There’s a memory I carry with me that is as dusty and sun-warmed as the attic where I first found Dad’s old guitar: the summer of 1977, the rare flourish of wild daisies in the fields outside Helmond, and a country song you’d be hard pressed to find spinning anywhere on the radio today. The song is “Big Wheels and Empty Fields” by Chet Hawkins, an artist whose voice cracked like weathered leather and whose work, for reasons that still baffle me, never made it beyond the outposts of niche playlists and late-night vinyl spins.
Chet Hawkins, bless him, came and went with the southern breeze. “Big Wheels and Empty Fields” hit the B-side of his only LP, _Some Roads Don’t Lead Home_, released in the autumn of 1977—the year I started thinking maybe I wanted to write my own country songs, right here in the Netherlands. I remember, as a boy of sixteen, riding the rear fender of my brother’s battered Peugeot Cyclomoteur through dirt roads outside Helmond, a cheap cassette player wedged between us, hearts full of everything and nothing. That song was always crackling behind the wind.
The magic starts in the first verse:
*“Big wheels keep turning, just dust and old steel,
Sun on my shoulder, I fade from the wheel.
Empty fields whisper of dreams worked too long,
But I keep on rolling, one more midnight gone.”*
When I first heard those words, I recognized something beyond language or geography. My family had always toiled the land, patching the heavy Dutch clay. The world Chet sang of—the endless fields, the bitter compromise of men and work—somehow spoke to my father’s hands, which bore the same cracks as old tractor tires.
For most folks, a song about trucks and crops seems simple enough. But “Big Wheels and Empty Fields” is a haunted little prayer about longing for something more. Not for riches, or fame—Chet never cared for any of that—but for meaning in the mundanity, poetry in the repetitive rhythms of labor. It resonated in our Helmond farmhouse, just as it must have in every Kansas outpost or Texas garage that dared play it.
The chorus—oh, I still hum it when I’m alone, tuning up before a show, remembering lost summers:
*“Big wheels and empty fields,
Carrying me past what’s real.
Night falls and memories yield
To big wheels and empty fields.”*
There’s a tired resignation there, but it’s never defeat. I hear it as courage. Because, in all my years, I’ve learned that it’s much harder to keep moving—to keep turning those wheels—when you know nothing life-changing is coming over the next horizon. The true nobility in Chet’s song is in the resolve to keep moving anyway.
June 1977 was the first time I sang that chorus at a local pub, Het Zilvermeer, with a borrowed six-string and my brother watching from a back table. Most of the crowd didn’t understand a lick of the lyrics, but I saw old Mr. van Dijk nod along, and Maartje, my childhood friend, wiped a tear from the corner of her eye when I struck the final chord. Afterward, the bartender asked if it was an American song or something I wrote. I said, “It’s an American prayer, but it feels like ours, doesn’t it?”
The verses unfold like a road trip through loneliness:
*“I left a love sleeping to follow these lines,
Chasing some daylight that’s always behind.
Each mile I remember more than I forget—
A man and his shadows, a truck and regret.”*
Even now, so many decades and so many heartbreaks later, I’ve never heard a lyric get closer to the ache of turning your back on love, not because you want to, but because something nameless inside you pushes you down the road. I wonder, sometimes, if Dad—who left us too soon—heard himself in that music when he fixed up the combine, or when he watched the rain from the shed, fingers absently drumming out a beat only he could hear.
People think our lives in Helmond are far from Nashville or Amarillo, but the longing in Chet’s song was universal. We all have empty fields. We all have wheels—choices—that keep us moving forward, sometimes away from the things we love, sometimes toward something we can barely name.
Chet Hawkins vanished as quietly as he came. “Big Wheels and Empty Fields” never charted, never saw neon lights or late-night TV. Sometimes I dream I’ll see him in an old black-and-white photo, or hear someone else covering his tune in a smoky bar in Oklahoma or Rotterdam. But it’s never happened. All that’s left is the memory, the melody, and a feeling I’ve carried all my life.
Musically, the song does what all great country does: three chords, a melody sweet as clover honey, and a subtle pedal steel that cries in the background. But it has a hardscrabble stoicism I’ve rarely found elsewhere. For the musically curious: find a faded copy of _Some Roads Don’t Lead Home_, and play the B-side until the tape warbles. Listen in quiet. Let yourself yearn.
There are nights, even now, when the world feels too fast, and I’ll walk the old road out by the canal, the engine of memory humming along. I sing to the hidden hares, to the poplar trees, to my restless heart. “Big Wheels and Empty Fields” is for the ones who keep driving—through loss, through lists, through life—hoping to find home at the end of the road, even if it’s just a patch of evening sun over wild daisies.
Maybe you’ll find time to listen. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll see yourself somewhere in Chet’s song, in the dust and the daylight, kindly rolling on.
Yours in music and memory,
Kroes den Bock