The Music of Iowa

When we went to New Orleans, we spent quite a bit of time in the SUV going from our camp to the various houses we were working on. Joan is going to kill me because I ended that sentence with a preposition. Anyway. It was a Chevy Tahoe, a big fat SUV and I don't like big fat SUVs because they are bad for the environment. But boy, it was fun to drive. But now I'm off on a tangent.

The point was, we brought music with us. Several of us burned CDs to listen to during the long periods stuck in the kind of traffic that can only be caused by 50,000 people commuting every day from Baton Rouge.

Of course one of my CDs was songs of New Orleans. It's easy to put together a collection of New Orleans songs. There is magic in the place. The city just cries out for songs to be written for it, and many musicians and poets have responded.

This time our destination is Iowa. I didn't own any Iowa music. I didn't know of any Iowa music. I wasn't really figuring on finding much, but I decided to take a look on iTunes.

There are a lot of songs about Iowa.

I sampled a bunch, and downloaded enough to fill a CD. As a matter of fact, I was able to restrict myself only to songs called Iowa. They are all big, wide, lonely beautiful, haunting songs. One is even a particularly poignant song about the Iowa river flooding.

I don't know much about Iowa, really... Stopped there a couple of times on my way someplace else... The last place Buddy Holly played before he left this earth... The place where truly deserving baseball players end up after they die...

There are folks out there with a sense of wonder about the place. I'll be there in two weeks. I'm hoping to catch it.