rideaway

Ride Away

Over the last couple of years I've been trying to tell a story using songs and using my analysis of historical events that would encompass what has happened in the West. We have an abundance of wealth all throughout our states -- mineral wealth, timber wealth, water wealth, wealth in the creative talent and energy of our people -- but we don't have money for schools, we don't have money for roads, we don't have money for hospitals in small towns, we don't own the wealth that we have.

A lot of it's owned by the Federal government. Two-thirds of Utah is Federal land, and they put out the land leases to the private developers for the potash in our Uinta Basin or the shale on the Colorado-Utah border. We don't derive any wealth out of that, except for a few jobs, and most of the time these developers bring in their own people. Then that wealth goes someplace else, same as with Kentucky.

All that wealth was created, pioneered and discovered by people who moved out into the West, mainly after the Civil War. Every place they went they created this wealth with their hands and their sweat and, a lot of times, with their lives. And they wound up not owning it. They had to boom on to someplace else, just like I boomed out of Utah because I couldn't make a living there.

The story really begins at the end of the Civil War when a lot of people were given a lot of lies and a lot of promises, and paid off with a lot of funny money that wasn't worth anything. They found out that they didn't have any place to go. If they were Southern boys they very often didn't have a home to go back to. If they were Northern boys, there was a depression going on, there wasn't any work. So these people were encouraged to leave the East and go out West. For most of the people, at least the ones I've read about, the Civil War was a very bad experience and most of them wanted to get as far away from it as they could.

I hear this song being sung by a woman who stayed behind, a flower of the old Confederacy, who is writing a letter to her man who went off to war with all of the dash, all of the vigor, all of the pomp and circumstance. At the end of the war he might have wound up loading farm equipment on barges going across the Mississippi, waiting until he could get enough money together to join a wagon train going West. He's told her that when he gets settled out there he'll send for her, if she'll still have him. This song is the letter she sends back.

Now all our standards in battle have fallen;
The young men so seldom homeward repair;
The great hall is empty and now it seems haunted
By memories of loved ones who once gathered there.

Your father who loves you so often speaks of you;
Your mother lies sleeping where the magnolias bend;
Your brother has gone with a roving sea captain,
While I'm waiting here for some word you might send.

The moonlight is falling through high broken columns -
Old Longtree in ruins -- so silent and proud;
The garden where lately we wandered together
Is all overgrown with new brambles now.

[Prev] [Index] [Next]