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By the end of 1975, I’d graduated from college, lived in East Tennessee, worked for a newspaper, traveled to California, and returned to Nashville to write songs with Lee Owens. We recorded demos and performed at San Antonio’s River Festival, but by 1977, Nashville executives said our music wasn’t “country enough” and suggested New York or Los Angeles.

Then my old friend Stephen Kling called from Manhattan with a job at Record World. A few weeks later, I packed my ’66 VW van and headed north—a Tennessee catfish in the Hudson River.

I became Assistant Art Director and, in 1980, Art Director. From the 42nd floor of 1700 Broadway, I had a front-row seat to the music world, while nights at the Lone Star Café brought encounters with Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Jr., and Levon Helm. Those experiences inspired my tall-tale song, “Lindalu.”

Then came John Lennon’s murder in December 1980. At Record World, we scrapped our issue for a special Lennon edition. Days later, I joined half a million people in Central Park for his memorial. Hearing “Imagine,” I realized my youth had ended. Years later, I turned that moment into “Frozen Tears.”

When Record World folded in 1982, I became Art Director of Doubleday’s Literary Guild. Needing a “disposable car” for New York, I asked my dad, who gave me a 1962 Buick Special with a new cassette radio. One day, while listening to Flatt & Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the Buick had its own breakdown—a blown tire on the BQE.

I returned South in 1984, but the incident inspired my final song, “Breakdown on the BQE.” I changed the Buick to an ’83 because it rhymed with BQE, but the bluegrass and blown tire are true.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI