Red Truck Road Trip – EAST Coast Team

♪♪ “If I come back with my tail tucked between my legs / we’ll say, well, at least I tried it anyway/ if I come back a star or go home with broken dreams / I know Mom and Dad will be waiting for me / in Missouri.” ♫ (Josh Dunne)

There’s a fellow in Nashville singing my song; my heart bellows to his melody and his lyrics pull me into the Cadillac Ranch. There’s passion, soul, and country sadness while he performs his refrain of leaving his home in St. James, Missouri to venture for his Big Time Tennessee dreams. Fear strikes because this girl could fall in love with a country boy, so I almost didn’t enter. But that song beckons me, strummin’ my pain – you can say, and I grab a seat alone near the left of the stage. Pulled pork, fries, and a Pepsi, I order, and then try to write about Washington D.C. and Virginia, but I can’t. What lies before me is what lies within me, and I am in total love with this city.

As I take in my surroundings, it is three o’clock in the afternoon and the Cadillac Ranch is dim. In the center of the bar is a good, old fashion white caddy raised on a platform. Then, on the stage is my personal composer that I share with about twenty other folks who feel that he’s singing for them. They cry out, “Missouri, that’s my hometown.” But they don’t know that even though he and I are states away, we puzzle together more than they can imagine. His song is me. My time, my fork, my choice – his song is what I was and where I am.

Casey’s cowboy boots click as she brings me over a refill. Though I feel like a novelty in the scene, no one bothers me because they are amazed by the real gem, Josh Dunne, who finishes his song and says, “I love doing that song. It’s about as true of a song that I can write.”

Honesty is the policy I was taught as a student writer. Sometimes that notion is hard for me to bare; to share your soul, your pain, your fears, and your dreams, it’s as intimate as it can get. It takes courage to say you’ll miss your mother and know you’ll hurt her when you leave; but sometimes there are things that you ought to do. Only twenty-one years old, tapping his black cowboy boots to the rhythm of his black, acoustic guitar, Dunne sings out the essence of country – genuine stories inside a song with a deep resounding, harmonious twang. And the people adore those tales. They thank him with dollars for his plastic jug and shots of “Apple Jack” (Jack Daniels and Apple Schnapps). He blushes and chokes when he takes it. He tells us stories of life in Missouri and about how his parents met in bar and have been married for twenty-five years.

He then plays another country classic and though I feel in as if I entered a foreign land, another country where everyone knows the celebrities and I am naïve; but yet, I get it. I get him, his heart, his purpose. ♫ “If I don’t chase this, I’ll never forgive myself.” ♫ (Dunne) And when he says, “”They may never put me on the radio, but I’m going to die trying.” I finish my Pepsi with a smile.