Sweet Virginia Calling

Eli Cook in Bethlehem, NH

Eli Cook came to town last night. Or at least he came northward enough for me to drive over and see him. It was like Sweet Virginia calling.

On the way into Bethlehem for the show,^1,2 Willie Nelson appeared on the radio singing my favorite "Funny How Time Slips Away". It might have been the single song that pulled me up and out of where I was at the time I encountered early Willie.³

Eli was the rising blues phenom.

Bob Taylor⁴ at Rapunzel's in Lovingston⁵ was perhaps his biggest proponent. I caught Eli play at that venue, in Scottsville for the Fourth of July, and later at a weekly gig he had in downtown Crozet.

Admiring his 12-string guitar in Bethlehem, I was wondering who made it when thought I just caught the "R" and maybe the "dge" of a logo on the headstock. Rockbridge Guitars?

That's a name out of my past.

Sure enough, it was the Randall Ray and Brian Calhoun luthier operation, which started in Lexington where they are from.^6,7 They made his guitar, a (for them) rare 12-string. My interest in bluegrass started while a student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, and it was a Lexington bluegrass band that opened up the music scene for me in Charlottesville many years later.⁸ Brian and Ray both played with them.

I got to compliment his sweet parents on how well-mannered they raised him. Eli agreed to play a charity performance at a summer festival I helped organize in Harrisonburg several years ago. His dad helped him set up.

Speaks well of the whole Cook family.

On the way out of town after the show "A Place in the Sun" by Pablo Cruise came on the radio. As far as I can recall I have never heard this song on the radio before, even during the group's heyday.⁹ I only know the song because it was played over-and-over on my roommate's stereo in my Washington and Lee dorm room.¹⁰

Maybe the Gods of Music put this particular song on the radio at that precise time in case I missed that Eli coming to town was like . .

Sweet Virginia Calling.

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1. find any meaning in the town name?
2. just across the Connecticut River from where I live in Vermont.
3. in Houston, just popping out of "corporate America", and thinking about pursuing my writing.
4. then proprietor of Rapunzel's who was at the Prism Cafe in Charlottesville the night I became a poet, Bob subsequently named me poet laureate of that coffeehouse/bookstore/venue.
5. where Eli was born and from where he currently hails.
6. they've now moved to Charlottesville.
7. as their website says: "Rockbridge Guitars takes its name from Rockbridge County, Virginia, as homage to the homeland of the luthiers."
8. I also bought my first guitar at Rockbridge Music in Lexington.
9. the title song of the group's third album (1977), the single only reached 42 on the charts.
10. his high school girlfriend had just left him, so perhaps the way-more popular single "Whatcha Gonna Do?" was soothing; he's also nephew to Boz Scaggs.