first heard about the Cowboy Junkies years ago, but I've never actually listened to any of their music.

Their 1988 album, The Trinity Session, made a lot of "ten best albums of the year" lists.  It was recorded live, using only one microphone, at the historic Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto.  The Trinity Sessions was not mixed, overdubbed, or otherwise edited – what they played is what you get.

The Cowboy Junkies

The Cowboy Junkies' music has been described as alt-country, country rock, folk rock, blues rock, indie rock, and "Americana" (despite the fact that they are Canadian).  In other words, no one knows how the hell to describe them.

Suffice it to say that The Trinity Sessions includes covers of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline songs but also a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane."  None of those covers sound anything like the originals, mostly because the tempos on the album are (in the words of the Allmusic review of the album) "heroin-slow."

Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity

The Cowboy Junkies' guitarist, Michael Timmins, persuaded his sister Margo to become the group's lead vocalist despite the fact that she had never sung in public before.  (A third Timmins sibling is the group's drummer.)  Margo was so shy at first that she routinely stood with her back to the audience as she sang.  

According to Wikipedia, the refrigerator in the old farmhouse where Margo lives with her husband and son is covered with pictures of celebrities she has met over the years, including Sean Penn, Sylvester Stallone, Molly Ringwald, Meat Loaf, and Bruce Springsteen.    

Margo Timmons in 1990

Margo has quite the crush on Springsteen.  When she got married, she told her husband that if Bruce ever wanted her, she "would be his."  Margo once made People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" list, so maybe she's got a shot. 

"Anniversary Song," which was released on the group's Pale Sun Crescent Moon album in 1993, is a little over top when it comes to lyrics.

Here are the song's first lines: 

Have you ever seen a sight as beautiful

As that of the rain-soaked purple

Of the white birch in the spring?

Do white birches really turn purple when they get rained on?  

Here are the next lines:

Have you ever felt more fresh or wonderful

Than on a warm fall night under a mackerel sky

The smell of grapes on the wind?

In case you don't know, a mackerel sky refers to a sky mostly covered by altocumulus clouds because such a sky is said to resemble a mackerel's scales.  

I don't see that myself, but maybe you do:

A mackerel sky

A mackerel sky is a sign of an old, disintegrating weather front, and usually indicates dry weather.  Hence, the old saying "Mackerel in the sky, three days dry."  (I'm sure you've heard that old saying many, many times.)

But let's not get distracted and forget what follows the "mackerel sky" reference in the song: "The smell of grapes on the wind"?

Songwriter Michael Timmins eventually calmed down and wrote some nice, simple lines.  For example:

Have you ever seen a sight as beautiful

As a face in a crowd of people

That lights up just for you?

Have you ever felt more fresh or wonderful

As when you wake by the side of that boy or girl

Who has pledged their love to you?

Much better than purple rain-soaked birches and mackerel skies, n'est-ce pas?

So why am I featuring "Anniversary Song" today?  After all, we just celebrated the 5th anniversary of 2 or 3 lines on November 1, didn't we?

Cyril Jordan and Chris Wilson
of the Flamin' Groovies --
exactly one year ago today

Yes, we did.  But today is the anniversary of my attending the Flamin' Groovies show right here in Your Nation's Capital.  Of course, that wasn't as big a deal as the 5th anniversary of my wildly popular little blog, but it was still a very big deal.

Click here to read all about that concert.

"Anniversary Song" isn't a great song, but it seemed like a better choice than the alternatives.  

For example, there's "The Anniversary Song," which was first recorded by Al Jolson in 1947 and subsequently covered by everyone from Dinah Shore to Guy Lombardo to Rosemary Clooney to Frank Sinatra.

The music used for "The Anniversary Song" was a waltz originally composed by the Romanian Ion Ivanovici in 1880.  He gave it the name "Waves of the Danube," and it is sometimes confused with Johann Strauss's much more famous waltz, "The Blue Danube."  (To further complicate matters, "The Anniversary Song" – which is a waltz – is sometimes confused with "The Anniversary Waltz.")

Here are the first two lines of "The Anniversary Song":

Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed

We vowed our true love, though a word wasn't said

When I was a kid, I would occasionally accompany my parents on their Saturday-night excursions to Hidden Acres, a supper club in my hometown (Joplin, Missouri).

Hidden Acres had a two-man dance combo that would play requests, and every time they were asked to play a song for a couple celebrating a wedding anniversary, the pianist would preface the request by singing a slightly modified snippet of "The Anniversary Song":

Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed

We danced and we danced, 'cause our folks had the bed

Here's "Anniversary Song":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Patti Page -- "Detour" (1951)

Headed down life's crooked road

Lots of things I never knowed

Because of me not knowin', I now pine . . .

