Last week, my wife Foot Foot handed me a journal she found that I'd written about twelve years ago, before we married. She asked me to go ahead and look through it--right then! Uh-oh...something's up. What in the world could I have written in there to have behooved my missus? Oh, dear.
I had no idea, for I hadn't looked at that journal since...heck, I don't even remember writing in it. I flipped it open, and I asked her what particular page or pages she wanted me to read, and she told me the first two. I opened up to the first page, and she immediately reached over and flipped it over and pointed to the middle of the page and exclaimed, "That right there!" I'd written, "I wonder how _______ is doing. I haven't heard from her in awhile."
"See what I mean?" my wife asked. I shook my head.
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Yes," she responded.
"And, what, didn't I write something about you in here?"
"Yes, but you mentioned her last!" she said. Sure enough, she was right. I flipped through the rest of the journal (I'd only written in about two more pages--yeah, I sure was prolific), and I saw no mention of my wife after the last mention of ________. I flipped to the front and skimmed, and I did see that I mentioned my wife...first. Heck, I even speculated (in the journal) about what I could do to win her love. I dropped her name twice, too.
Didn't matter much, though. Foot Foot needed to be Donna Summer, Floyd Cramer, and Robert Johnson. She needed to be the last dance, the last date, and the last fair deal gone down. And she was, I tried to explain to her. Look whom I married, I tried to tell her.
"You didn't think so then," she said. Yeesh! What's a man to do? "You were going to follow her to _______!"
"But I didn't. I stayed here and married you," I said.
"Hmph. Bet you wish you would have gone. Bet you regret not going," she said, and then our two-year-old daughter demanded to be released from the confines of her carseat, and that particular conversation ended.
I've thought before--and not in a long time, not until now--about how my life would have been had I hightailed it north from Mississippi, leaving the life I knew to follow what I once thought might have been--or could have been, or could have turned out to be--love. What would have happened had I followed that girl and the situation not have gone like I'd have wanted it to go? What if the romance were to be doomed? Would have I turned tail and slipped back home? Would have taken that midnight train to Mississippi, back to the world I would have left behind not (to what would have been) so long ago? Would I have traveled elsewhere? Or would I have stayed put there, abandoned?
The latter's the case with the protagonist in Solomon Burke's rendition of the forty-year-old Tom T. Hall country-blues lament (it's been recorded previously by country artists Deryl Dodd, Lee Hazelwood, Buddy Miller, Bobby Bare, and by Hall himself), "That's How I Got to Memphis." The song--and it's a great one, as are most of Hall's during his prime--is the hard luck version of "Midnight Train to Georgia." Here, the tragedy inherent in the Knight song deepens. In the Knight song, the protagonist would rather live in her lover's world than without the lover in her own world, so she follows him home. In the Hall song, once the protagonist arrives, the lover leaves. Ouch. Sounds like it hurts, doesn't it? It does when Solomon Burke sings it.
Burke's voice was once both booming (he started his professional career as a pastor) and supple, as evidenced by this soul pioneer's vocals on his soul hits "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "Down in the Valley," "Cry to Me," and "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms) (which was a country cover, too). The years and the concerts and the Sunday sermons have taken a toll on Burke's voice, but that aged and worn quality serves him well here, as that ragged quality bespeaks of years of the blues. Burke must surely realize this, as he drops the volume in his lines at the end of each verse, some ending in barely a whisper. Burke's technique and the record's spare production lend creedence to the heartbreak in the lyric, the saddest part of which isn't that his lover's left him, but that he's determined to still see here again...by waiting for her to come back.
Right at the end of the song, Burke accomplishes something pretty special, something rarefied that only the best actors can accomplish. In the matter of just four recitations of the same line, with just the slightest change of inflection, Burke displays grief, resignation, defiance, and the self-effacing humor that often comes with acceptance. It's tragic and shattering and, ultimately, life affirming, as the once-bemonikered King of Soul plumbs the depth of the soul of a man who suffers a rejection that for most would be life altering. It's to Burke's credit--and Hall's, too, as this interpretation was always present in the lyric (though, until Burke, not the interpreter)--that this song can show us how strong a soul can be, how resolve can overcome whatever life and love and fate and former lovers may throw our way.
"If you love somebody enough/You follow them wherever they go," Burke sings here, and he's right. He knows. Tom T. Hall knows, too. As do I. Resolve and love and loyalty will take you anywhere, to follow the one with whom you can't live without, whether that be Memphis, Georgia, _______, or right here in Mississippi. Love can travel the world, but it doesn't always have to. Sometimes the midnight train leaves the same day it arrives and in the same location. Sometimes, she doesn't leave Memphis. Sometimes, she waits for you just as you wait for her. If she'd have left, you'd have followed, but sometimes she doesn't leave; she just reads your journal instead.
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