I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be "home."
Is home the places that we've once lived, or is it the people who've lived there with us? Is it both? Perhaps home something else entirely, something we're always creating as life goes on.
I've no answer to this question, but I've listened to many songs that speak of home. These songs all speak of their artists' own homes. Their musings aren't exact, and they aren't necessarily all full truths. But, they are all singing of some conception of their homes, even if they exist only in their own minds.
Here are some of these artists' musings of their own homes, found, as is usual, in the words of country songs:
"Deep within' my heart lies a melody, a song of old San Antone;
where in dreams I live with a memory, beneath the stars all alone.
It was there I found beside the Alamo, enchantment strange as the blue up above;
a moonlit path that only she would know, still hears my broken song of love..."
"And more and more I'm thinking, that the only treasures that I'll ever know,
are long ago and far behind, wrapped up in my memories of home..."
"Every day I drive to work across Flint River Bridge,
a hundred yards from the spot where me and grandpa fished.
There's a piece of his old fruit stand on the side of Sawmill Road;
he'd be there peelin' peaches if it was twenty years ago..."
"So lay me down, in that open field out on the edge of town,
and know my soul, is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you're reading this, I'm already home..."
"There's no place like home, there's no place like home.
It just hit me as I was leavin', there's no place like home..."
"Have you ever felt a Southern night?
Free as a breeze, not to mention the trees,
whistlin' tunes that you know and love so...
Have you ever notices Southern skies?
Well, it's precious beauty lies jut beyond the eye;
It goes runnin' through your soul,
like the stories told of old..."
"But I'm stuck here in Tulsa with my Oklahoma blues,
with a pair of concrete shoes that got me sinkin' pretty low..."
"But now happiness is Lubbock, Texas growing nearer and nearer,
and the vision is getting clearer in my dreams,
and I think I finally know just what it means,
and when I die, you can bury me in Lubbock, Texas, in my jeans..."
"Come on take a ride with me, we'll put some gasoline in this truck;
I fire it up, you let the windows down, like there ain't nobody in this town but us..."
"Eight years old, a couple cane poles sitting down by the creek;
Lines in the water, watching those bobbers, seeing that red sun sink..."
"On the banks of the old Bandera where roams the barefoot child.
On Sunday go to meetin' shortcuts out along the high wire lines, down the dusty road.
Once we ran barefooted through a clover fill of dew.
What it made you feel like is a song,
but what it feels like now is..."