MOVING ON
“That big eight-wheeler, rollin’ down the track / Means your true-lovin’ daddy ain’t comin’ back / Cause I’m movin’ on, I’ll soon be gone / You were flyin’ too high, for my little old sky / So I’m movin’ on.” – written & performed by Hank Snow
I woke up at 5am, rolled over to go back to sleep, and this song started playing on a loop in my head. I must have heard it a thousand times growing up KWKH out of Shreveport played it constantly. Hank Snow wrote and recorded it in 1950, and it sat at number one for 21 weeks, tying the record for the longest run atop the Billboard country chart. Everyone from Ray Charles to the Rolling Stones to Johnny Cash has covered it since.
So why did this fifty-year-old song surface at 5am? Because Barbara and I have moved on, literally , after fifty years in the same town.
It’s been eighteen months since I’ve written this column. A short note from Melissa Clarke, managing editor of Americana Highways, reminded me how much I missed my monthly musing about songs and music. So here I am, back again, hopefully for the long run.
Why would two seventy-somethings uproot after almost a lifetime in one place? Well, simple put If the community and opportunities aren’t working for you anymore, it’s time to move on, even though admitting that is hard.
We made a list: four seasons, some kind of music scene, an airport with major airline service, plenty of outdoor activity, volunteer opportunities, and a population under 50,000. In November 2024 we put our home of thirty years in northeast Texas on the market. We’d been told it wasn’t a good time to sell. It sold in three days.
We’d settled on the general Southwest. Arizona and Colorado were out on housing costs, so Albuquerque became our focus. Rio Rancho, a suburb just outside it, ended up checking every box but the population one and after a rural half-century, being somewhere with more going on felt genuinely exciting. A year and a half in, we love it.
I taught songwriting in Rio Rancho this spring and start teaching at a music school in nearby Santa Fe this fall. I’ve found that teaching the craft doesn’t just give back, it keeps my own songwriting juices flowing.
So in short: when a place stops serving you, maybe it’s time to move on. Yes, it’s scary. But then again, what change isn’t? You don’t have to be young and fancy-free to make a big change. You just have to want it.
Music life isn’t so different. If your songwriting inspiration is waning, maybe it’s time for a change too. Write about something completely different. Learn a new tuning. Pick up a new instrument. Or do what we did; move a thousand miles and see what happens. You might be surprised what it does for your inspiration.
Glad to be back. Thanks to Melissa for keeping this platform going, I know it’s more work than I can imagine. Thanks for reading, and I promise it won’t be another eighteen months. In fact, I’ve already got August’s column in mind.
Read some of Randy’s previous work here: Letters From Behind the Pine Curtain; ISIS and the Sparrow