Steve Earle "Carrie Brown"

I often wonder what life was like before instant replay.

I mean, in sports, there are infamous cases of officials making calls that were shown to be blatantly wrong on replay.

And beyond sports, tapes and recordings and photographs offer a chance to look back at a moment, and see it in a clearer light without the distractions of your own bias or self-perception.

Sometimes, you can even see a whole new narrative.

I’d gone with a group of friends to Nashville to the historic Ryman Auditorium, for a benefit show put on by a few groups who had come together to oppose the death penalty.

After an afternoon talk by Sister Helen Prejean (the nun who was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking), we were treated to an evening with The Indigo Girls, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle.

We bought the upgraded tickets that got us to a Meet & Greet backstage after the show, and that was my chance to talk to Steve Earle.

And as I waited my turn for an autograph, I tried to think of something thoughtful to say.

At the time, I was living in Abingdon, Virginia, working at a radio station there. But just prior to my radio gig, I had been a producer at an NBC affiliate in Bristol.

Bristol is actually two towns---Bristol Virginia and Bristol Tennessee. Two towns, two mayors, two police forces, two everything. And the border runs right through State Street. On the left side of the street it’s Virginia and on the right side it’s Tennessee.

By coincidence, Earle had recently put out his first bluegrass album, with The Del McCoury Band, called “The Mountain,” and it contained a song about a young man who kills the boyfriend of the girl he longs for but can't have. And the song contains this great line:

I walked around in Bristol town a bitter broken man
A heart that pined for Carrie Brown and a pistol in my hand
We met again on State Street poor Billy Wise and me
I shot him in Virginia and he died in Tennessee

Perfect! I’ll tell him I live right there! That’ll open up a dialogue and Steve and I will become friends forever!

So my turn comes around and I hand him my ticket and a Sharpie. And as he’s signing the front, I tell him I’m from Bristol and I think it’s cool that he wrote a song set in my town.

He finishes his signature, looks up and hands me back the ticket and the marker, and says kinda gruff-ly, wearily, “Yeah, I thought Bristol was a pretty good place to set a Hillbilly murder ballad.” And he moves on to the next guy in line.

That's how I remember him---gruff, a little weary from working all day (he was one of the event organizers), and just a notch above tolerant.

My friend Rita snapped a picture of a moment in our exchange, and seeing the photo gave me a whole different perspective.

(I didn't see the photo until several weeks after the incident. This story takes place waaaayyy back in 1999, when we actually had to get film developed, so you didn't know how your pictures came out)

Earle's face is much brighter in the photo than how I remembered it. In fact, the moment it captures suggests that his delivery of the "Hillbilly murder ballad" line was gruff and crusty and a bit drawn out, purely for comic effect, and that cracking the joke made him smile.

Here's the photo.

And it even lends itself to a sillier interpretation.

With the ticket and the Sharpie in his hand, and the bright smile on his face, doesn't it look a little bit like Steve Earle is asking me for MY autograph?

Somewhat surprisingly, I couldn't find the Steve Earle/Del McCoury version of this song. But Youtube is always good for some amateurs taking a crack at a good tune.