Eight years ago this winter, NPR launched a series of winter songs. “The songs we turn to during winter months are as distinct from the light, joyous anthems of summer as tank tops and shorts are from the mittens and scarves we pull out of the closet when a chill creeps into the air,” it said.
The series began with the novelist Ann Patchett telling host Melissa Block about the winter when she was 6 and had moved with her recently divorced mother from California to Nashville, Tennessee. “It was gray, it was freezing cold, and my father still lived in Los Angeles,” Patchett said. So she would listen to The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” on the radio.
“What I really loved about that song was, not only had I come to Tennessee,” Patchett recalled, “I had been enrolled in a Catholic girls’ school. So that line, ‘Got down on my knees and I pretend to pray’ seemed incredibly scandalous to me when I was a kid; that you could go and pretend to pray. And I remember going to Mass in the morning, and I would get down on my knees and close my eyes and sing ‘California Dreamin’ ... it became sort of the prayer to California.”
Eight years ago, we were in western Montana in a deep freeze, trying to housebreak a border collie pup too smart for his own good, in all that hectic dark and cold – when we were struck into delicious quietude by one of Block’s entries in winter songs. We thought of it Friday, when we saw Interstate 25 was closed by snow from Pueblo all the way down to Raton Pass. We have driven Raton Pass, and we have driven it in blowing snow, so if it needs to be closed, that’s fine. It was a day for staying in and listening to the radio.
On Jan. 2, 2012, Block announced a winter song story “about everything going wrong, until it goes spectacularly right.” She was speaking with the Texas musician Robert Earl Keen, who had selected the song “Snowin’ on Raton,” by Townes Van Zandt.
Keen and some other musicians had been on the road, he said, “traveling from Colorado to Flagstaff, Arizona, and on the way, we drove through Raton ... And when we got there, the manager of the venue was this lady and, for whatever reason, the promoter who was selling the tickets and doing his job, the two of them got in this huge argument...”
“And we thought, oh, my God, this is going to be bad ... We were in an art center there in Flagstaff, had a huge glass front, and that was our backdrop for our stage ... And right when we got finished, the cops pulled up and came in there and hauled the guy that was the promoter away. The venue manager felt like everybody was still a little uneasy, and she said, would you mind playing another song just to kind of make this a little better?
“... And I thought I know this Townes song, ‘Snowin’ on Raton.’ Let’s play this. And we were going along, kind of getting our footing and sounds pretty good, and we get to the chorus, (singing) snow-ing on Ra-ton. All of a sudden, right behind us, the snow just started coming down in giant flakes ... like you only see on some kind of cartoon snowflakes ... And the audience just literally gasped. And we thought, oh, we’re really great. And then we realized it was the snow that was falling behind us.
“The song worked out pretty well, too.”
Listen to Robert Earl Keen’s winter song here.