Should have read that detour sign

When I was young, my parents used to go out to dinner most Saturday nights with our next-door neighbors.  (Our neighbor managed a local liquor store, and the guy really knew his merchandise.  I think he and his wife were the store's two best customers.)

Their usual Saturday-night destination was a Joplin supper club called Hidden Acres, which has been closed for a decade or so (although the building still stands).  I was invited to join them once or twice a year, which meant putting on a coat and tie, ordering a "Roy Rogers" (a Coke served with a long-stemmed cherry and a swizzle stick) for my aperitif, and feasting on a bacon-wrapped ground sirloin (not hamburger!) steak with a baked potato.  According to the menu below, that delicacy went for $1.65 -- not bad.

After we finished our meal, I would dance once or twice with my mother.  When I was in the sixth grade, I took weekly ballroom dancing lessons with quite a few of my schoolmates.  Thinking about that experience today causes me to have hot flashes and break out in flop sweat, although I don't think I was embarrassed at the time.  I think I thought I was a pretty good dancer and a pretty cool guy back then.

Hidden Acres dinner menu

I was enough of a show-off to enjoy the attention the adults gave me when I danced with her.  I was taller than she was, which helped me feel like I cut a pretty dashing figure on the Hidden Acres dance floor.  (I was six feet tall when I was 13, with size 12A feet.  That certainly made shopping for school shoes easy.  I could get black Florsheim wing-tips, or I could get brown Florsheim wing-tips . . . or I could go barefooted.)

I remember my parents dancing quite a bit those Saturday evenings, although I do think my mother enjoyed it more than my father.  They were both attractive people who were in good shape, and were better-than-average dancers.  (I assume that they were self-taught.  Both of them grew up during the Depression in families of very modest means -- especially my father.  He was one of seven children, and was barely nine years old when his father died in 1934.  Ballroom dancing lessons would have been an impossible luxury when he was in sixth grade.) 

The one song my parents always requested from the pianist/vocalist at Hidden Acres -- his name was Clint Harrison -- was "Detour."  Mr. Harrison died earlier this year -- click here to read his obituary.

"Detour (There's A Muddy Road Ahead)" was written in 1945 by Paul Westmoreland, who recorded it with his Western swing band that year.  David Allan Coe once said that real country songs were always about trucks, trains, prison, mama, and/or getting drunk.  "Detour" goes the prison route -- the song is about the road (or the detour) not taken, which resulted in the singer spending five years in jail.  

Spade Cooley's band (Tex Williams was the vocalist) had a big hit with "Detour" in 1946.  Three other versions of the song also made it to the top 10 that year, so it seems that the song was extraordinarily popular.

Patti Page's version made the top 10 in 1951, and the song has been recorded since then by a number of well-known singers.

My parents on their 65th anniversary

My parents were married in 1947.  (Last month, I flew to Joplin, Missouri, to help them celebrate their 65th anniversary -- think about that number for a minute, boys and girls.)  I thought that they might have danced to "Detour" in their courtin' days, when the song was new and very popular.  But when I asked them, they said they didn't remember hearing the song until they started going to Hidden Acres.  

My mother says she liked it because it was a great song to dance to, but the lyrics are really quite appropriate for them.  Like the singer of "Detour," they stayed on the same road they started down, despite the detour signs.  The singer regretted not detouring from the path he (or she) had taken, but I don't think my parents did.  

No matter how well you think you know your parents, of course, they undoubtedly have some secrets that would surprise you.  But I never got any hint that my parents ever regretted that they ignored any detour signs that popped up after they tied the knot, and instead stayed on the road they had started down in 1947.

My parents, my sister, and I were watching TV the night of their anniversary when my father announced that he believed he would go to bed.  (That's the way we talk in Joplin:  "Well, I believe I'll go to bed.")  It was about nine o'clock, which is quite a bit earlier than most people go to sleep, but he's always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of guy.

My mother shocked us by commenting that he certainly hadn't gone to sleep at nine o'clock on that date 65 years earlier, when they were honeymooning in Branson.  (Oh my!)

When I wasn't eating anniversary cake or reminiscing with my parents or sister that weekend, I was walking the streets of Joplin.  In an upcoming 2 or 3 lines, I'll bring you up to date on what my hometown looked like one year after an EF5 tornado hammered it.

One final note: today is my father's 87th birthday.

Here's Patti Page's 1951 version of "Detour (There's A Muddy Road Ahead)": 

Here's a video that melds footage of her singing "Detour" on her TV show in 1956 and also in 1998.  While her 1951 recording was Western-swing style, with lots of pedal steel guitar, these performances feature big-band accompaniment.

Here's a link you can use to buy a copy of the song from Amazon: