I learned this one from Mark Ross in Missoula, Montana. It was the first time I hitchhiked across country on the northern route, and I’d spent a couple of days in Spokane with Utah Phillips, and he suggested I stop off in Missoula and meet Mark. So I did, and spent a few days there, or maybe even a week. I liked Missoula and I liked Mark, and he taught me a bunch of songs, including this one. As I recall, he played it more like Merle Travis, and I’ve retained some of what he showed me and filled in the rest as best I could.

Mark also got me smoking Bull Durham roll-ups — not that I was ever much of a smoker, but for a brief period I affected that dreadful stuff. It was a romantic cowboy thing, and Mark was very much a romantic. That was before the folk scene was full of young men in hats and vests who looked like they’d stepped out of a  Depression-era photograph, and Mark was ahead of the curve. He’d come out west from New York and reinvented himself as a bard of the Montana mining region, complete with an IWW card.

The beautiful thing was that Missoula had completely adopted him as a local character; he’d make a circuit of the bars, and everyone greeted him and asked for his latest joke — he had a seemingly infinite supply of them — and he played in the local bars and at all sorts of other events, and had created a life there. It was an interesting place; I remember a couple of old cowboy saloons with interesting modern paintings, one of them a big, 19th-century style oil study of the pyramids in Giza, complete with Arabs and camels… except that in place of the pyramids it had three looming versions of the Cattleman’s Lodge, a big old local hotel that, as I recall, sold excellent hamburgers.

I came through a bunch of times over the next few years, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes driving through on tour — for some reason, when I began touring across country in the mid-1980s half my gigs were in Western Montana and the Idaho Panhandle. (Probably the reason was that not a lot of people toured through there, so they were more open to minor talents like me.) However I traveled, I’d stop off for a day or three with Mark, and it was always a pleasure. I remember once he was booked on a big local music festival with Hoyt Axton, Kris Kristofferson, and a bunch of Texas singer-songwriters. It was a great show, but apparently a financial disaster, and, as a local, Mark saw what was coming and was one of the few performers who managed to cash his check before they started bouncing.

I have lots more memories of Mark and Missoula, and Butte, where I played two memorable gigs at the Silver Dollar Saloon, and a bunch of smaller towns — Whitefish, Kalispell, Moscow, Bonner’s Ferry… there was one gig out in the middle of nowhere, where halfway through my second or third set a guy came riding into the bar on a motorcycle, parked it in front of the stage, and asked if I could play “You Are My Sunshine.” (I could, and did.)

That was another nice thing; when I played around there, I was doing bar gigs, three or four sets, and rather than demanding the Beatles/Buffett repertoire bar crowds tended to want on the East Coast, folks were perfectly happy to hear Blind Blake or Gary Davis, or Hank Williams, or Woody Guthrie, or unfamiliar new songs by my friend Bill Morrissey — and if I played something with a bit of swing, couples would get up and dance, even though it was solo acoustic guitar and vocals.

I don’t remember ever performing this one, but by the last set I wasn’t always in shape to remember much, so I may have. It’s a fun song, and although I tend to try to reshape lyrics to fit my own voice and time, I do it as a character piece, complete with the reference to “the cutest girl in the 48 states.” I later heard the original version by Tex Williams, a classic Western Swing hit with a tight horn section, but I continue to associate it with Mark and evenings sitting around drinking whiskey and smoking Bull Durhams in his cluttered apartment in Missoula. That was more than forty years ago, and he’s in Eugene, Oregon, now, still playing, and we talk on the phone every few months. Too many people I knew back then are gone, and I treasure the ones who are holding on.