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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

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This episode of Noted Stories, “Artifacts and Fiction,” takes three events from the past and turns them into songs (with no small amount of creative license).

In “Miss Mesopotamia,” a construction worker returns to school to become an archaeologist. On a secret dig in Iraq, his team uncovers what appears to be an ancient beauty pageant. He can’t resist telling the coworkers who once laughed at his ambitions—and one of them tips off a tabloid.

“Warm Egyptian Nights” follows a weary West Tennessee farmer who believes that, in a previous life, he swept the floors of an Egyptian pyramid. He wasn’t a pharaoh, but he does miss the warm nights beside the Nile…a different Memphis in a different time.

The final song, “The Lyre,” begins with the tradition that Nero played music while Rome burned. Although the instrument he played is commonly described as a fiddle, it most likely was a lute. So, the lute becomes the focus of this song, or rather a lyre (which is actually a yoke lute). I imagine his instrument turning up centuries later in a Jewish shop in Germany on the night of Kristallnacht. The instrument’s journey is fiction, but the destruction and persecution are history—and a reminder to stay alert to their return.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode is called “Lone Star Stories,” and it’s all about Texas. The three songs include a fictional romance, a larger-than-life true story and a Texas-sized tall tale.

I wrote the first song, “Café Texaco,” not long after I moved South from New York City. It’s a fictitious mariachi-flavored story about a Brooklyn kid who finds work at a Texas border-town gas station café.

The second song, “Lookin’ Back at Luckenbach,” is the true story of an unforgettable trip in 1976. My songwriting partner, Lee Owens, called from San Antonio with unexpected news: We had been invited to perform at the city’s River Festival, and an airline ticket was waiting for me. When I arrived in San Antone, I met Hondo Crouch, the colorful owner and self-appointed mayor of Luckenbach, Texas. After Lee and I performed, Hondo invited us to visit Luckenbach—population four—where we passed guitars around a woodstove before riding across the Texas countryside to his ranch. Lee and I still remember that perfect day and I wrote this song to remember it.

The final song, “Picasso,” merges Pablo Picasso with Western Swing. Actually, Picasso never visited America, but this tall tale story song “paints” him as a secret traveler, landing in El Paso, where he meets a young Texas girl and is hired to create a rodeo poster. Unfortunately, the local cowboys don’t appreciate his unusual artistic style. It’s a classic case of “cubes meet dudes.”

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI