Jon Ritz

From: A Quiet Place, A Simple Melody

By Jon Ritz

If you know me at all—that is, if you’ve ever heard of Will Deary—it’s probably because of my song ‘(A Hundred Miles from) Nowhere, Texas,’ which was a decent hit (number six on the Billboard Country charts) for Darlene McKenna, who did a pretty nice job with it.

That song came about while I was playing a gig in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the final leg on a tour of medium size clubs in the Northeast.  We were billed as the “Will Deary Band—Direct from Nashville!” I was actually living in Charlottesville, Virginia at the time, and the “Will Deary Band” consisted of session musicians from Pittsburgh, but I had stopped in Nashville for a weekend on the way out (to discuss “prospects” with my manager, Shel), so I guess the billing was sort of true.  A lot of things in this business are sort of true.

We played the last night of the tour in Scranton.  After the show, the union guys headed back to Pittsburgh and I took off for Virginia. I drove the long hours through the middle of the night—miles of isolated Pennsylvania farm country. At some point I passed a sign which said “Nowhere—14 miles” and figured it was a joke.  I mean, who the hell would name a town Nowhere, for Christ’s sake?  I kept driving, and eventually came to another sign which pointed off to the left. I made that turn and about two miles later I was on the main drag in Nowhere, Pennsylvania.  There were a few small buildings—a hardware store, a Laundromat, a Tastee Freeze—but everything was dark.  At the end of the block there was a white church with a gravel parking lot.  A sign read—I’m not making any of this up—“Christ Church of Nowhere.” I was laughing by this time, and almost without thinking I pulled into the parking lot.

 

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