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about

Everything in this song is true, and because of that I don't seem to be able to sing it without crying. Chris wrote it during our visit to the area a few years ago. I told him a bunch of stories as we rode around, and unbeknownst to me, he wrote the song in his head as we drove to Topeka. He first recorded it with Houston Jones and their record Three Crow Town is available at www.houstonjones.com. Travis Jones sings it great. Our version here features the sweet, sweet, sweet clawhammer banjo style of multi-instrumentalist and composer Erik Pearson.

Hugh and Mary are my mom's late parents. There was a catalpa grove near the spur line and the rodeo ground's across the street. Popo's daddy planted the catalpa windbreak in 1900.

Popo is buried a mile from there, a small graveyard surrounded by open fields as far as you can see. Some of Momo's ashes were sprinkled at his grave.

Virginia, Mom's cousin, bought a lot of their property and had the cherry orchard chopped down; it was very old, but still so sad to us. In summer in the 1960s we'd play in the orchard and pick and eat as many cherries as we wanted. The cherry orchard was next to the packing shed where we polished apples. Momo said one day she watched a tornado go right past the shed.

Momo and Popo grew apples, melons of every kind, corn, wheat, peaches, and the cherries. Popo had wanted to be a farmer but instead worked for Ma Bell and started farming with Momo after retirement. Being who they were, they knew a lot about weather. Momo had a saying about a partly cloudy partly clear day, "There's enough blue to make a Dutchman's britches."

You can look up the town of Longford, Kansas, where the farmhouse, which my great granddad poured in concrete at the turn of the century, still stands and is owned by a young family. The farmhouse was a polestar for everyone in extended family out in all directions. People still go there to see it, to the chagrin of the family who now own it.

My mom was born in the house, in the same room where her dad passed away in his sleep in his 90s. Cousin Donald bought the house when Momo went to live with Mom. Donald passed away there, too. And Popo's father, who built the house, passed away in an upstairs bedroom in his 30s. He had appendicitis and there were no medications for him back then.

My sister and I have heard buzzing sounds in the rooms upstairs when we were falling asleep. Momo said there were a couple of people doing some work for her in one of the upstairs rooms and they saw or heard something that spooked them, left the house and wouldn't come back. After Popo passed away, everyone stayed in the house before the funeral. Mom was sitting in one of the rooms and said all of a sudden she could smell Popo's after shave so strong "it just about made me sick!" A house full of secrets. The ghosts must have traveled on once the whole inside was gutted and remodeled for the new family; they say they haven't seen or heard anything like that.

lyrics

Sweet Virginia burned down the orchard
In that three crow town
West of Topeka, North of Salina
A mile from the burying ground

There is no simple life
There's only the long way around
From the edge of the world
To the heart of a three crow town

Hugh and Mary grew old together
In that three crow town
Catalpa windbreak across the spur line
Where the blacktop meets the rodeo ground

That old house
Filled up with secrets as old as the plough that broke the plain
And the sky's still blue as a Dutchman's britches
And the wind blows with a head full of rain

There is no simple life
There's only the long way around
From the edge of the world
To the heart of a three crow town

In a three crow town
At the heart of the world
We'll sing the darkness down
For Hugh and Mary and Sweet Virginia
And the ashes on the ground

There is no simple life
There's only the long way around
From the edge of the world
To the heart of a three crow town

credits

from Colville (ten songs), track released December 31, 2011
words and music by Chris Kee
guitar: Chris
clawhammer-style banjo: Erik Pearson (www.myspace.com/erikpearson)

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Springhouse California

Music from the Americana Borderlands - from artsong to the roadhouse and places in between:
Chris Kee and Jane Selkye met in the San Francisco band Me Jane, and have played with David Phillips in various
groups for the last twenty years.
... more

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