100 Days of Gladness: Day 36

Retrieving a song that got away

tinalear
6 min readJun 12, 2024
Image courtesy of stock.adobe.com

To understand this gladness about retrieving a song that got away, you need the backstory. This is how I found the song the first time:

In the summer of 1988, we lived in Cody, Wyoming. My husband, Harry, was a world renowned western artist, and we lived part of our time in Cody, and the other part in Tuscany. It was a rich, busy time and our kids were young.

One summer, a great traveling show called “Ballad of the West” came to Cody. Bobby Bridger wrote it, and full company productions of it ran for eight consecutive summer seasons in Wyoming. Grammy Award-nominee Bill Ginn, Wes Studi (who later had a role in “Dances With Wolves”) and other stellar musicians were members of the cast.

Harry loved them. Harry and I both loved them all. Many evenings, we’d have them over to our house. We’d cook together and talk about the world and everything in it. Bobby made a mean fettuccini alfredo, and I made my signature salad. One night, as we came to the heart of the evening, the belly of it really, we all sang for one another.

I’ll never forget it. I had lived for so many years in a cowboy isolation tank — where it was all Hank Williams or 1970s pop radio (in the eighties) and practically no one even knew Joni Mitchell’s name, much less her music —…

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tinalear
tinalear

Written by tinalear

Novelist. Poet. Musician. Buddhist. Quilter. Animal lover. Visible grownup. Hidden child. Secret dancer when all alone. Makes good bread.

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