On Thursday evening, Leesa and I attended a local literary event. Atlas Books hosts poets and writers once a month at Johnson City’s Dos Gatos, and this month Davis Shoulders of Atlas welcomed poets Thomas Alan Holmes and Susan O’Dell Underwood to the Dos Gatos stage. Alan read from his first collection of poetry, In the Backhoe’s Shadow, published by Iris Press, and Susan — generally known as a poet — read from her first novel, Genesis Road, published by Madville Publishing. And there’s the tie-in to my song, “Genesis Road.”
As is often the case in these modern days, I’d never met Susan in person until Thursday, although we’d been online “friends” for a couple of years. Several months before her novel’s publication, she learned that I had a song with the same title as her upcoming novel. I don’t remember at this point whether Alan told her about it or I did, but Susan and I were joking in a message thread that she should use it as her intro song when she went out for readings to promote her book. While that didn’t happen for her entire book tour, we made it so on Thursday. Alan read from his beautiful and humorous collection to kick things off, and then he and I played “Genesis Road” to welcome Susan to the stage for her reading.
Song and novel are different in content, but Susan and I got our titles from the same place. If you drive I-40 between Knoxville and Nashville (or vice versa), as you enter (or leave) the vicinity of Crossville, TN, you pass Exit 320 for State Highway 298 / Genesis Rd / Crossville. I don’t know how often Susan has seen that sign in her travels, but I saw it lots in the years when I lived in Nashville and traveled many times between there and my home in Walnut, NC. I’m sure that one of the first sightings of the sign I must have flipped open my notebook and written down the road name.
But I was nearing the end of my time in Nashville before I wrote the song. I began with the title and then scoured my notebook for bits and pieces I might use in writing the lyric. The only bit I remember from this part of the process is coming across these lines that became the beginning of the second verse:
But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.
I remember writing this in Lexington, KY, where I and my friends Noel and T. Michael had gone to pick up scalper tickets for one of Bruce Springsteen’s ’80s tours–either for Born in the U.S.A. or Tunnel of Love. I remember sitting in the car parked facing the street outside some store or other that Noel and T. Michael had gone in to look for one thing or another. The afternoon sky was blue and dotted with cotton-ball clouds. A Lexington street stretched out in front of me, a line of traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red. And then came the lines. Pretty simple, really.
The main happening that brought my Nashville years to a close was reuniting with Leesa after many years apart. At some point as we moved through reunion toward marriage, I knew that I would leave Nashville and return to the North Carolina mountains, specifically to Asheville, where Leesa lived with her son Lane and worked at a major salon. Again, the idea of such a return wasn’t solely related to our physical reunion. I’d been thinking about it. Even though the writing of “There Was Always a Train” preceded that reunion by two or three years, you can still hear her living in the lyric. And before that, I’d reversed our situations in the lyric of “Dizzy from the Distance.” Then, of course, there’s “Best I’ve Ever Seen” and “Homecoming.”
Musically, “Genesis Road” has a simple four-chord structure: C, F, Am, & G. It begins with a little musical hook in the C to F progression, in which the movement on the D-string is this note pattern: E > D > E > F. The song was one put together by the Cody band in those Nashville days (Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, Steve Grossman on drums, and either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass; probably Mark C. and Steve on background vocals). Gene Ford came up with the signature lick sings out over the C > F movement. Mark Chesshir took the lead on the breakdown after the first chorus, and Gene took over the lead from there to the third verse.
Genesis Road
We ran the Genesis Road.
We ran it hard and fast,
Living every day like the last,
No questions asked.
With the love of the open-hearted,
A love that knew no shame,
We staked our claim
And Eden it was named.
But something came creeping
Into the garden,
Whispering to my soul,
Telling me there was a bigger world
Than that woman and that lonely road.
But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.
I see a lonesome star.
I see a tear-stained moon.
And far away somewhere
Those two also shine on you.
Baby, leave your window
And find a picture
Of the days when things were clear.
The smiling face beside you there
Is somber distanced from you here.
In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.
There are deeper rhythms in life
Than these driving my reckless pace,
And this mechanical human race
Is losing touch with grace.
You are a dancer in love
With the native rhythms I have left —
The rise and fall of your breast —
The beat of life itself.
Baby, set that rhythm as a beacon
I can feel and follow home.
I’ve left my winding way unmarked,
And there’s no returning on my own.
In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.