Page 29 of Night Songs

One night I tossed and turned as a melody looped in my dreams, tormenting me with each note. When I woke, it was still there, teasing my mind. I hummed it up at the ceiling, rousing Hess from sleep. She hummed it back to me, and then as we rolled on our stockings and applied lipstick in the mirror, we hummed it together.

In the diner across the street, we talked about possible lyrics. We wanted this one to be funny. Flirtatious. There was such a lightness between us. We spoke mainly in private jokes that no one else could understand. We were in the blush of new love, and we didn’t even have to hide it that much because we were young and sweet and apparently related.

One of our favorite jokes was mocking the way every venue host introduced us onstage, no matter the state:

“Now let’s welcome to the stage a pair ofpretty little ladies…”

“Get ready for some sweet music from thesepretty little ladies…”

“My oh my, here are somepretty little ladiesfor you…”

We should have called ourselves the Pretty Little Ladies for all people cared who we were. It was doubly funny that I was such a rough-hewn hillbilly, hardly what many would call a “lady,” and Hess was not what you would have called “little.” She was proper, but she was taller and stronger than most of the men in our touring group.

And of course, our nighttime activities were hardly the actions of virginal, sugar-coatedpretty little ladies.

I brought up the joke, and Hess said there was something there. We sat in the diner for an hour while our eggs went cold, making a list of all the traits of a pretty little lady, and then, all the realities of being a woman. We wanted to compare these in an upbeat, humorous story, where it felt like we were all laughing at ourselves by the end. That’s how you pulled off something like that. If we were all laughing, no one was getting their drawers in a bunch.

When we met, you called me pretty little lady

You loved how I fit in your palm

At the church, they called me pretty little lady

In my sweet little white gown

In the kitch’n, you called me pretty little lady

As I sweated over open flame

In the delivery, you called me pretty little lady

As the big, bouncing baby came

That morning we were headed to the next town in the bus for the lesser artists—mostly a bunch of kids and old drunks still working the circuit. Usually I liked to look out the window and allow new music to enter me through the changing landscape. There was something about passing new scenery that rearranged my mind and created ideas.

But for this ride, we worked for the full two hours, coming up with the right words and matching them to the tune we’d hummed all day.

When we got to the motel that night, we picked up our guitars and started to play the song for real. Once we’d worked out all the kinks, we played it through without stopping.

Hess and I locked eyes over our strings still vibrating in the stale motel air.

We could feel it.

That feeling when an idea finally achieves sparkling, solid reality. When it officially joins the world.

When we first boarded the tour, we’d had to get our set list cleared by Clayton and his music director. It was just a bunch of classic country songs, so there’d been no issues. That was what they wanted from us—sweet, lady-pitched background music for people to eat corn dogs to in the shade. No one from the tour actually watched us past the first performance, so I figured it didn’t really matter what we played. We could have tossed our guitars and whistled for all they cared.

So we were ready the next day when the announcer in Macon, Georgia, gave us the standard intro we’d hoped for:

“Now let’s give a big Georgia welcome to these pretty little ladies…”

We came in with the first verse echoing his words,We’re just pretty little ladies, and that made the audience laugh right off the bat. We gave him knowing glances, making it seem like he was in on it. We couldn’t have him telling Clayton we made fun of him. Nothing’s more fragile than the ego of a man with just a little bit of power.

As the song went on, the audience really got into it, and when they started clapping to the beat, I knew we had them.

We’re just pretty little ladies

Like a flower bloomin’ all year long