In the late 1980s, I was still living in Nashville. By some means, probably through my manager Dixie Gamble, I received a script for an upcoming film titled Next of Kin, with a cast headed by Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson and including Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Ben Stiller, Adam Baldwin, and others. The production team was seeking songs for an interesting story of three Gates brothers from the coal culture in eastern Kentucky. Briar (Neeson) is eldest, Truman (Swayze) is in the middle, and Gerald (Paxton) is youngest.
Briar works in the coal business, but Truman has moved to Chicago, where he’s a police detective whose beat covers the city’s hillbilly slums, where lots of southern Appalachian immigrants, particularly Kentucky folk, live. These two brothers are fighting over Gerald’s future. Will he stay home and work the mines, or will he leave the mountains behind for a different life beneath the big city’s sea of light?
As the movie begins, Gerald is in Chicago, but he’s planning to stay there only to earn enough money to put a down payment on his own coal truck. Unfortunately, the work Gerald gets in is a business run by a Chicago mob family, so the poor boy isn’t long for this world. When his honesty gets him killed, Truman wants to find the killer(s) through the legal channels, but Briar becomes impatient and leaves Kentucky for Chicago, where he plans to bring down the hammer of hillbilly justice.
SPOILER ALERT: Briar dies at the hands of the same mob, and Truman throws away all efforts to go by the book, turns in his badge, beckons agents of justice (i.e., revenge) from the hills (including a bow-and-arrow marksman and a feller with a school bus full of snakes), and battles the mob in a vast Chicago cemetery.
I wrote “Homecoming” for the end of the film, after the cemetery scene, when Truman, the only brother to survive Chicago, is taking his wife Jessie (Hunt) home to eastern Kentucky. The script described a scene in which the camera’s point of view is in the vehicle with Truman and Jessie, then the visual pulls back through the rear window to reveal that they’re driving Briar’s old pickup truck with Briar’s coffin in the bed. The visual then pulls further back and rises upwards to reveal the pickup to be on a two-lane highway with the outlines of the Appalachian Mountains rising into the sky ahead of them.
That’s the scene for which I wrote “Homecoming“:
If I die
© Window on the West (ASCAP
In this place so far from home
And I never make my living
From my native soil again,
Don’t leave me where these strangers
Will walk across my bones.
Take me back and lay me with my next of kin. . . .
At one point I heard that “Homecoming” was one of eight songs in the running for the end of the film, and I remember being very excited about it. But the song didn’t make the final cut. When Next of Kin came out in 1988, I learned that they’d changed the ending. Instead of the lovely scene which inspired “Homecoming,” Truman simply goes back to his captain’s office and gets his badge and his job back. Then he goes outside, where he and Jessie get in their car or walk down the street or something equally unmemorable. Not that I would have minded having “Homecoming” playing through that or any scene!
By the way, the end-title song was “Brothers,” written by Larry Gatlin and performed by him and Patrick Swayze, or “Brother to Brother” by Greg Allman.
While it’s regretful that “Homecoming,” the song is quite possibly my favorite among the songs I’ve written, so I don’t regret the experience at all.
Here’s a video that I put together for a class for a faculty technology class at ETSU and made it about my home of Walnut, North Carolina.