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This episode of Noted Stories features three car songs: one true, one partly true and one totally fictional. My parents once discovered that, as a toddler, I could correctly name the cars passing us on Sunday drives. Dad was a gifted mechanic, but I never inherited his skills. However, I did inherit his love of old cars—and later dropped them into my watercolor paintings.

“Filmore’s 55” is true. In the 1970s, my friend Filmore Strunk visited our farm in his green 1955 GMC pickup. He called it his “Old ’55,” after the Tom Waits song, which was featured on the Eagles’ 1974 album, “On the Border.” Driving through the East Tennessee mountains with that song on the radio inspired my 2003 song.

“’65 VW Van” is partly true. After my unreliable ’64 Falcon broke down on I-40, I read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion by flashlight while waiting for sunrise when I could be rescued. The book helped inspire my trip west. Later, I bought a stripped-down 1965 VW van and named it “Van Go,” although, most of the time it didn’t go. At any rate the van inspired the song I wrote in 1977.

“Work-a-Daddy Thunderbird” is pure fiction, inspired by James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and my childhood love of the red 1957 Ford Thunderbird. The song follows a worn-out husband who longs for that lost dream and settles for a modified vintage replica.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI