Nashville 1980 (Part III)

Remember that I got soaked and chilled working on the Opryland USA log ride one rainy Sunday in March 1980? And that I nearly ran over Willie Nelson at a traffic light near my apartment? As you might guess, one of the next things that happened was that I quit the Opryland gig and started looking for another job.

I found a flexible position as mailroom and errand boy for a publishing called Triune Music or Triune Publishing—something like that. Triune was a Christian publisher that focused largely on choir arrangements for churches, and I seem to remember that they had a special interest in cantatas or church musicals. At the time I was there, the company's biggest claim to fame, however, was its connection to singer Cynthia Clawson. I don't remember what that connection was, but I met her and thought that a step in the right direction. I also don't remember anything else about the company, except that perhaps I was interested in a receptionist there (with whom I never got further than a few laughs).

As the end of the semester approached that spring, the only friend I remember, Taylor Binkley, announced that he was joining the Navy—I think it was the Navy. I didn't like the idea of living where I was on 17th Avenue with the other fellow there and whoever else might show up to rent Taylor's place, so I started looking around for a new apartment. I found one across the river in east Nashville. I liked the place a lot, and sometime in May I packed up my little one-room joint and moved. As I recall my new place was half of a house, much like the downstairs arrangement at the 17th Avenue location. I don't remember the name of the street (Mansfield, just left of center on this map, seems familiar).

I moved to east Nashville but never lived there. Taylor's departure, the end of school and the prospect of a summer alone in Music City left me disenchanted with the place. As I recall, I went home for a weekend of mid spring in the North Carolina mountains, and for all intents and purposes, I retreated from Nashville. I recruited my young cousin Mark to ride return there with me, load up my stuff and drive back to my home in Walnut, NC, all in a single day.

So ended my first sojourn in Nashville. That fall of 1980 I enrolled at the University of North Carolina, Asheville (UNCA), as a Literature and Language major, but I made it through only half the semester before I quit. Even though I'd left Nashville, my heart was in the music, not in school. I got a job at a sports store owned by a good friend from those days. I sang a lot in churches—wrote "Dear Mother" that fall, I think, and "Daisy"—and began to play a little bit in local restaurants. Home still had its loneliness and world its sadness—my cousin Joe was away at UT-Knoxville; that December, John Lennon was murdered—but I felt myself better off than in Nashville.

But it wouldn't be long—April 1981—before notions of returning to Nashville began to creep back into my mind.