Where You Can Stand on the Ground and See for 50 Miles

Last night, my husband and I went into the city to watch Robert Earl Keen and Cross Canadian Ragweed play in concert for Texas Independence Day.

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Cross Canadian Ragweed

(If you can bear the first minute of ads, this video is pretty great.)

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It was a fantastic concert, and in the final encore, Robert Earl Keen brought out Cross Canadian Ragweed for one of his best-known songs followed by 20-minutes of finger-flying guitar solos from every guitar picker in each band. It was definitely one of the best I've seen, from the steel to the two leads, and then the two bass guitar pickers. While the former were outstanding, it's just amazing to watch and hear blurring bass guitar solos. That devil in Georgia didn't even bother to show.

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At one point, Robert Earl Keen asked the audience whether any of them had ever been to Lubbock, which isn't far from where I grew up in Booker, Texas. He said it's a place where you can stand squarely on the ground with your own two feet, look in any direction, and see for 50 miles. If you stand on a tuna fish can, you can see for 100 miles. Funny, but true. I remember a story about a man who lived in NYC and moved 15 miles from Booker. The vastly empty horizon literally drove him crazy, and he moved back to NYC two months later.