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This episode of Noted Stories, “Train Tracks,” features three songs inspired by my lifelong connection to railroads.

Growing up in Nashville, I watched the Christmas parade from Union Station and received a Lionel train that I still run at Christmas. My Donelson elementary school’s annual L&N trip to Gallatin was another childhood highlight. Years later, I rode those same tracks north on my way to California.

“The Burlington Line” is a true story song. In 1975, I met an elderly man on an Amtrak train making its way through Montana. He said he felt alone after losing his wife and was growing distant from his children, so that would be his last ride. That night, I watched him leave the train at a foggy station. As we pulled away, I saw its name: Paradise. The encounter inspired this song.

“Two Fast Trains” came to me in a dream. It tells of a switchman whose job is to prevent two trains from colliding—and how one bad decision sets off a chain of consequences.

“Steel and Steam Lullaby” began with a shaggy-dog story told by Bill Armstrong, the father of my teenage music partner. A boy spends his life waving to trains and calling, “Hello, Mr. Engineer,” but never gets a response. On his deathbed, the engineer finally looks down and says, “Oh…hello, little boy.” My band, Dog & Pony, performed the song…usually after I had told the whole story onstage in front of a groaning audience.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode of Noted Stories, “Kinfolks,” features three “relatively true”songs. My love of stories and story songs began with my dad and his family in Jordan Springs, a rural Tennessee community without electricity. In the 1930s, battery-powered radios brought the Grand Ole Opry into my grandparents’ parlor. Neighbors gathered on Saturday nights to listen, sometimes joined by my great-uncle Tom, who played guitar despite having lost fingers in a dynamite accident. He taught my dad, and my dad taught me. The first song, “Tractor Battery Radio,” celebrates those nights and the family who made them possible.

My mother’s family lived near the Tennessee River until the TVA moved them to make way for Kentucky Lake. Her father, Daddy Bud, became a deputy sheriff in Dover. He loved wrestling on his black-and-white television, cheering Jackie Fargo and booing Tojo Yamamoto. Years later, I learned the rivals were friends. That inspired the second song, “Motorola Cigarette,” a relatively true song blending Daddy Bud’s love of wrestling and hand-rolled cigarettes with a tale of the wrestlers traveling together.

“Soapbox Derby Days” recalls my cousin Gary, born ten days after me and as close as a brother. In 1964, he won Camden’s Soapbox Derby and earned a trip to Akron for the finals. Years later, living in Brooklyn Heights, I remembered our childhood summers and wrote the song about the closeness—and distance—of growing up.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode of Noted Stories features three car songs: one true, one partly true and one totally fictional. My parents once discovered that, as a toddler, I could correctly name the cars passing us on Sunday drives. Dad was a gifted mechanic, but I never inherited his skills. However, I did inherit his love of old cars—and later dropped them into my watercolor paintings.

“Filmore’s 55” is true. In the 1970s, my friend Filmore Strunk visited our farm in his green 1955 GMC pickup. He called it his “Old ’55,” after the Tom Waits song, which was featured on the Eagles’ 1974 album, “On the Border.” Driving through the East Tennessee mountains with that song on the radio inspired my 2003 song.

“’65 VW Van” is partly true. After my unreliable ’64 Falcon broke down on I-40, I read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion by flashlight while waiting for sunrise when I could be rescued. The book helped inspire my trip west. Later, I bought a stripped-down 1965 VW van and named it “Van Go,” although, most of the time it didn’t go. At any rate the van inspired the song I wrote in 1977.

“Work-a-Daddy Thunderbird” is pure fiction, inspired by James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and my childhood love of the red 1957 Ford Thunderbird. The song follows a worn-out husband who longs for that lost dream and settles for a modified vintage replica.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode of Noted Stories, “Artifacts and Fiction,” takes three events from the past and turns them into songs (with no small amount of creative license).

In “Miss Mesopotamia,” a construction worker returns to school to become an archaeologist. On a secret dig in Iraq, his team uncovers what appears to be an ancient beauty pageant. He can’t resist telling the coworkers who once laughed at his ambitions—and one of them tips off a tabloid.

“Warm Egyptian Nights” follows a weary West Tennessee farmer who believes that, in a previous life, he swept the floors of an Egyptian pyramid. He wasn’t a pharaoh, but he does miss the warm nights beside the Nile…a different Memphis in a different time.

The final song, “The Lyre,” begins with the tradition that Nero played music while Rome burned. Although the instrument he played is commonly described as a fiddle, it most likely was a lute. So, the lute becomes the focus of this song, or rather a lyre (which is actually a yoke lute). I imagine his instrument turning up centuries later in a Jewish shop in Germany on the night of Kristallnacht. The instrument’s journey is fiction, but the destruction and persecution are history—and a reminder to stay alert to their return.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode is called “Lone Star Stories,” and it’s all about Texas. The three songs include a fictional romance, a larger-than-life true story and a Texas-sized tall tale.

I wrote the first song, “Café Texaco,” not long after I moved South from New York City. It’s a fictitious mariachi-flavored story about a Brooklyn kid who finds work at a Texas border-town gas station café.

