Day 9: Christmas/Music

Some of you might be wondering what goes on in this helmet of mine while I'm riding for ten hours at a time. The answer is music, mostly. In Arizona I turned Home on the Range into a reggae tune, then in Texas I came up with a song called Driving Through West Texas (original, I know) where lyrics about cities passed and surrounding landscapes were easily inserted into a simple country-western verse and chorus, and I came up with a second tune in which "I left my heart in Texas, and it moved to Tennessee, then I found it in Kentucky with the help of a bottle of whiskey." After taking in the New Orleans jazz I wrote an up-tempo song about living on the Mississippi River, and upon my entry to Virginia I found myself singing the story of a beautiful girl named Virginia loosely based on the song Melissa by the Allman Brothers Band. The lyrics are simple and usually there's only one mapped out verse, but I can sing the chorus, scat, and riff on each one of the songs for about an hour before I drive myself nuts and move on to something else. As I've gotten further north I've started singing Christmas songs to pass the time. Tonight I joined my Uncle Dick for a Christmas concert at the Mathews Library in which my Aunt Adele was one of eleven singers. For a choir of sixty and seventy-somethings they blended very well and brought back memories of attending and performing in many Holiday Chorales growing up in Rochester, NY. Truly, the Christmas spirit is best given with the gift of song. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for raising me with music in my soul!