Rodney Crowell: Telephone Road[purchase]
[purchase]
Just to be clear before we start... These are two different songs, by two different artists, but they both tell of the same stretch of Houston highway. Telephone Road is a highway in south Houston that developed a less than stellar reputation over the years as a place you could go to easily find "fun or a felony."
Of course, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle aren't really strangers to either of those things. It's no surprise then that both have penned tributes to this street of ill repute.
Both artists, though, seem to have fond memories of the time they spent on Telephone Road in their younger days. Wether it's Crowell boasting of watching "Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and The Killer puttin' on a show" as a mere child, or Earle sampling each of the one "hundred honky tonks" that lined the roadside... both look back on their experiences with a sense of wistfulness. It's as though they wish they could go back.
If nothing else, they can take us there with their songs.