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This episode of Noted Stories, “Kinfolks,” features three “relatively true”songs. My love of stories and story songs began with my dad and his family in Jordan Springs, a rural Tennessee community without electricity. In the 1930s, battery-powered radios brought the Grand Ole Opry into my grandparents’ parlor. Neighbors gathered on Saturday nights to listen, sometimes joined by my great-uncle Tom, who played guitar despite having lost fingers in a dynamite accident. He taught my dad, and my dad taught me. The first song, “Tractor Battery Radio,” celebrates those nights and the family who made them possible.

My mother’s family lived near the Tennessee River until the TVA moved them to make way for Kentucky Lake. Her father, Daddy Bud, became a deputy sheriff in Dover. He loved wrestling on his black-and-white television, cheering Jackie Fargo and booing Tojo Yamamoto. Years later, I learned the rivals were friends. That inspired the second song, “Motorola Cigarette,” a relatively true song blending Daddy Bud’s love of wrestling and hand-rolled cigarettes with a tale of the wrestlers traveling together.

“Soapbox Derby Days” recalls my cousin Gary, born ten days after me and as close as a brother. In 1964, he won Camden’s Soapbox Derby and earned a trip to Akron for the finals. Years later, living in Brooklyn Heights, I remembered our childhood summers and wrote the song about the closeness—and distance—of growing up.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode of Noted Stories features three car songs: one true, one partly true and one totally fictional. My parents once discovered that, as a toddler, I could correctly name the cars passing us on Sunday drives. Dad was a gifted mechanic, but I never inherited his skills. However, I did inherit his love of old cars—and later dropped them into my watercolor paintings.

“Filmore’s 55” is true. In the 1970s, my friend Filmore Strunk visited our farm in his green 1955 GMC pickup. He called it his “Old ’55,” after the Tom Waits song, which was featured on the Eagles’ 1974 album, “On the Border.” Driving through the East Tennessee mountains with that song on the radio inspired my 2003 song.

“’65 VW Van” is partly true. After my unreliable ’64 Falcon broke down on I-40, I read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion by flashlight while waiting for sunrise when I could be rescued. The book helped inspire my trip west. Later, I bought a stripped-down 1965 VW van and named it “Van Go,” although, most of the time it didn’t go. At any rate the van inspired the song I wrote in 1977.

“Work-a-Daddy Thunderbird” is pure fiction, inspired by James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and my childhood love of the red 1957 Ford Thunderbird. The song follows a worn-out husband who longs for that lost dream and settles for a modified vintage replica.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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This episode of Noted Stories, “Artifacts and Fiction,” takes three events from the past and turns them into songs (with no small amount of creative license).

In “Miss Mesopotamia,” a construction worker returns to school to become an archaeologist. On a secret dig in Iraq, his team uncovers what appears to be an ancient beauty pageant. He can’t resist telling the coworkers who once laughed at his ambitions—and one of them tips off a tabloid.

“Warm Egyptian Nights” follows a weary West Tennessee farmer who believes that, in a previous life, he swept the floors of an Egyptian pyramid. He wasn’t a pharaoh, but he does miss the warm nights beside the Nile…a different Memphis in a different time.

The final song, “The Lyre,” begins with the tradition that Nero played music while Rome burned. Although the instrument he played is commonly described as a fiddle, it most likely was a lute. So, the lute becomes the focus of this song, or rather a lyre (which is actually a yoke lute). I imagine his instrument turning up centuries later in a Jewish shop in Germany on the night of Kristallnacht. The instrument’s journey is fiction, but the destruction and persecution are history—and a reminder to stay alert to their return.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI