Let me tell you a story about the power of music and memory—a story that starts in a smoky bar off the Kanaaldijk, long before Helmond’s city center got its makeover; back when life was a touch less shiny and a lot more real. The song at the heart of this memory is a rare piece: **“Shadows on the Plains”** by Billie Jo Spears, released quietly in 1976. It never cracked the Top 40 and for most folks, if they ever heard it, it was by accident. Yet for me, and for a handful of others, it remains a cornerstone of who we are.
In the summer of 1978, I was twenty-four and convinced that stardom was just a matter of time, a few broken guitar strings away. My band, The Dust Mill Ramblers, had just landed a regular gig at De Blauwe Gans, a worker’s café where farmers rubbed elbows with truckers and even the barmaids could out-yodel the tourists. On Tuesdays, after the regular set, we’d stay late. The regulars would thin out, the guitars would come off the amps, and the jukebox would get a workout. That old jukebox was stacked with American records—mostly the big stuff: Merle, Dolly, Willie Nelson. But tucked in the back, in a row of forgotten 45s, was a worn-down copy of Billie Jo Spears’ “Shadows on the Plains.”
I discovered it by chance, fumbling for change after one too many verløs. The opening guitar lick was like a sigh at sunset: gentle, resigned, with a hint of longing. Billie Jo’s voice entered, low and smoky, singing:
*“There’s a lonesome sigh across the barley
As the night drapes the land in blue
Shadows on the plains just whisper
All the dreams that slipped from view.”*
In my youth, I’d been drawn to the bombastic heartbreakers, the tracks with the high drama and the steel guitar twang that threatened to split the roof beams. But “Shadows on the Plains” was different—a quiet ache that finds you in the stillness, in the place where the crowd has gone home and all that’s left are your mistakes. Hearing those lyrics, the hollowness of yearning for something that may never return, took me off guard.
I must’ve played that song a hundred times that summer. Each verse felt like a letter from a past self, reminding me of every step that brought me from those flat fields outside Aarle-Rixtel to the smoke and neon of Helmond. The lyrics, subtle and spare, held everything you needed to know about longing and loss:
*“And all the footprints in the wheat rows
Lead to fences worn by rain
Nothing stirs but distant thunder
And old regrets that bear no name.”*
What made “Shadows on the Plains” so special was its restraint. There’s no melodrama in Billie Jo’s delivery—just the tremor of someone who has lost, and learned to live with it. She sings of landscapes—rolling fields, silent nights, the hush of distant storms—but anyone who’s ever hung on to old hopes can hear themselves in every word.
There was a night that August when the café was near empty, save for the last old boys nursing Grolsch at the bar. I was fixing a broken D string, running lines in my head that would someday make their way into my own songs. My friend Piet, who played pedal steel for us, nudged me and said, “Set it up, Kroes. Put on that one, the moody one.” So I fed the jukebox another fifty-cent piece and listened with him, sharing a silence deeper than anything we’d ever played.
Piet wasn’t much for talking feelings, but that night, after “Shadows on the Plains” finished its last ride, he said, “Dat is het, hè? Geen theater. Gewoon de waarheid.” That’s it. No show. Just the truth. We sat there a long while, just looking at the jukebox’s flickering light—him thinking about a marriage he might have lost; me about a farmhouse that would never be mine again.
What makes a song like that hang around, when flashier hits fade away? Maybe it’s because it doesn’t ask for much—just your company, your patience, your honesty. It’s the song for that late-night walk home, for the edge of the bar when you’re not sure who’s left to talk to; for the last miles on a silent motorway, when the radio is half static and your heart is a little bit lost. There is something about how Billie Jo croons, *“Nothing stirs but distant thunder / And old regrets that bear no name,”* that turns a bar full of strangers into a congregation bound by shared ache.
That autumn, my band moved on and that old jukebox was replaced, but I tracked down a copy of “Shadows on the Plains.” For years, it was my secret weapon: I’d play it at the end of rough gigs, or in the quiet of my kitchen when autumn wind rattled the windows. It became a part of my songwriting DNA—how a simple turn of phrase, a gentle melody, could hold the weight of a whole life.
Every now and then, someone at a show asks for something from “the old days.” I’ll grin, tip my hat, and pick out a familiar chord progression. Sometimes—just for those who really listen—I’ll quietly play “Shadows on the Plains” as the last encore, letting Billie Jo’s melody slip out across the speakers. I see it land, every time, with those who know what it is to have loved and lost and kept breathing anyway.
So here’s to “Shadows on the Plains”—a song that never asked for applause, but left its mark just the same. It taught me that life’s best music isn’t always found in the bright lights, but sometimes in the quiet corners, waiting for someone to listen close.
Yours in memory and melody,
**Kroes den Bock**