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This episode of Noted Stories, “Train Tracks,” features three songs inspired by my lifelong connection to railroads.

Growing up in Nashville, I watched the Christmas parade from Union Station and received a Lionel train that I still run at Christmas. My Donelson elementary school’s annual L&N trip to Gallatin was another childhood highlight. Years later, I rode those same tracks north on my way to California.

“The Burlington Line” is a true story song. In 1975, I met an elderly man on an Amtrak train making its way through Montana. He said he felt alone after losing his wife and was growing distant from his children, so that would be his last ride. That night, I watched him leave the train at a foggy station. As we pulled away, I saw its name: Paradise. The encounter inspired this song.

“Two Fast Trains” came to me in a dream. It tells of a switchman whose job is to prevent two trains from colliding—and how one bad decision sets off a chain of consequences.

“Steel and Steam Lullaby” began with a shaggy-dog story told by Bill Armstrong, the father of my teenage music partner. A boy spends his life waving to trains and calling, “Hello, Mr. Engineer,” but never gets a response. On his deathbed, the engineer finally looks down and says, “Oh…hello, little boy.” My band, Dog & Pony, performed the song…usually after I had told the whole story onstage in front of a groaning audience.

© 2026 David Ray Skinner/Electric Quilt Music, BMI

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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