The second song, “Lookin’ Back at Luckenbach,” is the true story of an unforgettable trip in 1976. My songwriting partner, Lee Owens, called from San Antonio with unexpected news: We had been invited to perform at the city’s River Festival, and an airline ticket was waiting for me. When I arrived in San Antone, I met Hondo Crouch, the colorful owner and self-appointed mayor of Luckenbach, Texas. After Lee and I performed, Hondo invited us to visit Luckenbach—population four—where we passed guitars around a woodstove before riding across the Texas countryside to his ranch. Lee and I still remember that perfect day and I wrote this song to remember it.

The final song, “Picasso,” merges Pablo Picasso with Western Swing. Actually, Picasso never visited America, but this tall tale story song “paints” him as a secret traveler, landing in El Paso, where he meets a young Texas girl and is hired to create a rodeo poster. Unfortunately, the local cowboys don’t appreciate his unusual artistic style. It’s a classic case of “cubes meet dudes.”

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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Growing up in Nashville during the 1950s and ’60s, I spent many Saturday afternoons watching Flatt & Scruggs. When they removed their hats, Lester would announce it was time for a “sacred number.” In that tradition, this episode of Noted Stories is called “Bible Story Songs.”

One afternoon when I was visiting my dad and playing music together, he suggested that I write a song called “Writing in the Sand,” based on John 8. Jesus prevented a woman caught in adultery from being stoned by challenging anyone without sin to cast the first stone. I followed Dad's suggestion and wrote the song—it tells the story from an unusual perspective—that of the guilty man who was never brought before Jesus.

The second song, “The Mountain,” was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. I imagined what it must have been like for an ordinary person to stand among thousands and hear words that would change the world.

The final song comes from Numbers 22, where Balaam’s donkey sees an angel, refuses to move, and is given a voice by God. Long before Francis the Talking Mule or Mister Ed, the Bible had its own talking animal. Since Scripture never names the donkey, I did. The song is called “You Can Call Me Sam.”

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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“All Thumbs” is mostly about my brief and checkered career as a hitchhiker. I first tried hitchhiking during a college fraternity race to Atlanta. I managed to survive the experience so later, I dreamed of hitching to California and wrote the fictional first song of this episode, “California Itch.” In 1975, I finally traveled west by train, then hitchhiked throughout California. The reality was totally different than the song.

The second song, “Another Man’s Shoes,” is a true story. In 1977, I drove my unreliable Volkswagen van to Knoxville for a friend’s party. When my grandmother died, I needed to return to Nashville for her funeral but feared the van wouldn’t make it. I decided to hitchhike home. A man in an old station wagon picked me up and asked me to drive while he rested. Instead of sleeping, he told me about a cowboy in a Chicago tavern who gave his beautiful boots to a stranger, then walked barefoot into a snowstorm. That true story inspired this song.

The final song, “Easy Fall,” was written years later in New York. It tells the fictional story of a young woman hitchhiking across America, torn between the freedom of wandering and the desire for something permanent, which sums up my hitchhiking mindset in a nutshell.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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Growing up in Nashville during the Civil War centennial, I was fascinated by stories of soldiers and battles from another era. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was surrounded by another generation of heroes—men and women who had just returned from World War II.

One of them was my father. Horace Edward Skinner joined the Army Air Corps after high school and became a B-24 tail gunner with the legendary 90th Bombardment Group—the Jolly Rogers. His crew called themselves Jasper’s Jokers, named for their pilot, Lt. Jasper Skinner (no relation).

Dad rarely talked about the war. After he passed away in 1997, I discovered his squadron yearbook and began tracking down the surviving members of his crew. Those conversations opened a door to stories I wish I had heard from Dad himself. They eventually inspired my 15-song concept album, Jolly Roger Tailgunner (https://equilt.com/JRTGFlipbook/mobile/index.html#p=1). Three of those songs are featured in this episode.

“Big Blue Battlefield” tells the incredible story of a 1945 mission over Formosa—and how a split-second change in formation may have saved my father’s life… and ultimately allowed me to be here to tell his story.

“Big Chief” tells the (tribal and combat) story of Chief Leaford Bearskin, a Wyandotte tribal chief and Jolly Rogers B-24 pilot who survived combat so intense that he described the flak as being so thick he felt he could “walk on it.”

And “Willow Run” is my tribute to my mother, Ruth Sexton Skinner, who left Tennessee during the war to work in a Detroit factory. I took some creative liberties with the details, but the heart of the song is true: it is a tribute to a woman who did her part while her country was at war.

These aren't just songs. They're pieces of my family's history. They're stories of sacrifice, courage, survival—and the men and women who quietly did what had to be done.

I launched “The Greatest Generation” podcast to honor my father, his crew, the Jolly Rogers, my mother, and all those who served and sacrificed to help keep this nation free.

I hope you'll take a few minutes to listen. And if you have a parent, grandparent, or loved one who served, maybe it will bring back a story of your own.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI