This is another example of a Song of the Week that sort of worked its way into my brain by accident when I thought I had decided on a completely different song.  It came around as I was thinking about traveling.  For most of my life, I have been in the routine of spending the majority of time at home with my wife and kids and taking off for a family vacation or visit to relatives once or twice a year.  I have been quite happy with that approach to travel, but it seems that a different cycle has begun – I think a temporary one.  More on that later.

The Band was a group of four Canadians and a gentleman from Arkansas.  They originally got together in Canada as the backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, and were known as the Hawks.  After a few years, the group left Hawkins and began performing on its own.  Shortly thereafter, one of its performances was heard by Bob Dylan, who hired them to work with him as he moved from acoustic folk-based music to electric rock.  I was fortunate to have seen a concert by “Bob Dylan and the Band” while I was in high school.  Without getting wordy and going into detail, I vividly recall Dylan launching into a guitar break on “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” and going on and on until Robbie Robertson, the Band’s lead guitarist, walked over and shook him.

There was a break in the touring in 1967, during which Dylan and the Band members retired to semi-seclusion in Woodstock, New York.  That time was extended for many additional months when Dylan was supposedly injured in a motorcycle accident.  While they were not performing, the group continued to work with Dylan, writing songs and recording demos, a process which more or less culminated in Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album and the Band’s first album, Music from Big Pink.

That initial album was quite successful and was followed up in 1969 with the Band’s best work, an eponymous album, The Band.  Although most of the group’s members were Canadian, The Band was based solidly in Americana.  It looked back to the Civil War in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”; to the unionization of sharecroppers that occurred during the Great Depression in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”; to the ragtime era of “Rag Mama Rag”; to the truck driver of “Up On Cripple Creek.”  And among those songs was “Rockin’ Chair.”

“Rockin’ Chair is a complex song about which I could write pages.  I won’t.  I will just say that it tells of an aging sailor who has spent his whole life at sea and is ready to give up his travels and live out his days in a rocking chair “down in Old Virginny.”  The instrumentation is all acoustic – including an accordion – with no percussion. It sounds like it might be the work of a bunch of old friends sitting around a rocking chair or two making music on someone’s wooden porch.

In this song, the narrator does not actually make it back to his rocking chair, but the very last words are “old rockin’ chair’s got me.”  Those are the first words in a song called “Rockin’ Chair” written by Hoagy Carmichael in 1929.  In Carmichael’s song the narrator is in his own home and his own rocking chair waiting to move on to the next world.  It seems to imply that the old sailor will one day make his way to Old Virginny.

Now, as to where my family travelers are going this year.  Well, due to work obligations and family obligations and even children growing older, I get exhausted just thinking about it all.  Just a month ago, my wife Cathy and I were in Florida visiting her brother and her mother (who was visiting from Ohio).  As I write this, Cathy is in San Diego, California on a “girl trip” with three friends and our son Michael is traveling in Thailand (on a vacation from China where he is teaching this year).

Next month, Cathy and our daughter Suzanne and our grandson Ryder are going to Portland, Oregon for a week.  Shortly after that, I am taking a trip to China to to spend some time with Michael.  In the Spring, I am going to Paris (the one in France – and, yes, je suis Charlie, aussi) with Ryder, Suzanne and Suzanne’s husband Jeff.  Cathy wants to get back to Ohio to see her mother twice this year.  Beyond that, we have this timeshare (this “stupid timeshare,” I usually say), and we need to go away at least two more weeks to avoid wasting the money we have “invested” there.  As I say, it is exhausting just thinking about it all.  I would happily let almost anyone take one of our timeshare weeks, if they had somewhere they wanted to go.

Apparently that mental exhaustion caused my subconscious to think “Rockin’ Chair” – so here it is: