LETTERS FROM HOME: SATURDAY NIGHT WHERE THE RAINBOW HITS THE GROUND

May 30, 1996

Dear Julie,

Just returned from Nashville, where I watched a lovable bunch of broken down has-beens trying to recapture their glory days. I could do that by day during a PGA Senior Tour tournament and at night in the honky-tonks.

I had hoped to catch sight of a legend, Arnie or Jack, but they weren't at the tournament. Lee Trevino was, though, and Gary Player and Raymond Floyd and a bunch of guys a lot of people probably don't know about. Gods to golfers.

DC didn't accompany me on this trip because she wanted to stay home and straighten things for the upcoming arrival of house guests. So she said. I suspect the real reason she didn't go is because she thinks golf is excruciatingly silly. I've tried to explain its intricacies, the subtle differences of course design, the prodigious amount of skill and practice required to be a fine golfer. Her eyes just glaze over and she changes the subject to wallpaper.

The strangers I walked around the Opryland course with love the game. The heat and humidity were withering, but these were past-masters at work. Some of them can't muster the robust swings they once did, even look like weekend hackers just having a good day, but they were still magnificent.

The broken-down theme continued at night in Printers Alley, a touristy lane where country and western clubs coexist with a blues bar and a strip joint. My brother's girlfriend sings at Lonnie's Western Room in the alley. The owner doesn't pay her but she gets tips and can sell her demo tape.

That's the way it is in Nashville, Hollywood South, a city populated by dreamers and the sharks who gladly live off their hopes.

Of course, the dream can come true. My brother was roommates with a guy who suddenly found his songs sought after by the business's big names. They aren't roommates anymore. The guy just built a big house, parties with Tanya Tucker and drives a rented Jaguar.

A little bar called Barbara's provided a glimpse of what might be the real Nashville. A 30ish songwriter named Marty who's had a few successes was making a rowdy show, working on his hell-raiser reputation. Don't know if he was celebrating another hit or just Saturday night.

Cowboy-hatted Marty was dancing with his Champagne bottle and fondling a pretty voluptuary who might have been skipping her high school graduation party. "We're gettin' married," he drunkenly informed the bar. "In a hundred years!"

On the bandstand were some impassive veterans of many Nashville tours and Marty spectacles, no doubt. When they introduced a songwriter named Earl Clark, Marty grabbed a microphone and urged the audience to clap louder because "Earl Clark is real country, like me."

That's the schism in Nashville these days, between "real country" performers and Philadelphians acquiring Southern accents.

Earl, that legend I'd been looking for, has seen as many honky-tonks as Merle Haggard has and was having none of this. "I've been compared to lots of people but never to Marty Brown," he said. Marty smiled real big, maybe thought he'd been complimented.

Earl sang some songs that were slightly familiar. Songs about longing and feeling imprisoned. Those songs came from a place inside him Marty Brown hasn't been to yet.

Then Earl sang a tune about Nashville, a city where every pawn shop is filled with guitars. "Sometimes gold sometimes sorrow," he sang softly, "Where the rainbow hits the ground."

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.