The Songs Remember When

Every now and then I think of some great country music tunes I have heard through the years, and some of them inevitably lead me to recall past times in my life - when I was a child or when I stood on the verge of adulthood. I spent much of my childhood growing up in El Paso, Texas, where country music and the late Marty Robbins are synonymous. Here is Robbins's last great hit - "Some Memories Just Won't Die" - recorded a few months before his untimely death in 1982:



Robbins and country music are synonymous in the city because two of his best known songs - "El Paso" (1959) and "El Paso City" (1976) - celebrated its days as a frontier town, frequented by heroes and desperadoes trying to eke out a living in the Old West. I have fond memories of El Paso - the dry, high desert air, the snowfalls each winter, and the desolate but beautiful Franklin Mountains.

I spent my teenage years, however, living in Laredo, Texas - the city in which I was born in 1975 and which my maternal ancestors founded in 1755. At 18, I moved to San Antonio to attend college, but I would occasionally make the one hundred fifty mile trip down I-35 to visit my parents, during which I listened to some great country hits of the early '90s, such as "Even Now" by Exile:



Exile was an old country group founded in the 1960s, but did not achieve nationwide fame until the late 1970s with the pop hit "Kiss You All Over." During the '80s, the group returned to its country roots and scored a string of more hits, but by the early '90s all of the groups original members had left, replaced by younger musicians. Released in 1991, "Even Now" was the group's last major hit.

Listening to this song reminds me of those long drives down I-35, the South Texas Plain spread out before me, the sagebrush and mesquite harkening back to a time when Texas struggled to maintain its independence against the corrupt tyranny in Mexico City. Perhaps John Steinbeck said it best:

"I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it ...For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study and the passionate possession of all Texans."