**A Cold Kentucky Morning in Helmond: My Story with “Boulder to Birmingham”**
There’s a long stretch of canal here in Helmond—water flowing slow, reeds waving in the wind—that reminds me of nothing so much as the open highways I used to dream about as a boy in Brabant, cradling my battered guitar on the stone stoop outside my parents’ house. You wouldn’t think the peat-smelling grass of our Dutch lowlands had much in common with the star-studded skies I’d imagined over Tennessee hills. But for those who have spent their lives in love with country music, you learn that a yearning heart recognizes its own reflection—wherever you find yourself.
I want to tell you the story of the song that never left me—one that never quite climbed the peaks of the hit parade, but which shaped the kind of singer, and the kind of man, I wanted to be. The song is Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham,” off her 1975 album *Pieces of the Sky*.
Most folks my age remember Harris for her clear, sad voice or her duets with Gram Parsons. But unless you haunted the record bins for records the clerk had never spun, you might have missed “Boulder to Birmingham,” a song as wistful as a letter left unsent, and twice as heartbreaking.
I first heard “Boulder to Birmingham” on a rainy Helmond midnight, spinning the FM dial for static-laced American voices. My brother, Maarten, was in love with Creedence, but for me it was always the lonesome, poetic women of Nashville. That night, hidden under my blankets, I heard some faraway DJ say, “…and next, some new Emmylou Harris,” before the chords drifted through my room like perfume.
**“I don’t want to hear a love song.
I got on this airplane just to fly.
And I know there’s life below me,
but all that you can show me
is the prairie and the sky.”**
(*Emmylou Harris, Bill Danoff – 1975*)
I remember lying there—sixteen, invisible to the world—thinking her voice sounded like light falling through blue glass. European boys can’t know what the prairie looks like, but we know what it feels like to eye a horizon and sense vastness, emptiness, hope. Those opening words, refusing love songs, chasing a vanished compass point, carried me right out of Helmond and onto some silent southern highway.
What makes “Boulder to Birmingham” so rare—so unsung—is the way its grief lives quietly in the melody, never shouted. The song was written after Emmylou lost her close musical partner, Gram Parsons, to a tragic overdose. But it isn’t just his story, or hers; it’s for everyone who’s ever found the road too empty, the air too thin, because of a missing voice.
Her chorus, bare as branches after autumn, hangs suspended in memory:
**“And I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham
If I thought I could see, I could see your face.”**
There’s a particular kind of longing in country music, an ache that doesn’t fade, only shifts. Harris’s voice doesn’t blare defiance or shout rabble-rousing slogans; it offers something harder: acceptance, honesty, the trembling edge of sorrow. On that first cold night, listening to “Boulder to Birmingham,” I realized how much country is not about where you come from, but about what you’re willing to risk for love—or for memory.
During those years, while my friends were joining cover bands to play “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Hotel California,” I learned “Boulder to Birmingham” on a half-tuned guitar. The chords are simple—country always is—but each phrase came with its own silent risk, the way the Dutch dykes have to hold back a sea they’ll never quite trust. I sang those lines to emptiness, to canal fog, to the sweep of distant airplanes I’d never board.
As I grew older, the song became less about teenage solitude and more about grown-up loss. When my own father passed, I dug my old album from the attic, placing the needle gently on that track. There’s a line buried in the second verse—one I must have missed at sixteen—that nearly undid me at fifty:
**“But you really got me this time, and the hardest part is knowing
I’ll survive.”**
In that honest admission, there’s a tenderness for suffering rarely heard in more famous ballads. Surviving is often harder than grieving. Those nights in my Helmond flat, I would strum along and understand Harris’s secret: sometimes the best you can do is outlast the sorrow, walk from whatever “Boulder” you bear to whichever “Birmingham” you dream, and hope—just a flicker—that love might meet you somewhere on the road.
“Boulder to Birmingham” remains for me the most honest map of memory ever sketched in song. It taught me that country music is not rooted in American soil, but in the stubborn persistence of the heart, willing to cross boundaries and languages, even centuries. Today’s listeners chase flash and beat, but I urge you to sink into the truth that Emmylou Harris stitched into every line of that track—a geography of hope and heartbreak, sung not for the world but for the one listener who needs it most.
Even now, standing on the banks of the Zuid-Willemsvaart, watching April clouds slide past, I remember that night in 1975—me, a Dutch boy, spellbound by an American lament. “And I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham,” I sing softly to the water, and for a moment, every yearning I’ve ever held feels just a little lighter, bridged by song.
To those who’ve never heard “Boulder to Birmingham,” find it, and listen. There are no borders in longing, and no country music truer than this.
—Kroes den Bock