Honky Tonk

This last summer, Leigh Anne asked me a perplexing question. The interp crew was gathered in the K Bar on the eve of my departure from the West to the Pacific Northwest. I was dancing in my seat to Alan Jackson's "Chattahoochee" playing on the jukebox. The mountain air was steadily cooling outside but the K Bar stayed hot with the pizzas cranking out of the oven. We stayed cool by drinking pitchers of Alaskan Amber as we bit into spicy slices of the K-Bar Combo. And then the question came. Leigh Anne, while watching me shake it to "It's 5:00 Somewhere," asked, "Nancy, are you a honky tonk gal?"

I stopped mid song and glanced at her sheepishly. She looked at me and said, "Yup, you are a honky tonk gal." And that got me thinking.

There is nothing I love more than the cool air playing off Montana's mountains, the smell of sagebrush after it rains, crooning out the Dixie Chick's "Wide Open Spaces" as I drive through Big Sky Country, and watching cowboys rope and ride at the rodeo (or out in the open). I dream at night of owning a homestead by the Yellowstone River and dream during the day of returning to the frontier and watching the great bison herds on the Great Plains. And nothing fits the western places I love better than the music of the slide guitar, banjo, fiddle, and guitar (geeetar) playing some lonesome call of the wild.

My musical callings have long been oriented towards western songs and Americana. The first music I liked was country. The first tunes I learned on the piano (pianee?) were from early America. As I sit writing this, Dwight Yoakam, Yonder Mountain String Band, Willie Nelson, Dixie Chicks, Sam Bush, Alan Jackson, Allison Kraus and, yes, Garth Brooks croon their place-based rythms into my ears. The best concerts I have seen were of Yonder Mountain and Willie Nelson. There's just nothing like singing along to Willie and girating to Yonder Mountain.

Ah, just thinking of honky tonk makes me long for the west! The diesel trucks with gun racks and menacing dogs in the back! The wide open plains that end spectacularly in a ragged range of mountains! The wilderness, frontier, the sublime beauty! The elk, bison, and bears! The way western, country, and bluegrass fit the physical and emotional senses of the place. Oh to be in wide open spaces! As Bilbo Baggins would say, "I want to see mountains, Gandalf, mountains!"

So, perhaps, honky tonk is the epitomy of my sense of place search. It has the power to connect me to place and helps to set my spirit free. Willie Nelson got it right when he said (covered), "give me land lots of land and the starry sky above. Don't fence me in!"

Moscow, you ain't got enough honky tonk for the both of us in this town. I'm heading west! It's time to head east to head west (aka Wyoming and Montana) into the heart of the honky tonk! There my senses awaken to place and my heart fills with the beautiful might of the western landscape. That is where the scent of sagebrush overwhelms my nose when the thunder rolls.