Reentry

"Well, I'm back," as Samwise Gamgee says at the very end of The Return of the King, the final book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. When I last appeared here I was setting out for Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with a group of ETSU honors students and thinking about blogging my memories of life in Nashville in the 1980s and '90s. Today is a special day in those memories, which I'll get to in a bit, but first a few highlights from the three weeks since my last entry.

• The weekend after the Murfreesboro trip, I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, where I delivered a paper on Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Sherman Alexie: "Blood, Knowledge and Identity in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer." Louisville was being hit by an ice storm as I drove in on the evening of Thursday, 21 February. My session was to take place on the morning of Saturday the 23rd, so I had my work cut out for me on Friday. As in my student days, I didn't around to writing the paper until the day before it was due and so spent from about 2:00 Friday afternoon until about 11:00 that evening writing the paper. Attendance at the conference was down because of the weather, but a few people showed up for the session, after which I headed home to Tennessee.
• During the last two weeks of February, I went for the first time through the process of deciding the top 22 applicants for the University Honors Scholars Program I direct at ETSU. This group will make up next year's freshman class of scholarship students. Each application had been evaluated by five campus folk, four faculty and staff and one honors student. Then I did the rankings and put together the offer letters, the waiting list letters and the regret letters.
• The band at church has played a couple of interesting tunes lately: Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and Dougie MacLean's "Ready for the Storm."
• After Sunday School on Sunday, 2 March, the three of us left Tennessee for five nights in Charleston, South Carolina, where we walked around a lot, ate a lot of wonderful food, took a ghost tour (and photographed a ghostly "orb") and a carriage ride and generally lounged around, returning yesterday (Friday). Both on the way down to Charleston and on the way back, we stopped in the Columbia area to see son, daughter-in-law and beautiful granddaughters.

Finally, today is the 24th anniversary of the original recording of the original recording of "Thunder and Lightning," engineered by my good friend jb at Bullet Recording Studios in Nashville. Studio musicians were a bass player named Joe (I think), a drummer named Mark, guitar players named Greg and Brent and a piano player named John Jarvis. Here's my journal entry for that day, 8 March 1984: "Today was special! We cut a song called 'Thunder and Lightning' and it's hard to describe the results. Everybody was just flipping out at the sound. Earl and I picked it as sort of an afterthought, the band got it on the first take, and my vocal came together very quickly. It was magic; a magical gift from God! The whole sound of it haunts me and already it seems like a dream. It's difficult to hear something sounding so good when you feel like others have sounded good as well but there is something special in those tracks. I don't know what it is but I like it! We also did sax overdubs and cut "My Young Island Princess" both efforts turned out great. Time to sleep . . . Follow the light"

http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_Thunder%20and%20Lightning.mp3

This isn't the original recording from 1984, but I like this version even better.