In what were originally the first scenes written for Streets of Nashville (eventually folded into chapter six), songwriter Ezra MacRae is more than a little bit drunk and walking on Music Row just before midnight. He has been celebrating his first songwriting successes after five fruitless years of struggling to be heard. Little does he know that the next couple of hours will rock his world. He’ll witness devastating violence that threatens to overwhelm his joy, but he also experiences an encounter that will gift him with a friendship and his first hit song.

Keeping an eye on an approaching storm, Ezra heads for the Hall of Fame Motel’s Sound Track Restaurant & Lounge, some place “dry but not dry,” where he can keep drinking while he waits out the rain.

Ezra and Benny Jack talk for a little. Then the rain is on the verge of beginning, and Benny Jack gets lost somewhere inside his mind.

Sometime later, after the storm has passed, Ezra resumes his walk home in the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning. As he walks, his songwriter’s mind revs up for a few ideas.

With those words, Ezra walks into a storm of a very different and deadly kind.

Chapter Twenty-Two finds him locked in songwriting mode and writing the two main verses. He writes the bridge in Chapter Thirty-Three.

Here I am “covering” Ezra’s song during a recent visit Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky.