Deciding to Record at Sixty
It all started with a walk through a 19th Century family cemetery in the eastern part of Jefferson County, Kentucky. In the middle of the cemetery was a concrete pad holding parts of a half-dozen or so tombstones that had been scattered by a tornado that struck the area in April, 1974. The added inscription noted that there was no way to determine where the tombstones had been prior to the tornado.
As a Southerner (raised in Texas), I had been taught as a child not to walk on graves, as it was a sign of disrespect of the dead. Folk wisdom had it that when you felt a sudden, unexplained chill, then someone was walking on your grave. I occurred to me as I looked at the concrete pad that I could not really avoid walking on a grave as I strolled around the cemetery.
As I left the cemetery to continue the walk, the phrase “Somebody’s walking on my grave” popped into my head and, as a songwriter my habit and inclination, by the time I got home, I had a chorus and first verse of a song, written in a more-or-less 19th Century call-and-response style. The rest of the tune came together rather more rapidly than usual, so that by the time I next met my friend Michael the neophyte bass player, I was ready to try it out on him. He liked it and we worked it up.