Remembrance of songs passed...

Have you ever heard a song and suddenly been transported to another place in time?

That happened to me last night while watching Peter Bogdanovich's 1990 film, "Texasville," which I recently purchased on DVD. The sequel to 1971's "The Last Picture Show," the movie is set in the fictional Anarene, Texas, in 1984, and updates the viewer on the lives of Duane, Sonny, Jacy and the rest of the small town's citizens. As is Bogdanovich's custom, all of the music used in the film is diegetic, or in other words, one can see the source of the music in the actual film.

Most of the songs were blasting from car radios in the film, most being country and rock songs that would have been popular in '84. One of them, an old Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song called "Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper's Dream)" took me back to childhood. Hearing the song, I was suddenly six years old again, driving down the road with my Dad, listening to the song on a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band cassette he had just bought.

As the Dirt Band was singing about living life in plain dirt fashion, my mind drifted back over the last 21 years, marveling at how quickly time passes. The film itself was about the passing of time, about the various ways life ends up disappointing. It was difficult not to get depressed.

After all, it doesn't seem right for me to be able to hear a song, remember it and realize it was a hit 21 years ago...

The same thing happened earlier today, when a friend e-mailed about an old Vern Gosdin song I hadn't thought about in roughly the same number of years called "Way Down Deep." Who knows why the sudden remembrance of things past, particularly music, can suddenly bring back happy and bittersweet thoughts and feelings, but it nevertheless does.

It is probably not too healthy to be this nostalgic, but God, it feels good. Ending a Friday afternoon listening to Charlie Rich sing about taking it on home, life somehow, despite its disappointments, seems like it for once has fallen right into place.