"The night they hung the innocent man," (Bobby Russell - songwriter of The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia)

Vicki Lawrence, who was married to Bobby Russell at the time, originally recorded this song in 1972. Her rendition went to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Make a mad rush a scant nineteen years later to when Reba McEntire covered the song and you will have found her version only climbed to Number 12 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs Chart.


PREFACE:

I've always claimed life, as I knew it to be, began when I was a towheaded picayune of twelve. That number reflected my tender youth, when I was adopted by an unknown stranger I begged money from in a Wal-Mart parking lot. As bizarre as that statement sounded it is the absolute, unaltered, truth.

In Dog Tales, it is my fervent desire to delve deeper in the well and bring to the surface more details about this experience than I listed in my previous 2017 autobiography Unwanted Dog. Additionally, I want to recreate the sights, sounds, and tastes this convergence produced on my formative years.

Of course, I lived eleven years prior to the most fateful day of my life. But I've tried to bury that nightmare under a pylon of mortar somewhere in the shark-infested furthest, darkest, reaches of my mind. Got a shovel? Alpha Centauri would be a good start. There's no other place for them. Those atrocities have haunted me to this day. Who knows, perhaps some may rear their hideous noggins and make an appearance in Dog Tales.

Oh the marvels of a wolf's vocalizations. With their broad snouts, firm bodies, and bushy tails, unquestionably wolves are my favorite animals. I never envisioned myself a villain or a victim. The notion did not flow through my veins. Nor did it gurgle rampant through my DNA.

Voltaire claimed in his manifesto Age of Enlightenment, "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

I learned this lesson, the hardest way of course. How else did I ever cram anything into my mental membrane? In my mind, I'd broken the bond that secured me to the drudgery of Hermitage Hall and its mundane existence. Those vehement aspirations catapulted my desire to relocate to another, much more upstanding, area of operations.

I meandered along the sidewalk beneath the red oak trees with a playful hop, skip, and stomp. Splash! went the remnants of the puddles from the early morning rain Nashville is notorious for; up to forty-nine inches a year thank you. Above me, I noticed how bright the sun showed through the well-spaced limbs near the treetops.

As I made my way, I whistled Vicki Lawrence's Hit song The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia. A cool tune about sweet revenge on a cheating wife. I ambled ahead and picked greenish-pink coneflowers swaying in the mountain breeze. These long-flowering perennials, with their raised-centered blossoms, are popular in herbal cold and infection remedies.

Nature's admirations were impossible to detect from my prison cell inside Hermitage Hall. Here, a squirrel, with its chubby cheeks stuffed full of acorns, nested in its drey in the cylindrical trunk of the tree I leaned against.

A contented jay chirped in the glistening afternoon sun. The cheerful sound snagged my attention. I looked high up into the tree and spotted the lavender-blue avian. Its serene crest folded flat on the bird's head.

Carefree, I traversed the eleven acre Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park and scampered into the 95-Bell Carillon. These bells chimed all day long between 6:00 am and 11:00 pm. They also played Tennessee songs, of which there are currently, count them, eight State Songs. The most famous of which is probably the anthem known as Rocky Top. Being in the middle of these bells when they rang provided an unmatched immersive musical adventure.

Interestingly enough, this park was created on the French Lick that originally attracted fur trappers, settlers, tribes of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Catawbas, and Chiahas who liked to fight amongst themselves. A plethora of foraging wildlife also migrated to what became my hometown.

Looking back, how was I to know what inculpatory pursuit laid around the not too distant corner?