I remember one sweltering August afternoon sometime in the early 80s, sitting on the wooden porch of my modest Dutch farmhouse, a mug of stale coffee in hand, when a record from some box of American imports found its way to my dusty old turntable. The record was “Feed Jake” by Pirates of the Mississippi.
But I can’t write about that one—it was just a little too well-known in certain circles by the early 90s, and I reach further back, to a dusty corner of my collection.
There it was: a battered 1977 45 of Tom T. Hall’s “Fox on the Run.” Not his own original—the tune is an odd one, a bluegrass-crossover classic that Hall recorded, which itself was drawn from the Manfred Mann tune, which *itself* has roots in the British Invasion. But the country version, Hall’s, was almost a curio, even back in the day: not as world-changing as “Harper Valley PTA,” not as grievous and mythic as “Me and Jesus,” but it burrowed into my mind just the same.
“Fox on the Run” became my secret anthem for escape.
I was a strange young man, back then—unwieldy, anxious, all elbows and loneliness, far from the breezy outlaws in denim you’d see on the record sleeves. Helmond wasn’t Nashville, and though I lived among cows and fields, the country music I heard on the transistor radio seemed beamed from another, warmer planet. But when I listen to “Fox on the Run,” I hear a yearning that makes all distances and differences melt away.
“She walks through the corn,
Leading down to the river,
Her hair shone like gold,
In the hot morning sun,
She took all the love