**The Railroad to Anywhere: Remembering Billie Jo Spears’ “Silver Wings and Golden Rings” (1975)**
There’s some music that knocks on the door of your memory with the electricity of a summer thunderstorm—bold, unafraid. Then there are songs that slip over your mind like old leather—soft, familiar, and overlooked by just about everyone else. The latter is the kind that calls out to me on an evening in Helmond, when the Dutch dusk lays its gold on the canal water and I’m remembering long-lost places far from here.
Tonight, the song that haunts me is Billie Jo Spears’ “Silver Wings and Golden Rings,” released in 1975. Some country fans may know Spears only from her big hit, “Blanket on the Ground”—but if you listen close, you find her voice carried a hundred stories. This song, tucked just out of reach of radio stardom, is a cool hand on a lonesome brow.
Let me take you back.
The first time I heard “Silver Wings and Golden Rings,” I was a wiry Dutch kid with hay in my hair, barely fifteen, all blue jeans and bad posture. I’d saved my guilders for months to buy an import LP, truly miraculous in the days before everything streamed to your pocket. Most of my friends didn’t understand my obsession with that “American boerenmuziek”—but when I dropped the needle, I grinned as guitars and pedal steel turned my attic into Texas itself.
On Side B, buried past the obvious singles, came these lines:
*“Silver wings and golden rings
Will take us far away
As far as we’ll go I don’t know
But darling I just can’t stay…”*
It was a ballad for those who need to run, but want to remember. Spears’ voice is honey and gravel, skeptical and yearning all at once. The melody is simple, with a tender shuffle, just enough piano to ghost the melody, just enough steel to make your heart slide.
I sat in the half-light, letting her voice unspool the story—a story half mine. What teenager doesn’t want to get gone from where they are? But Spears wasn’t singing about running wild—she was singing about leaving because you have to, and loving what you leave behind. She was singing about real choices, not fairy tales.
There’s a faded photograph on my bookshelf—a snapshot my father took in the summer of ‘77, the year I first heard this song. You see me in a field, arms up, face hidden in the gold of dusk. My family was working hard, my father dreaming of better times, and my mother humming old Brabant songs as she weeded through the patch. That record player in my attic, imported from America by way of a Rotterdam dockworker, was my “silver wings”—the way I traveled before I could afford a train ticket, more precious than any ring.
But it was more than escape. In the second verse, Spears croons,
*“Love has been all that’s kept me down
In this one-horse lonely town
But I need to see those city lights
I believe our love will survive…”*
I played it over and over, letting her words fill the cracks I didn’t understand yet. Love as the anchor, not the shackle—love as the thing you carry with you, not the excuse you stay put. I didn’t know yet that I’d end up with a guitar of my own, touring little Dutch bars and singing country with a Helmond lilt. I didn’t know I’d meet Annemarie, whose laughter seemed to dare me to leave and woo me to stay. But I was learning something about what it means to move forward while holding on tight.
What made “Silver Wings and Golden Rings” special wasn’t just its melody, but its truth. Too many songs are about getting drunk, getting lost, getting over. This one was about getting somewhere—together, if only just barely, with a suitcase full of hope and heartbreak mingled.
I remember playing it on a crackling radio at a harvest festival in Deurne, long after most folks had turned to disco or pop. A local farmer asked, “Wat is heilig aan deze lied?” What’s sacred, he wanted to know, about this American tune? I told him: it’s sacred to want more and still treasure what you have, to fly with silver wings but carry golden rings—promises made, hearts remembered.
And that’s why, after all these years, that song still shimmers for me. Country music is at its best when it’s ragged at the edges—neither triumph nor tragedy, just people trying to make something last in a world that spins too fast. Spears found poetry between the leaving and the loving; she gave us a parable in three verses and a chorus.
If you listen to “Silver Wings and Golden Rings” now, you might think it’s only “nice”—just a silky piece of mid-70s country, good for background music and nothing more. But you’d be missing the miracle: not every song has to hit the top of the charts to ride the rails of your memory for decades. It’s the tunes you hum quietly, blending in with the rhythm of a spade or the creak of an old barn door, that become the fabric of your life.
For me, this forgotten gem still soars. Throw it on the turntable, sip some oude jenever, and let your mind drift—maybe you’ll catch the gold glint of dusk, the weight of a promise, the shine of wings ready to lift you somewhere new, if you’re willing to love enough to leave and brave enough to come home.
With a heart full of memories,
Kroes den Bock