I once read a music critic declare that he experienced his greatest pleasure listening to classical music while driving. The sound coming from an AM signal through the small speakers in his car rendered pointless any preoccupation with such things as sound quality. It was just music, solitude, and the road, the music, filling the night, setting the pace as he drove.
On drives through South Georgia in the mid-sixties music would have come from AM radio and while the car radio could sometimes pull in some of the big clear-channel stations after sunset, it was more often local stations in places such as Vidalia, Eastman, or Dublin. Because these stations had limited range you had to change the dial regularly as you drove into and out of one coverage area into another, the static eventually drowning out the music.
Pulling into a filling station in Soperton one night on a drive from Savannah to Dublin I stepped out of the car to near silence, my shoes on the gravel the only sound until I opened the door to ‘Flowers on the Wall’ by the Statler Brothers. ‘Need some gas, son?’ ‘No sir, I’m good on gas, just need to perk up a little, maybe a bite of something to eat and a cup of coffee. I need something to keep me awake for thirty more miles.’ I sat on a stool for a while, listing to the station operator and a friend talking about the opening of dove season. With thanks and good night, I shut the door on Merle Haggard, stepped back into the night. Someone had clear cut some pines alongside the road and the smell of pine needles and sap drifted in through the open window. Summertime.
I had been in that station before. Driving on Ga 46 five or six miles east of Soperton I saw a car in the side of the road and a person leaning over a flat tire. It was dark, warm. I stopped. The person turned out to be a young woman, delighted that someone had come along as this was not a busy road, and grateful for the help. I guess I didn’t appear disreputable and, in the event, did know how to change a tire. She was going much farther, to Columbus, a hundred and seventy miles away. I persuaded her that she should get the flat repaired before she continued on her drive. Columbus was a long way in the dark. I knew that there was a late-night gas station just up the road where a repair could be made. She followed. I went inside when we pulled up. In the late ‘60s gas stations still did at least some engine repair and most would fix a flat.
Several guys were inside were watching the TV when I came in and asked about the repair, explaining that this girl was trying to make it Columbus. One of the men said he would do it and I rolled the tire into the open bay. He said he wanted to hurry and get back to the TV. I asked what was going on. ‘You don’t know? A guy is getting set to step out of that lunar module and walk on the moon.’ He fixed the flat and I rolled it to her car and put it in the trunk, walked to the car window. ‘Guy is fixing to talk on the moon,’ I told her. ‘Want to go in and watch it on TV or just sit out here for a while?’
On ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken II,’ John Haitt sings a duet with Rosanne Cash, that depicts a couple in a car parked somewhere in the night. It’s a raucous tune that ends with Haitt talking over the music. ‘One small step for mankind. One giant step for us…’ Inside the men gathered around the TV watched as Neil Armstong stepped down onto the lunar surface.
I still travel those roads when I get back to Georgia, not as often as I’d like. It’s a six-hour drive from where I live to the Savannah River and a few miles more before I can get off the interstate. It feels different within a couple of miles, a relaxation, breath comes deeper, pulse rate seems to slow down. Coming through Pembroke late one night, past Aunt Daisy’s house, dark now and empty, past where the old gym and school stood, past the lane that led up to my grandmother’s house, past the Baptist Church, the water tank, up to the town’s only traffic light, passing by a hundred memories sleeping, quietly sleeping at the cemetery where I used to think one day I’d lie.
While the six or more hours of interstate are wearisome, I feel a sense of the familiar when I slow down for Metter or Mount Vernon, Edenton or Shady Dale, a sense of been here before, know this road, these scenes. I enjoy familiar stops, the Dairy Queen in Monticello, Jan’s Fried Chicken in Cedar Crossing, the street in Dudley, a little farming town where my parents died. The house is gone but the trees remain, the same wide, quiet street. A stop at the Rock Store up on Highway 80 for a take-out of fried potato slices and a Diet Coke.
Driving north out of Gray for Monticello the road passes through Round Oak and Hillsboro. Nothing happening there now but on July 31, 1864 the Battle of Sunshine Church was fought just north of Round Oak. Maj. General George Stoneman, US, was defeated by Brig. General Alfred Iverson, CSA. Stoneman and 600 of his troops surrendered. Iverson, from nearby Clinton, knew the countryside well enough to get his forces around Stoneman in time to dig in on a ridgeline directly astride Stoneman’s planned route. Stoneman had been attempting to get his brigades farther south to free Federal troops held prisoner at Andersonville. In its fourteen months of existence, of forty-five thousand union prisoners, twelve-thousand nine hundred and twelve died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, and exposure.
Six miles beyond Round Oak is Hillsboro. Established in 1795 and described well into the 20th century as a thriving and prosperous community with a number of stores, churches, shops, a bank, and a schoolhouse. The railroad long ago pulled up the tracks, the schools closed, people moved away. Martha and I went through on a fall day a few years ago and, slowing as we passed, saw blooming across all of the yards thousands of bright red spider lilies, Lycoris radiata, and surrounding these clouds of soft yellow Sulphur butterflies. The chief pollinators of the Spider Lily they only appear when the lilies are in bloom.
Much of the countryside is the same as it was fifty and sixty years ago, at least if you don’t remember what it looked like decades past. It’s green countryside still. There are fewer farms, many of the old fields row planted in pines or reclaimed by oak, gum, and pine. You see a difference when you drop down over the fall line and the roads spread out over the coastal plain. Though fewer, many of the farms are larger, enormous fields with center pivot irrigation systems with booms a thousand feet long. It remains open country, twenty miles to the next little town. Many of the roads are as they were, just new asphalt over the same old road beds. Georgia 15 is the same, a sweeping curve down until the straight stretch over the Oconee River Bridge and then up and to the right as the road enters a band of hills that mark Greene County’s southern border.
The mom-and-pop country stores have very nearly disappeared. Five-Points Store in Macon County, Taylor’s at Johnson’s Corner in Toombs County, Marshall’s Corner Store, in Cotton, Mitchell County, and a favorite, the Woodville Pantry, in Greene County. There are others though they are fewer each year, made obsolete by good roads, retail concentration, and the spread of the chain convenience store, offering the same but different.
Every long curve, church, cross-road store, every bridge over every river a memory. Falling sound asleep when coming to the stop on GA 46 at US 301 after midnight and when I put the car in neutral for a moment I just dropped off and didn’t wake up until someone came up behind me and blinked their lights. Or the night another Chevelle started to pull around me just west of Metter. It was late, no cars on the road, and I decided not to let him pass. We raced door to door from Metter to Soperton, thirty-four miles of two-lane road as fast as we dared to drive, stopped in Soperton, got out, admired each other’s cars, agreed that it was a good race, shook hands.
Music continues to be an important part of those drives and in this respect is better than in the past, or, to be precise, the source of the music is much improved. Spotify has replaced the intermittent signals, static, commercials, and repetitious playlist. Now I just select from one of the menus and I have a soundtrack for every drive.
Joan Didion, in ‘South and West,’ concludes by explaining her deep attachment to California’s Central Valley. With a change in only a couple of phrases her feelings apply to anyone with a strong sense of place and home. “Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in (Georgia). The (hardwood and pine forest) look right to me, the particular flat expanse of (South Georgia) comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” I am easy there.
Georgia Stories and Songs 
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